I Worked in the Weed Industry in My Twenties and Now I Fill Out School Volunteer Forms

There's a version of me that existed before I knew what a "volunteer background check" was.

She worked in the weed industry in California, back when it still felt like the wild west of a business nobody had figured out how to regulate yet. She kept weird hours, knew people who paid in cash, and would have laughed in your face if you told her that one day she'd be filling out a form at her kid's preschool listing her "areas of interest" for the fall carnival committee.

That woman is still me. That's the part I keep coming back to.

Motherhood doesn't erase who you were. It just asks you to fold that person into a life that looks nothing like the one she was building. Some days that feels like growth. Other days it feels like I traded something wild and mine for something smaller and shared, and I'm still not sure which trade was fair.

Here's what nobody tells you about becoming "respectable." It's not one big decision. It's a thousand small ones that sneak up on you until you're standing in a school hallway with a name tag that says "Luka's Mom," and you catch your reflection in the trophy case and think, who let this happen.

I did. I let this happen. And most days I'd do it again.

But I won't pretend the contrast doesn't get me sometimes. I spent my twenties in an industry built on risk, hustle, and knowing how to read a room full of people who didn't trust anyone. Now I spend my Tuesdays reading a laminated sign-up sheet for who's bringing juice boxes to the class party. Both versions of me had to hustle. Both versions of me had to read people fast and figure out who was full of it. The skill set actually transferred more than you'd think. Nobody puts that on a resume, but it should count for something.

On a good day trimming, I made about $1,800. Cash, in hand, for being fast and being good. And it really was that simple on paper: work hard, work clean, get paid. What it wasn't was simple in practice, because the whole thing ran on a popularity contest dressed up as a job. If you were fast and your work was tight, you got every job offered. If you weren't, you sat around waiting for scraps. That part I respected. What I didn't respect was the mean girl clique that formed around it, women running their own little secret society, hoarding jobs and information so nobody else could get in on the money.

It didn't matter if the work piled up and nothing got done on time. It mattered more to them that you didn't eat off their plate. I've camped out on farms for the season, managed crews of trimmers, kept the whole operation moving. And through all of it, I never smoked a single bit of the product I was surrounded by, because I hated what it did to me. I was the sober one running a room full of people getting high on their own supply, which honestly should tell you everything you need to know about how seriously I took getting the job done.

The things you see while working on a hill are insane. I mean that literally, out in the Emerald Triangle, which grows a massive percentage of the weed in this entire country, and almost nobody outside the industry even knows the name.

Up there it's your neighbors, it's someone's grandpa, it's a family from three states away who moved out to grow, it's people from all over the world who ended up on the same hillside chasing the same crop. And underneath all of it is the same clique mentality as the trim scene, just bigger. It was never only about how hard you worked. It was about who you knew. Who vouched for you. Who let you in the gate. You could be the best trimmer on the mountain and still get shut out because you didn't know the right person, and that's a lesson that had nothing to do with weed and everything to do with how the world actually works.

Here's the part I don't say out loud very often. Some days it felt like I was selling my soul just to keep the peace. I maintained fake friendships with women who talked about me constantly the second I left the room, and I had to sit there and act like I didn't know, because I did know. I heard a recording once of a girl I thought I was actually close to, someone I believed the friendship was real with, tearing me apart to someone else. Why? I have zero clue, my clothes weren’t overpriced maybe, I didn’t go get day drunk constantly and continuously fill my life with little clear baggies, or wasn’t spending thousands of dollars on things that didn’t actually matter? I have no clue. The person who shared the recording with me, I’m forever grateful for, I think she felt horrible for me, she told me “you should never be friends with these girls, they talk nicely to you because you’re a work horse, not because they’re actually friends with you.”

The things I heard? Horrible. I stopped thinking the world of that friendship dynamic and removed myself entirely, I stopped hanging out with everyone really, worked my ass off and dipped out.. That's a specific kind of gut punch, hearing proof of what you already suspected. There's no unhearing it, but I”m so thankful that the girl risked what she did in order to tell me what was going on. Some of the things I have seen, heard from these women, they would be ruined if it got out, but what would that do for me to talk about them as they did me? Nothing. That would require me actually giving a fuck and giving them one more ounce of energy I quit giving almost 10 years ago.

Then there was the watch. I got a gift, a nice one, I was so excited about it because I never owned something like it, and it happened to be the same as one another girl in the group already had, hers wasn’t new and it wasn’t the same color as the one I received. You'd have thought I'd committed fucking treason. I got called a copycat, a biter, like I'd plotted for months to steal her personality through matching jewelry. The day she confronted me about it, was in front of my “friends” and in the other room, she walked in and was talking the most shit about me possible, and another woman said, “that’s why I’d wait to buy a Rolex so no one could copy me.” They did this in the next room while I was sitting, right there next to another friend of ours, I heard it all and it was a lot more than just that comment but I won’t relay here because it’s pathetic to have said about a person. I couldn't even enjoy the thing after that. It sat there ruined and as a constant reminder that I “wasn’t shit but trying to be” this girl.

I gave it to a homeless man that night, figured he'd get more real use and joy out of it than I ever would wearing something that came with that much drama attached. In retrospect, I gave something away because some mean girl made me feel not worthy of what I received as a present from someone I loved, because she had it first. I should have just sat there laughing instead of taking it personally from someone I didn’t even respect as a woman, the list was endless of how shitty she treated me.

Even sharing this story is embarrassing of how much my feelings hurt because now? It’s comical, I feel bad that that could be a person’s view on another, to make them feel small so they could maintain the ability to talk shit about someone who could never possibly own the same items, the call I received later as an apology was even more comical.

That whole world ran on toxicity dressed up as sisterhood. Everybody called each other besties. Everybody talked horribly about each other the moment their back was turned, not one person in that group was clear of saying something horrible about the other. Nobody was exempt, including me. And most people were drinking or using something to numb out from a life that didn't have much reality left in it. Looking back, it felt like Hunger Games and Survivor had a baby, and everyone was playing both roles at once, ally and traitor, sometimes in the same conversation and definitely when we all got together for girls days, nights, or an event. I remember one of the girls I thought I was good friends with, didn’t invite me to her baby shower, however…the day after she told me she was pregnant I had bought her a few gifts because I was so happy for her. I thought we were friends, good friends but I didn’t make the cut, I donated those gifts to a DV center for moms and I felt more connected to that, then I ever did her.

The day I left and moved away, I felt this monstrous weight lift off my shoulders. I could actually breathe. I didn't know how heavy that world was until it was off of me.

What changes isn't your competence. It's your audience. The old me answered to no one but her own bottom line while trying to move in spaces that weren’t made for me or made me jeopardize who I wanted to be and the type of person I aspired to be. This me answers to a four year old who needs socks that match, a teacher who needs a permission slip by Friday, and a version of myself who still wants to be seen as more than "the mom who used to do something interesting."

I think that's the real ache under a headline like this. It's not nostalgia for the industry itself. It's the fear that the parts of you that were bold, a little dangerous, resourceful as hell, get quietly retired the second you become somebody's mother. Like there's only room for one identity at a time, and the respectable one wins by default.

I don't think that's true. I think it's just harder to see the wild parts of yourself when they're wearing a PTA lanyard. But they're still there. The woman who ran product, negotiated with people who could have screwed her over, and figured out how to survive in an industry with no rulebook, that's the same woman filling out this volunteer form. She's just applying the same instincts to smaller stakes and calling it "getting involved." Now? I used all that money, bought a house, invested it, got a few degrees, study law, volunteer, and would never make another woman feel less than invited to the table because they don’t have or can’t maintain, what I have. Value in life is measured in how you treat people, how you treat yourself, and how you move about in a world that doesn’t revolve around you. I’m happy I experienced all of this, because now when I think about it? It’s comedy, I left and grew exponentially and am continuing to evolve. I’ve seen none of that and have heard so much about how everyone I left there, is doing, acting, and standing in the same fucking place I left them in.

So if you're a mom who used to be someone your current PTA group would clutch their pearls over, welcome. You didn't lose her. You just gave her a new job.

She's still very good at reading a room.