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Source: Kelly H. & Rita C – OAR 2023 Celebrating Our Birthright – Date Unknown.mp3 File: kelly-h-and-rita-c-oar-2023-celebrating-our-birthright-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:38:01
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Hello, everybody. My name is Judy H., and I'm your moderator today, and I want to thank the committee for asking me, and I was surprised, but I knew that phone number. I'm like, got to get that call. Well, let's open with the serenity prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. Thank you.
Oh, I was supposed to do that first. Sorry, Beth. Anyway, I am a grateful member of Al-Anon, been on the program over 30 years, and been at this conference quite a few times. I'm trying to figure out how many, but several, when we used to have it in Atwood. And my home group is in Niles Wednesday night, and I want to thank everybody for being here, and it's just wonderful to look at everybody's smiling faces in the morning and the beautiful day. What a beautiful day.
Well, I want to remind everyone to turn off their cell phones, and we are going to have our panel today for celebrating our birthrights. And I'm going to start with the first speaker, which is Kelly H., and she's going to talk on courage. This should be easy, because I know half of you are here. And I go to meetings all the time, and I see you every week, except I'm nervous anyway. Thanks for the opportunity to let me think about courage a lot in the last few weeks, and to think that perhaps you got it wrong, and that am I fraudulent with walking through courage? I've been reflecting on that.
I think of courage as an adventurous person, a risk taker, thrill seeker, being bold. Those are my attributes, or I feel like those are my personality qualities, but is that courage? I'm not sure. I'm great in a crisis. I'm a great Al-Anon. Give me a problem, and I will try to solve it. Especially if it's your problem, I'll try harder. When it's my daughter's problem, triple that. I put my cape on, and I'm ready to go, because I got this. At least in my mind.
Mistakes have been made. Things have not gone as planned at my house. You would think with many, many years of recovery, and working this program, praying every day, it should be easy. I guess it could have been a lot harder, but it's not paradise, and it's kind of annoying, too, that things just haven't gone as planned. Is this courage to continue walking the path? I'm still not sure. Back to being a professional Al-Anon. When my daughter is not okay, I'm still not okay.
I wish I could say that I work this program so well that I have put boundaries, and been able to not sever, but have those lines in the sand that make everything all right, and that makes me all right, but I still relapse constantly back into my loved one's isms. The alcoholism, the addictions, I still jump right back in. I wish I could stand here and say I'm a survivor of many diseases myself, or this or that, and that's what pulled my courage up, but it's being a mom of an addict, an alcoholic, that's really been the hardest thing of my life.
When married to an alcoholic, I did the easiest, softest thing, severing the relationship. Those boundaries were hard. Detached with love, I kind of fell short on that a little, but with my daughter, it's like a whole other ballgame.
[00:05:06]
It started a number of years ago with cutting. Who the heck cuts? I didn't even know what that meant until I saw bloody arms and legs. Overdosing. Overdosing and cutting, that was a nice one. Running away, cops, all the things that addiction brings us to. All the times that you need to put your cape on and try to solve those problems. I've been in this program a long time. I came in here because of Alcoholic Husband, but I didn't feel it to my core like I have in the last few years.
If you met my daughter, she's the cutest little blonde-haired, blue-eyed person, soft-spoken, whispers when she speaks, will look right at you, ask you how you're doing. You wouldn't even think, like all the trouble that she's caused me. Your thing is me. Because she's the total opposite of aggression and stuff like that. But anyway, that's my person. I talk to God every day. Not only do I talk, I try to listen. I've been blessed with amazing people that I speak to on a daily basis or weekly basis. I have a tribe of amazing women that I use as my core.
And that have carried me through so many things. This past summer, my daughter was in a life-threatening car accident where she was life-flighted down to UH and spent two months in the trauma unit. Sunday mornings, I go to a meeting in Rocky River, and we've been meeting there since COVID. At 6.30 in the morning on June 24th, I got a call from the State Highway Patrol. Now, my daughter is also a party animal, too. So she was out partying and let somebody drive our car. They crashed into a tree 60 miles an hour. And they're like, well, you better get over here to Elyria Hospital. And I don't even know where the hell Elyria Hospital is.
So I'm like, okay. And she looked pretty bad. And then I was only in there maybe five minutes, and they life-flighted her from that hospital downtown to UH. I'll fast forward. She lived. She's fine. And she's okay. And she's out and about. But it took tons of prayers and you guys carrying me this past summer. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, God, for letting me allow you guys to come in. Because it could be easy just to shut down and not move on.
You know, it says in the AA Big Book on page 68, after the four-step inventory, there's a big section on fear. And it says, all men of faith have courage. And when Carrie asked me about courage, I kept thinking of that quote. And I got my Big Book out. And I said, where was that in there? And so my coworker, who's also in program, and I have daily meetings down at the steel mill with him as we walk around the Cuyahoga, I said, we need a Big Book study because I need to find this quote.
He's like, all right, let's find it. And then another friend of mine texted me the same page. It was kind of funny. But anyhow, I've been thinking of that quote, too. That without God and without my L&M program, I couldn't have the courage to just keep going. Is all that courage? I don't really know. For me, I've been thinking about courage a lot, obviously. But it's walking across that bridge. One of our readings says, can you walk across that bridge into the light and make that decision to leave anybody on the other side that's not ready to go?
[00:10:03]
I mean, I've been trying to pull this kid across the bridge for a while. And she isn't going. And that's where the courage is. Can I let go? Some days I can. Some days I can't. But I keep asking. I want everyone to have the same success that we are, to end up at a state park with our friends and hiking and listening to great speakers. And I wish that for all of us, the people that we meet coming in the rooms.
And we meet a lot of people that come in the rooms that are only there for one or two days. The qualifying and the price we pay to stay, it's hard. I mean, we all know it. I always say that we have to hit our own bottoms to get here and stay. And it's not just for anybody. You really have to have a lot of pain to make it in Al-Anon. I know that sounds bad, but it's true. Because we all got here and stay here for only one reason, to try to make it go away. After we've figured out that you're not going to give us the directions on how to keep somebody sober, we're here just to make the pain go away.
For me, courage is letting God run the show, being able to say no, having those hard conversations. To me, that takes a lot of guts. A friend of mine shared with me a few months ago, this is a hard one, that she didn't know if her daughter was here for the long haul because of her own health reasons. And I don't know if my daughter's here for the long haul either, because she's tried to kill herself a lot of times.
I mean, I wish I could fix her, but I can't. And those aren't my choices. And it's hard for me to say that I'll be okay. I'm okay today, but it's hard to watch it. And that's where the courage comes in for me. Being able to reach out and talk to other people that have lived through it and watch the success stories. Choosing my best life. I had a great time yesterday. I wouldn't have been at any other place except with my buddies on the golf course yesterday.
And those are my choices. Those are choosing the best life for me. Another hard choice for me is going to be, okay, I kid around and people say, what do you want to do when you retire? Well, I want to move to Florida half the year and volunteer at the Manatee Rescue Center. I will be a tour guide there as I walk down the path. Just one or two days a week, not that much. Then I'll be golfing, playing USTA tennis, and I'll be going to potlucks. Tons of meetings, working the steps, having you guys fly in. I'll pick you up in the Tampa airport. Yeah, there you go.
And that's my fantasy when I'm down there. And do I have the courage to make that happen? I hope so. I've been saving my whole freaking life for this. But anyway, it's going to take the guts to make that happen and move forward. As I also have been an awareness of courage, a quote came up on my meditation app that says, life shrinks or expands in accordance with one's courage. And we have to reflect on that.
And when I choose to be by myself or without higher power or without my people, my life can get really small. And when I'm able to open up and just share some of that pain, if it's pain, or share some of that joy, whatever Kim is, Share some of that joy, wherever Kim is, or effing joy, that, as we talked yesterday,
[00:15:07]
that, that refers to golf shots, so, but when I can reflect and laugh around and play with that stuff, my world becomes a lot bigger and when I meet with you guys for our walks and our going to the beach, I live by the beach up in Cleveland and I just love walking down there. I don't think I can give that up, but bringing my buddies there and all the other fantastic things that we do, that expands my world and that's, that's what I want to keep doing, so, with that, that's all I got to encourage.
And the next speaker is Rita on Truth. Good morning everyone. My name is Rita and I am a grateful member of Al-Anon. And I get a little teary when I look out at all the beautiful faces out there. It's not my first time up here, but my first time in a long time, so, they gave me truth and I'm going, what the hell? How am I supposed to come up with truth? And, you know, I mean, I'm looking at the world the way it is right now and it's like everybody's got their own truths, you know?
And my truth is different than somebody else's truth and, you know, so, okay, I've been praying about it this morning and I don't try to do too much preliminary work except thinking about it and I don't try to obsess about it because I used to be really good at obsessing about things. But I was in the back of my mind and I'm like, okay, I had no idea what I was going to say or how I was going to say it.
But I always know that my higher power gives me what I need when I need it and when I get up here, I say my prayer and say, give me your words, not mine, because I know that my words might not be what needs to be said. I need to say what you need to hear. And my higher power always manages to do that for some reason. And I looked up, one of my sponsees had said, look up the definition. So I went, oh, yeah, that's right, I used to do that.
It says, the quality of state of being true, he had to accept the truth of her accusation. Which is true or in accordance with fact of reality, and that one got me. A fact or a belief that is accepted as truth and truths. And I'm going, okay, reality. When I came into this program, I had no idea what was reality because I had my own reality. As a child, I used to escape into my fantasy sea by reading.
And I had my fantasy life in reading. I was going to be an adopted kid that Elvis was my dad and, you know, my mom had an affair with him and nobody told anybody, you know, and so, you know, and I got stuck in this family that I didn't want to be in and they didn't want me and, you know, that's the way I felt. But as I got older, I got more into that reading and fantasizing about my life and I had this idea what life was going to be when I grew up and, you know, I just knew I didn't want what my family had.
I wanted better. I wanted different. And I remember one time saying to my mom as an adult, I said, didn't you want better for your kids, you know, than what you had? She worked hard her whole life in factories and I said, didn't you want better? She goes, no, I just figured you'd do what I did. I'm like, huh, okay. You know, I just, I can never wrap my mind around my mother's mind because it just never made sense.
But she was my first qualifier, so that might explain a lot. And then I was, like, going to the pages and I'm going, okay, let's read a couple pages
[00:20:05]
and of course, yeah, ODAB always brings me back to the basics and I want to make sure I'm on the right page, I want to make sure I'm on the right page because I want truth not something else. But yeah, there's no page on truth. There's only a page on honesty. And that's basically, if I've got to be honest with myself, then I'll find my truth. And it says, honesty with self. If I were to sit down in a quiet corner and look back over the happenings of my troubled life as though I were examining the life of someone else or reading about it in a book, how would it appear to me?
I know I can do this only by guarding against all self-justification. That's a tough one. Looking at the facts honestly, have I said or done things in haste, anger, or desperation that made my situation worse? Are there things I recall with regret? We learn only from experience and only by making up our minds not to repeat past mistakes. I will not fall in with the alcoholic's craving for punishment to relieve his guilt.
I will not scold and weep for it will not help me overcome the difficulties we are trapped in. I will try very hard to deal with my day-by-day difficulties with quiet poise, remembering always that I am doing this for my own benefit. When I am tempted or pressured into irrational behavior, I pray that I may stop and think before I do or say anything, whatever. I ask God to remove these impulses and help me to grow into the person I want to be.
I would think after all these years of being in the program, and I think I work a pretty good program. I try and I go to meetings and do what I am supposed to do and work the steps, but I can still fall back into that trap of letting the alcoholic manipulate me. I have to watch because my current husband is very subtle about his manipulations. Just an example, we had a couch and once we moved from our apartment in Tennessee over to our house, I had just bought this couch and it was a nice couch.
He started, he was sitting on it fine before when we were in the apartment, but once we got in the house, he starts like, I can't sit on this couch. I need a recliner. I'm like, really? So what do I do? I go out and buy a reclining couch, I sell the couch, I buy a recliner for him to make him happy. And as I'm thinking about it afterwards, I'm like, he just manipulated the shit out of me. And I'm like, okay, and I've got to watch it because he's very subtle about it.
He just needed to be comfortable, I just wanted to make him happy. But my truth is, I've got to be honest with myself. Am I doing it for the right reasons? Am I making the right choices for the right reasons? This all started a couple of years ago, well, I mean, our marriage started a long time ago. But two and a half years ago, he came home and said he had put a bid on a job and we lived in Burton at the time.
And I said, oh yeah, where's the job? He said, Tennessee. And I go, oh, I never thought of living in Tennessee. And he goes, well, I got the position. And I go, oh, okay, that means we've got to sell the house. And so I got to work and I got everything, got rid of all the stuff that we had and sold and gave away and did all the cleaning out, okay, we're going to do this, we're going to make a fresh start, you know, in warmer weather, it's going to be wonderful.
And I worked my tail off. He went down ahead of me while I was busy getting rid of the house and fixing things to make it sellable and, you know, making things, get the inspection right and sold the house. We did good. Moved down there into an apartment on the third floor that he picked out.
[00:25:01]
We got a big German shepherd. They got big bags of food and he never picks the food up. I always pick it up. So I started ordering from Chewy and they shipped it. I'm getting smarter, you know. But we still had two dogs. I had no job when we first got down there. So I'm up and down these stairs every day four, five, six times because dogs need to go out a lot. And, you know, you can't let them go in the apartment.
So I thought I was going to lose weight, you know. Didn't happen. And then we decided, well, I'm going to make this, this is going to be our life long. This is my truth in my head. This is going to be our life, you know, now. And I was going to meetings there. I found some really good daytime meetings and, boy, they were strict about, you know, no crosstalk. I was like, wow, this is different. I like this.
I like this. There's structure to their meetings. It was different. It was definitely different. But, you know, I made some friends and we got along good and I did what I needed to do to make myself acclimate to my new surroundings and I finally did, well, we bought another house and down there and their houses are very expensive down there, let me tell you. What you can get for like $100,000 up here, you're going to spend $300,000 down there.
So yeah, so we got a nice little tiny house and it was exactly what I wanted and nice size yard and I went out and bought him a little electric mower because I wanted to be green and, you know, doing all these things to make things work. And in the meantime, I never asked myself if I wanted to do this. I never asked myself if I was happy. If I was just, I'm going to make it work. I'm just going to make it work.
And the truth was I wasn't. I wasn't happy down there. My family's all up here. All my friends were up here. And all my major contacts with Al-Anon and stuff, yeah, I was making new friends and trying but he wasn't. He would come in home, go into work, come in home and he's miserable and I'm watching him every day and it's not getting better and he's getting worse and worse and worse and I'm like, okay, and he's a sober alcoholic, well, he was, but then that didn't happen anymore and so but he had a slip and then he came back but he's still not going to meetings so I was going to more meetings and I'm doing the best I can to try and keep myself straight.
And then my son was getting married in Cancun and wanted us to come to Cancun and I couldn't afford it. I had to come to the realization that I couldn't afford it because I was going to try, I was working on it, I was trying to make my son happy and trying to do everything to make it work and it just was not happening. I couldn't find a job, I wasn't able to find work so that I could, if I would have had a job it would have been fine, we could have done it, but I couldn't get the job.
And then I made the phone call, the dreaded phone call to tell him I couldn't do it and that was in January and he has not talked to me since and unfortunately I, you know, can't do anything about that. I did call my sponsor and I asked her and I said, okay, what do I do? And she said, you need to make an amends and I said, oh crap, I tried so hard not to have to make amends and she said, you know, you have to make amends because of what, you didn't let him try to fix it for you and I said, he wanted to help and I wouldn't let him help and I was like, no, no, we just can't come, that's it and I didn't let him help.
So I made my amends but it didn't change anything and just because we make amends does not mean they have to accept it. And, you know, it's tough but, you know, it's the way things are and that's why I need this program every day of my life. If someone, this is in January 14th and this page really hits home for me with this topic. If someone dislikes me or resents something I have done, I offer. Who Generated the Dislike or Resentment, Was It Something I Did, Is It Something I Should
[00:30:04]
Make Amends For, If So, Am I Inclined to Justify What I Did When It Really Wasn't Right, Oh Yeah, I'm Good at Justification, Yeah, Answering These Questions Will Give Me Good Practice in Being Honest with Myself, If I Was Hurtful and I Made Excuses to Myself for What I Did, Which Was What I Was Doing, I Am Building a Second Wall Between Me and the Person I Injured, Let Me Tear the First Wall Down by Being Honest and Honestly Acknowledging My Fault, What a Relief It Is to Acknowledge That I Am Only Human, That I Do Make Mistakes, and That I Am Willing to Correct Them, I Can't Help Liking Myself Better After the Error Has Been Cleared, In Solidifying a Friendship, I Become a Better Friend to Myself, God Helped Me to Avoid the Temptation to Deceive Myself by Justifying My Actions When They Were Wrong, Make Me Strong Enough to Do What I Should to Keep Me Serene. And like I said, I found those this morning and was like, okay, let's just smack me right between the eyes. And you know, God always does that for me.
He likes to smack me upside the head and say, what are you thinking about, you know? I was trying to make my husband happy, and I was trying to make my son happy, and I couldn't make any of them happy. And then when my husband said, they called and said, I can take a job back in Ohio if I want it, and it's another promotion, I go, let's go. I don't care if we lose our ass on that house, I don't care. If we lose, you know, money, so what? You know, as long as we have enough to get the house. And it was a rigmarole, because we had one buyer fall through, and then another buyer came, but things worked out. We sold the house for what we wanted to sell it for, and we found a wonderful house in Walton Hills, and I just love it. I love where I'm at, I love, I've got big windows, I've got a big living room, I've got a big patio, I've got just what I need.
And it's very serene, I come out in the morning, and I sit and look out my windows and watch the deer walk by, and watch my dog go nuts, and I go, you just want to get the babies, don't you? And he's like, we talk a lot. But there for a while, that was all I had was my dogs, so we got quite close. And when we were getting ready to come up here, or down here, the dog was like by the door, and the girls are trying to get out the door, and they're going, now back up, back up doggie, come on, back up, and he's going, no, I'm going, I'm going. Last time she went to a hotel, I got to go with her, I'm going. So he came up one time when we stayed at the Hilton, and he loved it, he loved every minute of it. But back to truth, you know, it's funny, because I thought I had gotten past the point of deceiving myself, and self-justifying things, but I still have a lot of work to do, and that's the wonderful thing about this program. It doesn't matter how much time you have in, there's always room for improvement, and there's always times we can backslide, and we can self-justify, you know, and hopefully someday my relationship with my son gets back to where it was. It may never get back to where it was, but hopefully we can get some improvement. We were very close, he would call me every day before that, so not hearing from him and not being a part of his life has been really tough. My daughter, on the other hand, absolutely loves having all the attention, because she's got mom all to herself now, and she just loves that.
She was always very jealous of her brother, so it's like she's enjoying it too much, but I'm so happy to be back home, and you know, being honest with myself, I can't leave Ohio. I don't know why. I've tried a couple times, and every time I try, it doesn't work out, so I think I'm going to give up on that, so no Florida for me, people. And when I came back up, I found a job right away, you know, worked out. I didn't want to work full-time anymore, so I'm working part-time at a UPS store. I work my tail off, let me tell you, but it's good. It's good for me, and it gets me out of the house and gives me some money. I'm still looking for a home group, and I'm still looking for
[00:35:02]
to find my niche in the area as far as Al-Anon goes, but I've got lots of contacts of my friends, and one friend, God bless her, her and her husband helped us move in. 73 years old, and they're moving stuff in furniture-wise, and I'm like, oh my God, we're going to kill them. But, you know, my daughter came and helped me move in. Just being back around our people, and being back in an area where I feel comfortable, that's my truth. That's my love of my life, is being in the area, and, you know, I don't care about winter. You know, I survived in the snow belt my whole life, you know. I can do snow, that's no big deal. Down in Tennessee, no. Five inches, they're shut down.
I go, you do inches, we do feet, sorry. I am so glad that I got to talk here. There were definitely some things I needed to get out and talk about, and, you know, your truth is what you make it, and, you know, sometimes I'm not as honest with myself as I need to be. I'm not always honest with my husband about my spending, but I'm working on that. I'm getting better. But something, you know, there's a level of what you tell people when you know what the reaction's going to be. I don't, I don't, I'm trying to make smarter choices financially, and I'm trying to be smarter about my choices in life in general.
Al-Anon gave me that. Al-Anon has given me the acceptance of other people, the love of other people no matter what. I don't care what color, what breed, what race, what life you live, you know, what lifestyle or anything. It doesn't matter to me because this program taught me that we're all people. We're all the same. We have to love each other no matter what, and if we don't, then that's a sad life to live. I don't want to be that person. I want to be a happy, joyful, and free like this program teaches us, and I think I am about done, and I appreciate you all listening. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Both of you said so many great things to ponder and think about, and I appreciate all of them. Now I'm going to announce a break. We're going to take a break and be back in your seats. Bye.