Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

murky pool, and we stand there like kids, hunched and laughing, our skin covered with goose bumps.
“You go,” I say, nudging her, and she says, “No, you go.” And we giggle until she gathers herself
up, serious now. “OK, do you want me to go?” And I nod. So she walks out on the platform, like she
always has, and jumps first.
ONE SUNDAY MORNING, my mother and I are having coffee. We’re still in our yoga clothes, sitting on
the empty patio of a café. Out of nowhere, she says, “I’m just so glad you’re sober.”
My mom didn’t say much about my drinking for a long time, and now that the subject is out in the
open, I feel uncomfortable dwelling here. The words can make me feel stuck, branded. I’m four years
sober now. When do these pronouncements end?
But I understand my mother needs to give voice to these feelings. She is an emotional blurter. In
the middle of family dinner, she’ll say to me and my brother, “I just love you two kids so much,” and
it’s like: OK, but can you pass the chicken?
My mother stares at her teacup, getting a contemplative look in her eye. “I wish I could have been
there more for you when you were a little girl,” she says, and her green eyes turn watery.
“Mom, stop,” I say, waving off the emotional charge of the conversation. “Don’t you like who I
am?”
She nods that yes, she does.
“Do you think you screwed up so badly that it requires all this apologizing?”
She shakes her head that no, she doesn’t. She tries to explain gently, what I might not understand:
the impossible hope of parenthood, the need to shelter your child from pain. It’s hard to live with the
mistakes, she says. She wishes she’d been better.
I do understand. We all live in the long shadow of the person we could have been. I regret how
selfish and irresponsible I’ve been as their daughter. How many things I took for granted. My
mother’s constant emotional nourishment. My father’s hard work and unwavering support.
I have lunch each month with my dad now. He is different than the man who raised me. Looser,
funnier, and more engaged, faster with his smile. He still reads the newspaper every day. Watches the
evening news. There is so much more kicking around in his head than I ever gave him credit for. Just
because someone is quiet doesn’t mean they have nothing to say.
One afternoon, we start talking about drinking. My dad quit ten years ago, worrying the alcohol
would interfere with his medications. Though he’d never been much of a drinker when I was a little
girl, by the time I was in college, his consumption had crept into the armchair-drinker red zone. He
could put away a bottle a night without realizing it.
Because he quit so easily, and without complaint, I assumed it wasn’t a big sacrifice. But he tells
me that’s not true. It had been rough. He still misses it all the time. “I would definitely say I have
alcoholic tendencies,” he tells me, and I look at him. Once again: Who are you?
In the four years of my sobriety, he has never said these words to me. Alcoholic tendencies. I
continue to be startled by how much of my personality derives from him. My self-consciousness, my
humor, my anxiety. I may look and talk like my mother, but I am equal parts (if not more) this man.
What else has my dad not told me? How much more has he kept inside, because no one ever thought
to ask? And do I have enough time to dig it out?
I’m aware of the ticking clock. My mother loses her keys too often, and she forgets what she’s