"Ancient" history reminder (edited)

(I've reviewed some of the historical facts online, but the basic memories are still vibrant.)

I still remember the night that made clear for me whose side I was on in their relationship.

The 1973 Sugar Bowl was held on New Year's Eve.  It hadn't moved to New Year's Day as of yet, when the Cotton, Orange, and Rose Bowl games were contested.  This year, the tilt would basically be a national title game between Bear Bryant's undefeated Crimson Tide and Ara Parseghian's Fighting Irish, who'd also completed their regular season with a clean slate.  Alabama finished the year ranked #1 in the coaches' poll, which at that point didn't vote again after the bowls.

In our home, while mom may not have been the typical Catholic in many ways, she was very much rooting for Notre Dame in this contest.  Dad was convinced that Alabama was the better team, and was pulling for them to complete their undefeated season. Each of them openly relished the debate over the game.

By then, Dad's too-brief period of sobriety - prompted by our family doctor's well-intended misleading regarding the negative effect that drinking might have on the recovery of control of his left eye following his auto accident in the autumn of 1972 - was long since over.  His relationship with mom, and with pretty much everyone else, had deteriorated drastically in the booze.  The two of them were usually civil to each other, though by no means "always," and it was clear by now that they no longer had a loving relationship.  Mom had figured out that she couldn't stop him from drinking but also didn't have to be a part of his entire dynamic anymore.  She'd returned to working nights at the bank, which usually allowed her to leave after my sister and I had gone to bed for the night and be home before we were up for school in the morning.  So in the midst of this dynamic, a friendly - well, socially acceptable - area of unwavering disagreement between them was this football game that had the nation's attention.

I'm sure I'd never cared about either team before, but that on that night when dad's Alabama team took on mom's Irish for the first time, I was definitely a Notre Dame fan.

In retrospect, I recognize how much that bothered him.  I think he concluded that mom was turning us kids against him; he'd yell as much at her in the midst of an argument one night in the coming months, when we were in bed and the two of them thought we were asleep.  He couldn't understand that it was his own dysfunction that was making it impossible for him to love us as we needed and would be able to respond to.  In the fog of his alcoholism, he lacked the foggiest notion of how unstable he was making our home, how we feared his drunkenness even though he never physically abused us in the midst of it.  In fact, during the only directly abusive action I remember from him, which had happened at least the summer before and perhaps as much as three and a half years earlier, I am certain that he was completely sober.

(disgustingly detailed memory omitted)

Notre Dame would win the AP national title that night by hanging onto a one-point victory in a hard fought game.  Dad was pretty pissed (in both senses, actually) at the end.

And grown-up me wonders whether concluding on that night that he'd lost my sister and me to mom - as I'm sure he thought of it - contributed to this being the last Sugar Bowl he'd ever see. By the following New Year's he was dead by his own hand.

Remembering this, as Notre Dame and Alabama prepare to contest for the national title once again, feels oddly calm.  As I finished recounting the memory, I expected to check in with myself to find my stomach in knots and my fingers and toes cold from the stress of the recollection, from the pain of our dysfunctional home and the brokenness that just kept pouring forth in my life for so long thereafter. Instead I'm just grateful for the memories, and missing my mom just a little, and praying for her and my dad and sister.