Sherri S – Kentucky State AFG 2023 – Date Unknown

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Source: Sherri S – Kentucky State AFG 2023 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: sherri-s-kentucky-state-afg-2023-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:57:18

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Come on, Sherry. I got it. Hello, everybody. My name is Sherry Staples, and I'm the grateful recovering member of Al-Anon and Alateen. I cannot tell you how excited I was to get this phone call because I always wanted to speak in Kentucky, and I've never spoken in Kentucky, and I'm a genuine Kentucky hillbilly stock. My grandfather was born and raised in Kentucky. His name was Forrest Odell Fisher, which sounds like a really good Kentucky name.

His mother was Leal May, and his father was Loftus Morgan Fisher. So we were very hillbilly Kentucky. So my grandfather had three sisters, and his father died at a fairly young age. He ended up going up to Detroit to get a job up there and then bring his mom and his three sisters up to Michigan because basically they were living in their standard small rundown cabin with a dirt floor. And he was a hell of a shot because he had to shoot critters to eat. So it's a matter of pride in my family to be part of Kentucky. And the other reason I love Kentucky so much is I'm an Army brat, and my father was stationed at Fort Knox.

And so the reason I like Fort Knox better than any other station was I was born when my dad was in Fort Meade, and then we went to Fort Benning. But Fort Knox was the first time I could remember a place that we were living. And we toured around that NCO quarter as well, these little kids, and rolled in the red clay that my mother could never get out of my clothes. So Kentucky's a happy place for me, and I've also been able to work here quite a bit. So I'm really, really thrilled to be here. I also want to thank the committee for the nice bag of chow that I basically ate. I wasn't going to eat anything, but it was so good, so I ate some healthy granola and then some really good coconut cocoa balls.

They were great. And a few other goodies that I really thank you because that really gave me some energy to get here. I left this morning. I got up at three and had to leave my house at four, so I could get to the airport by five, so I could get on the plane at 620. So I'm not even sure where I'm at or what I'm doing. So please be patient with me. I have decided to call this talk Growing Old in Al-Anon, and that is because I came into Al-Anon on Easter Sunday afternoon, 1980, and I was 20. So this past Easter was my 43rd anniversary in Al-Anon, and I am not the child I was in 1980. So I've grown to maturity at this point. So this is how you do it, with some grace, with the help of Al-Anon.

My parents met on a blind date. My mother's best friend had an uncle who was stationed at Fort Meade, and he invited her and my mom to come down and meet some G.I.s and maybe get a date or get a boyfriend. Well, my mom met him, and she was afraid because my mother was about five foot, oh, eight or nine. She was tall, and she wanted a tall guy because she got tired of dancing with short guys. And he was tall, and he was handsome and very rugged-looking, and so they were halfway through dinner, and he got up to go to the restroom. He excused himself, and that's when her best friend leaned over, and she goes, Gene, it's like this. If he comes back and tells you he's been called back to the barracks, you just flunked the test. But if he just comes back, you'll be fine. Well, sure enough, he came back, sat down, and it proceeded. So my parents were married. A short while after that, they told my mother, all Eddie, because he did drink a bit, but then what sergeant didn't in the early 50s and early 60s? And so they kept saying, oh, Gene, don't worry about Eddie. All he needs is a good wife and a loving family, and he won't drink anymore. And I've always called that the big warning. And it's a really good thing that she decided to marry him, because they were married in November, and in June of the following year, my mother gave birth to a very large pound, seven-month, supposedly seven-pound preemie, and that would be me. For years and years, my dad, I mean, I found out. It didn't take a lot to find out, because my dad could never remember the exact year. So he always said the true year. My mother would try to back it up one, and I was like, I know, guys,

[00:05:01]

I know, but that embarrassed the crap out of my dad, so I didn't say anything. But anyhow, my father was my hero, and I absolutely loved him, and I loved being his daughter, and I loved my mama, too, and I knew I was loved by both my parents. But I will tell you this, that when I was six years old, my father came home drunk, and I knew that he was drunk. Now no one had ever told me what drunk was, but I knew he was drunk. And I've heard people say, well, it didn't affect my children, and they didn't know because they were too young. That is so not true. I mean, children get so badly affected so early. It doesn't take a lot to figure out what's going on. So it became a problem, but not until after retirement. Then it became a very, very big problem. My mother was a telephone operator.

She was really kind and nice and just really a good person, and she drove me crazy because she had things she wanted me to be, and I didn't want to be them, and she wasn't as much fun as my dad, and so she was not my favorite parent. My dad was my favorite parent. Anyhow, she actually hated her job for a long time, and it was years later that I finally realized that my mother, who didn't really like her job all that much, was the one that was putting the food on the table, paying the bills, et cetera, et cetera, because handsome pop is out there drinking all the money away. So later on, I had to realize she was actually the hero. My dad had 152 IQ. He was a voracious reader. He loved fine literature. He taught me how to read fine literature. He loved music. He was a competitive singer. I became a competitive singer. He liked arts and history. We used to tromp all over battlefields, and after I moved to Virginia, he loved coming down so he could see every Civil War battlefield in the state of Virginia, of which there's a lot, and everything I loved in life my dad sort of gave me, and what I did begin to notice, though, was our days were predicted how good or bad they would be by the level in the old granddad bottle, so if the old granddad bottle was steadily going down, we were going to have a bad night, but if the old granddad bottle was staying kind of maintaining, there's going to be a good day or a good night, but that was, you know, my old granddad lived in a closet, and he was there all the time.

My teenage, my childhood years were really, really good. I would tell you, in hindsight they are. I would have told you at the time that I was deprived. I was not deprived, and that, you know, we had to move a lot, which I really didn't mind because I was young and you could just adapt real easy, and I'm quite the chameleon now because he just put me down wherever I am, and I pretty soon, if I told Kim if I stayed here long enough, he'd be talking just like her. I'd have a draw like you could not believe, but in my teenage years things began to change, and they changed rapidly and badly, and my father began to drink heavily almost on a daily basis, and when he got severely drunk, he would become violent, and at this point in time, I'm now really, really angry because I'm living in this hellhole, and I can't figure out why, and he would become really violent, and my mother, God bless her, she would get the dining room table between him and her so that he couldn't hit her or hurt her, and she was pretty good at dodging around the dining room table, but I knew there was nobody else in this world whose parents were doing that.

I just knew that there was nobody doing that, and I've heard it said that alcoholics hide bottles, but those of us in Al-Anon used to hide a live full-size drunk, and that is true, so I was very busy keeping that away from my friends. What started happening was when my mother would work nights, I would come home, and I could always tell if there was things that were going to be a problem because the car was parked crooked, and there's signs we all have when we know things are going to go bad, like cars being parked crooked, and I would go in, and he would get nasty, and I would get nasty, and for a while there, I didn't drive, but then later on, we would get into huge physical fights, and not necessarily was he the one that threw the first hit. Sometimes it was me. A lot of times, I would spit in his face, or I'd scream at him, and then all hell would break loose, and I would have not black eyes, but I would have bruises like on my face that I could cover up, but what I used to do to him was I had really long nails in those days, and I would just take it and break it down his face, and then I had to get up in the morning, and I had to

[00:10:02]

face him, and he had to get up in the morning, and he had to face me, and the shame just went deeper and deeper. I knew for certain at that point that I was crazy. I was certifiably crazy, and the reason I was worried about it is those three sisters that my grandfather brought up from Kentucky up to Michigan, all three of them went into insane asylums. Later on, I found out, except for one, the other two weren't insane. They were alcoholics, and in those days, women got put away for being an alcoholic, and there was nothing you could do about that, but I didn't find that until years later, years and years.

Anyhow, when I went to my Al-Anon meeting, when I first started going to Al-Anon, there was an old timer there, and in the old days, they weren't nice in Al-Anon. They were not coming at, oh, sweetheart, are you a child of an alcoholic? It's okay. Have a seat. Oh, no. They weren't nice, and there was one lady in particular that I think sought me out just to torment me, and so I went into the meeting, and I'm telling about how awful these things are happening in the house, and I'm really upset, and I'm really new in the program, and she said, stop volunteering for the violence, and I said, what are you talking about? Because I'm certainly not wanting this, and she said, and at that time, I drove by that time, and she said, well, next time it gets all nasty, leave, and I thought, what?

You know, I always say the program is so simple. It is just so simple. Leave, and I said, well, that's not going to work, and she said, and I said, and he's always there. How am I going to get out? She goes, he has to go to the bathroom eventually. I said, well, that's true. She said, pick up your purse and leave. I'm going to prove it's not going to work. I left. I woke up the next morning. I didn't have a fight. I didn't have any bruises on my jaw. He wasn't all scratched up. I mean, total change all because she said to me, leave, and I never, ever would. I mean, the program, both programs are so simple, but we just can't see through that fog so much, so anyhow, I did. My father went through a period of drying out at different, oh, God, in the 60s, it was a lot of times in mental hospitals and institutions, and they would, you know, detox him and send him home, and they never mentioned my mom and I. They, am I okay? I thought it was really loud, okay?

My mother always said I was loud and believed her. I still do. Anyhow, there was never any mention of family, and really, there was never any mention in the early days about AA. They were just drying him out and giving him the drugs to, you know, keep him stable, but I was standing at the police office at this point, and I was in college, and my father was driving drunk, and he hit a school bus, and fortunately, there was only two children on the bus. They were fine, so was the driver. My father, not so much, but the bad part was it was on, the guy was dating, his name was Andy, it was on his police shift, and it was really embarrassing, and it was really horrible, and his captain called me and said, Sherry, you've got to come down and get your dad. He's hurt, and da, da, da, da, da, and I said, I don't want to, but they finally got me to go down, and I did that, and I wished I hadn't, but I did, and so he went to jail, and they told him that if he would go through recovery, he could probably do just weekends, and he could keep his job, and everything would be much better, so we went to a place, and I don't mind saying the name. It's a really wonderful place. I'm pretty sure it's still there. It's called Seabrook House, and it's in South Jersey, a place called Bridgeton, and he went to a Seabrook House, and they had just started doing something totally unknown in the alcoholic world, and that was they treated alcoholics and their families together, so we went on Easter afternoon. Like I said, it was my date that I started going to Alamo, and I went on Easter afternoon, and I met with a counselor, and she said to me, do you think you're crazy, and I said, well, all my great aunts are, you know, because that's what they told us, and she said, what if I told you we could help?

I told you we could help. I was like, oh, please, please do. Please. And she met my

[00:15:03]

mother, too, and my dad was already in there. And so we started at that place. They would – they mixed – we had three or four groups that would be, and each group would have – would have alcoholics and family members. And we all would talk about our issues together. And that's when I began to have frequent Al-Anon slips, and I started having compassion for the alcoholics. Because I never really, really heard their side, excuse me. I never heard the side. And my dad wasn't in that one. He was in another group. My mother was in another group. And it was eye-opening. And your group would decide when you were ready to graduate from the program. It took me nine months, and one of the things my counselor said, he said, Sherry, you're not going to leave here and graduate until you make amends to your mom. Not my dad, my mom. And I said, will not. And he said, yes, you will. And I said, but I don't know how to do that, and I don't think she deserves it. And he said, do you deserve forgiveness? And I said, yeah. So I worked through things. I had to do a fourth and fifth step while we were still there. It was like I've only been in nine months. I've done several since then, but that was the start. And I began to get better.

And so there was an Al-Anon meeting in my hometown, and so my mother and I started to go to that one. But the other thing I need to tell you about Easter Sunday afternoon was they had an Al-Anon meeting every Sunday there at Zero Pulse. And so I walked in, and I was 20 years old, and all these people are smiling, and they're happy, and they're all having a good time and talking and hugging, and they were all menopausal women. And I thought, oh, no, no, no, no. They have no idea how bad I've had it, and they have no idea the pain I've been through. And the joke's on me now, because I'm not only menopausal, I'm well past menopausal now. So, you know, it happens. But I thought there was nothing they could tell me or I could learn from them, because they were not me. Precious and pitiful, always precious and pitiful. Anyhow, my dad did not stay sober. But after that, he began to do what, he would go in and out. So he'd go to AA for several months, and then he'd have a slip and go back out. But he never quite could let AA go. He just could never stay sober for long periods of time. Anyway, my mom and I went to this Al-Nam meeting in my hometown, and we went as Sherry and Jean. And we made this deal that she would sit on the opposite side of the table, I'd sit over here, that we would not talk about anything we heard in the meeting, that we would not use the meeting in any way except to get better.

And we both started to get better. We got better so quickly, because we were going all the time. And even when my dad would go out and have slips, he would bake brownies and make iced tea or lemonade for our Al-Nam meeting. So he was real happy that we were in the program, to put it that way. So I began to know my mother. And my mother was kind of a cross of Mrs. Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island and Betty White. In the fifties, she was really, I look at pictures now and I think, good lord, she looked kind of like, not quite this overtly sexy, but she looked a lot like Jane Mansfield. She was beautiful. And my dad always said she was beautiful. My dad never stopped loving my mother either. And that confused her just like it confused me. But she was funny, and she was talented, and she loved my friends, and they all thought she was so great. And I began to see, oh yeah, you know what, she's really great. By the way, she could swear like a sailor with that pretty, pretty face. Not bad, but she would every now and then drop something and we'd go, Mom. And my girlfriends would go, Miss Jean. So it turned out she was a fabulous, fabulous lady.

I'm glad I continued in Al-Anon. I then began, I was getting ready to finish up college. And I wanted to get a job. And I wanted to get, I wanted to move. I had to move because my major was in mass media communications. And Philadelphia is 21 miles from my home, and that's a major market. And nobody getting out of college is going to get a job in Philadelphia. So I picked several states and I just flooded different places with resumes. And I ended up at a job producing really cheap local commercials in Hampton, Virginia. They were really cheap, by the

[00:20:00]

way. And I moved down, and I remember making the concerted effort to find an Al-Anon meeting, and I did. And it was really interesting because when I walked into the Tuesday night Grafton group and they said the opening, a lot like we did tonight, and then we read the steps, the traditions, it was like, oh, I'm home. You know, this is perfect. Now that would have all gone really well. There was just one problem. Allergy medicine. Gives me dry mouth. Anyway, there was this guy that I worked with. So I dated a guy in high school. The police officer was in college. We were still dating, but there was this guy at work, and he needed somebody. And all the signs were there. All of them. And he was cute, and he had big puppy dog eyes, and he was just so sad. And he began to, you know, pursue me and take interest in me. And so I thought, one day he was at my apartment, and there was a local flyer that came from our hospital in the region, and it had a hand chained to a glass. And he looked at that and he pointed and he said, I feel just like that. Now, what should I have done? I should have run. And I didn't, because he was just, you know, he was so cute.

He needed somebody so bad. And you know, I was going to be the one to save him. You know, I thought, after a while, I mean, I'd been in Al-Anon maybe two years. But see, I'm now independent in Al-Anon. Big mistake there. Anyhow, and the things I was not doing was I was going to meetings, but I didn't have a sponsor. I was not working the steps. I was not going out for coffee after meetings, which I don't know if we do that anymore since COVID. But I wasn't doing any of those things that keep you connected. So I decided, you know, to save him. Well, we were together about almost three years. And that last third year, he was drinking just terribly. He was drinking horribly all the time as well. And he lost the job and he picked up another one. And I had this huge ego because I knew I was going to go to college, I was going to get a good job, and I never, never was going to marry an alcoholic, ever, ever, ever. And I had this really good job and I was afraid they'd find out because I had this facade of, you know, young video producer and all that. And they could not possibly find out what was going on. I mean, what would that do to me? What would they think of me? So I'm hiding this. But I had some friends who knew and occasionally would like sort of warn me, but they kind of just waited for me to fall on my face. And so one day, some people find it amusing, so I kept trying to break up with him. And he finally had gotten a job where he would travel to D.C. and like work the weekend and then come home on the weekends. And while he was there, I told him that I was going to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert with a friend. And if you're from New Jersey like I am, you go to a Bruce Springsteen concert anytime he's around. It's just inbred in us, right?

And he said, no. And I said, oh, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, no. I'm going. And I said, you know, this is not working out. You've become really mean. You're angry. You drink too much. I just think we'd better break it off. I'll pack your stuff up, and when you get done on Friday night, you come over and pick it up. So that was the plan. Unbeknownst to me, he had left much earlier than normal. It was usually about 9 or 10 o'clock. And he came through that door. And I was nervous, and I had run a hot bath, and I always just take a hot bath and kind of relax before he showed up. He came through that door, and he just started slamming me into the wall. One weekend, he had locked me in the bedroom and wouldn't let me out for the entire weekend. And I couldn't get to a phone. Of course, we didn't have cell phones then. I thought about crawling out the window. It was a little high up, though. But anyway, it did occur to me. But he came through and just started beating me up. And somewhere during that period, he raped me.

And then I have no idea how it ended up here, but I ended up in that bathroom. And he had me, my head, underwater in the bathtub. And he would bring me up, and then he pushed me back down. And I thought, oh, my God, I'm going to die. And I don't know what came over me, but I just sort of relaxed, stopped fighting him, and he let me up. And I calmed him down. And I had on an old, long men's vinyl T-shirt, and I was soaking wet. And I said, okay, just calm down. Let's talk this out. And I said, I'm just going to get us some iced tea, and

[00:25:04]

I'll be right back. And this was just a miracle. I walked out the door, and it was either left to the kitchen or right to the front door, and my pocketbook was there. And I never usually kept it there. My keys were in my purse. And I just walked over, grabbed it, and walked out the door, jumped in the car, and took off. And I went to a friend's house. He did follow me there. My friend took me down to a magistrate. This was in 1985, maybe 86.

Anyway, he took me down to the magistrate, and he refused to take out a warrant for him because he said, oh, sweetheart, he's been living with you. He said, well, it's my apartment. It doesn't matter. And you're going to bring him back anyway, aren't you? He kind of changed when he found out I worked in media. By that point, I was producing local programming, and he knew that wasn't a good thing. So I ended up, I couldn't get anybody to help me. And so I had a friend whose fiancé was a doctor, excuse me, a lawyer. Good Lord, it's the sleep deprivation. He was a lawyer, and she got with her fiancé, and Charlie came over, and we wrote a warning letter and a warrant that went unsigned. And I went over with Charlie to his parents. He was not there. And I said, you either get him out of the state, or I'm serving him, and I'm going to serve him with attempted murder. And his parents, his father was ex-military, too, and he just basically said, we'll take care of it, and they sent him to Texas. And I've never seen him since. And for years, I couldn't call him George. I just referred to him as the Beast. But his name was George, and that's a really big deal for me now. So after that went on, I started to go back to meetings, and then there was this guy. His name was Jesse, and Jesse was a lovely human being. As a matter of fact, we really had a nice relationship. But he was a little bit younger than me, and he was not ready to settle down. And his mother owned the company that I worked for, and they were selling it. So the whole family went over on a cruise over to Europe, and he was gone for two weeks, and he didn't come back for two years.

That's what it takes to get away from me when I get my claws in you. Anyhow, and I didn't have a job, because they had sold the company, so I was unemployed. I didn't have a job. I didn't have Jesse anymore. I didn't have anything. And I was just as depressed as I could possibly be, and I kept getting worse and worse and worse. And sometimes you say that God sends us people that become God with skin on for us.

Well, I had a cat who was God with fur on, and I would lay in the bed all the day long, and she would curl up next to me and purr. Well, my best friend happened to be coming down, and so I put on the great facade, and I was getting ready to take her to the airport, and she said to me, Sherry, I really need to talk to you before I get on that plane. And she said, I'm scared to death for you, because you are obviously seriously depressed.

Anyway, so she convinced me, and I had to sit on the phone and call my doctor, so she'd hear me make the appointment. And I called and went to see him, and he just retired. And I just, ugh, because that guy's been taking care of me for 30 years, and you dare to retire? Anyway, I told him what was going on, and he said, well, you are depressed. You're very severely depressed, and I'm going to give you something for that.

He said, but didn't I just hear you say that you go to Al-Anon? And I said, yes. And he said, well, how many meetings do you make a week? And I said, one. And he said, aren't they free? Smart man. So I took his advice, and I started going to every Al-Anon meeting I could possibly go to, and I started to have friends in the program, and I had friends across the hall in the program, and it was just, things were really, really going well, and I was busy.

And there's a little book, do we still sell it? It's called When I Got Busy, I Got Better. One of the best books I've ever read in Al-Anon, because it made me involved. It made me feel good. It made me make friends. It made me be useful in a positive manner. And I didn't have a boyfriend for two years. Ha-ha. So there. And I had learned how to be Sherry without a man, and I had three friends. Two of them were in AA and in Al-Anon. One was my friend Joan, and then my friend Bill, and then an older man in AA who reminded me of my dad, and his name was Ed, and he kind of was very fatherly to me.

He was a great guy. And so I started palling around with these people. They were all at least, at minimum, 20 years older than me. And we would go to the beach, and we would go listen to concerts, and we would just have fun. And I was having a great time. And I was having a great time, and I was, you know, they had started this meeting, it's

[00:30:02]

still a meeting, it's AA with strong Al-Anon participation, but it's basically an open AA meeting, but they welcome Al-Anon, and it was called, it's called the Me and You menu, the Me and You meeting, and we met at a holiday inn that had a breakfast buffet every Sunday morning, and I started going, I didn't miss it, and Ed was there, and a lot of my friends were going, and it's still going, COVID did knock it around a bit, we're not eating breakfast anymore, somebody sometimes, this week, somebody at the last minute realized there was no coffee and donuts, so they went and bought those Cheez-It crackers and put them out, it's like, that's a guy, yeah, he put out the Cheez-Its, but anyway, I began to have this really great life, I was Sherry Without a Man, and I was getting to be really happy, and I enjoyed my apartment by myself, and my little angel with fur on was still with me, and it was going great, well, so, there was this guy in, actually, I wasn't looking, he was in AA with Ed and Joan and Bill, and he was, I couldn't deny it, he was a very nice-looking man, very nice-looking man, a year older than me, single, never been married, no kids, I mean, this is a prize package, let me know, my grand-aunt, my grand-aunt told me that, she said, this is the one you got to pick, he's got no baggage, except he's an alcoholic, oops, anyway, and he was involved in some, we have a big breakfast, we used to, things are still coming back slowly from COVID, but he worked on the AA side of the big breakfast, and it was, we'd get speakers from all over the country, and it was huge, and so, he asked me on the date, well, what Bill and Ed and Joan didn't tell me was, Doug had a girlfriend, but they didn't think she was good for him, and that's why a lot of AAs need to go to Al-Anon, and Joan and Bill were in, so, anyway, so I said, I'm not going to do that, I didn't wait this long to get involved with somebody who has a girlfriend, no, no, no, so, anyway, that was in, like, July, and, oh, we went to the AA conference in Roanoke, AA convention in Roanoke, a bunch of us, and who comes in and is in the room next to me, it's Doug and his girlfriend, Jean, and so, my friend Ed says to Doug and Jean, and she was really nice, I mean, there was nothing wrong with her, she's a nice lady, but Ed says to Doug and Jean, we're going to go to this great breakfast buffet tomorrow before the convention starts, would you like to join us, and Doug turns to Jean and he says, do we still have the donuts we bought early this morning on the drive out, and she goes, yeah, and he goes, we don't need to go to breakfast, and I thought, oh, he's not for me, he's cheap, I now call him frugal, but it's still there, he's frugal, but, anyway, so that was in, like, June or July, and then, you know, I just gave up, and I thought, I'm not going to do this, I'm going to let go, and I did, I didn't fret about it, I didn't, like, stalk him, something I would do, you know, I didn't do any of that, I was perfectly happy, except I did one thing, and that was, on the breakfast buffet was fruit, and I used to, he would sit across the room on another table, and I would, like, take fruit and sort of just eat it in a very provocative way, mostly strawberries, and no, I never did that with a banana, just so you know, but we had a friend, his name was Pete, Pete was also at our wedding, and Pete walked up to me, big guy, big guy from the Navy, just Navy chief, truly wonderful man, walks up to me and goes, I don't know if he's noticing, but you've got to stop that, I cannot concentrate on the meeting, anyway, everything, you know, falls into place, and in December of that year, Doug's back in my life, he and Jean broke up, we tried to do it really, I was trying to do it one day at a time, he's an alcoholic, we don't do things one day at a time, if I want something, I'm going to pursue it relentlessly until I get it, and by the time we were in January, he was saying things like, I think we should get married, no, we've been dating two months, we're not getting married, are you crazy, and I had to go to Houston on a business trip, and he said, well, I'm thinking I might get a ring, I said, no, you're not, you're not going to disrespect me, you're going to, in June, things are going well, we can start talking about it, but I'm not talking about it now, so he went with a sponsor and got a ring, I did not know that until March, we went to the AA state assembly, and we went out to dinner, and I got engaged during an AA assembly.

I was really afraid to marry him, because everybody, Doug had some things I never, Doug

[00:35:03]

had integrity, he still does, he has, everybody liked Doug, everybody looked up to Doug, even though he was only almost three years sober, he had such dignity, and I thought, I can't play any crap with him, I'm not good enough for him again, this is a nice man, I'm not good enough for this guy, anyway, my father loved Doug, and Doug, I said, we can't tell my parents unless you ask my dad, and he goes, that's a little old-fashioned, I said, that's my dad, and so we went up for a weekend, and nothing happened, and so I went to the bathroom to drive back from South Jersey to Virginia, and I hear, Ed, can I speak to you, I'm like, oh my God, it's like 30 seconds and we have to leave, and you're now going to do this, this is what happened.

So Doug had a sponsor, his name is Joe, and Joe is from Northern Ireland, and he got kicked out of three countries, including Northern Ireland, got kicked out of there, went in the merchant marines, got kicked out of Australia, then got kicked out of South Africa for going to the wrong neighborhoods, and he ended up emigrating to the United States, he came through Canada and down to Boston, because Boston is a haven of Irish people, and he got sponsored for citizenship by a young Massachusetts congressman by the name of John F. Kennedy, and he became an American citizen, he also became a sergeant in the army, and we figured out that my dad, we looked at all the different papers, me and Joe, we figured out, my dad and us, we left about three weeks before Joe arrived in Fort Knox, which would have been a catastrophe, because they would have been drinking together at the NCO club, I would never have stood, put it that way.

And here's the thing about Joe, when I first met Joe, his name is Slippery Joe, and that's because he would go pick up a white chip, feel so good, he'd go out and have another drink to accelerate, and he literally had a bucket full of white chips. But he was so loved that people relentlessly pursued him until finally, when he coded several times from alcohol poisoning, he decided maybe I should take this seriously.

But Joe, when I met him, had purple nose, he had really bad teeth, and he wore laser suits in 1987, and they would sit him by the door in front of the AA meeting and say, keep drinking, you're going to look like that. Joe's a legend, Slippery Joe is a legend in AA in Virginia. So when Doug asked me to marry him, I said yes, I said, I'll back up just a wee bit here, I said, does that mean Joe has to be your best man?

And Doug said, yep, love me, love my sponsor. Well, by the time the wedding came around, because I stretched it out, we were not getting married, you know, the month after he proposed, we had a giant wedding, if you've ever been up north, we have big weddings. The only thing we didn't have was a bar, although there was a bar in the hall, you could get drunk to your heart's content, but I'm not paying for it.

But nobody did, and the lady that owned the ballroom that we were in said, I've never seen so many people have so much fun without drinking. Now, all four of the guys who stood up for Doug, including Joe and our friend Pete, and two other guys, and Ed, and one other guy, they were all in AA. And on my side, I had the tricky side, I had two of my girlhood friends, and then I had one, my friend Joan, who's in AA, and in Al-Anon, but she was so refined with British accent, nobody ever thought she could be a drunk.

And then there was my friend Mary, who was in Al-Anon. And so we had this big wedding, and it was wonderful, except for one small problem. My father, when we went up around, we were going every once a month to pick flowers, and dresses, and all kinds of stuff like that, and my mother would call me at 8 o'clock in the morning and say, what do you think about an eight-piece orchestra? No, click. It was just constant.

And so we went up, and Dad looked terrible. Now, he was always tall and very thin, because that's, the fissures are that way. And, but he looked sick. And I was scared. And my mom had said that he had something in his throat that was bothering him. So they called our family doctor who was a surgeon, and so they set up for the next week for him to have a biopsy. But when they were doing the test, they also found a shadow on his lung.

And I knew that this was not good news. And I said to him right before we left that time, that day, I said, Daddy, you have to get this taken care of, because I love you,

[00:40:00]

and I need you to walk me down that aisle. And he said, I promise you, I'm going. So the night before he was going in for the test, I called him, and I talked to him, and Mom said, I'll call you, and the hospital was, like, almost across the street from our house. She said, I'll call you after it's over and tell you what they think. I said, okay. So I came home from work, and Doug, at that point, was living with me.

How that happened, I don't know. Well, you know what happens. One day, you realize they put some of their socks in your drawer, and next thing you know, they have a whole drawer full of their underwear and socks. And it's like, how did this happen? But anyhow, I made the call, and I asked Mom, how's Daddy doing? And she said, Sherry, he died. Because when they had taken the sample biopsy in the lung, they didn't realize they had nicked some blood vessel, and he was, he, not then, but a couple hours later, he bled to death very fast.

And so I had two things that went through my mind. The first one was, oh, my God, I'm still breathing. Because I really thought, if I lost my Daddy, I wouldn't, I couldn't go on. But I am breathing, you know. And then I thought to myself, dear God, thank you, the battle is over. And he's out of pain. Sometimes I cry when I say this, and sometimes I don't. Thank God it's a nice one of those nights. Anyway, the weather went on.

It was a family joke of Sherry asked, because I asked my uncle to give me away, and he died in January. So it was like, if Sherry asked you to, you know, to give her away, say no. And I had a great uncle that I adored, my uncle Bobby. And my Aunt Frances said, please don't ask, please tell Sherry not to ask more. Bobby, because he's not doing that, I'm not going to do that. So my uncle that passed was my favorite uncle, and I asked his son, my oldest cousin, to give me away.

It was perfect. He had just lost his Dad, I had lost mine, and he walked me down the aisle. So things went really well. I'm going to bring you up quickly to the future. Oh, one more thing to tell about my father. So my Dad had three things he wanted to do in life, like his wish list. He wanted to go on a cruise. He wanted to go to Alaska, and he loved to fish. So three weeks before he died, they went on a 10-day cruise to Alaska, where he got to see Alaska, he got to cruise, and he caught a 45-pound keeper salmon.

The salmon arrived before he died, packed in dry ice. He got everything he, it's like, thank you God, everything that he loved he got to do. So that was something that worked, you know. Now the thing is, I really thought that I could never, ever, ever have a child, because I had that tendency to be violent sometimes, you know, arguing and fighting my Dad, and I thought, I cannot have a child. And so when my Mom and Dad met Doug, that was much better than it was the year before.

But he had gone to bed, and Doug had left, and my Mom and I were sitting up, and we were having a cigarette and a glass of wine. We, like, she stopped smoking. I still have a bit of a problem with that. But you used to think we were naughty to have a glass of wine together, you know, it's just so naughty. But anyhow, I said, you know, Mom, I think he'd make a great father. And she looked at me and she said, oh, dear God, you're going to marry him.

And she was very happy about that. And so a couple of years into our marriage, I said, well, let's try a trial child. I don't know what I was going to do with it if it didn't work out, but we, you know. And my family used to pray at Thanksgiving that I would find a husband. And as soon as I got married, my family would pray at Thanksgiving that we'd have a baby. It was just relentless. And so we decided we would try to have a baby.

And everybody said, oh, you're older. I was, like, 34. It's going to take you a while. Well, I tell you what. I went off the pillow and I took my shoes off, and I was pregnant. I almost fell over there. And so I was afraid. I was really afraid because I didn't know how to be a mom. And my mother said, well, they don't come with instructions. You just do it. And so I had, Doug and I had Lindsey Marie Staples, and she is absolutely wonderful.

And we love her to pieces. She is itty-bitty tiny. When she was 18, she looked 14. Right now, she's 28 and looks 17. I mean, she's just really tiny. And she has really great black and pink hair. There was a lady here that had pink hair. There was a lady here that had pink hair. There you are. My daughter would love your hair. Absolutely love your hair. And we've had our ups and downs. I thought we were going

[00:45:02]

to go into the sunset as Mr. and Mrs. Staples, and when anything would come up as a crisis, we would read the Al-Anon literature and the Big Book and we would work it out. Yeah, that doesn't kind of, no. You know, you start yelling and screaming and eventually you say, wait a minute, we should be treating each other better than this. But, you know, we've had our ups and downs. Recently, this year was hard. In July, I was coming downstairs on July 4th and my life is so exciting, I was doing laundry instead of at the fireworks and I missed the bottom step. And I didn't fall, but I heard something snap like a pencil.

And let's just say, I'll cut to the chase, I broke my foot. So, which, I am not somebody that sits still, so that was a problem. And then, and then my sister-in-law died suddenly. And then Doug lost his job. Now, I tell you all this, not so you go, poor thing. Honest to God, Doug works in sales and there's been times that he's had, you know, he's been laid off and different things. Neither one of us worried. We were just like, something's going to happen. We'll be fine. We've done this before. We can make it together. You know, I was not panicking. Our daughter was panicking a bit. But, honest to God, we weren't, we were not worried. And Doug got a job the next week. So, thank you, God. I wasn't asking that, but, you know, thank you. But we, I mean, his life, there was a time there for a while where Doug wasn't going to meetings and I was doing now and then Al-Anon. And that doesn't work. Not for me, anyway. And he got, our marriage went through some strain and a lot of it had to do with that we weren't working our program. About three years ago, we lost Joe. And that devastated us because not only was he Doug's best man and his sponsor, he was Lindsay's godfather. And he had met this woman. She's the one that got rid of the leisure suits and they've been married a while. But, so he died. And they still talk about him in AA meetings. They still talk about him. It's like, well, you know what Slippery Joe used to say. And this is three or four years after he's been gone. Two smaller things. I could tell you a thousand other miracles in my life, but I don't want to keep you here all night. I, after I was, at first I was on GR. Then our delegate talked me into being DR. That's when I was eight months pregnant. That'll tell you how smart I am. Because our delegate at that time was a guy. And he said, well, we had two children when I've been delegate.

And it's like, no, we didn't. She did. But I became DR. And then I was going to run for alternate DR and I mean, alternate delegate. And I didn't. I ended up being delegate. And I was shocked. I mean, I was really shocked. And that was, there's three delegates in here that I know. That's just amazing. And one's out of Tennessee. And he's one of my favorites. And I just loved it because I'm kind of wonky like that. I loved all the argument. It wasn't argument. All the debates about things and the meetings and, you know, all the crazy stuff that goes on at conference. And I just realized I had gone from being a group rep to rep of my district to representing the state of Virginia and now to be part of the world. And it was just fabulous. I had a blast. I really did. Other people, I don't know, maybe they didn't like it as much, but I just had a blast. And then I became chairman. In our area, we kind of go backwards, delegate then chairman. And I got, you know, I was in service, but it began to taper off. And I asked God, well, what do you want me to do? And I was, I go to a church. I'm a Methodist. And we were having a, we were going to have a mission trip to the Navajo reservation. And I work, now I do documentaries and I do awesome like American Printing House for the Blind. I've worked with them. I've done exhibit videos for them. I did a big thing on how they do the Braille. So I, that's what I do, work with museums and nonprofits. Anyway, so I've worked with Native Americans up and down the East Coast. And then I worked with a Chiricahua Apache artist in Santa Fe. And so they were going to go to Navajo. And I said, and one of my friends said, you're going to love it, Cher, you should go. Well, I didn't, A, I didn't want to go down there and ram Jesus down their throats. It's not my idea of, I wanted to do something profound that would change or help or make them know anything. Primarily what we do now is we, if we can teach the children that God loves them or the creator, which as they call it, the creator loves them, that we've done huge goals. So I didn't, I signed up and I kept meaning to cancel because I was not good enough to be a missionary. You know, it's not what I, I'm just not good enough to be one. And I, we drove straight through to Albuquerque from Newport East, Virginia, and then we mutinied at Albuquerque. We made the pastor stop for

[00:50:03]

the night and then we went on. And what we would do was we would do, everybody had to do a daily devotion one in the morning, one at night, and we would sing, my pastor played guitar. And so I'm still terrified at this point. We're really close to the rez. And right across from this rez stop is Acoma Pueblo, which is beautiful. It's a white Pueblo. It's spectacular. And we're sitting under this, this shelter and we were singing the song and it said, who shall I send? And the song goes, here I am, Lord. And it was like, oh my gosh, I'm really supposed to be here. We got there. We were there for two weeks and we did heavy construction. We also did Bible school. And there was this lady, her name was Mary and Mary had nine children. She had a set of twins and then a toddler, but they're like, shoo. And Native American women have, as a rule, do not have a lot of say in their own fertility, we'll put it that way. And her husband was violent and he'd been to prison many times and he was in prison again and she was so desolate. And she started telling one of my friends, whose father happened to be in the same AA meeting as Doug. And so Lisa brings Mary into me and she says, you need to talk to her. So I did. And I told her that it didn't have to be this way. And I gave her every single piece of literature I had, because I always carry lots of literature with me. I did not give her my ODAC because it was, it was already well worn and mine, mine, mine. But I did give her my courage to change. And then I called my friend, Mary Lou Malman, who worked at, who's now passed away, sadly. She worked at WSO and I said, do we have anything that we could send out for Native Americans? And she said, well, that's just funny, you should ask. We just printed, Al-Anon is for Aboriginal Indigenous people. Pamphlet, really good one. I'll send it to you. So I went, if you want to get anything done on the reservation, you go to the pastor or the pastor's wife. So I told her I was getting this. Well, the lady that was running the team, she said, it'll never get here, Sherry. It'll be months before it gets here, because they were literally out in the middle of nowhere. And it got there four days later, four days later. Last thing to say, and that is that we used to laugh and think it was funny, and now it's not. We used to look at Lindsay's crib and when Joe would be there, he'd go, what side of the hall are you going to end up on, kid? You know, and I'd be like, stop that. She's super, super smart, super smart. But about the beginning or middle of middle school, she started to slip, and she got in with a bad crowd. No matter what I could do, she got in with a bad crowd. And she began smoking pot, whoopie doo, and she started drinking. And she was just acting out all kinds of crazy ways. So I dragged her to her counselor, and after a lot of unpleasant meetings together, she cracked. And it turns out she had ADD. So all of her grades had just completely plummeted. And so I was really worried about putting her on drugs. But the funny thing is, is that, funny, when she started taking it, her grades went way up back to the way they've always been. And she was a lot calmer. And she wasn't doped up or anything. And things went really well. And then she went off to college. And she went to Virginia Commonwealth University, which is in Richmond. And if you asked her during her freshman year, how much did she, how much was she enjoying college, she actually would tell you, I didn't hear this, how much she liked Richmond. And she ended up being asked to leave in the first semester of her sophomore year.

And she was drinking and drinking. It's such a merry-go-round right now. I'm not going to do her inventory, but I firmly believe my daughter's an alcoholic. And so does my husband. But we also, she had a severe breakdown, just a really horrific episode. And we had her arrested. And I remember thinking, I saw these people coming in in the late 80s, early 90s, these older people coming in for their adult children, alcoholics. And I was just devastated. And I watched them handcuff her. And my husband was, he's the one that called them. And he felt so guilty. I never should have done it. I'm like, hell, you shouldn't. That's what she needs. And so she agreed to see a doctor. And the doctor, and a lot of friends have told her this, but a doctor told me she's type 2 bipolar. So we're dealing with mental illness, which is tough. And we're dealing with alcohol.

And they don't mix real well either. And there's not a thing I can do. And I heard a very famous speaker say one time, she had left her alcoholic husband. And she would, every night, when she didn't know where her son or daughter were, she would literally pick them up in her mind, in her arms, and take them down to the altar on her church and leave them there. And I'm so glad I heard that.

[00:55:02]

Because that's what I do. And some nights she's home and everything's great. But when I'm not sure where she is, I'll leave, I'll say my prayers. And the last thing I say is, dear God, please keep, watch over my daughter. Don't let her get hurt. Don't let her kill or hurt anybody. But the DUI's okay. If you see fit, you know, whatever it takes. But nothing prepares you for watching that. Nothing. Nothing. Especially someone that's really brilliant. You know, just one of the best students, you know, and she went to private schools because she couldn't, she kept going further ahead of people in public schools, so we sent her to private school. And it's painful. It's very, very painful. But that's where life is now. So, I go to a lot of Al-Anon meetings. And I don't know what I would do without them. And like I said, you know, this is how you get to be a 20-year-old who suddenly wakes up and finds herself 64 and talking at a convention in Louisville, Kentucky. One of my favorite quotes, and it has to do with a lot of my journey, and I keep these note cards. And the funny thing is, I just keep them in case I forget anything. Like you would know, right? I always think they'll know if I forget this. This was given to me as a gift one time when I had spoken a long, long, long time ago. And it's Mother Teresa's business card.

Now, it's Mother Teresa. It's not conference literature, but how bad can it be? It's Mother Teresa. And this is what her business card said. The fruit of silence is prayer. The fruit of prayer is faith. The fruit of faith is love. And the fruit of love is service. Thank you.