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Source: Mary T. (Pearl) – 12 Step Study Part 5 1998 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: mary-t-pearl-12-step-study-part-5-1998-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:14:50
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Step 9 is making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so it injure them or others. Now, it'll tell you that good judgment and a sense of timing, courage and prudence are the qualities, you know. You know, when you're making amends, you don't go dump garbage on somebody else. You know, you're hard on yourself, you're easier on someone else. You gotta give them a break. Now, the first amends that I made, and it wasn't a big amends from the past, but it was very necessary for me to be able to make, because when I came in the program, I saw the 9th Step.
So, anything I was doing on a daily basis, I thought I could put off till the 9th Step. Huh! Prayed not. Prayed not. And so, what happened was I was addicted to cigarettes. You know, that's a big addiction for a lot of people. And I think in some cases, that's harder to get rid of than alcohol. I don't know. It seems to be, anyway. But, anyway, I was a three-pack-a-day smoker, Salem. And so, I was addicted to menthol, nicotine, holding something in my hand, you know, this kind of thing.
And, you know, I just, I was in bad shape there. Well, J.D., when he got sober, he decided he would quit smoking, he would quit drinking. He was going to get good. Now, all this meant was he wasn't buying cigarettes anymore. That's all it meant. And he would sneak-smoke mine. You know, it's like if he had gone to bed at night with a drink left in the bottle, and he'd got up the next morning, and I had drank that, he would have been hocked to trot.
Well, that's how I was, because he'd smoke my cigarettes while I was asleep. And then I'd get up and wouldn't have a cigarette. Well, you know, you've got to pump your lungs with a cigarette to start the day. I mean, everybody knows you've got to jump-start yourself on nicotine. Either that, or some people do it with caffeine. You know, you've got to jump-start your heart. You've got to get it going.
And so I'd get up, and there would be my empty little pack in my little cigarette case. You know, he'd leave the empty pack, never throw the pack away, you know. It's because it filled out the case. Maybe I wouldn't notice. You know, and I'd reach over there, and I'd get my little, and I'd open it up, and I'd just go berserk. And so this one particular morning, it was the morning I'd had it. This was it.
I'd had it. And so I told him, I said, I am so sick of you stealing my cigarettes. I said, you're nothing but a common thief. And I began to do the nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh, because I got started. And so he started walking around the house. I started following him. And so just continuing to chew, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh. And so he went out the front door, got in the truck, and I'm going down the driveway, nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh, until he drove down the street.
Well, I only got a block or a house or two away before I came back. Well, I am so mad. I'm in my house coat. You know, and I'm so mad about the situation. And about that time, the phone rang. And it's a girl from my group. And she said, what's the matter? Because I sounded angry when I said, hello! You know. I've never been one that masks my feelings real well. I can't be in the middle of an argument.
Now, J.D., I hate him. He can do that. You know, we can be screaming and yelling, and he'll go, hello. And I just go, nyeh! I can't turn it off and on like a faucet, you phony! But anyway, so I yell hello into the phone, and the girl says, well, what's the matter with you? And I just told her, man, you know, he'd sold my cigarette for the last time, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh. I began to tell her all this stuff.
And so after about 10 minutes, and I took a breath, and she said, ooh, I really hate to hear that. And I said, I know. It's terrible. She said, no, no. She said, honey, don't you have any money? I said, yeah, why? And she said, do you have a car? And I said, yeah, why? She said, then why don't you get your butt in your car and go buy you some cigarettes? Well, it's the principle of the thing. He stole them.
He should have to bring them back. She said, he's not going without a cigarette. Well, see, that makes too good a logic. And you're caught. All of a sudden, you realize it, but you don't want to give in, you know. And so I explained to her that, you know, this was the wrong thing to do, and nyeh, nyeh, nyeh. And she said, and not only that, you owe him in a millions. Excuse me? This old beast stole my cigarettes, and I owe him in a millions?
And she said, well, you're the one that threw the fit. I don't think I like this program. It's all on the alcoholic side. Have you ever noticed that? So I said, are you serious? She said, yes. She said, you're the one that threw a fit. You're the one that cussed him out. And she said, go buy yourself some cigarettes. Have a couple cigarettes. Calm down. Pray about it. And go make an amends. And I said, but I'm not on step nine.
She said, that's for the wreckage of the past. This is the wreckage of right now.
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And I said, OK. And she said, now, I'm going to tell you how to make the amends. I said, all right. She said, you go and tell him you were wrong. I was wrong? He stole them from me, and I am wrong? I said, that doesn't make any sense. She said, you stood anyway. She said, don't think about it. Just do it. So I went and I got my cigarettes, and I smoked maybe 10 or 12 nonstop. And then I knew where he'd gone.
He'd gone to the enemy camp. He'd gone to my mother's. She liked him better than she did me. And so when I drove over there, sure enough, there was his truck. So I pulled in behind him. And he was out in the back 40 mowing the back field for Mama. And I saw him out there, and so I just got out. And I'm stomping back there. And so he saw me coming, and he stopped the mower, and he sort of squared off.
We're going to have it out here in the field. Wouldn't be the first time either. Anyway, I walked over to him, and I said, what's wrong? He said, what? I said, what's wrong? And he looked at me, and he said, what did you say? And it's like, it's killing me. And it's like, I told you. And I said, I'm wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong. And he said, did you say you were wrong? Now, J.D.'s hard of hearing.
He has a 65% hearing loss. And it's like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. And he's forcing me to say it. And I finally said, yes, I was wrong. And he just looked at me, and I said, I shouldn't have jumped all over you about the cigarettes. It wasn't that big of a deal. And I made a big deal about it. I said, I was wrong. And I looked back at him, and he had tears running down his face. And he said, do you realize you've never, ever said you were wrong?
I said, that's a lie. That's a lie from the pit of hell it is. And now my brain begins to go, you know how you're going to prove it, and you're going to tell them when. And there goes my brain, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching, searching. Not found, not found. I couldn't think of an instance in which I had, because I was the person that even if I knew I was wrong, even though I knew I had started it, I couldn't admit I was wrong because that meant I was a mistake.
And so to end the fight, J.D. was always the one to say, I'm sorry. J.D. was the one that had to do that every time, because I wasn't person enough to be able to do that. And when he said it, it really, see, it showed me a lot about me. It showed me a lot about our relationship. And it's like, I was so grateful when he would say he was sorry, because see, then that could end. If it didn't, I could have carried it on forever because I couldn't be wrong.
But because I could say I was wrong about the cigarettes, that was the beginning of me to be able to admit I was wrong. You know, and when you're wrong, then that's the greatest thing in the world to be able to be wrong, because you're always going to be wrong. You know, no one is perfect. Everyone is frequently wrong about something. You know, it's like, I mean, you can just say, what's on Channel 7 tonight?
Well, so-and-so, that's what you usually own. You haven't looked at the TV Guide and all of a sudden it's some special. You're wrong, you know, and it's not the end of the world, but it used to be for me. I couldn't afford to be wrong. And now I'm grateful I can be wrong, because when something happens, I screwed up. I blew it. No big deal. And it's not a big deal, you know, but before it was everything.
It was everything. And so then, you know, I had to be willing to change. And the worst relationship, of course, we know is with mother. You know, that's the worst relationship, you know, on that never list, you know. And so I told my sponsor, I said, my mama's getting old. I said, my mother's in her 80s. And I said, this bitch is going to die before I can get this amends done. Because, see, it happened with my brother-in-law.
You know, he died. And so here, you know, I'm out there, and my sponsor told me, and I wrote an amends letter. And I went out to the cemetery, and I sat down on the grave there. And I talked to J.R., and I made an amends to him. I blackmailed that man. I blackmailed that man. You see, when I was in junior high school, my brother-in-law came home to me.
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And it scared me, and I bluffed my way out of the situation. I went home, and I told my mother. And what mother said to me was, it's a terrible thing, and he needs to be killed. And she says, but instead, this would hurt Dorothy's feelings. And she said, what you do is don't ever tell your sister because it would destroy her. And she said, and never let yourself be along with him again. Now, that's a tremendous responsibility on a 14-year-old kid.
But, see, mama didn't know how to deal with that. What that also told me was my sister's feelings were more important than mine. One more time, you see. And so that was the big family deal there. You know, I never said anything, but what I did later on is I became an adult. When I would want him to be good to my sister, he was a very sick man. Both of his parents, he was an adult child. Both of his parents were practicing alcoholics.
And he was so hard trying to fix and to please his parents to make them okay that he totally forgot he was married. And so my sister had her engagement ring. And I noticed when I got back from Newfoundland that she wasn't wearing it. She had it on her wedding band, but she didn't have her engagement ring. And I said, why? And she said, well, that it had worn through on the back. And she had told him she wanted him to get it fixed for her.
And she said, it doesn't mean anything to him, therefore it doesn't mean anything to me. And I knew that she was hurt because he had not gotten the ring fixed for her. And so I decided when Christmas time came that year that that was going to be taken care of. So I went to him and told him what he was going to do for Christmas. And I said, you're going to get her ring fixed better than that. I said, you know that diamond in that little engagement ring looks like a gnat's ass.
I said, she's lived with you and your trifling ass all these years. She needs something nicer than that. And he just looked at me and I said, and you're going to do it because if you don't do it, I'm going to tell her something that this will ruin your little playhouse here. And so he told me to go get the ring. And so I went and I got my sister this beautiful ring made. And he gave it to her for Christmas.
And he liked to choked on it, but he gave it to her. And, you know, I'm going to tell you that wasn't the right thing to do. But the look that was on her face on Christmas morning when she saw that and was worth it to me, was worth it to me. And see, I don't have to worry about her hearing this because my sister don't have anything to do with the program. So I can say whatever I want to. Because you all have to know what you hear here when you leave here.
Let's stay here. But anyway, I'm out there and I'm telling him, you know, and that was just one time I blackmailed him. But there were a lot of times that I put pressure forth against him because I knew how to play. And once he gave in to me, I knew I had him. See, that's the thing when you're doing that deal. Once you know you have him. And I had quit doing things to him when I got in the program, but I just didn't know how to go back and to clean that mess up.
And then while I was procrastinating, he died. I mean, he had a car wreck and was killed. And so it's like, hmm, should have really done that. And I still to this day, you know, I wish I had done differently. But I did the best I could for where I was at at the time. But I did go out there and I made that amends. And I told him and, you know, the way I've made an amends to J.R. is the fact that I have never done that to another person.
I've never gone back and emotionally blackmail somebody like that again, you know, because I can't do anything for him. But I can take from that and not do it to someone else. Now, with mother, though, that was a long process. And when you become ready, when you truly become ready, the teachers will appear. And there was a girl that came to our group and she was from Missouri. And she had worked on a lot of the mother issues.
She'd worked on these things. And so she told me, she said, you don't accept your mother's limitations because you don't accept your own or your mother's concerns. She said, you're going to have to accept the fact you feel like you feel. And you're going to have to accept mother the way she is instead of asking her to be different. And see, my mother had told me time after time, quit trying to change me.
And I just knew she'd feel better if she'd be different. And it'd also be easier on me. You know, mother and I couldn't be around one another for five minutes that we wouldn't get to arguing about something. Sponsor's husband, he's a real smart aleck. And he would say things like, it takes two fools to argue. Two wise men won't argue with one another. A wise man won't argue with a fool. So obviously it takes two fools to argue.
Thank you for sharing, Joe. You know, I was hearing these things, you know, and I'm very grateful to members of Alcoholics Anonymous like him, the people that were kind enough to sit there and to share their program of recovery with me and to give me the different little things. And, you know, one of the things, Don P., he's been a trustee and whatever for A for years and years. He was the one that gave me the handle on how to make the amends.
And he said, you know, he said that you ask the person what you can do to make amends. You ask the person what you can do to make it up to them.
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Instead of you trying to figure it out, ask them, what will it take to clear this up between us? They know, you don't. You could do a million things and not get it right. And I thought, you know, that's true. But anyway, Betty told me to do that deal. And so I began to try to accept Mother the way she was. And it was hard because I didn't like the way Mother was. I didn't like the way I felt when I was around her.
So I began to try to accept the fact that I was doing and maybe Mother was doing the best she could to from where she was coming. Maybe she was. And then she told me, she says, now I want you to learn to ask God to let you see your mama like he sees her. And I thought, what? She said, you pray and ask God to let you see your mother like he sees her. God looks at her different than you do. You see, God looks at people through love.
God has unconditional love when he looks at people. He doesn't look at them in all their negative. He doesn't look at them and say, you're this, this, this and this and this. God looks at you and says, I love you. And I hate to see you hurting yourself like that. But I love you just the way you are. You don't have to change for God to love you. Once you know that God loves you, you will change. But until then, you won't.
And so it was amazing. And so I began to pray the prayer and it was like I had no clue what I'd see or how that would come about. And I didn't know how long it'd take. And I'd ask my sponsor, I'd say, how long do I have to pray this dumb prayer? She said, just till it works. OK. So I pray the prayer. And a year or so later, one fall, I'm driving in my mama's. My mom has a real long driveway and and I see her out in that backfield and she's raking leaves.
It was amazing thing that day when I saw her because I saw something about my mother I'd never noticed before. My mother was short. Now, that sounds stupid, doesn't it? My mother comes up to here on me and I thought she was tall. And I'm sitting there in the car and it's like I see that, but I'm going, how could you not know your mother was short? That is so stupid. And then it occurs to me because every time you come over, you come over as a little child.
Wanting your mama to approve of you, wanting your mama to love you. And when you're a little child, mama looks big. That's the reason you've been afraid of your mother. You've been afraid of your mother all these years. She's bigger than you. She was the authority figure. She was all these things. And you were a lot bigger than she was. Size didn't have anything to do with it. But that shows you the mental mindset that I had.
And I always went as a child wanting mother. To be different, wanting mother to be different. And it amazed me. And I just sit there and I cried a while and then I got out of the car and I started walking toward the back. She's still raking leaves. She hadn't even noticed I'm there. And it's like I could see inside of her heart. And I saw someone, not someone who had a lot of love and who was refusing to give it to me.
See, that's what I always thought, that she punished me by withholding love. I saw somebody who needed love. I saw somebody had scars all over their heart. Someone who needed love, not someone who had it and wouldn't give it to me. It was totally different woman I saw out there that day. And as I got there to her, I realized I'd been taught how to love in rooms like this. I was unlovable, didn't know how to love.
And you all showed me how to love by loving me unconditionally, inviting me to grow and change, but loving me anyway. With all the work, you love me. And so I had a responsibility to pass that on. And so here was a place it needed to go. And if anybody had love to give in this situation, I had the love to give. And so I walked over to my mom and I asked her to put down the leaf broom. And when she did, I put my arms around her and I just gave her a hug like I would one of y'all.
And boy, she stiffened up. You see, she wasn't. This is not something we don't touch and we don't hug and we don't do any of that kind of stuff. We don't talk. You know, we don't do that. And it just she just stiffened up like a little board. But I needed to do that because, you see, it helped something inside of me to be able to do that. You know, to pass it on helps you more than it ever helps anybody else.
It helps you. And so I had that that awareness. And but that didn't heal the relationship. That was just a part of the process. And then later on, I realized that when Daddy died, I made Daddy a saint. And then I compared her against the saint. And you're naturally going to come up short when you're being compared against somebody who's perfect. And, you know, if Daddy had lived, he may not have been a saint.
It's one of those things. You'll never know. You know those things. I do know today that if I had a husband and a kid like him and me, I'd kill him. Because we did. You know, we played her.
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We played her. And I think Daddy was probably passively aggressive with mother. And it was things like, can I do so and so should say, no, I'd go to Daddy. He'd say yes. And then and then I'd go do it. And then her and Daddy, you know, you know, it was that kind of thing. Always that kind of a deal with me in the middle there. And I realized that. And I didn't know how to tell her, Mom, I see that deal now.
I didn't know how to approach her with that. And so one day I had gone over to the the bank and on the way coming out of the drive in. It was like the voice says, go see your mama today. Just that simple. So I drove straight from the bank to my mother's because I've learned to be obedient. When you hear the voice, if you do it, the voice says you get the benefit. You know, it's when you don't or when you say I don't feel like it or I don't think that you shortchange yourself.
And I'm really I'll be forever grateful. I went that day because when I went in, mother said, I'm so glad you came by. She said, I want to talk to you about something that happened when Daddy died. And when I started talking to her about it, well, I remembered it differently than she did. And I thought, well, here we go. You know, this is the argument. We always have the argument. And instead, she said, but you were just 12 years old and I was almost 60.
We would have looked at it differently. And I thought, well, now that was wise, you know, and that was something for mother, you know, that's profound, you know, for mother to have a thought, you say. You know how kids are. You think your parents are stupid, you know, just that kind of a deal. And and so anyway, she said, I would like to ask you something else while we're talking about it. And I thought, OK, made so far.
And I said, what? And she said, why were you always such a rotten, ornery kid? Why were you that way? And I said, I was getting even with you for not loving me. I told her the truth, told her how I felt. And my mother looked at me and she said, not love you. How could you say I didn't love you? And I said, well, Mama, you never ever once told me you love me. You never, ever patted me. You never said you did good.
You never gave me any good strokes. You were just always there telling me what I didn't do. Constantly on me for what I didn't do. You didn't you know, you might have made your room 99 percent, but you missed this point over here. You know, you you may win the gold medal over here for your piano playing, but you didn't do this over here. And I said, I never when I bring home straight A pluses, you'd say that's what you're supposed to do.
I didn't get a you did good. And I said, it just seemed like to me I never could do anything to please you. And that's the reason I didn't think you loved me. And my mama said, but Mary Pearl, I gave you a roof over your head. I gave you food to eat and clothes to wear. It was more than I ever had. Now, see, here's the thing. In the years in between that I had coming down on, I had talked to these people who had been raised in these alcoholic homes.
Remember, I said my mama's family were all alcoholic. And my mother's family were very poor and they were from Tennessee. Now, my grandfather in those years was an engineer on the railroad and he would drink. And then when he would come home, he would force her mother to drink and she would drink with him. If he didn't, he'd beat her up. So she drank with him and she became alcoholic also. And my grandfather would physically abuse my mother.
She was the oldest girl. And so he would physically abuse her. And she had scars all over her body where he had cut her with things and he had hit her with things. And she had her appendix taken out by the local country doctor. And they didn't have hospitals, you know, these came back home. And he came in and told her to get up and put a log on the fire. He didn't know she just had her appendix out the day before.
And she said, Papa, I can't. So he stomped her. And he busted her incision open. And there was she nearly died. And there was a hole in my mother's stomach that you could put your thumb into to the first knuckle where it healed wrong from that. She had a lot of hard time getting pregnant. They said her womb was twisted on the inside from the adhesions, from all of this stuff that she had had. She had had all of that before she was 13 years old.
And when she was 13, he came in one night and he tried to rape her. And so she this time picked up the stick of stovewood and she hit him over the head and she ran away from home. And she lived. She ran all the way from Gleason, Tennessee, to Memphis, which is a long way. And she said that she lived under the little bridges and the little things and the trestles. And she stole things out of people's gardens to eat on until she got to Memphis.
And she lived in an alleyway in Memphis. And there was this lady that had a boarding house. And she saw mother out there living in this little box in the alleyway, stealing food, trying to save herself. And she took her in and she gave her a room, a roof over her head and gave her food to eat if mother would help her clean the boarding house and cook in the kitchen. And she taught my mama how to sew.
And so this woman took her off the street. And the the Air Force, not the Air Force, the Army Recruiter Office there in Memphis, the guys took their meals at this boarding house.
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And that's where she met my daddy, because he was the recruiter there in Memphis. And when they were 16 and he was 28, they got married. So now if you had had to live like that. That would what would be the biggest thing you could ever do for a child, for them not to have to wonder about having a roof over their head, a safe place to stay, food to eat and clothes to wear. And see, those were things she never had.
And it never really hit me, the impact of what she had told me those over those years until that day. And that, you know, I thought those things were what every parent provided a child that was given. And I know today that it's not. It's a luxury to many people. It's not just the run of the mill thing. And, you know, all of a sudden it became enough. I accepted that and accepted her as being the best mom she could have been from where she came from.
And, you know, the hole inside me closed up. And I looked at my mom and I said, Mom, how could you forgive me for all the things? What can I do to make it up to you for all the things that I've done over all these years? So many on purpose to hurt you. What could I do? And my mama said, forgive me for not being the kind of mama you needed. That's all I want is you forgive me. And I said, Mama, I forgive you.
And my mother held out her hands to me and she said, Baby, I love you. I've always loved you. And she hugged me. And that deal between us was over. That deal closed up. That was a done deal. Now, you know. Now, you know, that doesn't mean that every time we were together, everything was rosy, but there was never that feeling inside of me, that hate that had been inside me all those years because I was willing to do the deal.
The hate went away and I was at peace with my mom. And I'm real grateful. Mama and I had four or five years together that we could be together and have fun and joke and laugh and go and do. And then my mother got a mental illness. And part of that mental illness is they turn on the ones they love. But I'm real glad that I had that healing with her before all that happened. I don't think that for me, I could have ever been OK if I hadn't had that deal OK with me.
The graveside thing is one thing, but I don't think it would ever have healed like that was. And that was the way it was supposed to be. You know, forgiveness is a really small thing. All it means is giving the person another chance. Just give them another chance. Give them a chance to do better. You know, and how many times do you forgive? You keep on forgiving. How many times have you been forgiven?
You know, you know, there's been times I've done the very best I could and I screwed up every which way. You know, and I don't in a case like that, I don't need somebody to judge me or pounce on me or condemn me. I need somebody to forgive me because I was doing the best I could at the time. It may have been ready, but it was the best I could do. Now, you know, in this step, it says, except when to do so, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Well, I had this first husband, you know. Well, we all know I had the great affair. Well, there were many great affairs, not just one. You know, if it's worth doing, do it to down the spot. You know, that quick fix feel good. My husband, a father, left his mother shortly after he was born, and he and his sister were raised by a grandfather who didn't want him. And his mother died when he was 12. So he was an orphan by the time he was 12.
And so for him to have a broken home, he just he just couldn't have that. That wasn't going to happen for him. So he would have put up with anything for me rather than to have that broken home thing. And I knew that. And I knew he hated that grandfather. And his grandfather died. And his sister called and told him that she was taking care of all the. He said he wasn't coming to the funeral. He didn't like him. He wasn't going.
And so she said, OK, well, I'll send you a check for your half. He said, keep it all. I don't want any. Well, his sister was a fair person, and so she sent him a cashier's check for half of the estate. I got the mail. He was TDY at the time, and it seemed like an act of God. And so all I did was just endorse the check and put it in our joint checking account, and I went down and bought me everything I wanted to have.
And I spent his inheritance. I'd spend it all in a week's time. And it was a sizable amount of money. And so the thoughts of, you know, making amends to this ex-husband made a lot of problems because it meant there was going to be this, you know, tremendous amount of money to have to pay back financially. How do you make amends to all the. financially. How do you make amends to all the humiliation? I mean, I did lots of things to him. He was, the NCOIC, he was of the Quality Control for the Missile Squadron and they would
[00:30:06]
take their lunches and go out to the sites and I would write nasty things on hard-boiled eggs and I would make sandwiches with cardboard and stuff to humiliate him. You know, I mean, it's just, you know, I had all this contempt on the inside and I would do these little tacky things under the guise of, ha, ha, ha, isn't that cute? And, but I was doing it on purpose and he knew that. And so, I mean, how do you make amends for all that kind of stuff? Now, he had remarried, so what I said to myself was, he'll come under the except when to do so rule. Because, you know, if his wife might feel threatened if I were to contact him after all these years and she might think that I'm wanting to get back in his life and that may cause her some anxiety, so I'm going to just leave them alone. And that got me off the hook. But I want you to know, I really believed that. I really believed it. Now, my mother and that ex-husband always seemed to like one another. Mothers always like the guys I've married. Not me, but the guys I was married to. And so, when we were getting the divorce, he moved in with my mother. Anyhow. So, Mother kept in contact with Wes over the years and all of a sudden she got a letter from him. And Mother's been always rule one to share those letters with me, you know. And it's like, I don't care, but I did not read them, you know, ha, you know, just curious, just curious. And so, I got this one letter she did and it said that his wife had cancer. And he had a little girl 12 years old. And his wife died. And when his wife died, my excuse went away. You see, my excuse went away. I didn't want to cause her any problem. I ain't going to cause her no problem. And it began to prey on my mind. The little nudge, you know. Your excuse is gone. You need to clean that up. You need to clean that up. And I thought I was willing until that happened. And then I knew that I wasn't willing. And so, I began to pray to God to help me to be willing. And God did. He tortured me. I dreamed about it. I mean, I couldn't, I mean, it was just like right here. You know how an obsession is. It's like an octopus on your face and you just can't get it off no matter where you move, you know.
And that's the way this deal was. It was just right on me. And I just finally, oh, all right, all right, all right. And so, I asked my mother if she had his phone number. She said no. She just had the address. And I said, well, I want to talk to him. And he lived in San Antonio, Texas. And so, I called and I said, God, if there, you know, information, you know, if I'm not supposed to make the amends, don't let there be a listing. There was a listing. You know, I'm trying, I'm trying, you know. And so, then when the phone answered, you know, it was his daughter that answered the phone. Well, I could tell it was a child that answered the phone. And I assumed it was his daughter. And I didn't know quite how to approach that when she said, may I tell him who's calling, you know. And I said, tell him it's, I thought, well, what the hell, it's a lie, an old friend, you know, because friends we never worked. And so, anyway, he got on the phone and I told him that I had heard that his wife had passed away and that I was sorry to hear that. And especially because now here's this child, 12 years old, without a parent. I knew exactly how that felt. He knew exactly how that felt. And anyway, we got to talking and I said, I guess you've wondered why I've called. He said, the thoughts crossed my mind, you know, as we're talking, you know. And I said, well, I said, I belong to a 12-step program that says that part of my recovery is dependent upon my willingness to make amends for the wreckage of my past and your part of that past. And I would like to make an amends to you. And I said, I need to set up a payment schedule with you on your inheritance. I want to pay that back.
And I said, I don't know how to make it up to you. Tell me what I can do to make a difference for all the things that I did that hurt you. What can I do today? And he said, are you in AA? And I said, close. I said, I'm in Illinois. And I said, why would you ask if I was in AA? He says, because I've been sober in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for about nine months. And I said, you ruined my story. And he said, how's that? I said, I always told him that you wasn't sick enough for me. I had to get an alcoholic. He said, I'll tell you what, he said, it's funny that you should call because he said my sponsor and I've been talking about you. And he said, you know, I have some amends to make too. And I said, oh, and he said, yeah, he said, you know, I did. And he went into the list of things
[00:35:04]
then. And we, we sat there and we talked about it and he said, you know, he says, as far as that money goes, he said, let's just forget about that because he said, you know, when we got married, I promised you certain things that I would have, that I would get for you and do. And he said, I wouldn't do it. And he said, I was angry. And so I punished you by not buying you the, the things that you want. He said, I promised you furniture and I wouldn't, I made you use that old base furniture all the time. And he said, that's what you did. I bought my house full of furniture is what I did with it. And he said, so why don't we just forget about that and call that even? And he says, why don't we just be friends?
Would you be okay with that? I'd be okay with that. Would you be okay with that? And I said, oh yeah, yeah, I could be okay with that. I said, are you sure? He said, yeah. He said, in that way, anytime you're down here, if you want to drop in or anytime I'm up there, we can be friends. Let's not let there be any more hard feelings between us. Now I fought that amends for eight years. And when I got off that phone, that was the last on my original list of amends to make. I could go in there and check that off. And I felt a sense of freedom. I can't tell you. I was free because I could see him and look at him today and not have any of that between us anymore. I was free from the past. And then all I had to do was keep it straight. Now the amends to the checkers at the grocery store, that was a little hard to make too, because like say, when they run from you, when you go in and my sponsor said, what you're going to have to do is change your attitude. She says, you're going to have to act different when you go to the store. And I thought, okay, wondering what I need to do while being a person of extremes, I decided, okay, I can act different. So I went in and act like I was happy to be in the grocery store. I hummed.
I skipped behind my cart. Oh, there's the vegetable, happy little vegetable. You know, they thought I was on drugs. I'd get up to the checkout and I'd say, how are you today? How's your family? Good to see you again. But you know, I was consistent. See, there's the thing you got to, when you're making a living amends, you got to be consistent. And I went to the same grocery store all, you know, I went, I had quit going to that grocery store because of the way they treat, but I kept going to that grocery store because that's where I had done the deal. So that's where I went back to do the deal. And I kept going there. And I want to tell you that after a year or so of treating those people differently, you know, they begin to smile when they would see me come through and they'd say, how are you doing, Ms. Thompson? How are you doing? And that year when I got home, I was around Christmas time and I was taking my groceries out and I thought, oops, I didn't buy a greeting card. Oh my God, I've shoplifted a greeting card. You know, and I looked and I thought, no, I didn't shoplift a greeting card. And I looked at that and I opened the greeting card and it was from the checkers and the sackers. And they told me that I was their best customer and they love me. And they said, you brighten my day. Now see, this couldn't have happened before. You know, there's no way to go from there to here, you know, but it was a change in the way I treat them. Now, uh, last year at Christmas, I got a Christmas card from one of the boys that was the sacker 20 years ago. And he sent me a little piece of paper that I had given him one day. Now he had kept it 20 years and he was having a down day and I had gone out and written something out of my ODEP book and given it to him. And he said, you'll never know how much this has helped me all these years. And I just wanted you to know, he said, I've gone through some of the hardest times in my life.
The last year was he has a terminal illness. And he said, I wanted you to know, you know, that's amazing to me. Cause see, I didn't even, until I saw it, remember having written that, you know, just doing what you, you know, just doing what you're supposed to be doing and you make a difference. You know, God lets you, God can take the crummiest thing and make something that can be useful to help him and other people. If you allow it, if you allow it by doing the deal, you got to do the deal. And, and how can I make an amends to JD for trying to murder him? You know, you know, you know, I try to be a very kind and loving wife. That's how I make that living amends with him every day. And I threw away the stopper to the bathtub. You know, and what happens after you do this step? One of the most marvelous things that happens is you get the promises, the promises begin to materialize in your life. You know, not before it's after you clean up the wreckage of the
[00:40:01]
past, all of a sudden then the promises. And you know, there's a lot of people in Al-Nan that says, well, the promises in the big book on page 80, I think they're what 83 and 84. It says, you know, they're not for us. They're for the alcoholics. Well, I've read that book many, many times and nowhere does it say the following promises are only for alcoholics. It says, if you've been painstaking about your work to this point, meaning if you've been working the steps and if you've been painstaking about it, if you're working the steps, these things are going to happen. Be you alcoholic or Daisy, it don't matter. You know, if you do the deal, you get the deal, you know, it doesn't matter. And so, you know, that's why I want to encourage you. You know, I'm the kind of, I'm greedy. I want everything this program has to offer and I'll be damned if the alcoholics are going to get something I don't get. You know, I work hard. I want the same benefits. I want that deal. And it's for anybody who's practicing that, you know, when you get to that point, you're going to get those things, you know, and intuitively you'll know how to handle a lot of things that happen and you won't feel so pitiful anymore. You know, all that self pity and crap goes away and you'll take an interest in your fellow man and all of a sudden you'll begin to see that God is doing for you what you could never do for yourself. Now, those aren't little promises, you know, and there's a whole 12 of them in there and there's lots of promises besides those all through the book in this program. There's a lot of stuff and it's directly related to what you're willing to put in. It's directly related to what you'll get out. If you put a little, you get a little back, you know, but you put a whole lot in, you get about, and remember those little half measures really don't avail you anything.
You know, if you're half-ass work in the program, you're still a half-ass. Don't forget that. Okay, let's take a break and then we will go on with step 10. Got circulation back in your brain yet? That's why people say, why don't you talk sitting down? That's I can't think. Y'all ready? Okay, here we go. Step 10, continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. You noticed it says when we were wrong, not if we were wrong. You know, we've entered the world of the spirit now and our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness and it's a lifetime job that we're going to start here on step 10. Why do you have to do it promptly? You know, because they know if we have time to think about it, you know, the mind's a dangerous neighborhood. Don't go in alone. You know, if you think about it, you know, you'll justify and rationalize what you've done and you'll never go back and clean it up again. You know, that's the reason we have to do it promptly. We need to take a look at ourselves every day. You know, can you remember what you had say for lunch two days ago without having to really stop and give it some thought? You know, we do a lot of things during the course of a day and it's real easy in the rush and the hustle and bustle that you forget and you don't take care of things. So if you take care of things when you need to and I found that the older I get and the more my memory goes, you know, I'm the kind of person that I go around now and I write stuff, you know, and I can write it. I'll be in the kitchen, you know, and I'll say, I've got to go to the pantry and get something. And I get in the pantry and I'll say, I wonder why I'm here. Now it's only a room away, you know, it's only a room away. And so I go back in the kitchen, I go, oh yeah, now I know what it was. And so I go back to the pantry and I go, shit, here I am again. Well, I get tired of this, you know, little path to the pantry. So I've just found it's easier to write it down upon my hand and I get there. I hadn't lost it. You know, I go, oh yes, peas, that's what I want. You know, I'm having to do things like that these days and it's, it's not real thrilling, but you see, that's the thing. Same thing is true though. When you're looking back over your day, if you're going to look back over a week or a month at a time, you're never going to get it. You're going to, you know, 24 hours is far enough to have to look back, to go back through. And sometimes even so, you'll miss it if you're not careful.
And so, uh, this is a continuation of that fourth and fifth step. That's what this one is about. Now we wrote the fourth step, didn't we? So I believe in a written 10 step. Now not everybody does, you know, a lot of people can say they can do it in their mind and whoopie doo. I can't. And people I sponsor don't. So, you know, if you want it the way I do, you do what I do. And that's a, it's a requirement, but we need to take it. And the thing about it is I find that when I write it down, you know, and I find myself making the same kind of amends, I can look back over it and I'll go, gosh, I'm making the same kind of amends over and over. I wonder why. And then I go.
A.A. Twelve and Twelve is wonderful on Step 10.
[00:45:20]
It says that it's a way to have emotional balance in your life, is to do this daily type thing here. And I also do an annual inventory. You see, I'm not a saint. And I don't work my program 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I should, but I don't, because I'm not perfect. You know, but this is where it catches me, in that 10th step. It shows me where I'm working it, where I'm not working it, where I need to improve.
It also shows me areas in which I've done good. You know, because I try to always leave my 10th step when I finish at the end of the page. I try to leave it on a positive note. I don't like to leave it on a negative note, you know. I strive for progress, not for spiritual perfection, you know, progress. And this is how I began to do this. I began to see in my inventory, I had a situation that happened at the house, and this is where this inventory comes in handy.
I left and went to Kentucky. In fact, Lisa Ann was there. I talked on the steps in Kentucky, and there was a busy little fella at my house while I was gone. I didn't know about it at the time, but he was busy. And when I came back home, I got home late that Sunday night, and it rained, and I got up the next morning. No, I didn't. I was laying in bed the next morning, and I had talked to my sponsor, and I put my glasses on, and the world came into view.
And I was living in a river of mud, and it's like, how did this happen? You know, that's the main thing with an alarm. You want to figure out how it happened. You know, you're on the Titanic, and it's very important that you know what happened instead of getting in the lifeboat. But that's our natural thing. How did this happen? And I'm looking, and I have two poodles that are mud balls. Now they have walked all across the carpet.
They've been busy little dogs. They've evidently played tag across the couch and over on the chair, and, I mean, there's mud all over my furniture, all over my carpet. It's in my bed. You know, you remember the, what was it, the movie, was it one of the Godfather movies where the guy woke up with a horse's head? I mean, that's how I felt. Ah! You know, I mean, it was just all that stuff was in my bed, and I'm going, what has happened?
Now, J.D. had mentioned to me off and on for probably six months or so that he was thinking about building a water garden. Now when we talked about the water garden, it wasn't anything I was thrilled about. I mean, we have rooms in our yard now. You know, we have the cactus area. We have the meditation area. We have the turtle haven area. We have the storage building area. There's the outside patio.
There's the inside patio. I mean, it's just like having rooms in a yard. You know, I mean, he's got all these little designated areas. And he wanted to put a water garden in, and I said, where are you going to put it? I mean, we got a big backyard, but that's ridiculous. Where are you going to put it? Our yard's much smaller now. When you get all these rooms, you have very little yard to work with, actually.
And he said, well, I just want a little small one, maybe about three by six foot, you know. And he's showing me all these magazines and books, and a water garden's about 18 inches deep, and you get a little form, and you fix it up, and it makes a cute little goldfish pond or something like that. That's the pictures. And I say, I live with an alcoholic. And remember, more is better. Bigger is better.
So I go, and I look out the backyard, and it's like, I don't even recognize my backyard. It is a river of mud. You see, a water garden took place while I was gone. He must have been out there digging like a maniac. He did it by hand. I would have swore to God he would have taken a backhoe. We have a water garden that's 12 by 18 by five foot deep. Because we might want to raise Japanese carp. Now, J.D. is a really good planner on the plan, but he never goes past this.
He never plans what may happen after stage one. What do you do for stage two? So when he was taking dirt out of the hole, he never had it planned what he was going to do with the dirt. Can I tell you how much dirt goes in a hole that big? We're talking a swimming pool size here. So he got rid of the dirt. He would never work in prison. They would find him out. You know how they get rid of the evidence in prison, is you walk out in a little fall at a time.
Well, see, we had all these yards of dirt all across.
[00:50:03]
He spread it across all of the backyard, thinking that it will go away. The grass will grow up and you'll never know. But it rained, J.D. It was February. Now, the problem in hand is get the dirt off the dogs because the dogs are the transmitters of the dirt. You know, I can't stop. The dirt is out there. I have a field of mud out in the back. So I give the dogs a bath. I lock both pet doors so they can't get out in the back.
Now the thought says, how often do the dogs go outside? Because you see, these dogs have had their own pet doors for 14 years. They have never had to be monitored about their potty training. They have used the door from the very beginning. So every hour on the hour, I've got two leashes on two dogs who are just wondering what the hell is going on because they no longer have the freedom to go pee in their own little time and place.
But they've got to be on the end of a chain. And they're being out to the front, walk around, they smell of everything, come back in the house. You know, they're looking at me like, what's wrong with her? And of course, the mud on your carpet or on your furniture has to dry before you can get it off. Because if you try to get wet mud off, you just smear wet mud. You know, you've got to wait till it dries and then brush it and go through all this gyrations.
And I called my sponsor and I said, I'm married to a moron. And I'm going to kill him. She said, been here, done that. I said, you know, he is a moron. Because I said, you think about it, any man that's already been drowned one time, why would he build a water hazard? He can float out there like a lily pad, I'm telling you. Had a hard time with this. I really had a hard time with it. Joyce was coming to visit me in two days time.
And here was my house, a river of mud. I wasn't real thrilled about that. So when he came home, I was out in the front yard with the dogs. And he looked at me and I said, there's a problem. Go in the house and think of a solution. Don't talk to me till you have a solution. And he went in and when I went back in from taking the dogs for the walk, he was sitting at the bar like this. Oh, God. I said, God's not going to save you, I'm here.
I was mad. And I said, the first thing is, you're going to have to fix the yard where the dogs can go out in the yard, but they're not going to get in the mud. Well, there's mud everywhere. So what we had to do was we had to build a cross fence and cross it where the patio where the dogs walked on concrete, you know, instead of being on the grass. Thank God he didn't put the dirt on the concrete. I guess he ran out of dirt.
That's the only thing I can imagine, it stopped him. And so now he was going to do all this himself to save money. Now, we've got to remember that, too. So we had to go by fence post and fencing and do the whole length of the yard there to fence the dogs out. So now we're a couple hundred dollars down the drain there. And so we got in there. And then now for Christmas, I had had my carpet and my furniture professionally cleaned.
I'm not happy. It took us until Joyce got there to get the house clean. And anyway, I was just I was real upset about this. And I'm one of the things I found out later in this doing the tent step. I got left out of the loop. You know, it's like he did it behind my back while I was gone because he knew he was going to make it bigger and he didn't want to argue about it. He just wanted to do it and have it done when I got home so I couldn't do anything about it.
You know, that sneaky crap, I hate that. I don't mind doing it, but I hate it when it's done to me. So that was unforgivable. You know, that's what I figured. And so all I could say when I first looked at that situation was I was left out and I became a victim. When I was looking at that, I became a victim. And the more I became a victim, the madder it made me, the madder it made me. And so there wasn't anything good about the water garden, none, not a zip, nothing.
And I mean, and it's big, it's got this real free form thing. It's not one of those form things. It's where you take a swimming pool like liner and just make it fit the ground and all like that. And there's a shelf down about, oh, it's about, the shelf is about that wide and it's out of dirt, but they form it over it.
[00:55:00]
But it's way down in the water. It's about maybe a foot and a half or so deep down in there. And I told him, I said, you know, it's real dangerous. He said, what do you mean? And I said, well, something could fall in and drown because I said, it's not 18 inches deep, JD. That's five foot deep. You know, I could do you in the bathtub. What do you think we could do it out here? And he said, well, you're just being a fanatic about it.
I said, okay, I'm being a fanatic about it, we'll see. And so anyway, then he came in and he brought these sheets of marble. Marble. Do I have to tell you how inexpensive marble is? We're not talking man-made marble. We're talking God-made marble, you know, and, and then he's out there with a hammer and he's breaking it up. He buys it in sheets so he can break it up and he's going to have this mosaic marble thing around the water garden.
And I said, congratulations. It looks even more like a swimming pool now. It looked like the deck around the swimming pool. I said, that's the ugliest thing I believe I've ever seen. He said, you wouldn't like it no matter what I did out there. I said, that's probably true. But let me tell you, this is a pile of mess. And so now every year in May, we have an annual yard party at our house when we had an uncommonly wet spring.
And so all that mud is still out there. It's not going away. It's just continuing to rain. And now we get the marble over here and the mud there, and we're going to have a hundred or so people in my backyard wearing galoshes. And we play yard games. It's not going to work. This is not going to work. And so he decided, okay, he would get into a frenzy. And so he had a couple of truckloads of zoysia sod delivered.
Now I tell you, they don't give that crap away either. So now we got half the yard in zoysia, and he decided that was too expensive. So you got half a yard of zoysia, half a yard of mud, and the whole, okay. And I'm telling him, I'm standing there going, I said, I hate it. And the dogs and I are on this side of the fence, and he's on that side of the fence. And we're just staring at each other across the backyard.
So then my sister decides she will help. Now here's a fixer, untreated alanine. You know, she's not like us. You see, her case is different. And so they decide that the solution for the yard party is astroturf. So now we have half a yard of astroturf. Anybody need anything for your house? We've got plenty. It's at a bargain. They carpeted the yard. Well we could play yard games. We had half carpet or half grass.
It's sort of like, you know, wouldn't that tear a football team up? You know, one half of the thing is on the turf, one half is on the astroturf, you know. Anyway, we had the party, and I kept telling him, I said, J.D., it's hideous. I can't stand it. And he said, well, I'm going to take the fence down because finally the grass began to grow up and the dirt began to go away. And I said, nope, you ain't taking the fence down.
And he said, why not? I said, because Voodoo plays soccer. And I said, he'll be running across with his soccer ball. It'll go right across that marble and into the pond, and he'll go after it. He said, well, he can swim. I said, not forever, because there's no way to get out. The pond is too deep. It's five foot deep. The dog won't have anything to have his little feet on in order to get out. You know, I said, that won't work.
And the shelf is only, like I say, it's that deep, but it's only about this wide. So it's not enough for the dog to be able to get his feet on to get out. The dog will drown. If the dog drowns, J.D., you're out of here. And he says, you feel strongly about this. I said, I certainly do. And my sponsor said, you don't mean that. And I said, oh, yes, I do, because I said, those dogs are like my children to me.
And I said, those dogs are 13 years old. I said, they're not going to die from drowning in the backyard by themselves. I'm telling you, they're not going by themselves. And so anyway, he says, you're just a fanatic. I said, I don't care. It's not going to happen. And I said, I don't know what it's going to take. And so, and I've been praying about it. I've been praying about this, because we are having one of the most major conflicts, because you see, it's going on week after week than we've had since we got early sobriety.
And it was like, well, maybe we have to throw it in after 20 years, who knows? You know, it's like, I don't know that I can keep doing this deal, because I'm real, you know, I was mad about it from the way it started. But now it's like, I'm trying to defend the lives of my pets, and I got dug in. I got dug in on that. And so anyway, what happened was, JD has these turtles, see, now he raises box turtles, and the turtles are out there.
I went out and I said, well, hello, they're two part turtles, out there in the pond, swelled
[01:00:00]
up, they can't swim forever either, and so I just said, well, when he got home I said, go out and look at the pond, and so he came back in and he said, what happened? I said, they drowned, I said, they're not sausage turtles, they drowned, they're all swelled up, and he said, how, I wonder how that happened, and I said, J.D., they couldn't climb out either, I said, it's dangerous, the pond is dangerous, and so he came back in and he was real upset about his turtles and now he's more upset about his pond because now you see, you know, he's wrong, he sees he's wrong now, and you know, really, I didn't get a lot of satisfaction out of him being wrong, because I hated for his pets to drown too, but better the turtles than my dogs, you know, we don't sleep with turtles, we sleep with the dogs, you know, you know, so anyway, kept praying about it, and a strange thing happened, you know, God works things out so weird sometimes, what happened was our cable channel changed, you know how they just add channels on without asking you and then just charge you more, don't you love that, don't you just love that, you know, and so one of the channels we got was that home and garden channel, so I'm sitting there watching the home and garden channel, I'm a little fascinated with some of the home stuff and interior stuff, and they had a thing on there about building water gardens, and I thought, oh, I can't believe this, and so I'm looking to see, because I want to make sure nobody's making one five foot deep, you know, just so I can turn the screw, just all you know, but what the guy was talking about was, he said that it's a gardener's dream that takes place out in the yard, when they start doing, a real gardener, and he said that he had, I forget, you know, three or four thousand acres, and he had waterfalls and he had this and he had that, and the guy who was narrating the show said, well, that a lot of the stuff that he had planted to decorate around it, he said, you'll never live long enough to see all this stuff take place, he said, well, but it takes place up here, and he says, whether it ever happens or not in reality, this was my dream, and somebody else may get to see it like that, I won't, but it's my dream, and he said, that's what it's all about, it's the dream, and that began to dawn on me that JD had a dream out there, and the dream was his water garden, and it didn't turn out the way he wanted it either, but when I kept on him like I did, that he had to defend it, because it was his dream, and it wasn't the way it turned out, not, but he couldn't change it, because he was, we were both locked in, and somebody was going to have to give, that was what the bottom line was, and so I was out there, and I was looking at the backyard, well, now see, I have this cactus garden, and every time I went to Texas, I would get this prickly pear cactus and bring it back, and after a while, that stuff multiplies, and so I had this great big cactus garden out there, and then I had gotten these landscaping timbers to sort of keep it contained, so it wouldn't get out in the rest of the yard, and they were not as attractive as what I thought they'd be, so I had started years ago collecting rocks, big rocks, and everywhere I would travel, I was speaking, if I saw big rocks, like in Sedona, Arizona, the big red rocks, well, I'd get them and put them in boxes and send them back on the plane, and the guys at the airport would say, what the hell you got in here, what are you, rocks, I'd say, yeah, and I'd have these massive rocks, you know, I went to the top of Pike's Peak, and I had, y'all remember the story with Lucille Ball with the long, long trailer, and how she was collecting rocks and putting them in, and what have you, well, see, that's what I did in my car, when I went all across the country in my car, I had rocks all in my car, and so I brought them, and I've had them delivered from various, I've had them shipped in from Texas, when I knew people, I'd found them, and I'd tagged them, and I had told people in Texas that I knew to stop and pick that rock up, if somebody told me they could have it, and they'd bring it to me when they would come, or, and people from Oklahoma brought me granite from Oklahoma, so, I mean, I had all these beautiful rocks, all different colors and shapes and sizes of big rocks, from all over the country, and I got to thinking, those would make a look like a real water garden, because you see water garden made out of natural stone, and I said, that's what it needs, it doesn't need those tacky, tacky marble pieces, you know, and so, when he came in, I said, can we talk about the water garden, he, oh, God, you know, and I said, no, no, I didn't say fight about it, can we talk about the water garden, and he said, yeah, and I said, I just don't like the water garden the way, and he says, well, I know that, he says, what is it that you hate the most about the water garden, well, when you hate so much, you know, it's just hard to get one labeled, and I said, first of all, I hated being left out of the loop, I said, I really think that was the part that really, you know, when your freedom of choice is removed automatically, I think you rebel on that, even if I had wanted a water garden, the way it happened was bad, and I said, but the main thing is the fact
[01:05:00]
that it's not safe, and I said, it's because it doesn't have a barrier of any kind, where the rocks built up, you know, create a barrier around the water to get, so things wouldn't just go flipping in, and I said, because as we see, it is dangerous, and he agreed, he said, that didn't turn out like I thought it would in my mind, and he said, but I didn't know what to do with it, and he said, I'm not happy with it, he said, I just want to go fill it up with, and I thought, oh, God, don't bring more dirt, don't bring more dirt, he said, at this point, Bill, I just feel like filling it in and say to hell with it, and I said, but that wasn't really what you wanted, and I said, let's see if we can work on it together, and he said, what do you mean, and I said, I've been doing some thinking, and I watched this program on the cable, and I'll be willing to give you the rocks that are all around my cactus garden, there may be enough of them to completely do your water garden, and he said, you'd give me your rocks?
Well, they are my rocks, you know, and I said, yeah, I'll give you my rocks, I said, and we can put them out there, and so we began to take and put them and place them out around from taking one side of the yard, truck them over to the other side, and then we had some, and I said, J.D., I watched that guy on TV, I think I can build you a waterfall, he said, you're kidding, I said, well, no, I think I can, and I built the most beautiful waterfall, didn't work, but it sure looked good, you know, the pitch of it's got to be just so where the water will come back out of the thing, you know, it has to all go, and I didn't have the rocks just so, and so the water was coming, and we were getting a lot of backsplash from it, and I said, well, I'll take a picture, it looked real good, and so then the next one I got down to the last big stone, and J.D., of course, was having to do the lifting, you know, and I'd say, no, move it a quarter of an inch this way, and move this one a half an inch that way, trying to get the pitch so it'd go, ping, ping, ping, ping, you know, you want that wonderful sound of ping, ping, ping, and coming down the waterfall, and he got to the last stone, he was a little tired, and he pushed it instead of set it, and when he did, the whole waterfall fell in, and, because it hadn't set yet, so we decided we'd put the waterfall off for a few days, and after we had to get the rocks out of the bottom of the pond, and start over again, and so we built the third waterfall, and I prayed about it a lot that day before I went out there, I said, God, please, and we've got a pretty waterfall, it's a pretty waterfall, and the big, there's a big white rock at the top that came from Big Sur, you know, and it's like, there's a lot of memories in a lot of those rocks, and so it's really a neat little waterfall, and it's got a three-tiered fountain in the other end, you know, and then we begin to get the plants and everything, and you know, it was a thing, J.D. and I have never worked well together on things, he does his things, and I would do my things, but we didn't work well together, because we didn't like taking directions from either one, we didn't like somebody else's suggestion, when you're doing your thing, but we had to work together, and that began a whole new thing for us, is learning how to work together on things, and we've been doing a lot of that ever since, so this really turned into being, God took something that was bad, and you know, after looking at it day in and day out, day in and day out, I became willing to do the change, willing to do the change, make the amends, admit I was wrong in the way I was approaching it with him, and then he was allowed to admit he was wrong, and what have you, and we were able to get over that deal, and go on, so what nearly pushed us apart, showed us a new way to get back together again, to work on things, it's been real nice, also on this promptly, I had to learn to quit lying, you know how I was taught to quit lying, straighten it up on the spot, and by that I mean, when you hear yourself lie, say, excuse me, that was a lie, now the truth is, you can't get more prompt than that, and do you know something that will keep you from doing it, you'll think before you open your mouth when you know you got to do that, and I used to have these terrible emotional hangovers, terrible emotional hangovers after I'd been on one of those little emotional binges and what have you, and that's where I would sit there and I'd try to rationalize and justify my behavior, you see, there's no doing that anymore, there's no doing that anymore, I have to take a look at myself on that daily basis, and I can't rationalize or justify, and see, for so long, like on the finances, I blamed Jane D., when it was really my fault, you know, I would rape them all to fix my feelings, you know, I'd go out there, and I learned to take things back, see that's how I promptly make amends when I do something like that, I'd take it back and say, I made a mistake when I bought this, we couldn't really afford this, we didn't want this, I don't even like this, I just took it home trying to fix myself, you'd be surprised when you do that how you can think more about what you buy, you know, and it was doing those things, taking it home, taking a look at it, doing that 10 steps,
[01:10:00]
I'd say, nope, tomorrow it goes back, that promptly makes amends to our finances, that makes amends to the whole thing, now I've got a couple of sales people at Dillard's that say, are you sure you really want this, don't write it up, she'll be bringing it back, like I say, I'll try to look for the good I have done, you know, it tells us in the book that there's a spiritual axiom that says whenever you're disturbed, no matter what the cause, there's something wrong with you, you know, and I hate that, I just hate that when I hear that, whenever I'm disturbed, no matter what the cause, there's something wrong with me, and that's what this will tell you, what is wrong with me that I'm letting this tear me up, you know, is it because I don't like what's happening, why do I not like it, do I feel threatened by it, see, like on that deal, I was left out of the loop, my feelings were hurt, and when my feelings get hurt, I have a, my go back to that instant thing is to go back into the anger, because that protects my feelings, the anger protects my feelings, like I say, I had to do more RPMs, you know, and I have a choice as how I choose to feel, I thought that you automatically felt, but you have a choice how you feel, and there's a guy that came to our group, and he was a black man, and he says, you know, he says, when people calls me a nigger, I ask myself, are you being one, he says, is that the kind of attitude that you're putting forth, are you being what somebody calls you, and if you're not, you owe them a prayer, because they're mistaken, but under no circumstances do you owe them an argument, he says, because that's not going to do anything but prove to that person you are what they think you are, you know, and he gave me a lot of wisdom there, you know, it's like somebody calls you a chair, it doesn't make you a chair, you know, you have a choice how you choose to feel about something, so when somebody says or does something, it's not always all about you, it may be where they are, you know, give them the right to be wrong, give them the right to make a mistake, and then that spot check inventory, when I feel some, uncomfortable sometimes during the day, look at my partner, and what am I doing that's making me feel this way, am I taking everything that comes to me, am I taking it to heart, am I having a PMS day or something, you know, or am I into fear, you know, am I having false events appearing real, now you can do that F.E.A.R.
that way, you know, and I can do it the other way too, called face everything and recover, you know, you can change those things around, am I going back in time and magnifying what's happening right now, I can go back and get an old tape from the past and say this is just like, and the first thing I know, I've magnified what's happened today and made it into something great big because I've brought back an old feeling from the past and added to it, I've given it more emphasis than what it makes, how important is it, is it worth going to war over, you know, you'd be surprised, you know, we will go to war over nothing, you know, like, which TV program you want to watch tonight, well, you watch what you want to, last night, isn't it my night to watch TV, those kind of things, you know, we have a sticker on the mirror at home and it says, you're looking at the problem, you know, when you look in the mirror, you're looking at what your problem is, an annual inventory shows me that I'm where I'm at right now, it's sort of like a progress report in my growth, each year I try to take an inventory and look at where I'm at, I look at where I'm at in the relationship with my higher power first and now look how I'm in relationship with myself, what's going on inside of me and then I will look at how my relationships are doing and then I will look at how my program is going, you know, those things will tell me where I'm at, it'll show me the areas where I have grown a lot, it'll show me the areas where I'm sitting on my butt or it'll show me the areas that I need to look at, different things, it goes on like this, now my 10th step is like a letter to God, I started off, dear God, this is Mary Pearl and this is how I feel, how do I feel at the end of the day, do I feel good today, do I feel rested today, do I feel tired today, am I angry, did something hurt my feelings today, what am I feeling, what's my feelings like and then as I think about how I'm feeling, I go back and I say to myself, what generated that feeling during the course of this day, where did this come in, you know, especially if it's a negative feeling, that gives me an idea of what I need to become willing to let go of and allow God to work one more time, do the deal, you got to keep doing the deal each day, you know, some people talk about steps 10, 11 and 12 as being maintenance steps, I don't want to maintain anything, I want to learn to grow and you can't, you'll become stagnant if you're just maintaining, but you got to learn to grow and you got to continue to grow.
in order to grow.