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Source: Glendalee B – OAR 2013 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: glendalee-b-oar-2013-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:50:48
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And I was just asked in the last couple minutes to do this so I've only had the pleasure of speaking to her for about a couple minutes but I can tell by what she said to me that she will be very encouraging this evening. So I'm going to give you Glenda Lee. Bill's turning me on. I knew she was going to do that. It's been a long time. We're going to have fun. My name is Glenda Lee. It's Glenda Lee Burns. I don't tout my anonymity anymore at this point in life.
I would like you to help me with the serenity prayer and then we'll get this kicked off. God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'm a forum reader. I tout this magazine, I wait for it to come and then I sit in my kitchen, have a cup of herb tea and read it from front to back. They have an article in here about sharing recovery in Al-Anon and there's just one little line that I thought was worth reading that it is in giving that we receive.
I never thought that I would have anything to give anybody when I got to this program. I'm going to give you a brief history of growing up and my personal recovery which ties in also with my family's recovery. I'm the eldest of three children. I have a sister three years younger than I am, a brother eight years younger than I am. I grew up in an alcoholic home which a lot of people shared that they also have had this experience.
My dad was a construction worker and my father was a man who worked very hard and on weekends felt that he had a right to have a couple drinks. My home was violent at times. My father was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality, the most wonderful, kind, loving man when he didn't drink. But when he drank, he was a binge drinker, he'd go out periodically. The house was ripped apart, my mother was knocked around and things were terrible.
But one of the things I remember about growing up like this was then my father would be filled with such guilt and remorse that we had anything that he could possibly give us to make up. So I grew up a construction worker's daughter. They had cashmere sweaters. I had my own car when I was sixteen. He was constantly trying to make up for his behavior. I was also at that time also a very controlling child.
I remember Christmas Eve when I took a bottle of Canadian Club and poured it down the drain so my father wouldn't drink it. My mother caught hell for it but I was trying to control the situation, even at that early age. I will tell you that I have what we laughingly call the Al-Anon memory. I forget very little. And I have a sister, my sister is three years younger, says she can't remember any of this. She dealt with it by blocking it out.
And my brother won't discuss it at all. So here we're three different members of the same family. We've all handled the situation differently. But I will tell you that growing up also you had teachers who would say to you, oh you had the whole weekend to get your homework done. Well you didn't discuss what happened in your home. I was raised back in the forties in the early fifties. You didn't tell people this. This was private business. It stayed in your home.
And I thought everybody had this kind of a home. I know it was just chaotic and full of violence and nastiness. And yet there was love and there were trips and there were things. So you were constantly on a yo-yo. You lived your life on a yo-yo string. You never knew if it was going to be up or down. When I was fifteen I got very, very rebellious. And my parents couldn't handle me. I ended up being declared a ward of the courts.
And I ended up under the care of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd for girls who needed a little extra guidance. And it was a good time because I found out that I was smart and if
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I dedicated myself to my studies and I did things and I was under lock and key so I couldn't get out and get any mischief. But I was there for a year and then I came home. I was a year ahead of myself in school. So I graduated from high school when I was just seventeen and went into nurses training at the old city hospital which is now Metro in Cleveland. And I was there for about three or four months.
And I would come home on weekends to be sure that there was nothing happening in my home on the weekends. I was still the in-charge daughter to protect my mother, be sure my father didn't drink and wreck the house and things like that. So I was home one weekend and then I was going to meet a couple of girlfriends and go back into Cleveland. Twenty-fifth Street really rocked back at that time. And it is now too, I guess, but you know, if you wait long enough everything comes around full circle.
But anyhow, I'll jump ahead just a little bit. You know we write our own history and my grandchildren gave me a beautiful book, Grandma's Memories. And on the first page it's how did grandma meet grandpa. Well guys, grandma was hitchhiking and grandpa picked her up. So, I want to tell you, this guy, he had on my favorite perfume, which the lotions the guys wear today couldn't compare with this, Juicy Fruit Gum and Beer.
It just knocked me off my feet. I just, you know, and he was so different. He had a DA haircut and he talked with a Brooklyn accent and he looked bad and that looked really good to me. So grandma, by then I invited him to my house for dinner. And I was never the domesticated door, my sister helped my mom in the kitchen and did all the goody two-shoe things with her. But I wanted to impress him so as he came up the driveway I said to my mom, and right away you can see the devious, manipulated behavior, tie this apron on me, I want him to think I cooked this meal.
And I couldn't boil water, but my mom was a great, great cook. And Tom and I were inseparable. I met him in November and he met my father. My father was a boomer. My dad worked out of town in construction and would come home periodically. And he went, took Tom up down to the corner to have a few drinks to get to know him. And they had this terrible fight. They both ended up with stitches and broken noses and all this stuff. And the other shot of it was that my dad forbid him to come near me.
My dad did not want him hanging around with me. And of course that was go signal. Three days later we ran away and eloped. Tom did have a job at that time, but of course his drinking, he lost it. And my dad being a pipe fitter took him into town and got him into the trades, got him into an apprenticeship. Now my dad had just built this beautiful two-car garage behind our house. And we turned it into a honeymoon cottage.
It was really darling. It had a little kitchenette and a bathroom and a bedroom and a little space heater in the corner. And we were going to settle down and live there. See, it's funny when you hear other people sharing and you think, ah, yes, the fantasy world we live in. I was not going to live like my parents lived and my world was going to be different and my world was going to be perfect. And I will tell you that I was the eldest in my family when I got married.
I was eighteen in the end of October, which I've got. By the way, Betty, you said something about your brother looking eighty. I will be eighty on the twenty-first of October. And I don't think it's too bad. But anyhow, I just thought I'd throw that out. I was the eldest when I got married. I got married at the end of October and I was married the end of December. And I knew everything in my life was going to be different. My sister married the day after her seventeenth birthday and my brother married when he was sixteen.
This was all just to, quote, get away from our home situation. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, all of us, believe me. Because I went out and got my alcoholic, my sister went and got hers.
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And the brother that I'm sure never wanted to be like his, my father, turned out to be just like my dad. But this program has had a great influence on all of us. My brother-in-law is sober almost as long as my husband and my brother has been in AA also. So, we're a family in total recovery. But anyhow, getting back to my adventures with my husband, I thought that if I was this perfect person, I had this fantasy of what a perfect wife would be, that I wouldn't have any of the problems my mother had.
And I would cook wonderful dinners and he wouldn't come home. And I'd get all sexed up and pretty and ready and he wouldn't come home. Then I'd go on strike and I wouldn't do anything. I'd let the house get dirty. I'd let myself go to hell. Didn't really matter. He wasn't around. He didn't see it. He was not a fellow that drank at home. He was a fellow that drank away from home all the time. Well, it started out with, my husband had been briefly married.
I had a little son when I met him. So, at eighteen years of age, I became a mother of a six-week-old little boy. He had been divorced and there was a child and I ended up with Tommy. So, I had Tommy. A year later I had Chris. And, no change in the husband and we're still in the garage. And he is a weekend drinker and once in a while we'd get away. My mother and dad would watch the kids and I'd go out with him and we'd go someplace to have a drink or a dinner or a movie and enjoy ourselves.
And it would always end up in a bar. It would always end up in some kind of a fight. Either I looked at somebody, somebody looked at me. There was always nonsense. I remember he'd come home, he'd drop me off and he'd take off. And sometimes he'd be gone for the night and sometimes he'd be gone for two or three nights. And I never knew where he was or what he was doing. At that time in my life I was sure I could not live without him.
I quote, loved him so much that I put up with all this nonsense because I couldn't imagine my life without him. We separated briefly and then I had one of those make-ups, you know, I'll come out to see you honey and I'll apologize again and I'll believe him again and lo and behold I'm pregnant. So I wasn't sure, I heard somebody else say this, I wasn't sure that this was a pregnancy for me. And I downed some stuff that was supposed to maybe help me abort. Well it didn't work and on my twentieth birthday my youngest son was born.
So he will be sixty when I'm eighty, a couple weeks. And I think back, the desperation, you know, I couldn't judge anyone. Everyone does what they think they need to do with the time to survive and my whole focus at that time was how could I bring another baby into this mess that I was living in. If it had not been for my mother and dad we probably would not have had food or clothing for the children.
So here I am twenty years old and I've got three little boys that I'm raising. I put up with the nonsense. Eventually Tom, I separated. I told him I get out, I can't take it anymore. My mom said I should have had a revolving door in that house. You know that love fool, you feel like such a jerk because he'd tell me he wasn't going to drink anymore and I believed him. Then when he drank it was like you lied to me.
You hurt me again, you got me again. And every time this happened my self-esteem went down a little bit more and I couldn't hold my head up. Everyone knew I had this drunken bum for a husband. I knew he was probably running around on me. And yet I was so needy and so desperate to have him love me. I finally threw him out and went to work as a waitress because I had let my nurse's training go and we were separated for almost a year and a half and lo and behold he came out to the house and he said he was on the wagon, he hadn't drank and he couldn't live the way he was living. He loved me and the boys and he wanted to get back together.
But he didn't want to live near my mother and dad. He felt that they interfered in our lives, you know. And I listened to this nonsense. So we moved into Cleveland and it's a great neighborhood, 41st and Cloud, I'll never forget it.
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We were in the upstairs of the place. There were rats running all over the place. I'd never saw a cockroach before in my life. They were coming out of the cupboards. And here I am with my three little boys and this man that's going to be different. Well, it wasn't any different. And I got pregnant again. This was when we went back, it was in that he was going to not drink. So the pregnancy and this beautiful little girl was born to us.
And she looked just like him. She had gorgeous green eyes and black hair. And she was our little princess. And I remember him saying to me after she was born, this baby will never see me drunk. Well, once again he did it. He lied to me again. She was just a little infant crawling around on the floor and he's laying dead drunk on the floor next door and she's crawling over him. And at this time in my life, I was very sick.
I had terrible migraine headaches. I was just not healthy because I was spiritually and emotionally and at times physically abused. And I put up with it because I didn't know what else to do. And I was so ashamed of the way we lived and what was going on in our lives. Something happened. I think of the rats. I remember sitting and throwing shoes at rats so they wouldn't get near the baby. But we moved back out to Avon Lake and we bought a house on land contract.
We had no money. Back then, you know, young people today don't know about loan companies. But back then they had loan companies and you'd go to household, beneficial, finance, I mean, you name it, we knew them all. And you consolidated loans and you were going to pay them all off. Well, of course, you never did so then you'd end up owning five finance companies' money. He was getting drunk and driving charges.
We were borrowing money to pay fines and to pay lawyers. So we begged, borrowed, and stole. We bought this little house on land contract in Avon Lake. And once again, this was my fantasy that things were going to be different and our world was going to be different. Well, he promised me he'd quit drinking and we ended up the first month, we had to borrow money from my mom and dad to make the payment because when you buy a land contract, if you don't make the payment, they can come take the house away from you.
With this, I decided, you know what, I can't really put up with this anymore. We had a friend that was a lawyer. My sister and I grew up in this town. And at that time, he was also a judge. And he said, you know, girls, and we were very young and not too shabby. And he said, you know, girls, he said, I'll give you a divorce. He says, I'm going to make it better than that. I'm going to give you two divorces if you can scrape together the price for one.
And I'll do the paperwork, dump these two guys and get on with your lives. You're too young, too attractive to put up with this nonsense. So we had filed, my sister and I had filed for divorce. And the brother-in-law and my husband were talking. They were drinking buddies. Now I compared drunks even then. I figured that my sister's husband was a nicer drunk than mine. He was in his bed. At least, and he'd go to a bar and he'd stay in the bar.
She knew where he was. She could go get him. I could never find mine. And you know, you're blaming everybody. You're blaming their friends. You're blaming the people they're with. I was a very nasty, bitter young woman. I blamed everyone else for what was going on. And I was not pleasant. I know there were times that maybe it could have been better, but I held a lot of resentment and a lot of bitterness about the nonsense we were going through.
I have to tell you, too, there was an instance that I found out that he was unfaithful to me. And I remember my heart was broke and I thought, what am I going to do? I'm going to get even. And at that time, I said, a slut outfit was probably short shorts and white boots. Well, I had short shorts and I had white boots. And I put them on and I went down to West 25th Street. And I sat on the bar stool and some guy leans over and says, can I buy you a drink?
I said, sure. Oh, my God, my husband's been unfaithful to me. I don't know what I'm going to do. This guy pulled back like he'd been hit with a sledgehammer. He sat there and he listened to me carry on. And then he said to me, you know what, little lady? He said, I'm going to take you to the corner of your street and drop you off. Now, today, I wouldn't do this, but back then, he says, you don't belong here.
If you go home and you work things out with that old man of yours, he says,
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and don't come down here and ruin some other guys one night. Couldn't do anything right, I'll tell you. And that was my pattern. You hurt me, I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to hurt me by hurting you because it certainly wouldn't have solved any problems. It wouldn't have solved a thing in our lives. But I wanted to show him how it hurt to be hurt. Anyhow, we get this house and we're trying to save the house, and he decides with my brother-in-law they're going to go to an AA meeting.
Now, AA had started, in fact, I think the Avon Lake group is one of the oldest in Lurien County. And Al-Anon, there was a gal there that had started the first Al-Anon group. I think this was 1960. And when Tom went to the meeting, she contacted me and she said, I want you to come to an Al-Anon meeting because you need to support your husband. That's how she put it. And I, being the perfect person with no faults and nothing that I should correct, went to find out how to support my husband, how to keep him sober.
And she'd call me daily to find out how he was doing, and I didn't have time to talk to her. I didn't want to talk to her. There was nothing wrong with me. It was him. I'll come to your club, but I don't want, you know, I'm not going to get that involved in this thing. I just want to find out how to keep him sober so we can live some kind of a decent life. Well, this went on for about three or four months, and I never did really get my toes in the water.
I went, I never understood. We worked with a, there was one little pamphlet they gave, Just for Today, which meant something to me. And I did start practicing a few of the things I read in that, such as just for a day I can be pleasant, because I was not pleasant. I was nasty and vindictive. And I didn't believe him. I had a wall around me because I wasn't going to get hurt anymore. He wasn't going to manipulate me anymore.
So I never really got into that. Tom stayed sober for about three months, and we decided that if we had money that maybe that was a big problem in our lives, because we had started a remodeling project. We had no money to finish what we were doing. So he had a chance to go out to South Dakota and work at the missile sites. This was back in the 60s. And I encouraged him to go. Now, his sponsor called me and said, Doug Glendale, don't let him go.
This is not what you kids need to do at this stage of your lives. Tom was just 30 then, and I think he was 28 and I was about 25. And we were kids. And he said, please don't do this. He's just getting his feet wet in sobriety. And I thought, what do you know, you old coot? You've got everything. Your life is good. I want what you've got. And the only way we're going to get it is if he gets out there and makes some good construction money, because when you're a construction worker and you're working 7-12s, you're making pretty darn good money.
And I wanted mine. So I encouraged him to go. Well, he went out to South Dakota, and he was out there about six weeks. And he had called periodically, and he said he got a place to bring the kids out. Well, our oldest son was in school, so I had to wait until school was out in June. So I packed the four kids up and I went out to South Dakota. And when I got there, I realized he'd been drinking. Part of his story was everything was so great, he decided to have a drink and celebrate.
Well, you know what that led to. So I got out there, and the minute I saw him, I knew he had been drinking. He had that sloppy, drunk look. And I existed out there from June until after Christmas. And during that time, I did some terrible things. I thought I fell in love with one of his friends because he helped me do dishes. I thought that was, you know, he paid some attention to me. And Tom had gotten drunk, and he was in a jail in Sturgis, and they called me to come and get him.
Now, we were in a farmhouse out at the foot of Bear Butte Mountain. I mean, you bikers have been out there or anything, you know where these places are. But I was a mile off the highway and at least two or three miles from town,
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and I thought, I'm going to go in and get that SOB. And it wasn't sick on booze, I was thinking. And when I get him out of jail, I'm going to, once again, rip him a new you-know-what because I'm going to tell him what a lousy he is, how he's ruined our lives, and what a no-good bum he is because I had a mouth on me. And I was, I told you, I was mean and nasty and vindictive in this situation. So I set off, I left my four children alone in a farmhouse in the middle of winter, and I set off into Sturgis in anger and went off the road.
And I remember getting out of the car. The only reason I got out of the car is I thought I remembered there was a farmhouse down the road within walking distance, but I didn't realize when these winds come out of the mountains how treacherous they are. They had, later I found out that you put ropes between the houses and the barns so you could hold on to the ropes so you wouldn't lose your way in one of these things.
Well, I got out of my car, and I remember rolling down a gully, my eyes froze shut, and I remember crying out, you know, my God, my kids are alone, and I'm going to die. A fuel oil truck said they saw me, found me, picked me up in their headlights crawling down the road, and they said they couldn't turn around and take me back to the kids, but they'd take me into town if I could find someone to bring me back out to the farm.
That's when I decided to leave, and I packed the children up. I came so close to killing my family and myself over this drunk, and I thought, you know what, I'm losing my mind. I'm going crazy. So I packed up and I came back to Avon Lake. Meanwhile, my house had been rented out. The people had vandalized it, left it trashed totally. So I came back to a home that was just, you wouldn't have moved a family into it, but I had nowhere else to go.
My kids were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. I had to go to welfare to get money to help pay a gas bill and keep my lights on. Went to work as a waitress. My mother occasionally would take the kids and help out. And I was on my own, and Tom came by, probably in March sometime, and he was drunk and he was just knocked on the back door, and I told him, I just said, I don't want the kids to see you.
Well, I didn't want the kids to see him because I knew the kids would still love him. He was daddy. And I didn't want them to love him. I wanted them to just love me and know that I was the hero in the family, and he was a bum and he wasn't worth loving. And I told him to keep going. I didn't want anything to do with him, and he went to New York, and he had an awakening there, apparently. He called me maybe three or four weeks later, and he cringes when I say this, but anybody out there, any woman, would probably identify with this immediately.
I kid him, and I said, and this was my time of prostitution, because I decided I needed his paycheck, and I sent him the money to come back because if he got back in Cleveland, maybe he could give me some money and I could at least try to bail ourselves out of the debt we were in. And I figured, what the heck, you know, I didn't love him, but I could put out for a paycheck. I mean, that's exactly where I was at that time in my life, and with that attitude, too, totally.
I sent him the money. He came home. He was home a week or two, and it was like a Fourth of July, and there was a big fight. He had me up against a wall, and the windows were being broke and all the nonsense, and he ended up in jail. And my brother-in-law, who had looked at AA with him two years previously, at that time he had eight days of sobriety. And he came to Tom, and he said, you know, he said, I've been in the DTs, I've been detoxed, and I'm going to AA meetings, and if they let you out of jail, you can start going to meetings with me.
My sister and I, you know, the things you do, my sister and I didn't even see each other that much because these guys drank together, and we deprived ourselves of seeing each other as sisters because we didn't want our husbands together because they drank. I mean, the insanity of your thinking gets so warped. So the guy started to go to AA, and once again Jerry called me. Once again Jerry called me. You know, oh gee, Tom's back and my husband's going to help him and we want you to go to Al-Anon. And I didn't want to go to Al-Anon. I was so angry,
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so nasty. But I went because I wanted everyone to think that I was a good person. And most people didn't see this rotten side of me. So I went to Al-Anon and little by little I started to pick up on some of the stuff that they were talking about. But I still felt that I had control. I still felt that he owed me big time for all the grief and nonsense he had caused. And I would say to people, he doesn't do anything, he doesn't help me or anything around the house. He hand dug a basement under this cottage in sobriety with a pick and shovel. And I'm complaining because he doesn't help me around the house.
He doesn't do anything. He's sober, but all he does is go to these meetings. And I was not happy about that. Yeah, they're patting him on the back. Well, he's doing what he should have been doing all along. I've been doing what I'm supposed to do. I've been holding the whole thing together. Who's patting me on the back? I wasn't real happy about his sobriety and I really didn't believe it was going to last. Little by little he started to change. He became more considerate. He became kinder. I still was afraid to open the door because I just didn't want to get hurt anymore. And I come up out of this basement that he had dug and we had open two-by-fours. When you're doing a house, you know you always have open two-by-fours. And I got to the top of this stairway coming up out of this basement and my hand was all bleeding. And I do not even remember punching that wall, those two-by-fours coming up that stairway. But I was so full of angry and hatred and vindictiveness. And I remember getting to the top of the stairway and for the first time I said, oh my God, I am one sick cookie. What's wrong with me? And I started then to really try to absorb some of what they were trying to teach me. I let Jerry be my sponsor. I wouldn't let her be my sponsor. I didn't want people to know my private business or get into my life.
I didn't want to share any of the pain. I think what this program has done, when I said I have memories, but I don't remember with the emotional pain that I felt at that time. I never thought I could forgive or forget some of the things we went through the first nine years of our marriage and relationship. But you know what? It happened. It was like all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't bitter anymore. Tom and I started to work together. We actually started to do things that normal families do. We took vacations.
We went on trips. Our kids were growing up. The three boys one year all played on the same football team. They were all on the field at the same time. We shared a lot of good, good things with our children. Our little daughter took dance lessons and was in acrobatics. All the school things, we participated. We were normal parents doing normal things. And on and on it kept me balanced. I took my own inventory for the first time. I looked at myself and started to work on some of my things and let go. And then I started to open the door a little bit, a crack at a time, just to maybe start to love him again. And life got good. Kids grew up. They graduated from high school. Boys would have a drink once in a while. At that time, 3-2 beer was legal, 18 years of age. No big deal. Never gave a great deal of thought to it. Our second oldest son was the first one to marry. And he also was a pipe fitter. He went into trades with his dad. And I started noticing that things weren't getting done around Chris' home and that things were not good. He was drinking. And it's hard. He would come in and he would drop in at the house and he'd be drunk and he'd be belligerent. And I remembered that I learned how to put boundaries out for
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myself and my family. Because I said to him, Chris, if you drink, that's your business. But I will not have it in my home. And you will not bring your drunken self here. Because if you do, I will call the police and I will have you locked up. Now, I learned in Al-Anon that you don't make idle threats. You don't throw it out unless you intend to back it up. And I had every intention, if he had entered my home again, because he frightened me. He's a big man, stands 6'4", 6'5". And I remember standing in the doorway, swaying with his hand on the doorjamb, and I saw my father. And my stomach turned over. And I remember saying to him, you scare me. And I grew up like this. See, all this stuff come back.
I never realized a lot of this stuff until I got into Al-Anon. You frighten me. I was scared to death of my father when he drank. But I'd fight him. I'd get out there and go nose-to-nose with him. And I told my son, I could feel it. My guts had just, I'm going to throw up. So he didn't go out and join AA right away, but he never came to the house drunk again. Our daughter, at 23, now, she had always gone to meetings with her dad.
She was always with her daddy at the meetings. And at 23 years of age, she wrote my mother a letter, her grandma. And she said, Grandma, before I hurt myself or anyone else anymore, I think I'm going to look at AA. And then she told me, and I asked her later, I said, what made you realize that you needed AA? And she said, well, you know, I always went to meetings with daddy. And she says, one night I heard this woman speak. She said, I didn't associate with her drinking pattern at all. But boy, did I associate with her emotional up and downs and her depression. And I decided that maybe I needed to do something about that part of my life. So Corrine joined AA. And six months later, Chris decided that he was going to look it over too. And he came into the program. So here we are, golly, Tom's got 23 years of sobriety. Life is good. I mean, here we got kids in recovery. My oldest son never drank, which I'm very happy because we found out later he was diabetic. And my youngest son is what you call a social drinker, can have a beer or two and change to a cup of coffee and not have it bother him at all. Kids all have families. Chris had three children.
And what drove him into AA was he said his youngest son, Justin, was imitating him throwing up in the toilet. And it hit him that he didn't want this for his family. Now, he didn't have drunken driving charges. He'd never been arrested for anything. But he realized that his life was out of control. And they knew where to go, which was the marvelous thing because they had been raised from the time. I think Tom came into AA when Chris was seven and Corrine was three. So the kids had grown up with it. So our life was like marvelous. Tom had started his own business. The guys had a construction business. The younger brother also came in to work with them. Corrine worked as their secretary. And then she got a job in sales. And she worked with a company that sold advertising for Coca-Cola. And she traveled all over the country. I got a chance. I went to New Orleans and Memphis and Roanoke and just every place that she worked. And she loved her work. And she had even gone down to Antigua. She was in the Dutch West Indies selling these promotions. She was a beautiful woman. And when she walked into a room, she usually made her sale. Told me about all the meetings she went to, all the places, all the people that she met on her travels. In 1985, Tom and I moved her to Florida, Coral Gables, into an apartment. And she was 26 and a half. And she said, you know, it's time for me to move on and get out of the house.
She had collected antiques and all kinds of neat things. And we moved her out of the house, lock, stock and barrel, and took her down to Florida and got her settled in her apartment. Ten days later, there was a knock at the door. And a policeman is standing there.
[00:40:01]
And he asked for Tom. And Tom wasn't home. Tom was someplace else, I don't know, meeting her. And he said to me, Glendale, there's been a robbery. And Corrine was murdered. You know what? When life is good, it's easy to work your program. It's when it turns to crap that it becomes very, very hard. And anybody here who has lost a child knows that grief, that hole, never goes away. It's always there. But you learn to live around it one day at a time. And you find yourself doing things you never thought you could do. You can heal. And my response to this was to get involved in the criminal justice system. I became a victim's advocate, worked with other people that had found themselves in the same circumstances, started a group for survival of parents, was very active in this endeavor.
My husband, even in spite of his AA program, felt that he probably should have killed the man. It's impossible. I mean, they're guarded very well in the courtroom. They had him because he was a known criminal. He was out on parole. It ate my husband up, and I watched it eat him up. But there was nothing I could do about it, no more than I could do anything about his alcoholism. He did not drink, but he had a total nervous breakdown three years after her death. And at this time, I was leading my own life. I was in my own state of recovery, going to my Al-Anon meetings. I remember going to a meeting one night and a woman saying something about her daughter had come home, her prayers, God had answered her prayers.
And I remember feeling like I wanted to get up, walk across the room and slap her right across the face, because where was God when my daughter was murdered? There are answers what they say today. There are some things that you can't ask why about. I accept her death. I never really accepted the way she died, but that's the violence in our world today. Tom was held back in his mental condition, of all things, by our son, who had at that time five years of sobriety. And he said to his dad, he said, you know, our God is a God of love. He's not a God that kills. He probably cried too when Corrine was murdered. You see it from somebody else's perspective. Anyhow, time went on and I did my work and Tom healed and our son went on with his life and his sobriety. Grandchildren get involved. I have an old, my oldest son. Something happened and there was a very deep estrangement. He didn't speak to us for almost ten years. His wife also. This happened when their son was probably about 15, maybe 16 years old because we were, for some reason, we were never really permitted to be the grandparents. We were to our other five grandchildren. We were involved in everything our grandkids did. They lived around us and we were part of their lives and there was nothing that we missed. And then it dawned on me one day, geez, we were never invited to a grandfather's or grandmother's day at the school for Matthew. Or we were never invited to see a play or we were, I think I was invited one time to go to a parent something but that was it. And I never really gave a lot of thought to that. And then this estrangement came. And I wanted to accept the blame for it. I wanted to say it had to have been us. What did I do? Make the amends and do all the things that you do to try to fix the situation. Boy, that was hard for me to let go and let God and to say maybe it wasn't me, maybe it was them. Later on, I found out that my grandson, their only child, their only perfect child.
My son, their only child, their only perfect child, was a drug and alcohol addicted. And for some reason they couldn't talk to us about it. I don't know why. I've never questioned
[00:45:04]
that. But I beat my head against a wall for about three or four years trying to figure out what we did that drove them away and estranged them from us. And all of a, like I said, little by little things will happen. I let it go. I turned it over. It took me that long, after all these years in Al-Anon, to work my way through that situation. Out of the blue, there's a healing. Pull in the driveway like nothing's ever happened and we're one happy family again.
Well, I found out that Matthew is in AA. He ran into his grandfather and his uncle at meetings and he now has, I think, close to seven years sobriety. Healthy living, healthy sobriety. Never had a relationship with Matthew. But within the last year, he has stopped at least a couple times to visit with his grandparents. Now, he's no child. He's 35 years old. But he has come into our lives without any effort from me. That's another thing that I knew I had to let go and let it develop if it ever would. And it has. So we've had the joy of getting to know him a little bit, too. So we have a family in recovery. My husband has just celebrated, last July, 53 years sobriety. My son, 34 years of sobriety. And my grandson, seven years of sobriety. So you talk about a family illness, a family disease. We've got it, but we've all got the tools to get better.
There's no way I can repay Al-Anon. Al-Anon has let me be the best person I can be. I learned the things that I thought were hardships. We didn't have money. I remember dragging furniture off of tree lawns, learning how to reupholster, paint, redo, you know, redo furniture. All the things that I learned. If we had had money, I maybe never would have learned these things. When you look at it in retrospect, when part of my inventory was, wow, I had to admit that I couldn't blame my husband for all our financial difficulties.
Because I told you how my dad would make up for his drunks. Well, see, that's what I expected my husband to do, too. And after one of these things, I got all kinds of things that we could not afford to buy. And I never looked at it that way. It's amazing when the lights go on and you're sitting there and you're thinking, well, this is the reality of the situation. This is how it really was. I never would have looked at that without this program.
I will tell you that my father died in sobriety. He never got into AA, but he quit drinking. I saw parents that probably had a better life as they got older. For myself, a man that I thought I could never respect or love, I love dearly. I respect him dearly. We do a lot of laughing, because crying doesn't help anything. And we're having the things that happen to you as you get older. He's not accepting a lot of this graciously. It's like, darn it, I used to be able to do this. Now I can only work for an hour and I can't. Well, just sit down and relax and have a cup of coffee. I'm working on my patients, believe me, ages and stages. We never outgrow our need for this program. As long as I'm on the green side of the grass, I'm going to have to be working this one day at a time, let me tell you. But the privilege of being here, I want to thank the committee for thinking and having me speak. I love sharing and I do my best sharing around my kitchen table, though, I'll tell you that. If my kitchen walls could talk, it would be because it's been a lot of years and there's a lot of tears, a lot of laughter, and a lot of joy. I don't dwell on the past.
I try to look forward to the future with anticipation. And I've been blessed with good health, thank goodness. So I hope to keep kicking and be at my Monday night meeting, which is in Bay Village on Monday nights at 8 o'clock. Chair a couple times a year and make coffee and hope that I'm their halfway sponsor. I told my buddy when she asked me to be her sponsor,
[00:50:03]
I said, well, I'll be your friend. I'm not sure I know what a sponsor is. But I found that just by maybe making a few suggestions and just being there when somebody needs you is part of your sponsorship, it's part of your service. So I want to thank all of you for listening and don't forget to renew your forum subscriptions because you always have a meeting in your pocket even if there's nobody around to talk to. Thanks.