My parents were a mystery to me when I was an adolescent. At a time that I was beginning to experiment with drugs and sex, apparently my mom and dad were too.

It was 1975, and my parents were in their early 50’s.

One afternoon, my pal Dennis and I snuck into my parent’s bedroom while they were out. There was good reason for this stealth mission---they had recently redecorated it with a mirrored tile ceiling, a white faux fur bedspread, black and white Grecian wallpaper, and black lacquer furniture. This love shack of a bedroom conjured up images real and imagined, almost too much for a 13-year-old girl to grasp.

As if the wonder of their bedroom wasn’t enough titillation, the actual “holy grail” that we were after had been shining like a beacon before me for weeks. I had seen the red suitcase in their closet, and I couldn’t understand what it was doing in there. No one was planning to take a trip, and the rest of the luggage was neatly tucked away in the basement.

There had to be something shocking in that suitcase. My parents had started down a strange and lusty path of pot smoking, ménage a trois’s, and hysterical fighting. I had witnessed much of this from my vantage point of the bedroom next door. I never got a visual of any of this, but I had heard them in their room with one of my mom’s friends, and I had smelled the pot, and had heard my mother urging my aunt to try it one night when they were over for dinner.

I was sure that the red suitcase contained something forbidden, and possibly shocking.

I opened the sliding closet door, and grabbed hold of my prize. Dennis was standing beside me, urging me to hurry. I placed it on the bed, held my breath, and opened the latches.

First we gasped, then we laughed, then we began rifling through the contents. There were battery-operated vibrators, a few dildos and a huge strap-on, that Dennis proceeded to insert one of the vibrators into, extracting some leftover bodily fluid that “grossed” us both out.

There was that lid of marijuana that I was sure that I had smelled, and a copy of “San Francisco Screw” magazine---the centerfold being a blown-up photo of a vagina; an image that I can still picture vividly in my mind as if it were yesterday.

After about 10 minutes, all of our curiosity spent, I closed the suitcase and placed it back in the closet exactly where I had found it. I think that I may have lifted some of the pot from that notorious lid as a consolation prize. I figured that they would never know, and even if they did suspect, they would never be able to admit that it existed in the first place.

I was angry and outraged, but I just laughed it off, told my friends about it, and internalized all of my fears about who my parents were, and who they were becoming. They were unrecognizable to me, and there were times that I hated them.

That red suitcase was symbolic of a bigger picture for me, and my experience of my parents. I saw them as betrayers and abandoners. I accused them of being selfish and neglectful. I may have even accused them of not loving me. It was impossible for me to see or fully grasp how their own lives were changing, even unraveling. I was a complete little narcissist, like every other adolescent on the planet. My parent’s existed for me, and the very idea that they had their own problems, needs, and desires, were not a part of my young paradigm.

Today I can look back at my parents in 1975 and see them through a different prism. Having lived through the over the top drama, the passion and despair, the shocking and bizarre, I can finally forgive and accept them as having been only human---just people struggling through their own lives. It’s really not that hard to figure.

You see, I have my own red suitcase.