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Source: Kerri K – Kentucky State AFG Convention 2021 Kerri K. – Phoenix, AZ – Date Unknown.mp3 File: kerri-k-kentucky-state-afg-convention-2021-kerri-k-phoenix-az-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:46:15
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Morning everyone. Just give me a second here. A little housekeeping. I don't think I'll cry, but we never know. I can do that today. Hi everybody, I'm Carrie Kay, grateful Al-Anon member since May 17th, 1989. So I want to thank the committee for asking me to come. It's nice to finally meet Olivia. Where are you Olivia? Oh, there you are. And you know what, it's good to be at a conference, especially in this time, this crazy time. You know, this is only the second time I think I've talked in the last couple of years because we've all been batting down the hatches. So it's good to be here. It's good to be anywhere.
You know, when I first got the program I was happy to be invited anywhere. So I'd like to thank the committee for asking me to come. Are there any new people in their first year of recovery here today? Could you raise your hands if you're in your first year so I know who I'm talking to? Welcome, welcome, welcome. It was told to me when I was new that I was welcome here and what I would like to say to you is I want to personally welcome you and say that if you find something that resonates with you this weekend that I hope that you'll keep coming back and that you will decide for yourself whether you belong or not. I wasn't sure that I belonged when I first came here, and girl do I belong, but I didn't know it at all in the beginning. So with that I'll get started. Thank you Mary Ann so much for being so hospitable. You know, I don't discriminate, just for the record. I love alcoholics, period. I mean I happen to be more, love more women alcoholics, but men alcoholics, doesn't matter. Alcoholics are just flamboyant, charismatic, fantastic people.
And you know, part of why I'm here is I'm like a heat-seeking missile to alcoholics, you know. I mean, I tell people you could put me in a room this big with like 500 people with one alcoholic and I would find the one alcoholic in like 2.5 seconds, you know. It's a gift. I used to be troubled by this, but it's okay. I'm good with it today. I've been here for a little bit. I'm, well I'll be 57 years old and I've been here for 32 years, so I came in when I was 24 and I've been in program longer than I wasn't in program, thank God. I'll just go quickly because we've got a lot of, you know, 32 years is a lot, well actually 56 years is a lot to pack into 45 or 50 minutes, so we'll get going. Thank you very much, Hella, for your share last night. I look forward to the rest of the workshops and the speakers, people being of service. I was born 50 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee on a 500-acre cotton and soybean farm. We were out in the middle of nowhere. It was, I was 13 years old when they put a phone in our house. Up to that point, it was three miles away. And why I want to tell you that is because there wasn't much information coming in or going out of the little farming community that I lived in. One of the things that I've learned about alcoholism is that oftentimes there's a lot of secrets in alcoholic families.
And there was no drinking in my household. There was actually no drinking. We lived right next door to my grandparents. I could throw a rock and hit their house. And nobody drank in our immediate, my house or their house. But, you know, I have, looking now, I also have to say this, that anything I share today is my opinion. It is not the opinion of Al-Anon as a whole. If I say something that bothers you, please talk to your sponsor about it.
If you really need to see me, you can. I'll be around afterwards. No, seriously, if you want to talk about something, you can hit me up. I'll be here. You know, I had a great uncle on one side of my family, and he just kept, like, a blood alcohol level of loose all the time. You know what I mean? Like, he was always good, you know? No big ups or lows with him. And then my grandfather's brother, Uncle Charlie, he's passed on now. He was a binge drinker. And I didn't have names for any of this. Let me just tell you. I didn't know a thing about alcoholism until I was almost dead, brought to you people, you helped me identify what the problem had been my whole life. It was like, how do you tell a fish it's in water? Right? I mean, truly. Anyhow, so Uncle Charlie would be fine for months, and then he'd be drunk for three weeks. And my grandmother, who was the matriarch of our family, was like the classic untreated Al-Anon, and she spun the plates really well. Let me say, she had it all working like a finely tuned machine. And she was pretty good at manipulating and, you know, using guilt and the things that we learned how to do to get what we want before we get better. She would go down and pour fists of liquor down the sink and sober him up. But it was kind of tangential to me. I didn't really know a lot of it. I just knew that my grandmother ran everything, and my father always seemed like, as an adult, he was still her child. She had three children. The older two moved away, and my dad stayed to help farm. And looking back now, I also need to say that much of what I have learned has come through inventories, serious, several inventories in my time here.
And also going back and asking questions of my family members for those that remember things and kind of piecing it together and going, wow, you know, sometimes. At any rate,
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I've learned a lot. And what happened? Everything was good until I was about seven years old, quite frankly. My mom was 16 when she married my dad. I came along at age 18, so it wasn't a have-to situation. Ten years into their marriage, my father's, he was a compulsive gambler. And I think that, you know, as a young woman, she was home with two young kids, and he was out at night gambling a lot, and I think that caused some problems in their marriage. And there were really three people in that marriage, my mom, my dad, and my grandmother.
And I think that got to be one too many, so ultimately, my mom left. A lot of factors in that, but those were the two biggest ones, his gambling and her presence. Because he was not, he was still very enmeshed with his mom, which happens in alcoholic families. We don't know how to be independent humans in our own emotional space. And that kind of dribbled off on me too, but we'll get to that later. So my mom left at seven, my dad remarried, I thought it was a couple years later, but someone told me later, it was like two months later. Well, what I know today again, this is all hindsight, he remarried an adult child of an alcoholic. No one knew that, there was no name for that then, but she had been like beat and put in the closet by her dad when she didn't keep her siblings in line. So right from the gate, my father unknowingly set me up to be at odds with her, because he said on their wedding day, he told her that she would never come before his children. Well, he basically told the child that I was ahead of her. So pretty much that set up the next several years of emotional abuse and then physical abuse, and it was all in secret, because she would tell me that if he found out that it would be worse when he left again. You know, as a child, you have no reason not to believe the adults in your life. So what I learned very early on was to keep secrets and to put on a mask to let you know that everything was okay and fine. When I got to Al-Anon, I had two feelings, okay and fine. And truthfully, neither of those are feelings, but that's what I would tell you. So I learned how to, you know, just be how I thought you wanted me to be. Well, she had a son that was older than me. At about age 12, we got our family car and a bunch of us went out one night, and long story short, and I don't speak about this. When I say this, it might sound like it seems insignificant to me, but it's because I have healing around it. But I lost my virginity to a little boy that worked on our farm that I wasn't supposed to be seeing. And after that, on the way home, my stepbrother raped me. And that is traumatic, but the steps have healed that for me. I share it because it's probably happened to someone here and maybe you haven't had an opportunity to work through that, but what I want to tell you is that you can. And it really messed me up for a long time, but today it's part of my story, but it's not who I am. So after that, part of why I'm here is because I have a disease of perception as an alarm, I have distorted perception. The sky can be blue, you tell me it's purple, by the time it hits my brain cells, I think it's yellow. I mean, it's just something weird that happens in my brain, the wiring is off, you know, without the working presence of a higher power in my life to put the wires on the right poles, I just get it all messed up. And so I thought what I had done earlier in the night was probably worse and more egregious than what he had done, so I was afraid to tell on him. And so I kept one more secret. So I lived under the same roof with this guy for like another year, afraid to go to sleep at night that he would come into my room, and just living constantly with levels of adrenaline that mesh you up, right? I mean, really, they change you in ways that are not good. Luckily, as Marianne mentioned, I was a really good softball player.
I was really the golden child, quite frankly. I have a younger brother who's two years younger than me, and I was fortunate because I was a good athlete. I got to tell you, I was so grateful to be raised on the farm because I got my first minibike when I was five, my first shotgun when I was eight, I killed my first deer when I was eleven, I played ball, I drove tractors, I did everything the boys did, and a lot of it better than them, which really irritated them. And my dad was really proud of me because he wanted a boy, the first child, and I wasn't, but he just loved it that I could do all these things, until I took it a little bit too far, according to him. We'll talk about that later, too. So here I am out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, I could get on my minibike, so my stepmother was very abusive, and I hated staying in the house because she was in the house. So I would come home and get my chores done, get on my motorcycle, grab my shotgun, and go down to the lake and squirrel hunt till dark. What I can tell you is, when I got here, I had a really big problem with the whole God concept, but looking back, it takes time. For me, it took time. I might be slower than most, but as I began to look back in my life, I could see that, like, even in those times when it was so terrible for me in my home, my perception of it, other people might not have seen it that way, but it was bad for me, even then, I could go squirrel hunting and sit down by the lake. I'm a visual person. I like to paint pictures with words, and I would sit down at the lake, and it would be almost sundown, and I'd sit on the cypress knees at the edge of the water, and the catfish would be coming up at almost dark, and they'd splat the water, and it would ripple out, and the ducks would come flying in down on the water, and the sun would almost be setting, and the squirrels
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would be scampering through the trees, and I would just feel like something was just putting its arms around me and hugging me up and letting me be okay one more day. That was God. I couldn't have given it that name then, but that was God. Nature was a great soul of three when I was younger. All right, we're going to fast forward a little bit. My stepbrother attacked me again a couple years later, and this time, I told, and my father made him leave the house, and for 24 hours, they acknowledged that that had happened, and after that, we didn't talk about it anymore, but what I knew is everybody knew about it, and that was something I could hold on to, right? So again, I'm playing ball. I'm making straight A's. I'm doing everything I can, and here comes a distorted perception again.
It's time to go to college. My father said, You got to get a scholarship because I can't pay for you to go. I mean, we were middle class. We were what we called land poor. We had 500 acres, but not a lot of money. I mean, we'd have everything we needed, you know, but we weren't rich by any means, and so I wanted a softball scholarship. The distorted perception comes in here. I loved playing softball. I was really good, too, and we played slow pitch, and fast pitch hadn't really caught on where we were then, but I didn't know that mostly things were going to fast pitch, and I kept trying for a softball scholarship.
Couldn't get one, so I resorted. You see the Al-Anon salute here. I resorted to a full year, fully renewable, four year renewable scholarship that paid for everything, an academic scholarship, and I was irritated because I couldn't get a softball scholarship. This is why I need to come to Al-Anon. I just can't really, I can't settle things out right in my mind, you know, right? I'll keep coming back. Don't worry, because some of that hasn't changed, but so I went to college, and I will tell you, there's a lot to tell you folks, but God's going to get out what we need to get out. When I was 12 years old, cannot tell you why, my father sat me down and said, Carrie, there's three things you can do that I will disown you for. Steal, love a black, or love a woman. I would love to tell you that I had stolen my first girlfriend, that she had been black, but that was not the truth. My first sponsor was, didn't quite fit the exact thing, but you know, it's close. Anyhow, I don't know why he said that. Well, I do, and now I understand. Having gone back through history of my family, I understand he had some issues around that, some embarrassment to my family by a cousin, all this stuff. So I don't know what that means. I don't even know what sexuality is at this point. I really don't know, you know. When I get to college, I went to a women's college, Mississippi University for Women, the W they called it, quickly I understood what was different about me than the women I grew up with, or the girls I grew up with.
So by August, well no, September of my freshman year, I was in a relationship, I got in a relationship with a woman, and I'll just say this all a whole lot of trouble and just say for the next 10 years I was in different relationships. They just, same relationship, faces got different, right? No time in between, no introspection, no looking to see what my part was, do I need to heal? Nope, just plug and play, one night after the other. And part of that is because I didn't know how to be alone, I didn't know that I couldn't be with someone, I thought my value was whatever was on my arm. Left that first relationship, was in a second relationship by the senior year of college, spring semester of that year, my mother's mother, not big mama, the one on the farm, the other grandmother, I was not really close to her, she had mental illness challenges, and I think that just made her a little less available, and I wasn't available either, also because the custody agreement with my family was that I would spend every other weekend with my mom. She didn't try to fight for us because she felt like my father could provide for us better because we had a lot of land and he had means, and she didn't. And so I spent a lot of my early years in program and seeking outside help to work that through because I felt like she had abandoned me. But what I know today is that she really overrode the greatest instinct a mother could have to let her children stay somewhere that she thought they would be better. And I can only know that today because I happen today to be a mother of a seven year old, go figure, that's going to come in here somewhere, but life gets crazy. You know what, life is life. When I first got here, I was like, oh man, this is insane, and they said, you don't care, we don't know if it's going to be okay, but we know that you can be okay if you do the steps. It's going to be nuts sometimes, sometimes it's going to be great, sometimes it's up and down.
So I live with my dad, mom had custody of us. When I was in my teenage years and all that abuse was happening with my stepmother, I really couldn't be vulnerable with my mom because I only know shut down or open up at that point, right? And so I was kind of shut down with my mom. And so I have made some living amends about that. Nonetheless, I go to college, thank you, my grandmother, my mom's mom died and then two weeks later, spring semester senior year, my stepmother died of cancer and she had had cancer for like about a year. Well at that point, I was getting ready to take the MCATs to go to medical school because I was going to be like the best brain surgeon on the universe, you know, in the universe at that point, and something just said don't do it.
at that point and something just said don't do it and I know today that that
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was God but I had no conception of a conscious contact at that point so my partner at the time was going to go to Los Angeles and stay with her sister she was going to seek a career in acting and there was a place for her to stay and I said well hey let's just go to California. Geographics, I didn't understand what those words at that point you know go from Mississippi to LA you've never been west of Texas you know sure let's just go a little bit crazy but we went to Texas I always say this when I speak in Mississippi there's one interstate it goes from north of the state to the Gulf of Mexico two lanes each side interstate 55 that's that's the biggest I knew I come in to San Bernardino I'm driving there's like eight lanes one side I'm like oh my god you know and and put that on top of the fact that my drawl was so heavy you could cut it with a knife you know and they thought I was dumb as a stick so they start you know it's really challenging to my little southern sensitivities when I first got to LA and and I thought well I can always go home so you know I got out there got a job I went to a series of relationships and then I find myself living with a gal who drank here's what I can tell you when I well gosh so many things again sorry I got the LA and when I lived in Mississippi we had to drive like two and a half hours to go to a gay bar right well in LA they're on every corner I mean they have a parade they have a town and they have newspapers and everything and I was like a kid in a candy store go to bars you know what you find in bars alcoholics oh my god I have arrived you know my people I found my people and so I started staying in the bars I was like 21 years old you know I mean I didn't know any better having a great old time and and just you know being out there so I found myself in different relationships and one of them the gal we all partied so drinking was you know I should have known when I came into her house and they were like big huge green garbage bags full of beer cans that that was a little out of the norm but you know I'm willing to overlook a whole lot of things you know because if I'm anything I'm like I have the disease of wanting to be the good guy I'm gonna ride into my white horse and save you and up to that point in my life and deep in the program I felt like that was an attribute and I recognize it my wanting to save you can kill us all sometimes right I didn't there's quality control in alcohol let me just say I know how if you drink about this much where it's going to get you but when you put cocaine in the mix everything's off the table and that's what happened with that one there was no I couldn't I couldn't gauge things because she did also did illicit drugs and so I've wound up leaving that relationship and as a result of that I was trying to find out some do the sleuthing of like what lies did she tell and go see everybody that I know to find those out nobody's ever done that right okay so in the in the midst of that I bump into one of her exes who was dating this other woman who was in a triple-a double-a I don't know what was it she was put apparently sober and this is symbolic of me like the first time I met that gal I couldn't stand her I thought she was very snotty let's say let's not use the B word up here so I thought she was very snotty and the next time I met her I fell head-over-heels in love with her and went out on a date with her and was pretty much married and moved in you know and so that was my introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous and because she went to meetings all the time she was three years sober and she went to a lot of candlelight candlelight a meetings at ten o'clock at night and I understood that she didn't drink anymore and I knew that drinking had been a severe problem in some of my previous relationships and I thought she didn't drink so I thought everything was fine what I can tell you people that are new is that drinking is but a symptom of alcoholism alcoholism is a disease and actually drinking is the medicine right I mean it's the cure anyhow so I got in the relationship with this this sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous and thank God I can never I owe such a debt of gratitude to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous I sat in those meetings and I listened to the steps and I listened to how those people have been raised from the dead and I thought it was miraculous and I thought it was great for them I didn't need it I didn't need it well it didn't take long before we both showed up because we were actually just little kids in those adult suits that we were wearing and we didn't have tools for communication and she had a tendency to get a little reactive let's say and and I and I don't you know what I've learned that the universe gives me opportunities to kind of recreate scenarios from my childhood to work things out and so we would get in these big fights we had a third roommate it was also an AA I like to set this scene I would come home from work on a Friday and one of the roommates that the other roommate would be laying in the floor because she was kind of a cutter and I need to make sure there wasn't too much blood that we didn't have to go to the hospital about that so I go in the back room we would have kind of a knockdown drag out but by eight o'clock on Friday night we're sitting in our chairs at the AA meeting at Burbank Hospital now that's funny in a way right there may be someone sitting here tonight that's in a sober household where there's still a lot of abuse and what I need to tell you is that you don't have to live that way if you don't want to you don't I don't believe that a higher power would have us live that way but until we understand that we're worthy to live in a different way we don't always know and sometimes the way this disease affects us that we don't know our worth when I got to you I didn't think I was worthy of breathing air on the planet I was in that relationship we like I said we both showed up eventually it became violent and all I can tell you is I never hit back physically but I threw verbal punches that would draw just about everything my
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way because I knew how to hit you below the belt without ever touching you but I never hit back because I feel like one of us would have died if I ever had eventually her sponsor asked for me to go to an Al-Anon meeting and I said sure because I wanted to be the good guy and I went to an AA meeting and I think I've been going to AA meetings all along and I went to this AA meetings were great smoke drink coffee laugh talk tell the stories I go in this Al-Anon meeting circles of chairs Kleenex boxes in the middle people crying talking about their feelings I was like oh my god I don't want to be here so meetings were an hour and a half at that point in Southern California and I went upstairs at the break and she said it's fine it's all right you don't have to go so I didn't go anymore and and so what happened at a certain point I think you know that relationship now in hindsight it felt like it was ten years long is it a high highs and low lows I mean let me tell you I didn't touch on this how I qualify we had broken windshields fist through windows I mean clothes thrown over the balcony I move out in the middle of the night my little Al-Anon brigade comes get me to move out in the middle of the night and I mean it's just insanity high highs low lows all this in sobriety if you will you know at some point I had the sneaking suspicion she was having an affair with our mutual best friend but I couldn't get anybody to validate that well at the same time I went home now I've been sitting in these rooms of AA just listening for a lot at least a year at that point and what I can tell you is going to meetings and not doing the work is like sitting in a garage thinking your car you can sit in there all day but you're not a car and you know you can sit in meetings all day and not do anything and you're just gonna be as sick as you were but now you got a head full of information you haven't done anything with it you know so I went home and I've been thinking about living this double life because it really bothered me that I couldn't be who I was and in the back of my mind that thing that my father said to me when I was 12 year olds was still there so I would didn't have a lot of courage what I can tell you is my stepmother she had died right when I was in college and he remarried literally probably about a month later you know after that to her best friend works you know good for him I guess and and so well really I mean he can't be alone he found someone and so I told her right before I was leaving to go back to California I didn't tell her I said something underhanded because I had no courage like what do you think would happen if daddy thought maybe I was gay well by the time I landed in Los Angeles he had left like a five minute message on my answer machine literally saying you know I think this is wrong no you know this is wrong you don't exist you don't breathe there you're not my daughter you're not part of my family anymore and you should know I've called the entire family together to tell them not to speak your name in my presence and he was true to that and I was raised to make my father proud my father my grandma that was my job to make my father my grandmother proud and here I don't have an identity now and someone confirmed for me that my partner was having an affair with our mutual best friend that was probably about May 10th 1989 and I cracked that was when I was spiritually bankrupt and luckily that the other roommate that we had had been through a program for al-anon ism codependency we don't like to say that in here but she had been in a treatment program for that and I was able to get in that program and for 21 days they basically pulled every inch of emotional guts out of me and put words to it until that point in my life I had never been able to say to you that I was raped I had never been able to say to you that my stepmother was abusive that she was violent that I had not been able to put words to these because I if I put words to them I would have had to deal with it and there was no way for me to deal with any of that up to that point in my life and I will tell you that I was a mess for that 21 days and at the end of that 21 days they pretty much said hold out your arms here's all that we're gonna give you all that emotional gunk back to you we've done what we can you need to seek out a 12-step program to help you find a way to live and I will tell you that I crawled back to the rooms of al-anon that I so hardly walked out of a couple months prior I had been doing a lot of listening and I'm smart and I went to college and I said I'm gonna do what they told what I heard in AA which was get a sponsor do 90 meetings in 90 days and do what the sponsor tells you so I found someone to sponsor me temporarily and I had been hearing in al-anon that or AA rather because everything I'd heard then had been AA thank God for all that programming that it happened when I didn't even want to listen that you find someone that has what you want well I wanted a relationship with that sober alcoholic that I was with still so I found somebody who had a relationship with a sober member of AA and asked her to be my sponsor because I thought she could teach me how to make it work God bless her she must have really used her utilized her sponsor tremendously while she was sponsoring me I would call her and she would be like are you safe and I'm like yes and she would talk to me if I wasn't she'd say call me later I'll call me when you are and she would hang up and wait for me to get to safety it was insane oh my god and so you know I started working the step so I admit I so the first step I I could concede to you that my life had become unmanageable but in the beginning I could not I just couldn't say that I was powerless over alcohol or the alcoholic wasn't there yet well I was beat into submission almost literally eventually I determined I was powerless over alcohol my life was unmanageable and then we get to that came to believe power greater than
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ourselves it could restore us to sanity had a little issue with that because I grew up in church down south that kind of told me who I was was gonna burn in hell eternally just my perception of it and and I thought I can't get with that idea of God and my sponsor it's interesting now because I look back on it and there was something about her that I felt was just so different sometimes I thought she was a little bit boring but she was just so different what I recognized that she was serene and I couldn't recognize what that was I didn't know what serenity was but she was serene and so she said to me her name is Stephanie she doesn't I've asked her if I could tell the story she would say you can use my God till you get one and so every night dear Stephanie's God thank you for this day thank you for all my blessings so I did that for a long time until I got my own God and it worked I tell you so you know I've let tons of sponsors borrow my God they say you could be a doorknob I figure her God was a way big step up from that you know if you wanted to be a doorknob I guess that'll work for you anyhow we're going through the steps she told me when she said she was sponsored me that I had to do some things I had to call her every day had to go to two meetings a week and one of them had to be where she was that had to be is take a service commitment I have have home group and what I can tell you is that for now I had the same home but we just had our anniversary 14 years we celebrated our home group anniversary last week I've always had a homework in her home group and some homework in recovery and I always had a service commitment because she taught me that right out of the gate in the beginning I was a I did literature and how wonderful is that for a newcomer because first of all we know you want to dart out of the door so if we give you a job you can't leave and I don't know any online like me probably nobody here like this but if I'm a soldier I better read all that stuff so I could tell you what you need to read so that got me into the literature you know and then I became a greeter and you know then I held different service positions and in my time here I've done every job in our home group probably 20 times I've been a GR alternate GR DR alternate delegate I mean I've done a lot of service and I and I always will be of service because you know right now I have one of the very friend of mine I'm so oriented to service seven years ago my friend had to say look the different service position you have now is being a mom God understands that you're going to go to different meetings you're going to sponsor in a different way God will work this out for you just breathe you know because coming up you gotta understand like I always thought that I was like an outcast and so I didn't think that I would ever be a mom but God has a great sense of humor and hopefully we'll get to that here in just a couple minutes so working the steps I made a decision to turn my will in my life over to the care of God as I understood him and what I can tell you I've taken a third step I took it to the best of my ability that day and I take it every day and what I believe is that if I turn my will in my life over to the care of God it's no longer mine my life no longer belongs to me it belongs to God so if I have a conscious contact that I will get as I continue to work through these steps and have done many times now I recognize that when God says go left I need to turn or the universe gonna slap me up by a head with a two by four here in a minute you know I mean a lot of these things have come through time it wasn't like that in the beginning for new people just put your butt in the seat you know I mean really just keep coming back it took me probably months before I quit crying it took me 30 minutes the first for sure the first six months meetings are an hour and a half it would take at least 45 minutes before I could feel my butt in the chair I mean that's how wound up I was I was insane didn't even know how sick I was and now we start doing the fourth step I look at I write out the relationships in my life and I look at them and I go to my sponsor and we're looking for my character defects and and I read her my fifth step and and for a long time after that I would watch her to make sure she wasn't looking at me any differently because I thought for sure after hearing my fifth step she's gonna run out of her room with her hair on fire you know truth is she probably heard most of that stuff and she was there for half of it because I've had her on the phone you know but she didn't treat me any differently and I have to tell you that my first sponsor was probably the first recognition I have of unconditional love in my whole life up until that point my life the people in my life had loved me but it there always been conditions on it even my grandmother who was the matriarch who loved me I forgot to talk about her when I was 15 years old my grandfather died and so my father kind of gave up the sacrificial lamb and said Carrie you can move in with big mama and it was just right across the pea patch literally I could throw a rock to hit her well that also helped me get out of the house of my stepmother and I was so grateful because nobody bothered me when I was around my grandmother because they would you know she just wouldn't have any of that and thank God she let me stay with her she helped me in so many ways she was such a an example of a strong woman if she ran a little country store and people in the community who still couldn't read and write would come to her to fill out their paperwork and they trusted her you know and she was an upstanding member of the society there I get emotion today because I she died in 1991 I was two years in program when my grandmother died and even on her death bed much she hated the way my father was acting towards me She said, I can remember just seeing her in the bed right now, and she's like, don't you give up on him.
[00:30:01]
Like, don't close the door. And I couldn't lie to her, and I said, okay. And so I tried not to give up. And so for years, I didn't have any contact with my dad. As I continued to work through the steps, oh, perfect, thank you so much. So I'm working through the steps, I find that my, I couldn't figure out the part, my part in my resentment with my dad. And so I kept, you know, going through the steps, looking at the sixth and seventh step, being ready for God to remove that, and then I get to make the eighth step, right, to go make amends.
My amends to my mom was, I wanted to be in her life, vulnerable, open, in an active relationship with her. And she was open to that, but I said, we have to be able to tell the truth, and if we don't agree, we have to be able to work that out. I cannot have relationships that we can't talk about things, and that crazy making, I can't be a part of that anymore, because it makes me sick. I get toxic when I'm around people that want me to mind read, right?
I can't do that anymore. So she agreed that she would do that. With my father, I couldn't figure out what my part was. But after a couple years, I realized I was judging him for judging me. And so I wrote him a letter, and I thanked him for all the wonderful things. I told you, I rattled off the mini bike, the hunting, the all, I mean, my dad taught me all these things when I was little. Dude, I'm like, I'm your go-to girl.
If you wanna build a house, I will help you, you know? And I can get it done. I can figure it out. He taught me how to troubleshoot. And so I thanked him for all these things, and I sent him the letter, and the letter came back. Returned the sender. My sponsor said, that's not your business. You just keep doing what you're doing in the program, and that'll all figure itself out. So that was early on, probably like shortly after my grandmother died.
And for many years, I didn't do anything more. But I kept working through the steps. You know, I got 10th step, doing a personal inventory all the time. 11th step, seeking through. When I was early in the program, I thought, you know, sought through prayer to improve our conscious contact. Well, God, I just totally glossed over that whole meditation word. I didn't understand how to do it. I mean, when you shut your eyes, and you try to get quiet, like every, there's like these cascades of everything coming at you like that right now.
Who could do that? So I've had to learn through various methods, and trying, and experimenting how to meditate today. Because someone told me that prayer was talking to God, and meditation was listening to God. If the most important relationship I'm ever gonna have in my life is one with a higher power, then maybe I better spend some time with that relationship, right? I mean, and the whole purpose of being in the 12-step program, really, for me, is to find a higher power that I can't get to any other way.
Some people get it in church. Some people get it in other means. Some people may be just born with a conscious contact. That was not my story. But the 12 steps are the way that I can find God. I choose to use the term God, higher power, whatever works for you, but it's bigger than me, and I give my life over to it because I understand that my life is not complete until I'm in the will of that higher power.
Self-will, God's will, how do I know the difference? Pretty much, if I'm in self-will, it feels like I'm trying to swim up the rapids. God's will, feel like I'm floating down the river on an inner tube. Hmm, okay, I'll use that. I had these little mental gymnastics through the years. I've got a whole plethora of them. Then I use them. Sometimes I get on the whack wheel in my brain and I have to go, okay, easy does it.
First things first. Those silly little slogans that I thought were so contrite have saved my life. In the meetings back then, they used to read several readings in the beginning because you had a whole hour and a half, and I think it's really good to educate. I recognize now why that was so good because we could do all these different readings. The do's and don'ts. When I couldn't even focus on the steps, the do's and don'ts, those sound bites, they made it through that alcoholic craziness in my mind.
So, I do a lot of prayer and meditation, and I really do, I don't know what's good for me, but I trust that my higher power does, and that's why on a daily basis, I get up and turn my will and my life over and say, what do you want me to do now? And some days I have to go, oh, really? Okay, you know, because it looks that outlandish, but not really. I just have to be willing, and sometimes it's some pretty severe curves, you know.
To upstep, I had a spiritual awakening as a result of the steps, and I try to carry the message to others and to practice principles in all our affairs. I do that. I was taught early on that when a program request was made of me, unless I had already another engagement, that I was to say yes, and I do that. And I've had to learn that sometimes a commitment with my family is more important or appropriate to keep that commitment than to go do something for the program.
My sponsor's helped me learn that. You know, she's been in program a long time, and she said her mom, who was also in program, taught her that we come to program to get our families back. We shouldn't, like, come in and then just throw them away again, right, because we have a commitment. We have to learn balance. In and of myself, I don't know balance. All right, so, got out of that relationship. Got into a series of others because I recognized that I didn't know how to date.
I mean, I kept putting the cart before the horse. I kept having sex and trying to make a relationship out of it.
[00:35:01]
It doesn't work that way. You, like, actually need to like the person or know something about them, but I missed that when they taught that, even if they did, I don't know. So, I told my sponsor, hey, I got a good idea. I know what I'll do. And when I would say I have a good idea, I would hear this little chuckle, you know. And if you have a plan, sponsors love your plan. Tell them your plan, you know, but please make sure you run it by your sponsor.
I would say, look, if I find somebody I really like, I won't kiss him for 30 days, and if I totally dig him, I won't have sex for 90 days. I think I heard her fall off her chair when I said that, but she said that sounded like a really good plan to do it. And what I learned is, water seeks its own level. I'm a pretty messed up little cookie at that point, and I was attracting people just like me, you know, just as messed up as me.
People, like, heard my plan, they didn't want to have anything to do with that because I'm way too long. So, you know, I started learning how to, like, go for coffee and, like, talk to people, you know, go figure. But, you know, figure out or begin to see who they were, you know, I totally had no understanding of what that, I just thought lust was how you got into all that, and then it would magically work itself out because I had some fine examples, not really.
So, well, I mean, look at my dad, remarries, like, you know, right away, twice. And so, anyhow, I got in different relationships and they have been with people in the program and each one was better than the last because as I was growing and I was working the steps and I was learning and becoming a different person, I was attracting a different level of person, right? So ultimately, I find myself in Boulder, Colorado at some point, I was in LA for 12 years and then I moved to Colorado and had been out of a relationship for about a year and got into another relationship and moved to Phoenix, Arizona and dove right into the program down there.
That's when I really started doing service outside of the group more, became a GR and then DR and all that. And one day I was hiking, I love to hike, and I was hiking on a mountain and I was thinking about the steps and how much I had changed and how, you know, I wanted to be useful to God. And I mean, we're here to be of maximum service to our God and fellows, right? I mean, whole point of me being on earth is to let God, I believe, is to let God's love come through me and to recognize my worth, God's worth in me, as me, in the world.
And I thought, you know, maybe, I probably sponsored like at least a dozen people all the time at that point, you know, and I was really involved and it's my life and I love the program and I love helping people get to that higher power. My job as a sponsor is to help you find your own higher power that has all your answers. I don't know any of your answers, that's what I tell my sponsors. I barely keep my life between the ditches.
I don't know what you should do, but God does and we help you find God and then you'll figure it out. And in the meantime, let's go do service and let's do this and let's do that, right? So I'm hiking and all of a sudden I thought, well, you know, maybe there's a way I could be a good daughter even if I don't really think my dad's being a good dad. So I thought, well, I could send birthday cards and Christmas cards.
So I started writing cards to my dad. And I gotta tell you, I would spend like 20 minutes in Fry's or the drugstore looking for a card that was, it had to be, I had to be able to be authentic and I didn't want to say, I love you and all that. I didn't feel like that. I want to be like, send a picture of the Grand Canyon that says, happy Father's Day. I'm good with that, you know, because I'm not being inauthentic, you know.
So I started doing that and after about, I don't know, maybe six or seven years, I went to the mailbox one day and there was a letter, had my name on it. And the strange, I was like, that's weird, had this little odd feeling. I opened it up because I recognized the handwriting, but I didn't and it was my dad. And he sent a birthday card and he said, happy birthday, Snooks. That's what he called me when I was a little kid.
He said, I've never stopped loving you. And the Al-Anon part of me did that. Well, not, the recovery part of me did that. The not recovered part went, we sure have a great way of showing it, you know. And I called my sponsor and I was a puddle talking to my sponsor about that, you know, because I just kept being consistent year after year. So a couple of years later, I'm hiking on the mountain. Think I need to quit hiking because I was on the mountain and I thought, well, maybe I need to go see my dad before, because he's getting old, you know.
So I called my uncle. I won't go into all that, but my uncle kind of became my dad in a way after my dad did that. And my family hated the way my father was with me or still hates the way my father is with me. And I'm sure they pray for my salvation, but they, you know, they don't, they just overlook what they think is wrong in my life because they love me. And thank God for that, you know. I mean, it's not us, up to us to judge about other people's lives.
They just love me and I'm grateful for that. So I called down there one day, my dad was there. I remember this, and he handed the phone. I said, hey, and he goes, hey, who is this? And I said, well, it's Kerry. And I said, I want to come see you. And he said, all right. So we worked out when. So I flew to Mississippi. At that point, every time I would go home, my uncle's was like home base up near Oxford.
And so my dad lived like three hours south of there. And so I went to my uncle's and got up really early to go meet my dad at like seven o'clock in the morning. Was not at all resentful that I had to get up 3 a.m. to go do that, but I went.
[00:40:00]
I asked, because I wanted to get, you know, I mean, I had program calls all the way there and I was able to have program calls all the way back. You guys have taught me to bookend. If you guys don't know what that means, it means you call someone in program before you go do the hard thing and you call someone in program after you do the hard thing. And that gives you a little God moment there, right?
And so I went in and I met him. And you know, my father, I remembered him as being bigger than life. And I met him at a Cracker Barrel. And he just, I saw this little guy like this, just hunkered over and couldn't even pick his feet up. He'd been a truck driver for so long and he sat across from me and he said, oh, he thought you'd come see me before I died. I said, yeah, I thought that'd be a good thing.
We kind of had a laugh, you know. And we talked about football and work and things that were completely not uncomfortable to him. And I was really good with that. And what I can tell you is for the first time in my life, I sat across from this man and was fully okay in my being because you guys loved me and taught me how to love myself. It didn't matter to me what he thought about me. That was the freedom that I received from working the steps.
And I went another time, like a year, like probably a year later, I went back. We had breakfast again and it was good. A lot of crazy, a lot of cool, I don't want to say crazy, cool stuff had been happening in my life. The partner I was with at the time, we'd been together probably like, you know, 12, 13 years at that point. She was in AA and her niece had a baby prematurely and eight weeks premature, everything kind of went wrong.
And we find ourselves with the baby when it's eight weeks old and the mom isn't really able to care for it very well. And we agreed to keep the baby and the baby never left. And now we've adopted the baby. We had adopted the baby and I didn't think I would be a mom and she was going to do all that, my partner. And, you know, I don't know how much of it was just my natural mothering instinct and how much of it was my Al-Anon-ism and how much of it was just the way it was supposed to be.
But that baby bonded to me a great deal. And God, when she was colicky, it was harrowing. But, and, you know, also like 40 years old, becoming a new mom, I was like, what is this? You know, and so, you know what I know? Al-Anon is filled with moms. And so I've come and I've asked questions and y'all don't laugh at me when I say I have no earthly idea what I'm doing. What you say to me is, honey, nobody does.
There's not a manual. Here, come on, we'll tell you some of the things we did and this is what you can try. Four years after the baby was born, series of things, circumstances changed. And, you know, God directed all of that. The laws in the state of Arizona changed so that we could marry legally and I'd become that baby's mom and we're both on the birth certificate. And I'm like, that never happened.
I didn't think in my lifetime that would happen for someone like me. But God moves mountains if they need to be moved. You know what I'm saying? Four years in, it was clear to me that I had been contributing to a level of imbalance in my life that was not good for me spiritually anymore and I needed to leave that marriage. And the last thing I wanted to do was leave a marriage and leave a baby the way that my mom had left.
So I tried to do it differently. And what I'm doing different today is we're co-parenting that baby. I don't live there, but I have her two nights a week and every other weekend. And when she wakes up at their house, I am there every morning at six o'clock and I get her up and I feed her and I get her ready, I clothe her and I get her to school. So I spend time with her every day of the week except for every other weekend.
And I think about like how my grandmother's presence, because the age difference is about like that, right? I think about how my grandmother's presence has been so impactful in my life. And when I tell this, I really tear up about my grandmother. I do miss her, but I tear up because she, how lucky am I and blessed am I to have been impacted by someone's love so much that even almost 30 years later, I still feel the void.
What a blessing. We're so blessed, right? I spent so much time before I got here looking at what was wrong. I couldn't look at what was right. So what I've been taught here is to practice gratitude. Gratitude has you look for the blessings. The more you look for it, you're gonna find whatever you're looking for. So the more I look for it, the more blessed I become. God's miracles happen all the time.
I mean, there's no way some of this stuff has happened in my life I would ever have dreamed could have happened. And here's the thing, I wouldn't have chosen it. I don't know what's good for me. I would have told you I can't be a mom. I'm a good mom, you know? Sometimes I probably let her get away with a little too much but I'm learning, I'm learning because my Al-Anon friends are telling me, girl.
And I listen to you begrudgingly sometimes but I listen to you, you know what I'm saying? I know we're getting close to needing to close here but you know, for people that are new, what I can tell you is if you don't know if you belong, sit in the seat long enough to figure it out. Chances are good there's alcoholism in your family tree somewhere. I would put $100 bill down on it, you know? And no one can tell you whether or not you should be a member.
You're the only one that can decide. My sponsor told me. My sponsor told me, we can't, I said, I'm afraid I won't get to go to Al-Anon. They're like, we can't kick you out. You qualify because you've been affected by alcoholism.
[00:45:01]
But you've got to understand, I was a pretty hurt little kid because my father disowned me. So I thought, like, maybe you wouldn't want me either. But you just say, come on in. All that stuff is an outside issue. It's all outside issue. The alcoholism, that's the part we need to heal from. That's the part we, when we get that out of the way, your heart gets big and God can shine through and He can use you and He can help others.
And we can help others. Alcoholism is rampant in our country right now, especially now. We all been cooped up all this long, you know. So just show up, go to work, act like a decent human being. People smell that on you. They won't know what's different about you, you know. And in time, if it's appropriate, I tell them. But in the meantime, I go to program, I sponsor people, I pray to God, I ask for Him to use me and I come to try to be of service in any way I can and today it happens to be here.
So thank you for sharing my recovery today. I'll pass. Thank you.