If I still drank, I would have last night.
There was nothing noticeably different yesterday from all my other days. I woke in the morning and helped my husband get our second grader ready for school – my husband fixed our son’s breakfast while I laid out his clothes and made sure he had a snack, his folder and a water bottle in his backpack. I ironed a navy blue t-shirt my 13-year-old daughter wanted to wear, and told her “not a chance” when she asked to borrow my new pale pink espadrille platforms. As her bus took off from our driveway, I settled into my workday.
I work from home, so I was there when my kids got off the bus, the second-grader at 3:00 p.m., the 7th grader ten minutes past 4:00. By 5:00, I was helping my son search for his drum sticks for his 5:30 drum lesson. Before we left, I told my daughter to do her homework, and not to be glued to her phone while we’re gone.
And then, while my son was with his drum teacher and I was nestled into the oversized stuffy chair in the back of the music store, with parents and kids coming and going and an assortment of instrument sounds – flutes, guitars, tubas – coming from behind closed doors, I read this line:
This essay was published on Medium’s Human Parts. You can read the rest of it at: On Drinking and Dead Parents and Life on Other Planets.
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Amy Gesenhues 