Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget Read Online Free PDF
Author: Sarah Hepola
nicely.
Just once more, Mommy. Just one more time.
So she let me crawl back up to the safest spot on earth, and she didn’t mind. My mother believed kids develop on their own timelines, and a child like me simply needed a few bonus rounds. She wanted to be a softer mother than the one she had. The kind who could intuit her children’s needs, although I can’t help wondering if I was intuiting hers.
These were the hardest years of my parents’ marriage. Nothing was turning out the way my mother expected—not her husband, not her life. But she and I continued in our near-umbilical connection, as diapers turned to big-girl pants and long-term memories formed on my developing mind. Was she wrong to let me cling like this? Did she set up unrealistic expectations that the world would bend to my demands? Was this a lesson in love—or codependence? I don’t know what role, if any, my protracted breast-feeding plays in my drinking story. But I know that whatever I got from my mother in the perfect little cocoon of ours was something I kept chasing for a long, long time.
I was in first grade when my mom went back to school, and much of the following years are defined by her absence. She disappeared in phases, oxygen slowly leaking from the room, until one day I looked around to find my closest companion had been relegated to cameo appearances on nights and weekends.
She became a therapist, the go-to profession for wounded hearts. She wanted to work with children—abused children, neglected children, which had the unintended consequence of pulling her away from her own. She cut her long brown hair into a no-nonsense ’80s do. She stored her ponytail in a hatbox on ahigh shelf in her bedroom closet, and sometimes I would pull it down, just to run my fingers over it again.
E VEN THOUGH I was seven when I first stole beer, I was six when I first tasted it. My father took care of me and my brother in the evenings, and he spent most of the hours in a squishy chair in the living room, watching news reports of weather and death. I often saw him with his eyes closed, but he swore he wasn’t napping, which made me curious where he had gone, which alternate reality was better than ours.
He nursed one beer each night. Sometimes two. He poured the beer into a glass, and I could smell the hops dancing in the air as I passed. Few scents crackle my nerve endings like beer. As gorgeous as campfire, as unmistakable as gasoline.
I sidled up to him.
Can I have a sip?
Just one.
I placed my nose in the glass, and I could feel stardust on my face.
I don’t know if parents still let their kids taste beer, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time. The bitterness was supposed to turn us off the stuff, but that one sip lit a fuse in me that burned for decades.
My parents weren’t big drinkers back then, but thirst ran in our bloodlines. My mother’s Irish heritage requires no explanation. My father’s background is Finnish, a nationality fabled for its shyness and its love of booze (two qualities that are not unrelated). To be both Irish and Finnish is to be bred for drinking—doomed to burst into song and worry later what everyone thought about it.
My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears, which he thought stood out funny, and thevitiligo that looked like spilled bleach across his arms and shins. He was a handsome man, with a beaming smile, but he carried himself like someone who didn’t want to be noticed. He wore a lot of beige.
My father’s EPA office was in the flashy downtown skyscraper where J. R. Ewing swindled his fortunes on the TV show
Dallas
. But the two men couldn’t have been further apart. My father was a diligent government worker who scanned our bills at Steak and Ale to flag any item accidentally left off the tab. He took me to a movie every Saturday, and he let me choose the film (a luxury no second child forgets), but he was so anxious about arriving on time we often showed up before
Just once more, Mommy. Just one more time.
So she let me crawl back up to the safest spot on earth, and she didn’t mind. My mother believed kids develop on their own timelines, and a child like me simply needed a few bonus rounds. She wanted to be a softer mother than the one she had. The kind who could intuit her children’s needs, although I can’t help wondering if I was intuiting hers.
These were the hardest years of my parents’ marriage. Nothing was turning out the way my mother expected—not her husband, not her life. But she and I continued in our near-umbilical connection, as diapers turned to big-girl pants and long-term memories formed on my developing mind. Was she wrong to let me cling like this? Did she set up unrealistic expectations that the world would bend to my demands? Was this a lesson in love—or codependence? I don’t know what role, if any, my protracted breast-feeding plays in my drinking story. But I know that whatever I got from my mother in the perfect little cocoon of ours was something I kept chasing for a long, long time.
I was in first grade when my mom went back to school, and much of the following years are defined by her absence. She disappeared in phases, oxygen slowly leaking from the room, until one day I looked around to find my closest companion had been relegated to cameo appearances on nights and weekends.
She became a therapist, the go-to profession for wounded hearts. She wanted to work with children—abused children, neglected children, which had the unintended consequence of pulling her away from her own. She cut her long brown hair into a no-nonsense ’80s do. She stored her ponytail in a hatbox on ahigh shelf in her bedroom closet, and sometimes I would pull it down, just to run my fingers over it again.
E VEN THOUGH I was seven when I first stole beer, I was six when I first tasted it. My father took care of me and my brother in the evenings, and he spent most of the hours in a squishy chair in the living room, watching news reports of weather and death. I often saw him with his eyes closed, but he swore he wasn’t napping, which made me curious where he had gone, which alternate reality was better than ours.
He nursed one beer each night. Sometimes two. He poured the beer into a glass, and I could smell the hops dancing in the air as I passed. Few scents crackle my nerve endings like beer. As gorgeous as campfire, as unmistakable as gasoline.
I sidled up to him.
Can I have a sip?
Just one.
I placed my nose in the glass, and I could feel stardust on my face.
I don’t know if parents still let their kids taste beer, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time. The bitterness was supposed to turn us off the stuff, but that one sip lit a fuse in me that burned for decades.
My parents weren’t big drinkers back then, but thirst ran in our bloodlines. My mother’s Irish heritage requires no explanation. My father’s background is Finnish, a nationality fabled for its shyness and its love of booze (two qualities that are not unrelated). To be both Irish and Finnish is to be bred for drinking—doomed to burst into song and worry later what everyone thought about it.
My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears, which he thought stood out funny, and thevitiligo that looked like spilled bleach across his arms and shins. He was a handsome man, with a beaming smile, but he carried himself like someone who didn’t want to be noticed. He wore a lot of beige.
My father’s EPA office was in the flashy downtown skyscraper where J. R. Ewing swindled his fortunes on the TV show
Dallas
. But the two men couldn’t have been further apart. My father was a diligent government worker who scanned our bills at Steak and Ale to flag any item accidentally left off the tab. He took me to a movie every Saturday, and he let me choose the film (a luxury no second child forgets), but he was so anxious about arriving on time we often showed up before