Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

when no one was looking, and I would spin around the living room, giggling and knocking into
furniture. A carnival ride of my very own.
Later, I would hear stories of girls this age discovering their bodies. A showerhead positioned
between the thighs. The humping of a pillow after lights off. “You didn’t do that?” people would ask,
surprised and maybe a little bit sad for me.
I chased the pounding of my heart to other places. A bottle of cooking sherry under the sink. A
bottle of Cointreau, screw top crusty with lack of use. But nothing was as good as beer. The fizz. The
left hook of it. That wicked ka-pow.
In high school, girls would complain about beer—how gross and sour it was, how they could
barely force themselves to drink it—and I was confused, as though they were bad-mouthing chocolate
or summer vacation. The taste for beer was embroidered on my DNA.
THE MOVE TO Dallas was hard on everyone, but it might have been toughest on my mom. She was
catatonic for a week after our arrival. This was a woman who had traveled alone in Europe and was
voted “most optimistic” in her high school class, but in the first days of our new life, she sat on the
couch, unable to retrieve even a lampshade from the garage.
She was too overwhelmed. She’d never been so far from her big, noisy Irish brood, and though
some part of her longed for distance, did she really want this much? My mother was also not what
you’d call a Dallas type. She wore no makeup. She sewed her own empire-waist wedding dress,
inspired by characters in Jane Austen books. And here she was at 33, with two kids, stranded in the
land of rump-shaking cheerleaders and Mary Kay Cosmetics.
I was happy in those early years. At least, that’s the story I’m told. I shimmied in the living room
to show tunes. I waved to strangers. At bedtime, my mother would lean down close and tell me,
“They said I could pick any girl baby I wanted, and I chose you.” Her glossy chestnut hair, which she
wore in a bun during the day, hung loose and swished like a horse’s tail. I can still feel the cool slick
of her hair through my fingers. The drape on my face.
I clung to her as long as I could. On the first day of kindergarten, I gripped her skirt and sobbed,
but no amount of begging could stop the inevitable. Eden was over. And I was exiled to a table of
loud, strange creatures with Play-Doh gumming their fingertips.
The first day of kindergarten was also a rocky transition for me, because it was the last day I
breast-fed. Yes, I was one of those kids who stayed at the boob well past the “normal” age, a fact that
caused me great embarrassment as I grew older. My cousins dangled the tale over my head like a
wriggly worm, and I longed to scrub the whole episode from my record. (A bit of blackout wished for
but never granted.)
The way my mother tells it, she tried to wean me earlier, but I threw tantrums and lashed out at
other children in frustration. And I asked very 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