Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

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 a high shelf in her bedroom closet, and sometimes I would pull it down, just to run my
fingers over it again.
EVEN 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 the vitiligo 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 the previous
movie had ended. We’d linger in the lobby for 20 minutes, the two of us sitting on carpeted stair