Grow up or give up.

It’s late and I can’t sleep. 2 a.m. again. Hello darkness, my old friend. Fuck tomorrow and all its vagaries. I’ve padded downstairs and opened the whiskey. Can’t wake the pregnant wife and I’ve shouted the kids to sleep again. I wonder if I’m a bad father. I wonder if I've done this to them. I wonder if in trying to be everything my own father wasn’t, I’ve become him. A sick mirror merry-go-round. A colleague of mine has died so I talk to her. I see raw imaginings of her mother llorando. Gritando ¿por que? I talk to her ghost. Tell her I’m sorry she’s dead. Hope she is there. Hope for all our sakes that she’s not nothing.

I’m drinking whiskey from my son’s purple plastic cup. Surrounded by boxes of all we own. Double walled cardboard coffins to hold three years of children and five of marriage. I’m moving them all away. We all make mistakes. I’m not sure if this is one of them.

The whiskey doesn’t help me sleep but it helps something. Therapy? I’m not so sure. Self-indulgence? Possibly. I’ll have another. Since my first sip when I was 14 I’ve striven to like it. It all clicked one day – became sweet. I’m not sure if that’s the day I grew up or the day I gave up.

There’s only three ice-cubes left and I’ve forgotten the ending. It was all so planned when I sat down to write this. So meticulous. I’ll pad back up again in a minute. Slip into the marital sheets. Try not to wake the kids. Avoid the responsibility. Wonder if I’m a bad father again until morning. Then I’ll have enough to occupy me until this time tomorrow. A whole 24 hours of bad parenting under the guise of enlightenment and comparison. ‘My parents would never have let me get away with that.’ Self-satisfaction. I find comfort in selective comparison. Sweet dreams.