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Source: Peggy W – Al-Anon Speaker Talk (1968) – 1968-08-17.mp3 File: peggy-w-al-anon-speaker-talk-1968-1968-08-17.mp3 Duration: 00:57:06
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In introducing the speaker today, there are so many things I could tell you, I would take up too much of her time. At Southeastern, as a diplomat, I know that most of you met Peggy. Like Lucille and Annabelle and others, she was under the table, taking no credit for anything. But she was the one that wrote that skit, The Go-Go Al-Anon Gals, You Know, and Boys. You remember that one? And then she gave us the Al-Anon Tree, Before and After.
She gave us the Stop, Caution, and Go, along the road, Al-Anon Road to Recovery, that we have used for the past two years and have given to many other groups. There are so many more things I could tell you that she has been involved in in Miami. And Dick has gone right along with her, has helped her, has taken her when necessary. I met Peggy up in New York, and I was entranced. My replacement, Mona, has the same sort of thing.
I appreciate all these great ideas once they are said out loud or suggested, but I haven't the slightest bit of that in me. Thank goodness I'm married to one who does have. But I can only appreciate the artistry of others, and this I do in Peggy. I won't enumerate the number of ways in which she is affiliated and works day in and day out in Miami. I will tell you that after we left the diplomat, the southeastern in Hollywood, we stayed over a few days.
She invited us to dinner. And you know, Richard picked us up, and just guess what? When we got there, Peggy, and this describes what I call real Al-Anon. Peggy was going around the kitchen with the phone on her shoulder, stirring everything on the stove, talking to a very despairing, hopeless Al-Anon. And you know what? She talked her into meeting us about two hours later. And we met the girl, and she got well.
So that's the nicest thing I can think to say about this wonderful gal that I've been privileged to know a number of years. And now I give you my dear friend, Peggy. Ruthie, thank you. You know, I'm going to, when I leave this room, I'm going to go up and pray for the good Lord to give me humility, because I'm a mighty great woman. My name is Peggy, and I am so grateful to be here. I am so happy to be here.
You've all been so kind to me, and it's been the most marvelous conference or convention I've ever attended. It's so warm. Your hearts have come out to me and to Dick, and you've been wonderful to us. I cannot express my appreciation. And then at 8 o'clock this morning, this beautiful corsage delivered to our door. How can you say thanks for all of these wonderful things? You don't know how. I just don't know how.
I want to thank you, too, for your beautiful city of Charlotte, those of you who live here. It's a lovely city, and even the merchants have just been so marvelous to us. They've been so kind. And they keep wondering, I think, why don't they have their last names there? And nobody has asked, though. Maybe they all know. This could be. I'm not sure. Maybe they know. But whatever it is, it is hospitality at its finest.
[00:05:00]
Again, my name is Peggy, and I am a grateful Al-Anon. I am the daughter of a deceased alcoholic father and the wife of a man who chooses to call himself an alcoholic. I'm going to say right out to you that there were days when I didn't call him an alcoholic. I prefaced it with something. A such-and-such alcoholic. Well, no, I didn't call him an alcoholic. I called him a drunk. That's what I called him.
And there were many words that went ahead of it. And when I think back and remember what I was like, I know that I have only one story that I can tell you today. I can only tell you who and what I was and what happened to me. And I hope what I am like now. I don't know. When I listen to Ruthie, I think, boy, I'm pretty great. But when I get off by myself, I think, who are you and have you come anyplace?
And yet I know I have. I must have. Because I could not stand up here this morning and tell you that my name is Peggy and be able to speak to you if I had not come a long way. Because when I came to Al-Anon, I could not say my own name. I knew it. I knew what it was. I wasn't like a girl in our group who didn't know her own name when she went to see a doctor and he said, what is your name? And she was in such a state of despair and hysteria that she couldn't tell him and finally had to get out a credit card to look herself to tell him what her name was.
Now this was certainly despair. This was desolation. This was the height of confusion. I was almost that bad. And you know, I was conditioned for it right from the very start. The daughter of an alcoholic father. And knowing from the time that I was four or five years old that there was something wrong in my home, not knowing really what it was, I knew that it came out of the bottle in some way or other, but I was not quite able to understand what this did.
The insecurity of the child, particularly the very young child, in an alcoholic home is so terrible because you don't understand what it is that's happening. The world is constantly falling away before you. The bottom is dropping out of your life all the time. It hurts worse when the parent who is not an alcoholic has become so hysterical and so distraught that they also help to tear away the world that's under your feet so that there is nothing stable for you to stand on.
There is nothing. I can remember when I was five years old and my father was drunk and my mother was battling. My mother was Irish. I should have bet on her to begin with here, but I sort of thought my father was going to get the best of the battle. I should have known better. And I had an empty whiskey bottle in my hand at that age and I was banging him over the head for all I was worth with it at five years old.
And yet my own children had to see me this hysterical and this overwrought that I would have done battle with my husband if he wouldn't always walk away from me. He always walked away from the fights and my father didn't. I guess this was one of the few differences. So you see, I was conditioned for this. Through my teen years, I recall I didn't want anybody to know who I was. I wanted them to know what my name was.
I didn't have any objection to this, but I didn't want them to know me. And believe me, I didn't want to be involved with them. I didn't want to know people. As a matter of fact, I never liked people very much. It wasn't that I disliked them. This would have been understandable. I was indifferent to people. I suppose that there is nothing more dreadful that one can say of oneself than that I was indifferent to people, and I was.
I didn't want to be involved with them. I didn't want to know anything about their lives, and I certainly didn't want them to know anything about the inner part of me. Well, I didn't know anything about the inner part of me. This is why, along in my late teens and early twenties,
[00:10:01]
I became very interested in summer theater. And this was a great outlet for me because I could always be somebody else. Well, I'd been doing that all my life. From the time I was a small child, I had been somebody else. I used to come out of the movie theaters and try to walk like the heroine. I would try to come out with the same casual, nonchalant air that she could walk about. Or I would stand in my room, I remember, and try to recapture the tragedy and the comedy that she had shown in the movie.
I could not be Peggy. This was impossible to me. Well, I couldn't be Peggy because I didn't know who Peggy was. Now, would you say I was fear-conditioned? I don't know. I don't know whether it was just the alcoholism in my home, because my father was a good man. He was a kind man, and he was a gentle and loving father. Oh, he could get on a bash when he was drunk, I'll say that, and things flew around.
But he was a gentle man, and I don't recall that he ever slapped me in my life. But my mother, who was a nonalcoholic, used to knock me around once in a while during her despair over him. And I did the same thing to my children when they were little. And I couldn't help but think how it was visited from one to another down through the generations, how you carry on the old fears of the one who went before you, and you nurture them, as it were, and they flourish and grow, and they certainly grew in me.
So everything about me conditioned me for what I was to become. Well, when I came into Al-Anon, I can say frankly, I was a full-blown hypochondriac. I was a completely frustrated woman. I was a nagging wife. I was a bitter, hostile, and resentful wife. And I was a mother who wanted perfection from her children when she couldn't even begin to know what perfection meant for herself. I had no idea. I was completely lacking in self-confidence.
I no longer believed in myself at all. And yet at the same time, I had the most remarkable intellectual arrogance. So during the later years of the bad times in our home, I climbed up into that ivory tower. It's easier really to climb up into it than it is to get down because the rungs coming down are sort of hard. You don't want to get out of there. And I dwelled up in there for some few years, more years than I like to remember right now.
Now, isn't this strange, this paradoxical situation to exist within you, believing I was an intellectual? Well, God forgive me. And at the same time, so lacking in self-confidence. You think, how could these two things exist in one person? You all know what I mean. I don't care whether you're alanons or alcoholics. You know what I mean here. Because you're trying to hang on to something. I can remember when Dick used to be out late at night, and some alcoholics are out late at night.
And I was going crazy or crazier, and I would think to myself, now if I can just get my intellectual nature working here, maybe I can calm down a little bit. So I would begin to go through the music dramas of Wagner, trying to get them in order. Why in the name of God did I think that this would help my sanity? But I did. And when I would get to the end, I think, well, at least I'm still sane. And here I was, up out of the bed, walking the floor, wringing my hands, and more times than I am very interested in mentioning to you, running into the bathroom.
And then in between times looking out the Venetian blind to see if he was coming home. I can laugh at this now, but this was despair. This was anguish. It was 25 years ago, it'll be 25 years, the 4th of September, that I met and married that wonderful man to whom I'm still married. And I thank God for that. And I thought this was going to be the greatest life, this was going to be the greatest married life, that we would walk down all those years, you know, you walk into the…
You would walk down all those years, you know, you walk into the sunset hand-in-hand.
[00:15:02]
I thought this was going to be the marriage of all time. And I knew that he drank too much. It was during the war, and I was aware, fully, that he did drink too much. But then who didn't during the war? Everybody did, because maybe tomorrow you weren't going to be here. Especially if you were flying, as he was, you might not be here. So you did drink tonight to cover up the dread of tomorrow. So I thought, well, after the war is over, he won't be like this.
And I somehow knew that this was the man above all men that I had ever met in my life, that I wanted to be part of my life and my love for as long as God would permit us to be together. And so I somehow led him off to the altar. I somehow made him believe that he wanted to get married. I'll have to confess to you that on our wedding day, this was the most nervous man I have ever seen, and he was completely sober.
And I held his arm. We ran off to Kissimmee, Florida, I remember. He was an aviation cadet, and they weren't allowed to get married because they didn't make enough money, for one thing. The government didn't want to be responsible for a whole lot of families. So we ran off and eloped. Well, now you see, this in itself is as romantic as anything can be, an elopement, especially one that you're hiding from the United States government.
So we ran off to Kissimmee, Florida, and we went to the, we got our marriage license, and we went to the home of the Methodist, it was the Methodist parson in Kissimmee who married us. And I remember I took Dick's arm while we were being married. It looked like a great gesture of affection, but actually I was kind of holding him up because he was shaking. I was not because I had him right where I wanted him.
And he told me afterward that during the ceremony, he said, well, the perspiration was just dropping off him, and he was thinking of all the worst things he could think of back at the airbase. He was thinking of the planes crashing, of all the terrible things, because nothing that he could think of seemed as bad as what he was going through at that minute. I'll hope you changed your mind about that.
So we were married, and I told myself, you know what I told myself, when we're married, it will be different. He will have me to come home to. There will be this love waiting for him at home, and he won't have to drink anymore. And the drinking did change. It got worse, as it always does. Actually, I suppose it wasn't a little more than a year, year and a half after our marriage, and I didn't see him much at that time because he was in flight school a great deal of the time.
But it was only about a year and a half after that the war was over, and we were back in Florida together. I had followed him around quite a great deal wherever I could. I was like a camp follower in some ways, except that I was doing it legally, legitimately. And we had a lovely daughter when we came back to Florida. She was five months old when we returned from Tennessee, Bradenton Station. And then our troubles really began.
My troubles really began. I don't know how bad his troubles were. This is his story. I have no idea how bad his troubles were. Mine began to get very bad because now I wanted this man to stop drinking. By now my father, who had had some few years of sobriety, was drinking again. And my mother and I would go back and forth across the street, either I to minister to her when my dad was drunk or she to minister to me when my husband was drunk.
Now, you know, by some miraculous means, which I don't understand to this day, they never got drunk together. I can only say that this was a relief that they did not. And I don't really know if I could have stood it if both had been drunk together. And so they never were. But I began to feel terrible fears. And a year or so later, when our fine young son came along, I began to entertain dreadful fears.
When is this man going to stop drinking? What is wrong with me that he drinks?
[00:20:03]
What have I done to him that makes him do this? Now, I knew that I hadn't caused my father to drink. After all, I'd heard all my life that my father drank long before I was born, so I knew I hadn't been the cause of that. And yet I thought, why is he drinking like this? There's something wrong, something wrong about me. And yet I could not have said this to him, although once in a while, as we non-alcoholics frequently do, we will say, what is it that I'm doing wrong?
What is it that you really want of me in marriage? Where have I gone wrong and where have I failed you? Most of you who are alcoholics have heard this from your spouses, and the non-alcoholics know what I mean when I say this. I moved down to Miami, and then I think began the most terrible anguish that I had ever known. Oh, I'd known anguish before this, I guess. Well, I had known terrible fears from the time of my childhood.
I, well, I told you I was a hypochondriac. Well, this was true from the time I was a little girl. If I used to see a little rough spot on my arm, it wasn't just a rough spot, it was leprosy. If I felt a little pain in my head, it wasn't a little pain in my head, it was two or three brain hemorrhages. Now, these were things I had always known, but by now, they intensified. All of these things that were there already, just waiting to come in to blossom, as it were, really did.
They bloomed. Oh, they flourished. I began to have, oh, ten or fifteen heart attacks every day, palpitations. I still get them, as a matter of fact, and I don't know why I get them now. It's a force of habit, I guess. But I was so afraid all the time. And, you know, I didn't attribute this to Dick's drinking. I attributed it to something else. I knew that if he were to stop drinking, that certainly my physical condition would be better, and that I wouldn't get these other things.
By the time we moved to Miami, I had entered into a stage of pulse feeling. Did you ever try to feel your pulse with one hand, like this, and at the same time try to hold your head to hold down the pain or whatever it is that's going on in your head at the same time, and at the same time wish you could hold your side because you've got appendicitis? You can't do all these things at once, but believe me, a real fearful hypochondriac married to an alcoholic can do it.
I know, I did it. I did it constantly. I suppose I took my pulse some fifty or sixty times a day. And I never arrived at any conclusions about it because I don't know anything about taking a pulse. But I continually took it. So there I was in Miami. My mother, Lord have mercy on her, was in her last illness, back up the coast near Vero Beach, Florida. My father was drinking again heavily. And I was torn with the love for my mother and wanting to be with her, anger at my father, not understanding how he could do this to her when she was so sick, and at the same time in a state of absolute terror with my own husband and with two small children, knowing I was incapable of taking care of them, not knowing what to do with them, not knowing what to do for them.
Oh, I washed and ironed their clothes and fed them, although I will never forget the day when I was lying down trying to escape from everything, trying to close my eyes and get off into some oblivion where I wouldn't think about all of these terrible things that had been sent to persecute me. Isn't it strange that I thought all these things had happened, that God had made my mother so sick to hurt me, to affect me, that God had made my father an alcoholic.
I didn't call him an alcoholic. I called him a weak-willed, uncontrolled man, that he had done this to me. This was done to me, not to my father, and that my children were a good deal of the time a pain in the neck, and yet I loved them with all my heart, and that my husband, whom I loved more than I could ever tell him or anyone, was drunk and he was driving me crazy. All of these things were conspiring to make me unhappy, depressed,
[00:25:09]
in a chaotic state of fear and hate and hostility. I had every one of them. Is it any wonder that Al-Anon too has to believe in a power that can restore us to sanity? Because God knows I was insane. I didn't know who I was by this time, not really. I didn't know what I was doing most of the time. I was going to tell you about this little boy who one day came in to me when I was lying in that bed and said, Mommy, I want an egg to eat.
He was four years old, and I said, Well, go and fix it yourself. And he said, All right. And he went out. We were living in a trailer in Miami at that time, and he went into the little kitchen cubicle, and after a few minutes he came in to me and he said, Where do you usually keep the eggs? And I'll never forget how he said, Usually keep the eggs. And I said, Well, they're in the refrigerator, of course.
And he opened the refrigerator and took out an egg. And I didn't hear any more sound for a few minutes, and there was enough mother left in me, I guess, that I thought, I wonder what he's doing. And I went out into that little kitchen cubicle, and there was that little boy standing in front of a gas stove, which he could not have lit, with a coal frying pan on a burner and an egg in the shell in the pan, sort of with some wonderful hope that the egg would break itself and fry.
Now, can you imagine that I would let this happen? And another day I was trying to escape into sleep, for I could abandon all the cares that God had thrust upon me, these terrible burdens that he had put on me. And that same little boy was frightened, and he felt alone, I guess. His sister was out playing. And he came to me, and my eyes were closed, and he opened one and he said, Mommy, are you in there?
And I wasn't all in there. I was only half in there, to tell you the truth. So you see the state of affairs that I was in. Then we bought a house. And my husband, drinking more and more and more, still was going up the ladder of success. He's a salesman, a manufacturer's representative. And he was going up the ladder of success. So every time I said to him, Don't you see what you're doing to yourself with all this drunkenness?
He said, What do you want from me? He says, I'm giving you all the clothes you need. The children are fed. We're going to have a nice house. I'm making money. What do you want? You know, I didn't know what to tell him. I knew what I wanted. What I wanted, now every non-alcoholic here is going to know what I mean when I say, all I wanted was a nice, simple little home and a kind husband and good children.
Everybody in the room has thought this is what they wanted. And, of course, it's all that anybody ever wants. Well, how often do we get it? Not on the terms we want it. So I couldn't see that this was a good husband because I was so overcome by what was happening to him, what he was deliberately doing to cause trouble to me, to cause agony in my heart, and because I kept thinking, Oh, God, he doesn't love me.
He doesn't love me. This terrible feeling of rejection. What's wrong with me? Why doesn't he love me? Why doesn't he want me? Why would he go out and drink like this? And when we moved into our home, I felt even more isolated. I was going to a great many doctors at this time for these various diseases. You might say that I frequented doctors' offices almost daily. And when one did not seem to help me, I would try another.
And I was getting no place with them. And I can remember that I went to one of them, and he said, Do you have any trouble at home? And I said, No. I said, no. You know, it never occurred to me to tell that doctor, who might have understood, as a matter of fact, that particular one that I told this to, would have, because he's now working with the Florida Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program, and it's just possible he might have had an inkling.
[00:30:14]
But it didn't occur to me ever to tell them that, yes, there was a problem in my home, one that distressed me terribly, that had me insane, only I didn't know I was insane. I didn't have any idea that I was. And I wanted so terribly to have it different. I wanted so terribly to have him sober. And I used to think, if he will just be sober, now that we're in this nice new house, everything will be all right.
Well, you know he wasn't. He didn't believe there was anything wrong with him, and I didn't know that he was an alcoholic. And, as a matter of fact, I would have said, oh, no. No. I didn't know what an alcoholic was. Tell you the truth, I thought back in those days an alcoholic was somebody who was lying in a doorway with holes in his shoes and an empty bottle of sneaky pee under his arm. That's what I thought an alcoholic was.
Well, my husband certainly couldn't be one. And things began to go from bad to worse. I thought they were as bad as they could get. But now I really began to get into it because I was isolated in this house, and I had become afraid even to go to the doctors because I was afraid now to drive. I wasn't afraid of the car or the roads. I was afraid I was going to have one of these attacks and collapse and die in the car before anybody could get help to me. So I couldn't go out of my house. I would sit in my living room in a chair. I was holding myself like this.
I could not get up and walk across the room because I was afraid that I would be struck down before I could walk across the room. There were only certain times when I could even go out and wash and hang up the clothes in the backyard. I was afraid to go into my backyard. And when my husband was out at night and the hour was late and it was the small hours of the morning, the dreadful hours, the desperate hours, I would think, I will get up and walk around the house now. And I would get up and walk around outside. I don't know why I thought this would make a difference, but I thought it would.
I thought he'll come in the house and he won't find me and he'll wonder where I am and he will realize I'm lost and he'll look for me. And I used to do that inside of the house. I would hide in a small linen closet when I would hear him coming home, when I would hear the car door. And I would get into that little linen closet and pull the door to and think he will look for me. He will search the house. Well, you know what he did. He quietly got into bed. He didn't know where I was, but he didn't want any trouble. So he got into bed.
And so then, in my ignominy, I would have to go and crawl into bed sooner or later myself. He was completely unaware that there I had waited for him to seek me out. Now you see how far I had gone down, but not as far as I had to go. Because now I began to entertain fantasies of a terrible nature. I believed that this man rejected me so terribly. I believed now that there were others. First, that there was another, and then that there were others, and they were all blondes.
If you are a brunette, you know they are blondes. I suspect if you are a blonde, you know they are brunettes or redheads. With me, it was blondes. A bottle could not be doing this. Not just a bottle. It had to be somebody else. So I began to entertain the idea there must be somebody someplace who wants to talk to me, who would love me. And I thought maybe I could find somebody who would. And I entertained this idea. I didn't follow through because to begin with, I don't know really who would have looked at me.
At that time, I weighed 96 pounds, and my hair constantly looked as if a nervous bird had been nesting in it. No one would have looked at me, but I used to pick up the telephone when he would come home early enough. I would pick up the telephone as I saw him hit the door, and I would be on it, and I would say, I can't talk to you any longer now. I'll talk to you later.
[00:35:06]
This would so they would know, he would know, that there was perhaps not just one unknown admirer, but a host of them. And so I would tell him, you know there are people, there are other people who might love me. There were others I could have married. And he would say, oh, I wish to God you had. Well, where did this leave me? And then I thought, why can't he realize my anguish? And I was already crying. I was always crying. As a matter of fact, I cried for the first year I was in Al-Anon. That's to give hope to any of you who are new.
But I didn't sometimes think I was maybe crying enough when he was coming in the door. I always timed these things pretty well. And I would go and look at myself to see the tears, and if there weren't enough, I went in the bathroom and ran the water and added tears. Came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. I'll never forget the last thing. There were many, many. Now I have to tell you first, just very briefly, about one of the worst fantasies of all. One, that he was going to kill me.
Now, my husband is as gentle a man as I have ever known in my life. Drunk, he was never violent. He just wanted to get along with people. He just wanted to be happy with people. But I began to believe that he was going to kill me. And I entertained ideas of a dagger that he would plunge into my back in the night. And I used to sleep with my eyes closed but a little bit open, looking toward the bedroom door that he would come in, facing him so that that dagger wasn't going to get into me.
You know, I even pictured it. It was a Florentine dagger. A Florentine one. Now, I don't think the dick would ever have gone out and sought a Florentine dagger. I'm not sure he would have known what one was and could have cared less. But, you know, he told me later, he says, you know, I used to have the same idea, though I think he thought of a stiletto. He thought I wanted to kill him. Then I began to believe, and this was bad. I laugh at it now, but all of these things were terrible. The agony was excruciating.
I believed that he would poison my food. So many plates of food went into the garbage because maybe I would have turned my back for a moment or two and I thought, he sprinkled powder in there that's going to kill me. And I was terrified. Now, you see, this was actually insanity, to believe this. And when we would ride in the car, I would still go out with him once in a while in the car. I had to watch him, didn't I? I had to keep my eye on him whenever I could if he invited me out in the car. I thought, if we should get to a place that's a little bit high, he will open the door and thrust me out. And I believed this.
So I used to sit close to him with my arm entwined in his. God bless him. He thought that it was because I loved him. And I, you know what it was. I thought, if we go, we go together. So there arrived, I will have to say that during this time, none of this was funny. It was horror. It was sheer horror. And my children had heard me screaming at my husband when he came in in the night. My children had looked out of their bedroom doors and they had wept and they had cried and wondered what was happening.
Because when he came home, I had to scream at him. I couldn't quietly say, where the hell have you been? I had to scream at him. I had to make every accusation that's known to him. And he would try to hush me. He'd say, shh, the neighbors will hear you. And I'll never forget one night, I said, the hell with the neighbors. This is what I felt. You know, actually, if those neighbors had ever been asked about that couple who lived in the chartreuse colored house, what kind of people are they, they would have said, well, the man seems to be a very nice fellow, but that wife, oh no, don't go near her.
[00:40:02]
He always won. But there was a culmination to how far I could go down. And it came the night that I recognized the restlessness again, the uneasiness. Every non-alcoholic, again, is going to recognize what I mean. Sort of the pacing of the floor, the walking from one room to another, and you know they're going to go out and you are thinking, God, please help me to keep him from going out again. Please let me not let him get out.
And not knowing how to do it. And this night I thought, I will know how to do it. And the uneasiness had increased and he had approached the door a time or two and walked back into the other room. And I thought, I cannot stand it if he goes out one more time like this and leaves me. Pretty soon he came out of the other room and he was freshened up and he was half drunk and he was going to go out the door and I laid right down in front of him. And I couldn't remember how I, you know, I should stay in the theater, I think, because I got real dramatic right then.
I raised my hand and I said, as God is my witness, if you go out of this house again tonight, you're going to have to step over me. He did. There I was. There was no place else for me to go. There was nothing to do. I was hopeless and helpless and frightened beyond belief. I was desolate. And it was shortly after that that my husband went reluctantly, oh very reluctantly, I've heard you all mention this, went reluctantly to AA. And I believe the first meeting he attended was a closed one.
Because in a few nights they had an open meeting and he invited me to go with him and I went. And the man who was his sponsor said to me, you know, there's a place for you too where you can learn something about the disease of alcoholism. The disease of alcoholism. So I went there. So I could learn about this disease and so I could keep this guy sober. I hadn't been able in all those years to keep him sober, but now these people were going to teach me how to do it.
And I went to this first meeting. I went with fear and trembling and I went also with a feeling of confidence that now I'm going to find out the answers. Whatever it is that AA is going to teach him, I will learn better so that I can show him how to do it. So I went into this meeting. Oh, and you know, to come into Al-Anon on the fourth step. This is murder. And that's what they were on. They were taking a fearless and searching moral inventory of themselves. I thought they were all nuts.
Because here they were talking about themselves. They were talking about their defects of character. One woman was saying, I lost my temper with Al again. He was drunk, yes, but what good did it do me to lose my temper? This was foolish. Why didn't I simply go about my business and do what I was supposed to do in the home whether he was or not? Why didn't I do this? And somebody else was saying, I don't know, I was so mean to the children again. And yet I could have been using the slogans. I could have been using the first step. I could have been using all of the steps. And I wasn't. And I heard them all talking about themselves.
Well, I wanted to tell them about him. I didn't want to take an inventory of me. There wasn't anything wrong with me. I was a lovely, sick, despondent woman who had been brought to this pass by a drunken husband. And I wanted to tell them what he had done to me. They didn't want to hear what he had done to me. Well, I knew there wasn't anything wrong with me, but at the same time I knew they had something that I needed, that I had to have. I hadn't found it anyplace else. My pastor, God bless him, had tried to help him and finally said, I don't know what to tell you. Shall I tell you to go home and pray? He said, you're doing that. He said, I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you to trust me.
I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you to try to cope with it as best you can. But these people were telling me how to cope with it.
[00:45:00]
I didn't realize this at the first meeting, but I could see they had something that I needed. I'd never talked to a marriage counselor, but I had read what one said. He said, Be dressed beautifully when your husband comes home, if he drinks too much. Have a wonderful dinner ready for him and sit down and have a couple of drinks with him. I tried that. I thought, well, the marriage counselor ought to know what he's talking about.
Well, he did have a couple of drinks together, and he had several more by himself. So this wasn't the answer either. But these people had an answer for me because they reminded me that I was an individual, that I was completely powerless over him. They said, Did anything you ever did keep him from drinking? And I said, No. Do you think there is anything you can do now to keep him from drinking if he wants to go out and take a drink?
I had to say no. I didn't want to say it because I didn't believe it. And I thought for a long, long time afterward that it wasn't so, for quite a long while. But still I knew they had something that I needed, and I thought, If I just go here and if I use this great intellect of mine and their know-how, I will learn how to keep him from drinking. I'll just combine these two things and I'll keep him from drinking again.
I'll show him how to work those twelve steps that A.A. is telling him how to work, use these tools. I'll show him the way. Well, it was within a month that they had pretty well pointed out to me that this really wasn't my function in Al-Anon or in the world or in my married life. And I began to be aware of something. I began to be aware of freedom. That I was not responsible for that man's sobriety.
That it wasn't up to me to keep him sober. I couldn't keep him sober. That it was up to him if he chose. And if he did not choose, then he would have to drink. It was that simple. They said to me, He can come home one of two ways. He can come home drunk or he can come home sober. If he's drunk, well, you can't do anything about that. And if he's sober, just thank God for it. This was so simple. You'd think I would have known that myself.
And I looked at those slogans and I thought, Oh, these cliches. Every one of them. Live and let live. I've been doing that all my life. Live and let live. I don't want anything to do with people. Let them live. I don't care. And yet that wasn't true. Well, none of it was true. Let go and let God. Oh, not me. I wanted to hold the reins. I would say, God, please let him have an accident, but not too bad.
God, please let him get sick, but not too sick. You see, I was giving orders to the Almighty and I was saying, God, please make him realize what he's doing to himself. And you know what I was really thinking. God, make him aware of what he's doing to me. In Al-Anon, I learned how to say to God, please, God, help him know how to get out of the trap that he's in. Not help me to help him get out. Let him know how to get out.
So I guess I grew a little bit in Al-Anon. I kept going. I knew I had to go. I couldn't miss a meeting. I had to go. It had to become the most important thing in my life. And it is the most important thing in my life. I've heard UAAs say this. I've heard you say, I've got to put my sobriety before anything else. And I know that I have to put my serenity in Al-Anon before anything else, because if I don't, there isn't anything else.
It has to come first. And as time went by, I grew a little bit. And I learned a little bit about the traditions. And I went through the steps, and I thought, oh, what wonderful. Divinity has been incorporated into these. And then I learned about the legacy of love, the third legacy. Oh, thank God for the third legacy of service, for the concepts of service. Because this I knew. I had to do. Because somebody had been there when I came.
Somebody was there to hold my six skinny hands with the fingernails bitten off down to the quick.
[00:50:03]
Now they look pretty good. I couldn't stop biting my fingernails any more than my husband could stop drinking. It was compulsive. I couldn't stop smoking. But I was able to finally. And these people took those hands, and they held them, and I clutched them. And I knew I've got to have my hands, too, for somebody who comes along. For that sick woman who calls up and says, if you don't tell me something right now, I'm going to take this whole bottle of pills that's here before me because I can't live with any longer.
Oh, God, give me the strength to tell her something that will keep her from doing this right this minute until we can get her to the first Al-Anon meeting. And the children who are in detention homes because they cannot tolerate the conditions in their homes. Just lately, I have been going into the detention homes down in Dade County and seeing the children. Eighty-five percent of them have come out of homes where they cannot live.
They're alcoholic homes. Some of these children, only 15 themselves, have tried booze, and some of them have tried pot, and some of them have tried hard narcotics. And these children want to be loved. And when we take their hands and say, we love you, they put their arms around us, too, and say they love us. And I've lately had the opportunity to work with Alateen and to sponsor a group of Alateen kids.
And they say, they've got to be a certain age, really, to get it. I don't know about that. Maybe they do someplace. But in this group, there are youngsters from 9 to 20. And we said to the 9-year-olds, oh, you're pretty young. You can't be coming into Alateen. They said, we've learned all the literature by heart, all of the teen literature. Are you going to say, no, you can't come into Alateen because you're not 13?
I'm not. They can come as young as they want, if this is what they want. To know the woman who calls up and says, I don't know how to take care of my children. I don't know how to take care of my home. I don't know what to do. And to be able to say one word that may bring her to us. Or to have someone else say, I hate him. I despise him. I won't live with him any longer. And you know it isn't true.
You know that she loves him. That she wants to live with him. That she, too, wants that nice little house and a good husband and the nice children. And you think, God help me to show her that even if she cannot have this, that she can have freedom within her own life. That she can again become a part of a community. That she can again be part of the mainstream of life. Because we were all isolated.
We were all socially isolated. We were isolated in every way. And to think that God, through AA, through Bill and Dr. Bob, who must be the greatest men of their generation, surely when the century is looked back on, they will say these were the greatest men of their generation and of their century. How often do people become legends in their own lifetimes? But they did. And Lois, who also, with God's grace and with the help of AA, was able to help us to spearhead the Al-Anon drive that now stretches all across the world.
I can never be grateful enough. I can never hold my hand out enough because you gave me so much. I have a little thing here. Strangely enough, this is a little verse, a few verses, that's an anonymous verse. Seems appropriate for us, an anonymous verse. And it's simply called Love. It's what you gave me. It says, I love you. I love you. Not only for what you are, but for what I am. When I am with you.
I love you. Not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out. I love you for putting your hands into my heaped-up heart and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can't help dimly seeing there.
[00:55:04]
And for drawing out into the light all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find. I love you because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life not a tavern, but a temple. Out of the works of my every day, not a reproach, but a song. I love you because you have done more than any creed could have done to make me good and more than any fate could have done to make me happy.
You have done it without a touch, with only a few words, without a sign. You have done it by being yourselves. Perhaps that is what being a friend means after all. God bless you all and thank you for hearing me. Thank you. Thank you Peggy. Will you join hands with the one closest to you? Mary, will you lead us in the Lord's Prayer? Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.