My dad runs. He's done the Chicago Marathon, though his favorite competitions are triathalons, and every day he goes out for a half hour and runs 4-5 miles. Today my mom announced dinner, and I came downstairs from my bedroom to find my dad lying on the floor. His face had a decidedly unhealthy pallor. "I almost didn't make it home today," he said, "apparently there are limits to what I can do." I had never before seen my father humbled.

He was conscious, coherent, but his paleness worried me. My mom's dinner was sitting on the TV-Tray in front of the recliner across from the TV where Pirates of the Caribbean was playing. She was upstairs getting the big-ass first aid kit stored in my parents' closet. The Black Pearl and the Interceptor were exchanging fire when we found out that the blood-pressure cuff in that big-ass first aid kit had neither a bulb nor a gauge, so I went out to the car to retrieve a different first-aid kit. I returned to find her sitting cross-legged at my dad's side, staring at him while he watched the movie from his position sprawled out on the living room floor, couch cushions propping up his feet. I handed off the first aid kit to her, and she wrapped blood-pressure cuff #2 around his arm. She then removed it and tried to use the infant cuff. Dad snapped at her a bit, which was my first clue that his condition was improving from his previous near-unconscious state.

The next few minutes were filled with working around my mom to administer care to my dad, talking over Will Turner and cannonfire to confirm with him that his blood pressure and pulse were improving, and ignoring the woman whispering "9-1-1" to me every minute or so. It struck me than that she was slightly drunk.

Over the course of my 20.608497 years, I've developed what I can only explain as a learned oblivion to my mother's drinking. I can't really say it changes her, because whenever she's home, she's drinking. It's always subtle, too, a shot of rum in a glass of diet pepsi. She just has a constant, ceaseless, slight buzz that I usually don't notice, just because it's so universally attributed to the bubbly personality she had from working with preschoolers for the majority of her professional life [I should mention, at this point, that she does have the presense of mind to prevent her drinking from affecting her job, either previously at the preschool or currently with the TSA. She just starts when she gets home at night], but that at times can absolutley infuriate me. This was one of those times. She was doing the exact opposite of helping; she was taking what had happened to Dad and spinning the situation out of control in her own mind.

As little as my dad seems to work [a lieutenant, he's the most senior non-administrative employee at the local fire department--he gets a lot of time off], he's almost never home, and I'm left feeling like my mom's babysitter. After his color had returned and he was sitting upright in the rocking chair watching Pirates, she turned off the movie and stared at him. At that point, I made a poor medical decision and left the room. I made a plate of the dinner that was growing colder, and went up to my room. She, inexplicably, followed. I sat st my desk and stared at my computer screen, and she sat on my bed and stared at me. I knew she was hurting, she was on the verge of weeping, but I couldn't stand to be in her presence, let alone comfort her. After a few moments, she grabbed my garbage can and reached for my paper plate, but I grabbed her arms and tried to wrest the can from her grip. She was going into fix-the-house-because-I-can't-fix-my-husband mode like the cliched housewife, and it pissed me off. I knew she was strong; my mother follows a strong tradion of play-wrestling with her children, and I also knew that I was stronger. But whenever we fight, my primary concern is that I don't hurt her. She doesn't use such restraint, and so we're usually pretty evenly-matched. This time I gave up, and let her clean my room for a few minutes before she left to go do something else.