A Mother's Lesson by Chris Anderson

Disclaimer: Alias is the property of other people, including J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot productions.

There are reasons for everything, and all things can be justified one way or another.

I have in the past gotten drunk, and I suppose I had reasons I thought were good enough at the time. My mother taught me differently. She taught me about the loss of control, the dulling of the senses, the delayed reaction times, the loss of fine motor skills. She taught me these were weaknesses I could not afford.

She was right. And while the bruises faded with time, the lesson remained.

I haven't been truly drunk in years. I have had drinks, yes, but I have not been drunk, let alone blindingly so.

One reason I haven't gotten drunk is my mother's lessons. Another is that drinking alone has always seemed to me rather melodramatic. I am rarely that morose these days. And drinking with others would require a level of trust I truly feel I can offer very few people.

More conventional parents might have raised a glass to their daughter's safe return, but Jack and I have never been- and probably never will be- conventional parents. And it would have been, for him, a convenient excuse to indulge an old friend, a demon I feel (and he knows, deep down) that he is better off without.

In many ways his flirtations with alcoholism are my fault. It was, of course, my leaving that began it all, that and learning something of the truth of me at last. What is it about men, though, that makes them believe that the only relevant facts are the ones they happen to be in possession of?

It was not all a lie, only most of it. Does it, you ask, make so much of a difference?

Yes.

And so when the excuses come so easily to him, I won't take them. I will not allow them. If he truly wants to destroy himself- But he doesn't, it is simply the old patterns reasserting themselves. And what a foolish reason to drink that is!

As for myself, even if I wanted it, blinding drunkenness is something I cannot afford. I have been trained to keep my silence by any means necessary, but I, who might withstand torture for a time while revealing nothing, could be easily undone by lowered inhibitions. And I have worked too long, risked too much, to see everything fall down around me for an ill- spoken word.

In her way my mother taught me that as well, and I hope that I have, through means less painful but no less persuasive, helped to teach that same lesson to my own daughter.