The sun crept over my open window, steady and silent. The light poured over my eyes, gently at first, then overpowering and bright all at once, like the floodgates had been opened. My subconscious self fought it for as long as possible, but soon enough the harsh light pulled my mind to the surface. My eyes could no longer fight it: the time had come to finally wake up.

As my eyes adjusted to the morning light, the rest of my body followed, letting out an uncomfortable groan and rolling over slowly as to avoid the nasty glare. My mind was slower to react, however, and tried despairingly to remain asleep. The effort was futile; the sharp pain in my left shoulder kept me from returning to a peaceful slumber, and I swung my feet over the side of the bed in an effort to get up. My knees cracked and my head throbbed. As my mind finally began to catch up with my body and woke itself up, the events of the night before came to the surface.

Friday night always meant a party at the law firm. Sure, it may have been a business that promoted a sane lifestyle and an always professional demeanor, but once the clock chimed five on the last work day, we eagerly locked up the front doors and headed out to Breezy's for a good time. The way we saw it, we worked hard all week and deserved to go a little crazy. We'd drink 'til the bartender made us leave, not just beer but hard liquor - we were pretty serious about having fun. It wasn't always as bad as it sounds, though. It motivated us to work harder during the week - whoever had the poorest performance Monday-Thursday during a given week would have to pay the tab Friday night. We racked up a pretty impressive tab each time, so we all felt the need to work hard during the week.

Last night had been especially crazy. The owner of Breezy's, Shawn, was bar-keeping. He's a pretty big partier too, so we knew we were in for a good time. When two o'clock came around, he shouted out that it was last call. He came over to our group of guys and asked if we wanted to head out to a party across the county line at the Mylan's property. They lived on a giant ranch - 6,000 acres, to be exact - and people knew them for the rad parties they threw. Inebriated as we all were, we heartily agreed to hit up the party with Shawn. We partied hard, and I didn't get home until close to five o'clock. I had to creep into bed so I didn't wake Sara up, being extra careful as her alarm would go off in less than an hour and I knew she was close to consciousness.

Now, less than three hours later, I sat on the edge of my bed, grumpy and with a nasty headache. I slid my size 12 feet into my favorite pair of moccasins so as not to startle my nerves with the frigid cold of the hardwood floor. I slowly dragged myself out of bed and shuffled down the hallway, still partially asleep and fully drowsy. I peeked into the rooms of all three of my kids, Shaynee, Espen and Jacy. I expected to see their tired bodies in the peaceful realms of dreamland, but instead their beds were neatly made and their slippers dutifully laid at the spot beside their bed where their feet would land, without fail, every morning. Well, Shaynee and Jacy's rooms were that way. Espen's room was a little different than theirs, with the covers flung all over the bed and one of his pillows barely balanced on his nightstand. His moccasins, well-worn and mismatched, lay in completely different spots on the floor, with one stuck under the door and one clumsily pushed under his bed.

I wondered where everyone had gone. What kind of people wake up at the crack of dawn? Well, except for those like me who work hard and are familiar with the throbbing of a headache after a night of celebratory drinks... But my kids were young, so I knew that wasn't it. My wife had never had a drop of alcohol her whole life - too much alcoholism in her family - so I knew her reasons for rising early were different as well. What was my family up to in my absence?

With my curiosity piqued, I continued my trek through the hallway and then made my way down the stairs. First order of business: take some medicine and get a drink. I read somewhere about cures for hangovers, but I couldn't remember what they were. Sleep, probably, but that proved to be impossible right now. Next, I planned to figure out where my family decided to go oh-so-early on a traditional Day of Rest. Maybe there'd be something on the calendar - my wife loved to plan things well ahead of time and put them in a public place so that our kids could stay on track with the scheduling of things.

After I popped the last of the Tylenol into my desert-dry mouth and swigged them down with a tall bottle of Bud Lite, I stumbled over to the refrigerator to find the calendar. My wife loves Blue Man Group to a strange extent, so for most of our marriage we've had Blue Man Group calendars. I found it (a large picture of obnoxious men painted in blue is impossible to miss) and tried to remember the date. I couldn't, but it didn't matter. I knew it was a Saturday and every Saturday had the same thing written on it:

Al-Anon, 7:30 a.m.

Al-Anon? What in the name of Bruce Springsteen was Al-Anon? It sounded like some sort of Middle Eastern gathering - didn't Arabic have words that started off as Al-? That couldn't have been it, because we were a German/Danish family that never knew a thing about Arab culture. And unless my family secretly enjoyed strange things, I knew they weren't at a Middle Eastern gathering. Al-Anon also looked an awful lot like AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. Maybe they just came up with a different way of stating it so that people didn't think they were talking about batteries? That made no sense either, though, because like I said before my wife and kids didn't interact with an alcoholic lifestyle, although my wife might still be having some troubles with her dad's supposed alcoholism... I doubted my nine-year-old son suddenly enjoyed a little Bourbon or that my sober-for-life, clean-living, beautiful wife threw back a few shots of whiskey on a regular basis. I knew where they were. Now I just needed to find out what it meant.

I slogged my way over to the family computer to find my answer. In my family we own nice things. We buy new gadgets fairly often, and this was the case in this instance. I thought we had an old desktop computer, but evidently my wife disliked it and decided to purchase a brand-new, top-of-the-line touchscreen laptop. It took a minute for me to find the on switch, and I waited a few moments for the computer to start up. On the screen was a beautiful family picture. I'd been exhausted the day that we were supposed to take the pictures (I'm not sure why my wife would schedule family pictures on a Saturday when she knew I would be unwinding Friday night), so my collar was messy and my hair was disheveled. Surprisingly, my wife didn't seem upset at that fact. I still looked sharp, just not quite as "We're upper middle class, don't you know?" as my offspring and wife.

Once the computer booted up, I clicked on the internet browser. I knew that my wife kept all of her most commonly visited websites on a bar above the main webpage, so I went searching there for my answer. I found the normal things - Facebook, Pinterest, Moms Today, those sorts of things. My wife is so easy to understand. She's not like most women, thank goodness. She doesn't care if I go out and have drinks with the guys. More than anyone, she seems to be okay with me partying. And she should be; I provide her with everything she wants. The least she can do is let me have my fun. She gets the whole day to do nothing, just sit around and do laundry. I'm out there "winning bread," as they say, and she sits at home waiting for me to bring home the bacon. So I think she understands why I go out and unwind.

I didn't see anything about Al-Anon on the main bar, which was confusing. If it was important enough to be on my family's calendar every single Saturday, one would think it would be on the place where my wife kept everything important. It could mean only one thing - my wife was trying to hide it. Being a typical woman, though, she's not always smart. I figured something about Al-Anon would probably be in the browser history. My wife would have no idea what that is - the "Clear history" button only frequents the male mind in its state of worried perversion. I hit "History" from the "Settings" tab and went to work. It didn't take me long; there was something about Al-Anon about every four entries in the history. I knew my sneaky tactics would work. Women... they're so clueless!

Barely even interested anymore, I clicked on one of the Al-Anon websites. It looked like a journal entry. I glanced through, reading those sentimental words, clearly written by some home-wrecked woman. A man would never lower himself to that level of sensitivity. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page, looking for the author's name. I didn't find it (apparently people like to be anonymous online), but I didn't need to. Even if I didn't know who penned these disgustingly emotional words, I could draw the connections. As I glanced through the paragraphs, a word stuck out: alcohol. The author kept talking about alcoholism, how this alcoholic person was blind to his addictions, and that he or she continued to struggle with their insecurities even after attending Al-Anon on a weekly basis. They said that the discussions in the therapy groups had encouraged them to open up, but that the wounds hadn't yet healed.

So that's why my wife visited this page frequently, and why she had started attending Al-Anon with the kids. She still struggled with the addictions in her family's past. Only one person was close enough, around her enough, influenced her enough to make her feel this strongly. Her daddy always had a love of the bottle, and I knew she harbored some residual bitterness about him now. I felt sorry for her, you know, with all that she had been through. He really broke her heart and left her spinning. That's why I do my best to work hard for her, so that she has nothing to worry about. I was a little offended that she didn't mention how I helped her get through the loss of her daddy to liver cancer in her blog post, but I got over it pretty quick. I know she loves me, so it wasn't a big deal.

In my careful concentration on the dimly lit computer screen, I forgot that my longneck bottle of beer sat right next to my right elbow. I moved the mouse to scroll down the page to keep reading, and in the process I knocked my half-full bottle onto the wood floor. I let out a string of swear words (we all express frustration in different ways, after all) and rose to grab a mop. I had quite an ordeal cleaning up the shattered glass and wasted alcohol, so after I wrung out the mop and put it away, I headed back into the kitchen. A few moments later, I was lying back in my well-worn recliner with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I turned on the TV and flipped to the midday news. It'd been a long morning, and it was well past time for a break.