“Mom!” Reese was leaning out the wide open passenger window yelling into the dark. “Mom! Where are you?!” His 11-year-old voice cracking through the sobs. “Mooommmm!!”

Mike drove slowly down the long wooded driveway, navigating slowly through the fog and muck that crisscrossed the thin dirt road at every turn. At the end, he turned around and came back trying to keep his search thorough. I kept quiet and held my place laying in the dirt about 10 feet off the road in an overgrown field. Steadfast and sick with the idea that I wasn’t going back until I found something else to drink.

Reese, my oldest, had flown from his father’s house in Colorado to spend the summer out East with us. We thought it might be good for me. We thought having him out here might help break the downward spiral I was losing time with. We thought maybe things would go back, you know, more or less to normal…or at least what normal had been before my currently raging relapse.

That night had been rough. Alcohol making depression worse, as I had continued to consume throughout the day my thoughts had turned to self-harm and I was in full destruction mode when I managed to run out of alcohol late into the evening. No problem, my sodden mind thought, I would just have to find a way to the grocery store about a mile down the main road.

Nevermind that it was 10 at night and my child was already asleep in the spare room we had made up to be his. Nevermind that I would have to walk because I had recently, voluntarily, had an alcolock installed in my car as yet another attempt to thwart my using. I would have to sneak out, undercover without Mike knowing since he would undoubtedly try to stop me which would cause a huge fuss and wake up Reese. Being a superhero in my own drunken mind however, I didn’t see an issue with this plan.

Me, not being the subtle drunk that my own mind likes to make me think I am, of course, made noise and set off alarms that alerted Mike that something was afoot. I didn’t get very far out the door before he realized I was gone and quickly raised the troops. He, Reese, and the dogs were all in the car before I had gotten fifty feet from the house.

This is how I wound up laying in a muddy field under the cover of night hiding from my family while my baby cried for his mama.

I don’t think that scene playing out in my mind is anything I will ever forget.

Prior to that summer, Reese had seen me drunk many times but I had reached my first sobering point before he hit an age where he would remember any of the early stuff. I prided myself at least a little that I hadn’t scarred him with any of that directly. I loved that I had been able to sober up in time to actually be a mother worth having to him…Until I relapsed when he was 10. So, while this was nothing new to him, my drunken shenanigans, it was all entirely new.

My heart broke hearing him call for me through those tear-streaked cheeks and yet, at the time, I couldn’t bring myself to stop what I was doing and go to him. My child needed me and I just couldn’t bring myself to put his needs above my own, above the desperate persistent call of the alcohol.

I never made it to the store again that night. Instead, I passed out in that field where I lay hiding, waiting for my family to go away so I could give in to the only thing that mattered right then. I’m pretty sure I came to a few hours later and just went back home.

We wound up sending Reese back to his father early that summer and it would be at least another 2 years before he would come back out to visit. For all the times of drunkenness that he had so blessedly been able to keep from his memory due to his young age, he now had this.