It suddenly feels all very three years ago. I've accidently restored my phone settings so that all of my new contacts, photographs and suchlike have been deleted, and replaced with old stuff – pictures of our youngest when he was a baby, text messages from people whose names I've now forgotten, very strange contacts with cryptic names, such as Lawnmower Steve. Three years feels like a very long time ago, or else my memory is shot.

On the same evening that I mistakenly reconfigure my phone I call R, who is on his last night of a weekend away seeing old friends. I want to shoot the breeze, tell him how our daughter has run up a phone bill that means I won't be able to pay for groceries next month.

He listens silently as I tell him our son has a temperature. "Can you drive him to the GP?" he asks. It is 11pm on a Sunday night. This is the sort of nonsense he talks when he is drunk. And when he asks again, I realise he is. He voice always lilts up towards the end of sentences, a guise to keep things normal and cheery, an attempt to mask any malformed words.

This could be a scene from a couple of years back, an unremarkable journey where I get to revisit my not-so-distance past. R is pissed, slurring, talking baloney.

Yet it is not like three years ago, because my mind doesn't start frantically analysing why he is drinking. (Was it the non-alcoholic beer he's been buying recently that has tempted him to drink the real thing? Is it because he's stopped going to AA meetings? Have his old friends made him nostalgic for his old life)?

I do not feel wounded in my chest, either, like everything has been ruined and R's drunkenness will ultimately lead to chaos and a string of unhappy days. I feel a little unsettled and disappointed, yes, but I don't continue with the conversation. I say goodbye and go to bed.

A friend whose husband is in recovery once said: "There is absolutely no point in entering into any sort of conversation with R when he is drunk. You will only feel like crap."

In the morning, R arrives home. I'm greeted by the potent whiff of a thousand drinks. It's not pleasant, so I stand back. But weirdly the anger's not there. Pity, maybe, because he looks quite sad and says, "I don't think I can go on weekends away like that at the moment. Perhaps I never could." I do what all British people do when a near-crisis is brewing and ask if R would like a cup of tea.

And sooner or later he says, "I drank," which is something he never explicitly offered up before. I laugh and say, "The whole of the bar?" and he starts to give me a serious answer but then he realises I am joking.

I want to update the familiar, new settings on my phone but I fear they're lost for ever. But at least I can scrub the photographs that remind me of three years ago. Not because it was all so terrible: we're smiling as if we mean it in some of the shots. We all look relatively content and our elder son still has baby teeth that make him look impossibly lovely, which for a moment fills me with a longing for all the children to stay for ever young.

But I was not at all OK, not at all able to enjoy those actual moments for any sustained period of time back then. I was obsessed with R's drinking. I counted his sober days like good behaviour points on a children's sticker chart.

I was fixated on his life as if it were my own. My simple belief was that if R could stop drinking then we would all be so much happier. I was full of rage, yet unable to express it in a way that was useful; my anger like poison gas, omnipresent, ruining the good times and making the bad times worse. So no, three years ago would not be somewhere I'd like to be. Apart from my hair. My hair was better then.

So we move on without malice into the evening, when all of the children have been put to bed by R, who has not once lain down and complained of a sore head. He makes me a dinner that is so delicious that I think of how fabulous a cook he is, rather than of his recent binge. Because the moments of happiness that I thought I was missing out on three years ago, that I thought could only exist if R remained sober for ever, can be experienced right now.