Ellen C – 12 Steps to Serenity – Part 4 – Date Unknown

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My man's at his station, God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. You have been wonderful today. In case I don't tell you that again, you've been wonderful. Very few of you have gone to sleep. And I know, I know, Dee, I saw you. I saw you. I was trying not to stare, but I saw you. You know how it is, you know, you're in a room full of, there's 100 people and 99 of them like you and there's one who doesn't, and who is it you focus on, you know, that one, that one.

And that's what I tend to do. So I try not to look anymore. I just try not to look. I don't think about the fact that he's just loaded up on carbohydrates in this middle of the afternoon and he's tired. You know, it's all about me. It is all about me. It's always been about me. It will always be about me. This is not conference approved, but I saw that a couple of the books that you raffled off were the Lois Wilson story, When Love is Not Enough.

If you haven't read that, I recommend it to you wholeheartedly. I cried in the preface. It is, it's a wonderful book, you will know. You will love Bill Wilson, though you will not like him much. You'll love him in a special way. It is our story. It is our story. It's a wonderful book. I loaned one, I won one at a raffle myself not too long ago, and I was so happy to see it because I had loaned mine out, of course, and it never came back.

And so I took my one that I won. Wednesday nights, the girls I sponsor, those of whom are participating in whatever current project we're in, come over and we do whatever current project we're doing. And I told them, I said, oh, look what I got. I got this book. I loaned out my old one and it's never come back. Well, it wasn't three days later that one of them said, ah, I think I know where your book is.

Okay, good for you. All right, we're on step ten. Continue to take personal inventory. Oh, in case I forget to tell you, the reading sheets are here someplace if you want to know the readings that go with this. Continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. It doesn't say, this is the good news and the bad news about step ten. It doesn't say, and if you are ever wrong, promptly admitted it.

It says when, which leads me to understand that it's going to happen and I shouldn't be surprised, you know. Healing doesn't happen in comfort zones. Growth doesn't happen in comfort zones. It's that wonderful line, and it's quoted in one of our books, that says ships are safe in harbors but that's not what ships are for. You know, the way I know I'm doing this is if I do something wrong from time to time because if I'm not out there taking chances, if I'm doing just what's comfortable, if I'm doing what I've always done, I am not in the process of becoming and I want to be in the process of becoming.

I want to be in the process of more Ellen. And so I have to remember that says when, not if by chance I might happen to be someday in the future a little bit tiny on one side wrong. It's pretty clear. And what it's talking about is letting go, you know, step four and five of the process, six and seven of the process of letting go of my old ideas. Well, ten is about letting go of my current old ideas, you know.

They're the old ideas I woke up with this morning. They're the ones I brought into this room. How do I know what they are? Well, there's a couple of checkpoints. I think it's 12 and 12 talks about the spiritual axiom and if there's something disturbs me, the problem is not the thing disturbing me, the problem is me. It's my disturber one more time. My disturber has been turned on. One time I said to my sponsor, she said, how are you doing?

And I said, well, he's pushing all my buttons. And she said, what are you doing with buttons? See, the steps are a process of button removal. I should be having the buttons removed because it isn't about them pushing, it isn't about their pushing, it's about me having buttons. That's the issue. Step 10 is the place where I stand on guard. My sponsor used to say for the sly little foxes that creep back into my life, the old worn out useless ways of doing things that don't serve me or God anymore.

The sly little foxes, I think of that. The spiritual axiom, that's a good, if something's disturbing me, that's a place to look. There's an old idea. There's something in my head. You know, in 6 and 7, one of the things that I've learned to ask for is that the need for the defect be removed. There's a reason why that defect worked for me. There's a reason why I had to keep doing it.

[00:05:00]

And I want to have the need for that defect removed. So when I get to 10 and I get a disturbance again, what's the payoff for me? Why am I doing, why is this disturbing me? Sometimes, and this is the truth, it's too quiet in my life. It's just too quiet. And I'm an adrenaline junkie. I sponsor this wonderful gal. I sponsor a bunch of them. But this one has worked in public schools for like 35 years, and she finally retired this year.

And she needed to. She had to skip out of the last two weeks of school last year because the stress was so hard on her physically. The heart doctor and the gastro doctor told her she had to stay home. She couldn't go to school anymore. Working in an inner school, middle school, and it was just awful. And so here we go, and she says, you know, we're coming up to the end of August. And she called me up one day and she said, I can't stand this.

I have got to find something to do. I'm not supposed to be doing nothing. I'm supposed to be doing something. I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something. I said, you know what? You're an old horse, and you've got an old idea here that somehow along the end of August you're supposed to be gearing up for another fight. Maybe, maybe this quiet that you're feeling is peace. Maybe you should just go with that.

She was like, whoa. Aren't you supposed to do something in peace? No. Be. This is a be. You know, that's that prayer. Oh, I love it. The fear prayer in the big book says, God, please remove this fear and direct my attention to what you would have me be. Not what you would have me do, but what would you have me be. And if I say that prayer when I get scared, it's interesting to hear the answers I get.

I want you to be trusting. I want you to be still. I want you to be confident. I want you to be loving. That's what God would have me be. Not astronaut or, you know, mother of the year, but that's what I would have you be. Rules. Do you have rules? I sponsor a gal who a couple of years made an inventory of the rules in her life, the rules she lives by, the rules that go on in her head, and the way you know you're in one of those rules if it's got a should attached.

I should, he should, they should. My sponsor's husband told me one time, he said she was not home, and so he had to listen to me when I called. That is a sponsor's husband's job, though. And I told him what was happening, and he said, oh, should. He said, well, it sounds like you're playing by somebody else's rules, and who's going to punish you if you break the rules? And that's what shoulds are. They're somebody else's rules.

And who's going to punish me when I break those rules? Well, who's going to punish me is the way I start finding out how long I've had that rule. Now, I may make my own decisions about where my boundaries are and what my code of ethics is, what my belief system is, and that may have some shoulds for me, you know, a person of this. But I need to make sure they're my shoulds and not somebody else's shoulds.

And if it's my should who's going to punish me when I break it, am I going to punish me? Is God going to punish me? Whoop, back to step two, we need to find a new God. I don't have a punishing God anymore, so I need to look at that again. Those are the ways I know that I'm hanging on to an old rule. Some of you have heard this story, but the rest of you, you're all going to hear it again now. Twenty-one years ago, my daughter was hanging out in slippery places with slippery people.

She'd been sober once and was now going downhill. She was 18 years old. It looked like bad things were going to happen again. I had done an inventory about living in active alcoholism, and what I discovered is when I live in active alcoholism, I break out in malignancies. There were studies then that said that cancer was a stress-related disease. Cancer is prevalent in alcoholic homes. I believe that the cancer I had was stress-caused.

What I knew was that my daughter was not going to give me peace of mind, that it's up to me to create the peace of mind I need. I told her if she couldn't abide by the rules in the house, she couldn't stay there. I'd said it many times before, but I meant it for the first time because my life was on the line. I picked the deadline to be the day I was going to Crested Butte with 600 of my closest friends to the Crested Butte Mountain Conference, cbconference.org, in case you want to look it up.

That was the morning she threw herself across my bed and said, you're going to be a grandmother. She was 18 years old and she was pregnant. I thought that changed everything, that I was going to have to stay home and take care of her. I thought I would die. That's exactly how it felt. If I have to stay here and take care of her, I will die. After a little bit, I finally picked up the phone, called my sponsor, turned myself in.

She said if you don't want her to stay, I'll stay on the phone while you tell her.

[00:10:02]

I thought the pain was about letting go of her, and what I discovered at that instance was the pain was about holding on when it was time to let go of her. The pain is always in the resistance. It's never in the action. It's in the resistance. It was time to let go of her, and I quit hurting. I lay the phone on the bed and I quit hurting. I told her she was going to have to go anyway. We went through a difficult fall with her telling me what a terrible mother I was.

She called up the old treatment center and told them what a terrible mother I was. She was pregnant and 18 years old, and I wouldn't let her stay home. Here was a kid who didn't even like dolls. I'm thinking, what is she going to do with a baby, for God's sake? I wasn't any worse because I went around telling people what she was doing to me now. Now she's pregnant at me. That's what I told them. I was serious because it's all about me.

Like I told you, it's all about me. The tapers have often been my best friends. Honest to God, there was one stretch of time when I saw more of the Dyke Hope tapers than I did of my own kids. My friends would say, where are you going? I'd say, rectangle state, Dyke Hope. That's where I'm going. I'm not sure where I'll land, but I know they'll be there. This was a taper. I said to him, she's pregnant at me now.

He took a deep breath and he was very serious. I love alcoholics who don't laugh at us, who take us serious. He took me serious and he said, honey, I understand how you feel. He said, you know what? Our son's girlfriend has had a baby out of wedlock and that child has been the light of our lives. And that was when I saw my old idea. I had this huge should, that she should be married, that she should be older, that she should be responsible.

This shouldn't be happening this way. This is not right. And then he said, you know what? Our son's girlfriend has had a baby out of wedlock and that child has been the light of our lives. It had never occurred to me I might like it. It had never occurred to me it might be a good thing. When you are people like us who live in the chaos of alcoholism, and the rules are important, because if we don't have rules, it's all going to go to hell in a handbasket.

And the rules get more important than the people. They get more important than the activities. The rules have got, because it's the only place we feel like there's any control. I say sometimes, you know, my kids are 37 and 39 and they'd still be going to bed at 8.30 if it wasn't for Al-Anon. 8.30 is when you should go to bed. I'm not going to be calling them up now. You should be in bed, you know. It's an old idea.

And what Al-Anon allows me through the process of uncovery and discovery in 6 and 7 is the process of changing my mind. I believe that acceptance is not, there's a difference between tolerance and acceptance. You know, tolerance is okay, okay, I'll put up with it. I don't like it at all and it shouldn't be like that. I guess it's God's will, I'll just do it. That is tolerance and love and tolerance is our code.

It's part of the process, but it isn't the end all be all. The end that I want to get to, the event that I want to have happen, the thing that I want to feel is acceptance. I want acceptance. And acceptance is when I say thank you God for everything exactly as it is. I wouldn't change a thing. My sponsor used to say that to me all the time. When she was dying, she was ill for a couple of months and I'd call her up and I'd say, you know, how are you?

And she'd say, you know, I'm really not very good today. I don't feel very good. And she'd say, but you know what, I thank God for everything exactly as it is. And it was her way of letting me know she was okay in the process. You know, she was okay in the process. And that's the acceptance part I want to get to. And that's what I did with those babies, the baby. I said, yes, thank you God, thank you for this baby that's coming.

And a couple of months later, Melissa called and she said, Mom, that blue blanket you're knitting, knit faster. It's twin boys. I had a sonogram today. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know those alcoholics. If one's good, let's have another. And what I know today is if she hadn't had that second baby, you'd have another speaker. Because it would have changed, it would have, I could not have resisted one baby.

It was a little easier to resist two of them. I've got to tell you. At least that's the way it seems. And I made the decision. She moved out and gave me power of attorney when the babies were five weeks old because she said she didn't want to do it. When the babies were five weeks old, because she said she didn't want to keep them and I could have them if I wanted them.

[00:15:02]

And I went to adoption agencies and said, I'm looking for a family that wants two babies and a grandmother. Because that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be the grandma. And I've been the grandma for those boys. They're 20 years old. They were 20 years old in March. And I've been the grandma for those boys all these years. Their family has made sure that every month we have a meal together. It's been a little helter-skelter since they graduated from high school and have spent more time in jail than out.

Oh, here's a family that doesn't believe in alcoholism and gets just bad morals or something. And no drugs or alcohol have been involved with the boys. But there is ism up one side and down the other. I'm telling you, I have a picture up here of my darling boy on his motorcycle. He called me one day, Grandma, I've got new wheels. Do you want to see them? I said, ooh, I'd love to see them. I said, I'll act surprised. Oh, you're going to be surprised.

And it's this big blue motorcycle, not too long after that picture was taken. He'd already done some time in jail because of tickets that he thinks he's invisible or something. And they'll never see him. I don't know what he thinks. But he'd already spent quite a bit of time in jail. And he'd missed Thanksgiving, but he made it home for Christmas. And he came to my house for Christmas. I said, I'm so glad to see you.

He said, oh, Grandma, I'm glad to see you, but then I'm glad to see anything, not in an orange jumpsuit. I bet you are. He said, I've learned how to play dominoes like an old man. That's good, Tony. So his solution to the next set of tickets he got because he didn't want to go back to jail was he would just take the license plates off the back of his bike. Then they wouldn't know it was him. He'd just outrun them. That's what he thought, he'd just outrun them.

They clocked him at 138 miles an hour going through his little town. And because, I don't know why, I'd like to tell you God's good, but you know God's good all the time and bad stuff still happens, but he ran out of gas. Let's just think how happy those cops were when they caught up with him. I had dinner with him just last week. I had dinner with those boys. His mother handed him his latest bills, which included $1,200 worth of tolls that somehow he's run up just driving up and down the toll road.

That is a lot of driving up and down the toll road, you know, $1,200. And he's moved into a pretty expensive apartment I rented today. Oh, that's great, working construction and checking IDs at the club. Yeah, we're moving on now. He called me the next day and he said, I've got to get a trailer to move my bedroom set. And I can't wake up my mother to get the debit card number, so could you just give me your credit card number?

I kept it to one word. What I wanted to say was not in this lifetime or the next. He said, no, honey, I don't think I can do that. Oh, that's okay, I'll figure something out. I knew you would. I told him, I knew you would. That's the kind of guy you are. At one point in the last few years is these parents have just deteriorated in front of me as the boys are doing their thing. And I don't know if it was Tony pulling a knife on his dad or Cameron getting caught.

Just inside Walmart, if they got him outside, they could have hauled him to jail, but they got him right inside Walmart with the latest illegal addition to his women's underwear collection that he had at home. I don't know what that was, but the dad has, you know, he's getting thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner, and the mom is now wearing a wig all the time. I think she just pulled out all the hair she has, you know.

And I said to him at one point, if I thought they would be easy to raise, I'd have kept them. And I was serious as a stroke. I really was. And, you know, my deal with those boys has been we had a long discussion. When they were 10 and 11, it was the time they figured out there was something weird about our family. I mean, you know how boys are. They're not clueless. They are clue-free. It's just there's not even one in the neighborhood, you know.

They're both clue-free. They were 11 years old before they figured out that they called my daughter Melissa, but they called my son Uncle Murray. That was their first clue there was something weird there. Why is she not Aunt Melissa? And then the next weird thing was that their mother is older than I am. How did that happen? And they never could figure out exactly whose mother I was,

[00:20:01]

but it really hadn't worried them much until then. You know, that was when they started. Why is this? So they asked questions, and I spent the next year with them. This is part of my step 10. I spent the next year because back then when they were 9 and 10 and 11 and 12, they used to come and spend a week with me in the summer, those boys did. And I got to spend time with them one-on-one besides seeing them every month.

They come to my house for Easter. They come to my house for Christmas, you know. And that was the year we went through, Grandma, why didn't you keep us? Didn't you want us? Didn't you want me to be your little boy? Don't you miss me? And I got to talk it through with them, you know. And in my way, I was making amends to myself because I'd asked myself those very same questions. Didn't you want them?

Don't you wish they were your little boys? No, I don't wish they were my little boys. I want to be their grandma. I want to love them no matter what. I want to not care whether their room's clean. I want to not care whether they talk back to their parents today. I want to not care about any of that stuff. I want none of that to be my responsibility. I just want to be their grandmother and love them no matter what.

And that's what I got to with them. I said, you know, if I'd have kept you, I'd have had to be the mom. I'd have had to be the mom. I'd have had to crack the whip. I'd have had to be after you about your homework. And I don't have to do that when I'm your grandma. I can just love you exactly like you are. And they know that. They both know that. And they have a little sister who was born when they were 18 months old.

No, she was 18 months younger than they are. And another girl named Melissa offered her to their parents, to these parents to raise because this other Melissa knew that they had the twins. And she said, if you want a little girl, I can't keep this one, and you can have her. And they called me up, and they said, guess what? We've gotten a little baby girl, and she doesn't have a grandma. So I not only didn't lose the boys, I got a granddaughter in the bargain.

And she is something, that girl. She's just turned 19. She's going to graduate from high school this year, we think. She's never been allowed to spend the night at anybody's house. She doesn't have any girlfriends. They just guard her. And I'm not sure what's going to happen when she gets a little bit older yet. And it makes me sad, too. She's funny. Boy, she's funny. Last year, after Halloween, we had dinner together, and she said, Grandma, she said, I forgot it was Halloween.

Nobody said anything. I just didn't know it was Halloween. And I would never have left the front lights on if I'd known it was Halloween. And she was in the barn working with her dad, either shelling pecans or feeding little animals or whatever she was doing. And the doorbell rang, and she ran into the house and opened the door and darned if they weren't trick-or-treaters. And she didn't have anything to give them.

She didn't know what to do. So she just went in the kitchen and gave them canned goods. Oh, she's too funny, that girl. Anyway, that's been an amends to me. That's been an amends to my daughter, because one of the things that I knew would have happened if I'd kept those babies is that my daughter and I would never have a relationship. It would have been very hard to keep a relationship with those babies there.

They would have always been between us. And as it is now, Melissa and I, the boys go and spend the night with her sometimes. And she wails and gnashes her teeth, and I love it. She says, Are they ever going to get it? And I go, I don't know. Might want to work an alibi program. I don't know. How do I know when I'm wrong? I have to check it out with my sponsor. My tendency is to take responsibility for stuff that's not mine.

I have to call up my sponsor and say, This is what happened. The last time Tony was in jail, it was just this last little incident, and he spent three or four months in jail, and he's now a convicted felon at the ripe old age of 20. It was the Fourth of July weekend, and I was just in a dither. I was thinking. I was thinking, thinking, thinking about this boy, and surely there was something I could do.

My darling boy. I saw the picture of him in the newspaper, and it didn't say Ellen's Precious Grandson. It said Young Man is what it said. And I called up my sponsor, and I told her, I said, My precious, precious boy is in jail again. What can I do? She said, I want you to say that sentence over again. And this time, I just want proper names. I don't want any pronouns. I don't want any adjectives. Just put proper names in there.

Tony's in jail again, I said. Oh, she said, Is your name in that sentence any place? No. Then, I don't think it's your problem. I really wanted to do something. I hate it when you can't do anything. I hate it. I have to turn it over to God. Wrong.

[00:25:00]

Not misguided, misled, ignorant, or victimized. Wrong. This is when I'm early in Al-Anon. I'm four, five, six, seven, eight years in Al-Anon. That was early. I have this son at home who is now six foot one and doesn't mind. He's darling, but he did crazy things. At one point, one time, I remember the day it happened, he called me a really bad name. A really bad name. I had to jump up to smack him, but I did.

I jumped up and smacked him in the face. Then, I felt badly about that. I thought, You know, that's really not the way I would like to have reacted to that. I'm sure I was screaming things while I was jumping. My sponsor had taught me, This is a process. This is a process. It's not an event. We want to wait until we can do it perfectly before we do it. We don't want to go make amends unless we know we're doing it right and it's going to come out right.

She said, Here, Ellen, do it. That's why the amends stay in there all the time. That's why we have 10 that says when. Just do it. What I would do is I'd go to him. I went to him that time and I said, You know what? I was so wrong to do what I did. That is not the way I want it to be. I meant every word I said, but I was wrong with what I did. The next time something happens like that, I am not going to react like that because that's my part of the amends is changing my behavior.

I don't regret the past or wish to shut the door on it, but there's one thing I would change if I could go back and change it. It's when my kids were little, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and they'd say to me, Mom, I don't feel good. I don't want to go to school today. And I'd say, No, you don't have a fever. You've got to go. The reason that I wouldn't get paid is that I needed to be at work. I needed to be at a place where I had control.

I needed to be at a place I had power. I needed to be at a place where I was needed and I made a difference and I wasn't invisible like I felt I was at home. I was visible there. And so I would send my kids off. And what I did was I abandoned my children on a daily basis. I mean, I was there in the morning, I was there at night, but I abandoned my children. I was not present when they needed me to be present.

A couple of years ago, well, exactly 11 years, 12 years ago, my son called and he said, Mom, we want you to quit your job and come home because we're going to have a baby and we want you to stay home and take care of our baby. Now, these are the kids I pinned to the wall with my rage, you know. He wants me to stay home and take care of his baby. And my husband went, No, no, no, no, no. We need the money you make.

Now, he made like 12 times as much money as me, but we needed that money. And I recognized fear of financial insecurity when I see it. So I said, Oh, I wish I could. A couple of months later, my daughter called from California. Mom, guess what? We want you to quit your job and come home because we're going to have a baby and we're going to move home and we want you to take care of our baby. Now there's two babies coming.

And he's still full of, No, no, no, no, no. Okay. Well, the first baby was born. Madison was born and she was born in April and this is July. And I'd gone out to California and Dick had driven out there to meet me, and on the way out he'd listened to some CDs of Clint Hodges. And someone had asked Clint exactly how much money do you have to have so you wouldn't feel financially insecure. And Clint said, Well, I guess just enough money so I wouldn't have to trust God.

And when my husband heard that and my son called, and I could hear my daughter-in-law crying in the background, and my son said, Mom, if I tell you one more horror story about what happened at the daycare today, then will you quit your job and stay home? And when I heard her cry, and I had just had another run-in, as God would have it, with another mom who had done the same things I'd done about abandoning my children.

I turned to my husband and I said, I didn't know he'd heard those CDs yet. And I turned to my husband and I said, You know, we may have to eat beans in our old age, and indeed that's what's happening. But I said, This is really something I need to do. It's an amends to my children. It's amends to me. I couldn't be there for them then, but I can be there for them now. I can be there for their children.

And he had heard those CDs, and he said, Well, if you want to come home, you can come home. So of course I brought four parts of my job home, because you know how we are. It's just one little baby. How much time is she going to take up? And I opened a little business called Mom's Better Babies, an affordable daycare for your priceless children. But the only children I would keep were my grandchildren, so don't even bother to ask.

And the way it worked out was Madison came to me in August. She was exactly to the day the same age the twins were. August, she was exactly to the day, the same age the twins were, the day we gave them up. God didn't miss a beat with that.

[00:30:00]

She came in August, Tristan was born in December and he came at three weeks and 14 months later Kennedy was born and she came to me at four weeks and seven months later Sutton was born and he came at two months. My son had two daughters, my daughter had two sons. They had sense enough to do it in three years and I had the best job anybody ever had. I was the mom, I was the grandmom, I looked like super grandma is what I looked like.

And people say, gosh, how can you, but I know what I'm doing, I'm making amends. I'm being there for my kids today. They're 11, 10, 9 and 8 right this minute but they still come to me on sick days and holidays and in the summer. We take them on a spring break trip every year and every summer in August we take them to Crested Butte to be with 600 of my closest friends. I can't keep alcoholism from happening to these children.

And chances are good that it's going to happen. They're either going to do it or love one. And maybe, just maybe, I can make AA and Al-Anon safe places for them to be so they're not scared to go and they'll know where to go when it happens. Now we started taking those kids and my daughter had avoided coming to Crested Butte. My daughter's idea of anonymity in her AA program was not to tell people I was her mother.

And you know what? I don't care. Whatever she needs to do to be sober, I don't care. If that means she doesn't tell people I'm her mother, fine with me. I will act like a total stranger if she wants me to. But we started taking those kids. The bottom fell out in her life and we were on our way up there one year and she said, Mom, I've got to come. I just can't be home anymore. I've got to come. And she came to Crested Butte.

And she's on the board now. You know what? I always wanted a cheerleader daughter. I wanted the prom queen. I wanted Little Miss Perfect. Instead what I got was somebody with white makeup and black hair who banged her head on the wall and brought these freaky kids in my house. And she was just scary. Wrap herself in a roll of toilet paper and roll around the living room. She was just freaky, this kid.

Not at all what I had in mind. And the next summer, a year later, it just so happens my husband and I were chairing Crested Butte that summer, and I stood up at the podium and I looked at the back of the room, and there in the back of the room was my daughter and 14 members of her home group that she had cheered up to Crested Butte. I got the cheerleader daughter. You know, I got the cheerleader daughter.

If God had let me design her, how short I would have sold us both, you know? She's still very alcoholic, but she wouldn't miss Crested Butte. She told me this last year. When we stay together, when we go up there, everybody knows I'm her mother. She told me this last summer. She said, Mom, why didn't you make me come sooner? And then she laughed, and then she looked at me, and she said, you didn't want me to come.

I said, you know, at first I did, then I didn't. I just needed a break from you. Daily, moment to moment, sometimes moment to moment evaluations, asking for direction repeatedly and taking it, making daily decisions about, you know, I did this for a long time at my job. Do I want to stay in this job today? Do you want to work here today? Yeah, I'll work here today. I'm not sure about tomorrow, but I'll stay here today.

Staying in a marriage. How am I eating? I can do this today. The year of cancer, what I discovered was a really big question, which is step 10 for me. I did chemo, and chemo is nasty. It's nasty in the best of circumstances, and that was the worst of circumstances 25 years ago. It was torture. It was just torture. Throw up for 12 straight hours. I mean, who wants to do that? And it got to where you just feel sick thinking about it.

Nothing bad is happening to you just thinking about it. And the question that came up for me that my sponsor would say to me when I'd say, I can't stand this another minute, she'd say, how are you right this second? How are you right this second? Always, without fail, right this second, I'm just fine. Thank you. I'm okay. I've got everything I need right this second. I always do. And inevitably, you know, we say I want a guarantee.

I want some insurance. I've been given it. Everything has always been provided that I need. Everything always has. My husband says, well, historically speaking, and he's right, you know. Am I going to use this situation to beat somebody up with? Beat myself with? Grow from. Those are my three choices. And I've got to be careful for HALT. Except in my book, it's HALT's period.

[00:35:01]

Hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sick, or having a period. Any of that is going to screw with your perspective, and you might as well just check it out. That's one of the first questions I'll ask my girls. Okay, tell me, what day of the month is this? Are you taking those hormones? Okay, well, then we're not talking about it because I know what's going on with you. And I have fabulous pictures up here of all the children.

Step 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. Sought, not found. Sought. My job is looking. I heard a speaker not too long ago. Gosh, he was darling. He said, God is like a mom who plays hide-and-go-seek with her precious children. She never hides where they can't find her.

And when do they find her? She just loves all over them. He said, you know, that's the deal. All I've got to do is look. God's not lost. It's my looking that needs doing, that's all. I have a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of my spiritual condition, not the condition of my spiritual condition. You know, I think that if I'm doing everything I'm supposed to, I'm going to be feeling just fine.

Well, that isn't the way it goes here on planet Earth. But if I keep doing what I'm supposed to do, if I keep doing what my sponsor says, you know, sometimes it's time to change the routine. I need to check that out. But the maintenance, as long as I'm doing what I, you know, what needs to be done to maintain my spiritual condition, whether it really does maintain it or not, because sometimes it feels like God's gone away someplace again.

And I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, but you know what? That's the way it's supposed to feel. You can't have faith if you don't have doubt. They go together. There isn't any way I'm going to believe all the time. There's going to be times when I don't believe. There's going to be times when I feel separate from. There's going to be times when I feel lost. Or else why do I have to come to meetings?

Why do I have to talk to you? Why do I have to have a sponsor? Why do I have to read that stuff? It's because that's the way this life works. But the good news is every time I feel lost and then I know I'm found, I am more found than I was the last time. I'm closer connected than I was the last time. It's the way it works here. I keep a nightly journal, and it really is more of an 11th step than it is a 10th step.

Now, I'm going to tell you this. I didn't write it down. There are no rules here. You can do your own or you don't have to do it at all. It takes me maybe seven minutes to do the whole thing. But it's the way I check in with myself at the end of the day. I don't know about you, but I used to beat myself to sleep with all the things I should have said and didn't say that he said and didn't say that he did.

Oh, I beat myself to sleep with that. And my sponsor told me one time, she said, you know, the committee never sleeps. And she said, whatever you put in your head at the end of the day is what the committee works on all night long. And when you wake up in the morning, there it is. And it's worse than it was the night before because they thought of some things you hadn't thought of yet. And she's right.

So I'm very careful about what the last thing is that goes in my head at night. I do not watch the news. It's not news anyway, but it's just, you know, visual torture stuff they want to show you. I don't watch that. That doesn't do me any good. I always watch a little Frasier or Will and Grace or Little Friends, something to send me to bed lightly, you know. Matlock will do in a pinch. I will watch Matlock.

But no more murder, she wrote. I just think, I don't know, I'm over her, I think. Anyway, we've been close friends for a long time, but Jessica and I have cut the cord. Anyway, and I sit in my bed with my little pen and I write out my journal at night. The number one thing I write is my joy. Where did I find joy today? Because inevitably that's the place God touched me, was where I found. That's the God I have today is a God of joy.

If there was a place of joy today, that was the place I touched God, and I want to write that down. Lots and lots of times it's a little child. I work at a little preschool, and believe me, those little things, they will do you in. Gavin the other day is sitting in my lap, and he's three. And he's looking at my hands, and he's going, Miss Ellen, I love your nails. I said, well, thank you. They're very lovely.

Oh, and I love your toenails, too. I said, well, thank you. They are kind of pretty. He said, you know, I like your voice. You have a lovely voice. I said, well, thank you so much. He said, well, I'm just trying to give you a good report from my mother. Oh, I love that. Okay, got it. Well, you got the report.

[00:40:00]

We're moving on now. The next thing I write down is a truth. What did I learn today? The only way I can waste a day is if I didn't learn something today. Sometimes it's a big thing. Sometimes it's a little thing. One time the thing I had to write down was that after certain ages, four children did not go into the same bed anymore. He had to stop that. Sometimes, like the other day at that meeting when I heard, acceptance is what I want and judgment is what I offer.

That was what I learned that day. And I write down the truth I learned today. The next thing is a success. You know, I used to beat myself up for all the stupid things, but I've decided I need to celebrate what I've done today. Maybe some parts of a longer project that I just needed to do parts of and I did it. Maybe I kept my mouth shut today. Good thing to write down. Nothing is often the best thing to do and always the best thing to say.

And what do I feel successful about today? It's often another place I see God. It's often a place I know that I am enough. I am enough. I can do with help the stuff that needs to be done to make me okay. The next thing I write down, and I've been doing this for a couple of years, and like I said, this has changed through the years. It morphs. One of the things I beat myself up the most about is taking care of my body.

I don't do the stuff I need to be doing. I should be exercising. I should not be eating this. I should be going to the blah, blah, blah, blah. So I write down a little thing that says for my body, and I write down what did I do for my body today. This morning I walked 40 minutes. I did five yoga stretches. I did 10 minutes worth of meditation. That goes in my book. It's 45, 5, 10. That's the way it goes in my book.

Hopefully I will not have eaten any sugar by the end of the day, and I can write that down. Sometimes I went to the doctor. Sometimes I got a manicure. That's something nice I've done for my body today. So rather than beating myself up for what I don't do, I can focus on what I do do. The next thing I write down are miracles, and those are the places I've seen God at work. Maybe they're almost always in somebody else's life.

A bunch of miracles happened today already. Having Dick show up was just, he's made my whole month probably. If there's anybody who could probably do this, he could stand up here and do it for me. I mean, he's heard it all, I'm sure, but that he would come, that was pretty lovely today. So that's going to be a miracle for me today. And the next thing I write down, and this one has changed. I used to write down my prayer list, who I'm fretting over today, who I'm worried about today, who I'm concerned about today.

And I decided that doesn't do any of us any good. So this is my highest and best. I call them H and B, and I say, God, I'm turning these people over to you for their highest and best, whatever that is. And then I make a list of the folks that I could worry about if I gave myself space. But I decide it's better if I turn them over to God for their highest and best. And then the last thing I write down are my significant feelings today.

I had one feeling when I got here, and that was hurt, everything hurt. Fear hurt, words hurt, thinking hurt, everything hurt. We tend to come in here one of two ways. We either come in angry or we come in hurt. And I've learned that if you come in hurt, you're going to have to learn to deal with the anger. If you come in angry, you're going to have to learn to deal with hurt. It's the same feeling.

It's either I'm blowing it out on you or sucking it in on me, one or the other. And I need to recognize how I feel today. The other thing is I go through periods when I don't feel very good, physically don't feel good, emotionally don't feel good, whatever. Don't feel good. I'm angry today, whatever I am. And I don't know about you, but I get in one of those places and I think it's always been like that and it's always going to be that way.

It's never going to change. So I've made a practice of writing what I call my sig feels, my significant feelings, writing what those were today. What that has allowed me is I can go back and see the last time I didn't feel good, how long did that last? The new insurance company made me change medication, one that's been working forever, and they made me change it. And I've been sick for six weeks, almost two months.

And, of course, since I don't have a reaction the minute I take the pill, it takes three days later for me to have a reaction to the silly pill. I didn't put that together. So I kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And then the day went, oh, I think I know what that was. And the doctor said, how long has this been going on? That's the day it started. I know exactly the day it started. It's right there in my book.

But I'm bigger than the insurance company. There you go. Prayer is everything I say and do. Is Everything I Say and Do. I really believe everything I say and do is a prayer. And I believe every prayer is answered.

[00:45:00]

With the summer of the babies, I've got these kids, I've got no money, I don't know what's going to happen, I don't know how we're going to pull this together. I am frantic, I'm absolutely frantic with the money issue. And my son is now falling in love for the first time with a girl who lives in New Jersey. Great. And he's on the phone and he's running up $500 phone bills and he didn't have a job and he's not paying and I'm thinking, oh, I just can't stand this anymore.

The best solution I could come up with was to unplug the phones when I left for work in the morning and put them in the trunk of my car. Take the phones to work. That's what I did. So one day I'm at work and I got the phones in the back of my car and the phone is ringing at school and it's before hours and I shouldn't have answered the phone. We were in the middle of a meeting but I did. And it was a friend from California who said, oh, I knew you'd be there.

I just talked to your son. He told me you were at work. He'd gone digging in trash or something until he found an old phone that he could scream through and he, you know, he plugged it in and he was going it down. And I sat in the meeting and I didn't want anybody to see that I was ready to cry. I really don't want people to see that I'm going to lose it here any minute, you know. And so I'm doodling.

I'm doodling until I could get myself together, which was about a half hour. And then I looked down and I realized what I'd written was, please send help. Please send help. Got home. My dad had asked me a couple of days before. He said, I sent you a thing from church. Did you get that thing? Well, dad was always sending me a saint or something, you know. God knows I needed them all. I don't know what they were for but I'll take them, you know, whatever they are.

I said, no, dad, I haven't gotten that thing. Sheesh, you should have had it by now. I went home that day and there was the thing from church he'd sent. Now, I realize now that he may have mailed it outside the church. It was a check for $500. Didn't come until I needed it. Didn't come until I asked for help. It had been on the way a long time but it came that day. Please send help. God don't put, now this is powerful and I'm going to warn you about saying this prayer.

But I will promise you that it works. God don't put anyone in my life until you can be first and I can be me. I said that prayer and people fell out of my lives, my life and my lives fell out. Great player. I can't get hold of anybody and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried and I can, it's a freight, my sponsor used to say a freight train experience, you could stop a moving freight train before you could stop yourself from doing what you're getting ready to do.

And what she taught me to say was bless it or block it. Bless it or block it God because here I go ready or not. One that helps a good deal is God if it's not your will, please change my heart. Meditation is listening to the power. I have to set a time aside to listen to God. And I really need time when I'm not driving the car, when I'm not doing anything else. It's not particularly easy to do but the fact of the matter is it always gets better with practice.

And I read a thing the other day that said if you're not distracted when you pray or when you meditate, you're not doing it right. That's what's supposed to happen is, you know, my monkey mind wants to get up there and have chatter with me about all that's going on. And my trick is don't pay him any attention. He'll go away after a while, you know. And lately what I've been doing is a focused prayer meditation and the one that works for me best is the St. Francis prayer.

And I just say those words very quiet, in my mind, very, very slowly. And it's become very powerful, that prayer. Worrying is not meditating. Just want you to know that. Meditating is giving all my love and attention. Sometimes, you know, when I go to a speaker and the hour's up and I don't know what happened to my hour. That was a form of meditation, giving all my love and attention. Chuck C used to say that, to the thing at hand.

Give all my love and attention to the thing at hand. His will. What is God's will for me? Probably the thing right in front of me. And it's probably simple. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with changing somebody else or cause a reaction. God's will is very, you know what, God's will is very clear. God's will for me and the power to carry it out becomes step 12. That's God's will for me.

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs. The only step we have that's different from AA, and the only word that's different, is they're allowed to carry messages to alcoholics. We are not. Carrying messages to alcoholics is how we got here. But we have a much bigger job and there is fewer of us.

I had a spiritual awakening as a result of other people working the steps. And that's what happened.

[00:50:02]

Oh, isn't this funny? I think I have all the time in the world. No way. Okay, well, I'm not going to tell you that part. You'll have to ask me. Okay, it says, tried to carry this message. One more time, the emphasis is on my action, not on the outcome. God is responsible for the outcome, not me. I am only responsible for my action. I tried to carry this message. I tried to practice these principles.

I'm not responsible for whether they get it or not. Years and years and years ago, my dad and my stepmother took a house at Grand Cayman and they offered us nine kids a chance to come and visit them. We could stay with them. Now, we had to pay our own way, but we could come stay with them. They were there for like six weeks or something. And poor little pitiful me, this was back in my poor days, and my dad said, if you can get yourself to Houston, I'll pay you away from Houston.

Well, hell, I could walk to Houston, you know, I'm going to Grand Cayman. And all the other kids, there's nine kids. So, you know, we'd go to, lots of them had to share their time with dad. And I didn't have to. For whatever reason, the three days I was there with them, it was just me and them. And that was when my stepmother decided that I needed to have a talk with my dad about his drinking. She introduced the topic at breakfast one morning.

She said, Clyde Lee, Ellen is going to talk to you about drinking. My dad went, uh-huh, uh-huh, and I'm going, blah, blah, blah. And dad's picking up his bowl and washing it off and walking out of the room. Well, she has alcoholic children, and I don't know that my dad was alcoholic, but she sure thought he was. And I was leaving that day, and I was going down to the beach for one more walk, and I had my original ODAT in my room with me.

It was the ODAT with the tears on the page, and it was the ODAT highlighted and underlined. The pages turned back, and phone numbers all written in the front, and phone numbers all written in the back. And, you know, there was probably eight or nine years' worth of recovery, of my recovery in that book. And I said, I told her when I went for my last walk, I said, you may want to read it. Just, why don't you just look at this book while I'm gone?

Why don't you just look? And I'll be back in a few minutes. And I came back in a little while, and she's laying there with my book clutched to her chest. And she said, I want this. And I said, well, I'm pretty sure they've got a meeting someplace here on the island. I bet you can find a book here. No, that's not what I said. Well, I'll send you a book when I get home. No, I don't want that. I want this.

She wanted my book. What she wanted was my recovery. What she wanted was, what she could see was, you know, alive and well living in those pages of that book. That's what she wanted. And the words marched across my head inside. And they said, you can't keep it if you don't give it away. And that means you've got to give your favorite book on all the planet away. And I gave her my ODAT. Now, I was dating a fellow, of course I was, who shopped at Half Price Books.

And he had found me a second edition ODAT. It was already sitting in my house waiting. I wasn't one day without a book. You know, it was at my house. And for the rest of my dad's life, that ODAT lay right up on the bar. So he always knew she knew what he was doing in there, you know. My dad said to me, for a long time, when Daddy moved into the nursing home, every time I'd go on a trip for Al-Anon, I would send a postcard to my dad.

He just thought, you know, he just thought, Daddy saw the difference in me, maybe more than anybody else on the planet. My dad saw the difference in me. And he told me one time, we were in the nursing home. He waited until everybody left the room. And he said, listen, I just want to talk to you a minute. I don't know exactly what your position is in Al-Anon. I have bad news for you, Dad. I'm one of many.

That would be my position. He was pretty sure I was, like, winning or something. You know what? Daddy just thought Al-Anon was the best thing that ever happened, you know. I got my stepmother a couple of meetings, but she wouldn't go without me. And that's okay. I'm not responsible for whether they get it. I have to carry the message by being the best example of the Big Book and how Al-Anon works to newcomers, but also sharing solutions and talking Al-Anon in meetings.

Attending group conscience, listening to long-timers, sponsoring, calling when I need help is a way of carrying the message. Oh, you know, this gal, she's called me sponsor for a while now, but she's yet to pick up the phone and call me. She thinks she's worked some steps, but we haven't really talked about much. And I told her the other day, she was saying something about, I said, you know, you can call me anytime.

Oh, I don't want to bother you. I said, let me decide about the bothering, okay? I'll let you know if it bothers me. That's the commitment I make to you. I will let you know. Calling me for help is a way to carry the message. Carrying the message, not the person. Practice, practice, practice. It doesn't say perfect. It just says practice. Practice the principles. Use recovery to respond to life.

[00:55:02]

Recognize my feelings and live from my principles instead of the other way around. Practicing the traditions. I am a huge believer in the traditions. I believe that the steps will teach me how to be at peace with myself and God, and I believe the traditions will teach me not only how to help my group survive, but to teach me how to live on the planet Earth. They are written directions for me in groups, how I can be in relationships.

Years and years ago at Crested Butte, it was the year of cancer, and I had no hair, and I had a 60-40 chance of living another five years, and someone paid my way to go to Crested Butte, and I have an actively drinking alcoholic husband at home, and a hot pink-neon-orange daughter who had fallen off the edge of the planet somewhere. I realize now she'd been into drugs and alcohol for a couple of years at that point, and a beige-and-neon, a beige-and-navy-blue son who was disappearing more and more a minute at a time, and I ended up at Crested Butte, and I was pretty pitiful.

You know, no hair on, I was just awful. I was just, you know, I was pitiful. If you're going for pitiful, I'm a pitiful. And I'm in the condo with my sponsor one day being pitiful. You know, I'm just pitiful. And there was some music playing, and I said, my husband would love that music. And she said, oh, my husband loves that music, too. They're just alike. No, they're not. No, your husband's sober.

My husband's not sober. And I'm wailing, you know, I'm wailing. About that time, her precious husband starts in the back of the room, and he's trying to get, but we were between him and the door, and he had to get between, to get to the door. And he kind of made a look at her like, I'm going out, and he said, she said, oh, no, you're not. You're going to hug Ellen. That's the absolute last thing Bob Wallman wanted.

It's the last thing I wanted. I'm miserable. Leave me alone. If you touch me, you might take the edge off my misery. And I am, I need to be in my misery right this minute. And he doesn't want any part of a snot-slinging Ellen on, you know. He doesn't want any of that. And so we do one of those A-frame hugs, you know, like this. Don't touch me, kind of a thing. But you know what, somewhere in the middle of that hug, it changed, and Bob's arms went around me, and my arms went around him.

And I quit crying tears of self-pity, and I started crying tears of gratitude. And I can't tell you how it happened. I just know that it did, because we did the action she told us to take. And I went from feeling so sorry for myself that the A-A dream wasn't going to come true, we were not going to trudge the road of happy destiny together, to being so grateful that there was such a thing as sobriety.

And I knew a sober man. I knew a miracle right in front of me. I have gone through the steps from non-involvement in my own life to THX sound, Technicolor, and Skywalker special effects. I live in the process and the questions. My sponsor used to say that all the time. Can you just live in the question? Can you live in the not knowing? Instead of my fantasies, knowing that the outcome isn't up to me, but will be far better if I leave it up to God.

Thank you. Applause.