I come from an amazing family. Growing up in my house, friends were treated like royal guests after long journeys from far off lands, and every evening we sat down to a delicious home cooked dinner for seven (plus whoever else was still there playing basketball or video games). My parents are still married after almost 40 years, all four of my siblings are self-confident and loving people, and even though we’re spread out across the country, we make it a point to vacation together several times a year. A family of non-artists, they have never once wavered in their full-hearted support of my life as a musician.

But there was a short period of time when this harmony was disrupted. During the last couple of years of high school I started smoking pot and skipping class. I had met a new group of friends, and I was eager to break away from the formulaic suburban life I had been handed, a spoonfed existence of honors classes and awards ceremonies. My new best friend was openly bisexual, which was incredibly liberating as I was coming to terms with my own homosexuality at the time. We would ditch 4th period and run off to the beach to get high, talk about life, and enjoy the serene beauty of our hometown Santa Barbara. It was so different from anything I had ever known, so rich and exciting. I worked at Baskin and Robbins, had an income and a car, and was a very valuable asset to the group, even if a relative novice in the ways of drug culture. I never felt at ease around dealers or hanging out with the more seasoned stoners whose very lives and homes seemed built around that identity. We experimented with a few other drugs, but to this day I’ve never even seen the hardest stuff like heroin or meth. Still, my parents were terrified.

I don’t blame them. In addition to knowing I smoked pot, they also knew that I was gay, even though I hadn’t talked with them about it yet. Both drugs and gay life were pretty foreign to them. But instead of mustering the courage to ask me about what it was really like, they unfortunately let the sum of these two unknowns create an atmosphere of fear and panic. They drew no clear line between pot and other drugs. As the pamphlets say, marijuana is a “gateway drug,” which leads helpless young suburban kids down the slippery slope toward homelessness, sunken eyes, and death. Not to say this doesn’t happen, I know it does. It just wasn’t my reality. Not even close. Still, drugs were completely “off limits,” and after a small run-in with the law and repeated calls home about missed classes, they started urine testing me at home and taking me to psychologists.

As a result, our relationship moved into a realm of separateness and even hostility. And this at a time when I was experiencing so much that was new and exciting outside of the house, which I was actually quite eager to share. Their frantic efforts to save me may have helped in some small way to prevent a disaster, who knows. But by tightening up around their fear, they also sacrificed a key opportunity to understand who I was and have become as a person.

I started thinking about this last weekend on holiday with my family. I was sitting on the couch late one night with my sister and her best friend, both new parents, talking about drugs, and how as parents it is perhaps their biggest of fears. Of course, there is always the possibility that our worst fears will come true, but if my parents would have continued to focus on the positive side, cultivating self-awareness, honesty, and openness in their child, even in uncharted territory, they wouldn’t actually have had that much to worry about. I hope that if and when my sister faces this with her own kids, she will have the courage to ask them about their experience and truly listen, rather than tighten up and slip into panic mode. She may discover it to be an important opportunity to get to know who her children really are.