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Source: DICOBE-00107 – Yvonne N – 26TH LAKESIDE CONF – 1986-09-27.mp3 File: dicobe-00107-yvonne-n-26th-lakeside-conf-1986-09-27.mp3 Duration: 01:06:37
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My name is Yvonne N. and I'm an alcoholic. I would like to first of all thank the committee for asking me to come down here. I have always wanted to come to this conference and I've heard about it since the days when I first got sober. I assumed that we'd give our sobriety date and I would like to stand here and say to you that I had been sober for a period of almost 28 years, but that isn't true.
I went to my first AA meeting in 1959 and I had a little slip and it lasted for 10 years and so my sobriety date as a result is February the 11th of 1969 and for that I'm eternally grateful. I look around in this group of people and every time I come to a conference or every time I go to a meeting it's just absolutely a miracle that people like us are alive and that families that belong to us have endured all of the trauma that we put them through.
I guess the only way that I can describe my drinking days, you can do that in one sentence, and that would be that I had total moments which constituted hours and days of sobriety that were filled with hysteria and that was interrupted intermittently by seconds of panic. There was absolutely nothing in my life that was stable. I came to this program and I had been so tense for so long that when I finally got a feeling of calm I got nervous about it and it took me a long time to accept AA.
Obviously from the 10-year slip my surrender to this program was the most difficult thing that I have ever, ever endured. I said for a minute ago that I was an alcoholic, I am suffering from a disease and it's vital to me that I remember daily that my disease is permanent, it is irrevocable, irreversible and it is potentially fatal. And I think the things that I might say this morning would probably be different if I talked again this evening on account of my attitude changes moment by moment in this program and it has been over a period of time during that 10 years prior to my making my surrender and coming into this fellowship with your help it has been a very strong, it has been a laborious process for me because I was not one of those people who came in and miraculously walked through the doors and got cured with the healing of the hands, you know, laying on of the hands by the old timers and I go through periods today when it is essential that I have to work this program.
I have heard a lot of people who speak from the podium and they say, well I work the AA program every day to the best of my ability. They may, but that is hogwash for me because there are days that I am not canonized. I like to believe that, particularly when I am talking to some newcomers, you know, and there are days that I am not particularly a saint. And sometimes when you have been sober a little while, the program is more difficult for you to work on account of, I think I heard Wes Pease say this many, many years ago.
He said that he has so much more to lose now than he did when he came in because he didn't have anything. And sometimes you get in a habit of being sober and you get in a habit of just accepting things and you forget, we were talking about this on the way down from the airport in Dallas, that through this habit in your thinking you forget sometimes to be grateful. And just by habitual sobriety you have a tendency from time to time to stop working the step.
And when I do that I am in real trouble because I have a tendency in my brain if I think of anything more than two seconds it becomes a plot. Another problem I had when I came in was it was not a situation where, as some of you had never heard about Alcoholics Anonymous and you just happened to venture into a meeting and all of a sudden they waved a wand on you and you loved all the people and you have
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been sober ever since. I had known about AA for many, many years since 1949 because my mother had come to this program and I had been around AA members and I remember well when they used to stand up and they used to say the only desire for membership, they said it was an honest desire to stop drinking. Well, hell ain't nobody honest, you know, when they come in here nobody really honestly wants to quit, but you have to.
And back in the olden days they didn't even have any traditions. And I remember when I was growing up they had to forge those out of a lot of wisdom, a lot of old timers. So I really cut my teeth on the steps and later the traditions in AA and I knew all about it and I knew it would work for other people because I had seen it. But I also figured that my knowledge would be insurance and that I would never be an alcoholic because we had gone through such a devastating experience with the alcoholism in our family when I was growing up that if there was anything I didn't want to be when I grew up, it was like she was.
So I thought, well, I'll have all of this knowledge and if I don't do the things that those alcoholics do, those rotten, stinking crunks, then I'll never be one. And I knew that alcoholics drank in the morning and I knew that they were arrested for driving under the influence and I knew that they went to hospitals and that they were dried out and back then they didn't have any of the fancy rehabilitation that they have now.
So those things were barometers for me and if I could avoid any of those actions I'd never be an alcoholic and that's the way I proceeded in my life. Took my first drink when I was 16 and I took it for the same reason that I took my last drink and the same thing happened to me and I got drunk and I vomited and I passed out. But there was a lot of water under the bridge in those years and I continued.
After I had that first drink there was a magic discovery that was made. At that time my mother was a practicing alcoholic and I detested it, absolutely detested what it had done. And I had a younger brother who was 13 years younger than I and I ended up with all the responsibility in many instances of having to take care of him. And my parents fought all the time and we had the Saturday night fights a long time before they ever had television.
And my daddy would pack and he'd leave and then she'd promise to sober up and then he'd come back and she'd be drunk again and this went on for years, for years and years. And I'd grab my brother and we'd run in the back bedroom and I'd take care of him and we'd cry ourselves to sleep and he was just a little baby. And so I knew that if I ever did get married that's one thing that I would never impose upon my family was drinking like she had done.
After that 16th year and I had taken that first drink, I drank I would assume socially, whatever it was, I knew what the feeling of having alcohol in my body was like and it was the first time in my life that I had ever been free. Somehow or another I felt free when I ingested ethanol alcohol into my system and it made me feel good and it made me feel like all the other kids looked because I was so inadequate and I felt so unworthy that when I drank I felt okay and accepted by the other kids.
Due to the inadequacy that I had when I was growing up I never fit in and so I never did feel like that I was accepted by anybody and so I set about to scholastically achieve that which you know competitive wise that I could excel and so I hit the books and I studied and I studied and I studied and it didn't come easy and so I won a scholarship to college and after I graduated from college I decided that I wanted to become an attorney and back then we didn't have female attorneys but I thought that's challenging enough and so I enrolled in Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
In the meantime my mother had become sober and had come to this program and all of the cruddy people and the bums and the derelicts were hanging around our house and I'd come home and I would visit and back in the olden days I feel so fortunate that I was able to observe twelve step work back then as it originated and they'd take someone into their homes and they would assign people to them and they would go in four hour shifts and I remember
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the big word the big sentence the question that was asked was can you go five minutes more can you go five minutes more and they'd say we'll try and they'd walk and they would walk and they would walk until they wore the living room rug out and then they would have coffee and they would have orange juice and honey and they would walk and that shift would leave and then here would come another shift and they'd keep people three four days a week maybe and they would take them to meetings and the shakes would stop and they actually in their twelve step work their lives were totally devoted and dedicated just to getting that drunk sobered up and I want to tell you the drunks they brought in sure didn't you know a lot of them came from jail a lot of them didn't have any homes they didn't have any clothes they were cruel some of them were just punks and my attitude was very snobbish I didn't think that those people had a right to be in our home and I suggested that we boil the coffee cups and whatever utensils that they had used because I knew we were going to get a social disease from these people and I really wanted no part of them I came from a I was cut from a different cloth I was a little bit better than these people and I had no comprehension or understanding that the things that my mother and her and the other people in her fellowship the things that they were doing were necessary for them to stay sober that was never explained to me never went to Allentown I just didn't like people in AA they were just bums as far as I was concerned while I was in law school I was tired one evening and I was working on the hill for a congressman sat next to a doctor who was getting a lot of grade and I complained about the load that I had to carry and he said oh try some of these that was in 1956 I was drinking more than socially then I tried some of the medication that he handed to me and little did I know what it was but I want to tell you something I was off like a skyrocket and I immediately became addicted to amphetamine I was a speed freak long before the beetles were ever born and long before they even had drug cultures I was heavy heavy into drugs and that tranquilizer that they used then was called Miltown I didn't even know what Valium and Librium was when I got sober after that that became very popular but the pills did for me not the same thing as the whiskey but I had to use them for remedial action I went back home I graduated from law school I went to work and clerked for the chief judge of the 10th circuit court of appeals in the federal system and we had gone to Denver to hold court and one evening now I don't know if any of you know any judges but federal judges ascend the bench they're infallible and they're a pain in the rear sometimes and so I got drunk at the brown palace hotel and I guess I was anti-social I don't know but it didn't set well with some of the federal judges who were in the bar that were drinking and so I decided in order to save my job I better go to an AA meeting and my mom had been sober for quite a while in AA so I went to a meeting in Denver Colorado and I went in and I sat down and the only thing that I was concerned with is how do I get out of this jam so that I could go and tell my boss that I've been to an AA meeting and maybe try to keep my job I did not hear one thing that anyone in that room said I did not listen to identification of emotions and alcoholism because you know what they talked about they talked about going to jail they talked about divorces at least this was my conception and they talked about going to hospitals and coming off drunk and paralyzed and a lot of stuff I hadn't even heard of and I walked out of that meeting and I said to myself those things haven't happened to me because I still have the barometers in my mind and until they do happen I don't have a drinking problem and I wasn't drinking in the morning before I went to work I hung it on heavy at night but I knew the things not to do and I walked out and I said I'm not an alcoholic cut and dry I did not listen to the things that they discussed like fear and alcoholism.
Things that they discussed like fear, being terrified to get up in the morning, the feeling
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of the lack of self-worth, the inadequacy, the lack of respect, none of that, none of that made an impression on me. So I went out and I continued to drink and I continued to take whatever I could find drug-wise. By 1964, I'd married and I had three children in three years. Now that is a problem when you have intended all of your life to be the Clarence Darrow of the nation, female-wise, discent-wise.
And I ended up doing nothing except mixing Pablum and strained apricots and washing toilet, you know, diapers out in the toilet. That doesn't set too well when you have a hangover. And we did a little geographic, we were living in Oklahoma and we moved to California because I thought, if I can just get away from my family and my mother. She popped in at the most inopportune times and I always had a drink in my hand.
By then it was morning, noon or night, whenever she came, you know. And she was limiting me and she was a prohibitive factor, you know, I had no freedom, I thought. So I said, I'm going to get out of here. Plus the fact that she had become the president of Alcoholics Anonymous. And she sponsored a lot of freaky people and I had to associate with them from time to time. So we moved. The problem was that I took Yvonne with me and nothing changed and it continued.
And we moved from Studio City to Malibu. I said, get me a home on the beach, let me be a beachcomber where I don't have the pressures I said, I don't like the smog, that's why, right? And we moved to Malibu and I continued to drink, nothing changed. In the geographics, I could never understand that. Every place that we moved, it was exactly the same. My pattern of behavior, my pattern of drinking. And so we were evicted from our home, our beach home in Malibu, because my husband couldn't work, he couldn't work and take care of me and take care of the kids.
So we moved back into town and we ended up in Van Nuys. All of the things that had happened to me were the things that they said were going to happen, with the exception of, I'd never been picked up on drunken driving, I had never gone to a hospital, and I hadn't been sued for divorce yet. But all of the other things, the emotional illness that sets in, the devastation that one feels, the horrible fear, I weighed 170 pounds, you talk about bloat.
You know, if I'd rolled over, I'd been in Chicago. And I had taken so much amphetamine that I just had speed sores, if you take a lot of that stuff, you get them. And you know, if you take a bath, you'll melt, that was what I believed. I had a drinking dress, a moo-moo, and it fit tight on me. And you sleep in it, and you never take it off, if I ever took that dress off, it'd break. So I did all of the things that alcoholics do, female alcoholics, I was protected.
Sometimes I think that when you're a protected female alcoholic, that it is such a long, drawn-out, slow process of dying, because you really never have to come to grips with the fact that in the world you can't function. I was incapable of practicing law, I couldn't even read. I knew that if I didn't drink, that I was going to die, and I knew that if I did drink, I was going to die. I had to stop, and I couldn't quit.
Two things I remember the most, during the last days of my drinking, one, I had to consciously go in and shut the drawers in my kitchen that contained the knives, because my little kids, you know, when they were like five, four, and three, would come into the kitchen, and I was afraid that some irresistible impulse would come over me, and that I would kill them, and that was one of the biggest fears that I had, and I knew I was crazy.
I was guilty of child abuse, I was not a good mother, I was not a good wife, I was not a good human being, and I wanted to die, and yet at the same time I was afraid to. I would go to bed at night absolutely terrified, afraid that I would die in my sleep, and I would wake up in the morning afraid to get out of bed, couldn't go to the door, couldn't
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answer it, couldn't answer the telephone, couldn't go to the grocery store and make decisions, and that went on for months and months and months. The second thing I remember is that I told my husband that I felt like that I, I tried to describe to him that I felt like that I was in a grave, just a big grave, and that the world was walking by and they were kicking dirt in on my face, and that was the feeling that I had, absolute desperation and futility.
I knew I was crazy, I knew I was going to end up in a mental institution, I had projected in my own, in my own mind that my little baby, my little kids would come to see me on Sunday with a picnic basket and we'd sit down and drink, and I resolved, I had all the acceptance in the world for that, because I knew that was going to happen, there was no way out for me, and you see I was not an alcoholic, because the things that alcoholics do had never happened to me, never happened to me.
I couldn't relate, sure I drank too much, but I couldn't relate my drinking with the fact that when I was sober I was crazy, absolutely stark stern crazy, I did bizarre things. We also discussed this coming down here, there are items or events in our lives that at the time when we take our fourth and fifth step do not warrant putting it down, you know, I mean they're just little things that happen, no big deal, maybe we didn't remember it, but we go back and ten years later we remember it, have you ever driven down the road and those thoughts come to you and you just die, just die at the embarrassment and humiliation?
I was so weird, in Southern California, they're weird anyway, I was so weird, thank you, speakers from there, I was so weird that I decided that if I could just find some place that I belonged, some place, so I read in the paper that they were having a flying saucer convention, and I decided that I would go because I might meet someone there, you know, that would take me home. And the only problem was that before I got there I got drunk and I marched in the flying saucer, hundreds of people in this convention, and I sat down and I waited, you know, for some enlightenment or for someone to say something, well, I was obviously very drunk and I was loud and boisterous and obnoxious, and a lady got up and she sang a song, and she sang the national anthem, and I jumped up drunk in the back of the room and I yelled out, sing, fly me to the moon, you know, and they asked me to leave.
Now when you're weird and you're thrown out of a flying saucer, and I'd gone to every kind of church there was, you know, started out Baptist, good old Southern Baptist, and the Bible melt, Methodist, Unity, Catholic, took instructions, went to a Jesuit law school, Science of Mind, Christian Science, I tried every church, every church to try to figure out what was wrong with me. Somehow or another, I don't know, I was empty inside.
There was something missing in my life. I read all those wonderful books on positive thinking, and I'd sit there and I'd read them drunk with one eye, you know, about how you have to project your positive thoughts on a screen, and that whatever it is you want to become, if you'll just think about it. I read all of Peale's books. I went into philosophy. I did everything that I knew how to do in order to get my life together, and it was slowly going down the tube, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.
And I could not relate drinking to the insanity when I was sober. In November of 1968, I was drunk, we were living in a transient apartment house right across Ventura Freeway. My son, my eight-year-old, I mean, he wasn't 18, but by the time that he was eight, that kid had been in like six, seven different schools because of my moving around, just moving around with all my geographics. At this time, my children were out of school.
I had taken them out, and we would walk to the park, and we'd have to cross the Ventura Freeway, and we would sit in the park, and they'd swing or play, and I'd sit and cry.
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And they'd say, Mom, what's wrong? And I didn't know. I had no idea except that I was crazy and that I was dying, and that life was absolutely insufferable and intolerable. And all of the education that I had, all of the things I wanted to be, all of that, when I grew up, business, I was incompetent to even be a soda jerk in a drug store. This evening in November, I uttered that prayer that all alcoholics in this room have said.
But you see, I had to qualify mine. I said, God, if you were there, please help me, because I wasn't going to admit the existence of any kind of a higher power. And in case one didn't exist, I wasn't going to make any commitment. And as I know now, that my higher power knew what had had to happen to me. And it took some more time. And it was like a roller coaster for me. Man, when I started out, I was gone.
It wasn't until February the 11th of the following year, we had moved from that apartment house into a home in Van Nuys. We didn't have a refrigerator. We didn't have any money. But you see, it was essential that I move into a house that had an Olympic-sized swimming pool. I didn't have any furniture. And so, because I didn't have a refrigerator, I took the kids' milk, and I poured it in wine bottles, and I tied a rope in gallow wine, you know, a lot of class, and I floated it in the swimming pool, so that the milk wouldn't sour.
So we finally got enough money to have the telephone put in. And the telephone man said, Lady, do you know that you have bottles out there floating in your swimming pool? I said, Of course. To me, that was normal behavior, absolutely normal. Everyone keeps milk and wine bottles when they don't have a refrigerator. My whole life, the last three or four years of my drinking, somehow or another, they told me that my sense of values was screwed up, you know, when I came into the program.
On this evening, February the 11th, I was drunk. I put my kids to bed early. My children had bed sores most of their lives, because I would always make them go to bed at 7 o'clock. It'd be daylight. And they'd say, But Mom, the sun's… I don't care. Go to bed. Because then I could get in and get about my serious drinking, and I was drinking all day long. I was functional. I had to nap a lot. I took a lot of naps, too, morning, afternoon, right after dinner, and early to bed, and I don't know what happened.
To this day, I do not know what happened, except that all of a sudden, I was as lucid as I am right now, physically drunk, lucid, and I just walked in the kitchen, and I just poured my drink down the sink, and I went over. I was too drunk to read in the phone book, but I just dialed up, and an operator answered, and I said, Would you get me Alcoholics Anonymous? She said, Where do you live? And I told her.
And she called the North Hollywood Clubhouse. They answered the phone, and they showed up that evening. They were at a meeting, and they had to round up some people to make a 12-step call. Now, I ran in and tried to doll up a little, at 170 pounds, put on some makeup, and by the time they got there, black mascara was just raining down. I cried a lot, you know. I hadn't washed my hair in weeks. It was just horrible, and they came in, and they started talking to me.
One lady had been sober nine years, one man five years, and one girl three months, and you wouldn't want to talk to anybody but that girl who had been sober three months. It's inconceivable that anybody can stay sober five, nine years. The court had taken her children away from her because she was an unfit mother, and I said to her, How do you stand it? How do you keep from drinking? And she said the most prophetic thing that I had ever heard in my life, and I had heard it all my life, but she said, I do it a day at a time, and I had heard that, but you see, my higher power didn't make me receptive until that moment of surrender, and they said to me something else that I had never heard.
They said, You don't ever have to feel this way again, and they left. They suggested I take the booze out of the house. They said, You don't keep a rattle. The House, They Said, You Don't Keep a Rattlesnake in Your Home, and from that moment on, that
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was my last drink, and my life did a complete turnaround, again, it was most difficult, I attended a minimum, a minimum of five meetings a week for a year and a half, I think when I came into this program, I was subterranean, you know, on the count of, when I quit shaking and then I was going to meetings, the first thing that I wanted to do was to impress upon these old timers how brilliant I was, and that I did have some knowledge about AA, and that I knew about it before they even had traditions, and that I would discuss this with them, fill us up, and they would say things like, if you're so damn smart, how come you're a grunk, or leave your head outside, that's what got you here, and there are a lot of people that are too smart to make this program, but ain't anybody we found that's too dumb to make it.
I suggested to them that they didn't know who I was, and that I had several degrees, a doctorate of jurisprudence, and one old man said, I know something that has a lot of degrees, it's a rectal thermometer. That was the kind of loving, tender care that the old timers showed me, but I want to tell you something, thank God for that, because they gave me what I had to have. They treated me the way that I had to be treated.
They had to absolutely squelch and stomp and devastate all of the insane and sick ego that I had. And I had to start deprogramming my mind, and I had to start learning all over. As I look back, it seems to me now that the success in this program is a complete, and Dr. Sopocesic, in the doctor's opinion, talks about people who recover in Alcoholics Anonymous have a complete change in their psyche. To me, in my simple way, that means the establishment of some beliefs and a higher power with the manifestation of a complete change in attitude and in perception.
My whole problem was one of perception, of how I perceive the world out there, and my inability to cope with and handle my living problems. I didn't have drinking problems, I found that out. I had living problems. I couldn't stand being sober. It was so intense. My feelings were so intense, and the suffering was so great that the only relief that I could ever have was to drink. That was the only anesthetic that I had.
So sobriety and living was my problem. Drinking and chemicals were my escape. This business of perception, it's like the two old ladies in the nursing home, and they're sitting there and they're rocking, and their friend, ninety-two years old, goes by on roller skates, stark, staring naked. And the first old lady looked and she said, did you see her? And the second one says, yeah. The first one says, did you see what she had on?
The second one says, no, she's going so fast, but she sure was wrinkled. It has been my perception all along. So the members in AA started to change my attitudes, and they said things like, say the serenity prayer in the morning. I didn't understand that. You know, I have seen, even to this day, people who have taken the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and have developed it into ritualistic cults and metaphysical this and that.
I can't stay sober that way, because I know what my brain is like. Anything I think of more than two seconds is a plot. I've got to keep it so simple, so simple. And when I came in, the serenity prayer meant to me, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Now, to me, that meant that I was an alcoholic, and that I couldn't change that. The courage to change the things I can't.
I didn't even know anything about attitudes and feelings, I didn't know, you know.
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And so to change the things I can meant my drinking habit. They said, you've got to ask in the morning and give thanks at night, and I didn't believe that either. They said, you do it. I allowed those idiotic inferior, intellectual inferior, that had twenty years sobriety, to impose their will on me. I rebelled, I resented, I hated, but I allowed that to happen, because I was so desperate, I was willing to go to any lengths.
There were people in my group that could not pronounce the word anonymity. That upset me a great deal. They had some kind of a rumor going around back then that there was a committee that was going to think about rewriting the big book, and I volunteered for that, because I pointed out that there were some grammatical errors in that book that should be corrected. For example, the word got. You never use the word got.
I explained to them that I was an English major in college, and they said, we don't care if you're a French gentleman. I said, but the word got is improper. It is like a weed in a garden, and it destroys the beauty of the sentence, and I picked up the big book, and it says, you can't give away what you haven't got. I said, this should be changed, and I started rewriting the book, and in their loving, tender way, they explained to me that I sit down, and I shut up, and I listen, and I go to meetings, and I do what I'm told, and it worked.
It worked for me. I don't think, for me, that I, in that period of time when I was going to all of those meetings, I didn't really have a handle on this program. I was just going to meetings, just going to meetings and learning. Trying to change my attitudes was like trying to move a cemetery, you know, and I just had to do it a little at a time, and the only way that I could change was to get the spiritual beliefs, the spiritual beliefs that were necessary.
There is a scene in Alice in Wonderland, and the Cheshire Cat is talking to Alice, and they are at the crossroads, roads run everywhere, and Alice says, which road shall we take? And the Cheshire Cat says, well, where are you going? And she says, well, I don't know. And the cat says, well, then it doesn't make any difference. And that's the way my life had always been. I had no purpose, I had no goals, I had no objectives, I had no reason for living.
In a sense, I lived twenty-four hours at a time, and that was just to survive with drinking. Every day, every day, every day. Then I came to this program, and it's like the story of the old farmer back home and the traveler drove by, and the traveler couldn't find the town that he wanted to drive to. So he said to the farmer, where is such and such a town, and the farmer told him. And the traveler said, well, I was lost.
And the farmer says, Nasser, you ain't lost, you just need direction. So I came to AA, and I got a sense of direction through a psychic change, a change in my attitudes, a change in my spiritual beliefs, a complete surrender to my higher power, whom I choose to call God. I returned to Oklahoma and became employable, became the Assistant Attorney General for the state in the criminal division, and then I served there for a year and a half, and I was appointed to the state bench as the first woman in our history that had ever received such an appointment.
And I was going to meetings, and I was sponsoring people, and I was doing all the things that we were supposed to do. But suddenly, my life fell apart, the man that I was married to came in, wanted a divorce,
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and I had to sit down and do an inventory, a marriage inventory. That night, when those three people came into my living room, they made a statement. They said, you will either grow together on this program, or you will grow apart. And that's very true, because the changes had come about in my life. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't remove problems from your life, it teaches you how to deal with them, that's all.
They're not such big deals. If any of you are new, there's just one thing I want you to remember. One thing, from what I say today, ain't no big deals anymore, ain't no big deals. And I have thought about that day to day to day, in crisis that have come up in my life. Ain't no big deals. And before, everything in my life was a big deal, usually a catastrophe. I was divorced, and I took the responsibility of raising my three children, and those little kids were just raised cutting their teeth on Allitot, Pratine, Allitane, hauling them to meetings, etc., etc.
And we were doing great, we were doing great. And we lived out in the country, and I had no complaints. My life was devoted to them, and I had become the president of Alcoholics Anonymous, I took my mother's place, you know. And so, there was a lawyer who appeared in my court from time to time, and when he walked in, there were sparks that flew. And I don't know what the problem was, and I still don't know, but there was, for some reason, I think that I feared him on the account that he was a lot brighter than I was, and that I would lay awake at night and figure out how he was trying to trick me to commit reversible error, you know, and to get reversed by the Supreme Court.
Outside the courtroom, a hell of a nice guy, hell of a nice guy, but inside that courtroom it was murder. I nearly held him in contempt on several occasions and put him in jail. So, he was a widower and he had four children, and I had thought to myself, now that's what I want to be when I grow up. I would like to be a lawyer that has as much knowledge and is as slick as he is. My dog came in season, my Great Dane, and I had heard that he had a Great Dane.
So I called him up and we considered the possibility of our dogs getting married. He came over, and that night was unbelievable. We took my dog out of the garage. Now Great Danes are right good-sized, and my dog crawled in the back seat of my car, and he turned around to tell me something. In the meantime, a German shepherd crawled in there. I said, get the dogs, and I was screaming, get the dog out of the car.
It's a problem when you've got two dogs that size in the back seat, and we were both trying to get the dogs, you know, and we took the dogs in, you know, we got rid of the German shepherd and took the dogs in, and they did get married, and incidentally they were all German shepherd puppies. And then three months later we got married, and I'll tell you, that started another adventure in my life, because I had heard that he used to drink a lot, and I had from time to time smelled him in the courtroom, and I thought, well, the reason that he drank was because his wife had been terminally ill for a number of years, and she died, and the only problem was that he was still drinking, but I excused that, because, you see, I was an absolute expert in the field of alcoholism, you know, and I knew all the answers, and so we got married, and we combined two families, his four children and my three children, and I'm telling you, it was like tomcats in a tow sack.
It was unbelievable. That was nip and tuck there for about a year and a half, and I used to go to meetings and I'd say to the guys at the meetings, this guy's a son of a bitch to die married, he's crazy, he's crazy, and he never drank, he never drank, I never saw him take a drink, and I would go through his inventory and take all of his personality traits, and there wasn't any question he was alcoholic.
Now, what do you do with someone who is 100% personality wise, alcoholic, and they don't drink? Personality-wise, alcoholic, and they don't drink, they're really crazy, well, little did I know that every time I would get ready to come to an AA conference like this, he would always become very angry at me, and two or three days before I would leave, he became very angry, and I couldn't figure out why, and I thought the reason was that I was going to an AA conference, now he was going to Al-Anon, and he was talking with a
[00:45:21]
group of pretty ladies in the Al-Anon meetings, and not many men went, and he would go religiously, and he'd come home and get worse. Those meetings didn't help him. I finally decided I wanted him to quit going if he couldn't act right. I'd go to conferences, and he'd become angry before I would leave, and so one Friday morning, my son was to speak at an AA conference in Arkansas, and I got up fifteen minutes late, and he had something snide, and he said, well, if you're going to stay in bed all day, I'd have just gone to the office, and I said, just go to the office, and I grabbed up my children in my car, and off we went to Arkansas, and I knew I was in trouble. I was in emotional trouble. So I prayed. Now, I never did like Al-Anon ladies, let me be up front, because I figured that they could work our program and still drink.
Plus the fact that when you go to AA meetings, and you're a female alcoholic, they look at you funny, like as if you're trying to steal their damned old husband. Who'd want them, you know? And I always felt uneasy around them. But having been around AA and going to conferences and speaking, I started listening, opening my mind a little bit to what the lady said, and then I thought, they're really sick. Anyone who would live with a practicing alcoholic is sick.
Now, what was really happening in my life was that my husband is what you call a periodic alcoholic. I don't understand periodic alcoholics any more than I understand social drinkers. But they are people who store things up and remember everything that you have done, and they pigeonhole it, and then they wait two months, and then it all comes out, and they justify their drunk. And you can't remember any of those things, but it's up here, and it gives them a reason to drink, and then they will stay drunk, sometimes four or five days, sometimes two days. I've never seen one.
So, that's what he was. And what he was doing was, when I was going on my conferences, I thought he didn't want me to go. Perception. What he was doing was storing it up in his mind, getting mad so that when I left, he had a justification to drink. He had to have a reason. So, I said this prayer. I said, God, I don't know anything about how to release. I don't know anything about any of that almond stuff. But what I want to know is, is why is it that I am unable to maintain a relationship with another human being over any period of time?
What is wrong with me? If it is necessary that I quit going to AA meetings, I can't do that. Because I really believed it was my involvement in AA that was causing all the friction. And I said, I can't give it up, because if I do, I'll drink, and if I drink, I'll die. So, I've got to make a choice. And I said, God, I just want you to take him and do something with him, because I can't handle it anymore. I came back from the conference, all my little kids tagging along behind me down the hall, and we knew, I knew.
They'd seen, you know, Dad left. Now they walked in, opened the closet door, and all his clothes were gone. And he had left, and he left a note on the bed, drunkenly scrawled, they love me, but that he couldn't live with me, and would I please call him. And I called on the telephone, and he was over at the farm. We had a farm. And what had happened was that during the course of this move, while he was moving out, he had been involved in an automobile accident. And he drove an MGB with a rag top, and that car had rolled over several times and skidded 30 to 40 feet on its top. He was not strapped in, he was thrown free in the ditch.
He came to, and he heard voices, and the voices were police. And they said, there's got to be a body around here someplace. Now, he's a slick lawyer, right? So he knows to hide, because they'd get him for DUI. So he hid in the bushes, crawled in the woods, came back up to the house, and the police found him, and asked if he's okay. He said, yes. And they said, we'll be up to get a report. So he ran out in the woods again and hid. It's bright thinking.
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Got his daughter to pick him up. She took him to the farm, took the truck keys away from him. And I called him, and he was drunk. I said, I've been asking, are you hurt? Well, no, I don't think so. He says, but I haven't had anything to eat in three days. So I called the Al-Anon ladies, because my deal was to go over, write the script, this is what you're going to do, by God, this is what you're going to do.
The Al-Anon ladies gave me some different advice. They said, you don't do anything. I said, what do you mean? Don't you understand? You don't do anything. So they said, when he tells she's hungry, tell him to go beg some food. So I said, go beg some food. He said, well, I haven't had any coffee. I said, go beg some coffee. Up and down the road with the other farmers, just beg. So he decided he needed to drink, had no transportation. Now, you talk about the insanity of alcoholism. He decided he was going to ride a tractor down Main Street in a very metropolitan, suburban town and get whiskey.
Somehow or another, I don't know, he says to me on the telephone, I think you'd better call Alcoholics Anonymous. And I said, you call. He said, well, broken glass is in the rack. I said, tell me who you want, I'll give you the number. You call. And he made his call. He said, well, next day. He said, would you call and tell him that I'm sick and I can't be, I can't go to work. He's a senior partner in this law firm. Al-Anon's taught me this. I said, you don't lie. So I called the law firm, answered the phone. I said, Henry's at the farm, he's wrecked the car, and he's drunk.
He came into the program and he has now been sober eight years. During the course of my living in AA, I've had a lot of growth that has been a result of pain. I have never grown simply because I decided I would do it that day. The most difficult thing that has ever happened to me happened to one of us, 14 years sober, other than my surrender to this program in the beginning. The 14-year event that transpired and continued to take place in my life lasted three years. It's the hardest thing that I have ever done, the most impossible, the most unnatural.
My youngest daughter was in high school and became addicted to chemicals. And unlike your speaker last night, I decided that the thing for her to do was to go to a Baptist high school. So I put her in the Baptist high school and she was expelled, not allowed to graduate, because the Baptists put their kids in the Baptist high school and they're all smoking dope. So she was thrown out of that high school and she did get her certificate, her degree. So then I decided I'd put her in Oklahoma Baptist University because she was having some problems.
The only thing is that the other Baptists put their kids there for the same reason and they all got to that school and they went crazy, just crazy. She didn't make her grades. I made every mistake that a parent can make. My motive was good. It was out of love. And I didn't realize that I was killing her. She didn't make her grades. I withdrew her from that university and I put her in another university.
She flunked out her first nine weeks. I picked her up with her clothes in a cardboard box and I brought her home and I didn't know what to do. We had a family council meeting. I didn't like treatment centers. Her brothers decided that's where she needed to go. She went and she couldn't make it to the treatment center. So I took her down to stay with some friends of mine in Norman with a commitment that she would live there and go to AA meetings for six months.
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She did that. She kept her commitment. She picked up her six month chip and she disappeared. I had no idea where she was and she showed up right before Thanksgiving and she was living out of her car. I asked her to come back home that we would enroll her in school again. We put her back into school and it became necessary for me to have to ask her to leave the house because of her conduct and her behavior and back into drugs as heavy as before. Then I got her a job knowing that I had thrown her out of the house. I got her a job. I rented her an apartment. I bought her furniture and I bought her a car. Don't ask me. You just do it.
I was sicker than she was. This whole thing of alcoholism and chemical dependency is so insidious that it is upon us before we even know. Within three months she had lost the job, the car, the apartment. She was on the street. She was selling dope and she was hitchhiking wherever she had to go. She's a beautiful child, kind of fragile, shiny blue eyes, blonde hair, frail, pretty little thing. I knew she was going to die. The most difficult thing that I have ever had to do since I have been in this program was to be able to surrender her.
For those of you who are in Al-Anon, it is one thing to surrender a hairy-legged old man and quite another to surrender your own baby that you carried and nurtured. I couldn't do it. I could not surrender that child to God. That went on month after month and I went to Al-Anon meetings and I tried and I prayed and I tried. I didn't tamper with her life nor did I interject myself or my feelings into it. I couldn't get her out of my mind. Every waking moment I was controlled by my fear of what would happen.
Finally, finally one night I was able to pray a simple prayer and the reason I say this is because there may be some of you who have the same problem and you can't let them go. You can't let your kids go. And the prayer that I was able to pray and it was a greater surrender than my alcohol surrender because it's unnatural for a mother to give her baby up. It's alien to our nature to let our kids go.
I was able to pray the prayer. God take her and do with her whatever you have to do. I knew she could be dead in the ditch, mutilated, maimed. I knew all that. She could overdose. I knew all that. She had been in fights. She had come home all beat up. I said take her and do whatever it is that you've got to do. But I said let me condition this prayer with only one request and that is keep her breathing because if she's breathing she's salvageable.
Her birthday came and went. I sent her nothing. I didn't have any idea where she was and in August about a week after her birthday she called in the middle of the night hysterical and that six months time that she had been exposed to your fellowship and what you had taught her. She said mama I will go to any lengths I have got to turn my life around. I will do whatever it takes. And I picked her up a couple of days after that because I did not, I had controlled and run her by for a long time.
And that baby picked up her two year cake this year. It has been an amazing wonderful thing for me. The miracles in my life. People say to you from the podium, you have a choice. You have a choice as to whether you're going to drink or not drink. I disagree. I don't have that
[01:00:05]
choice. I have a choice as to whether I'm going to live or whether I'm going to die. They say, I have had all of the whiskey that I could ever drink. I have no more drunks that are left in me. I disagree. For me, I have a lot of drunks left in me. I'm in good physical health. I have a lot of hell-raising that I can do if I should be so unfortunate as to have to go back out. But my problem is that I don't know whether or not I'll have another recovery. And it was so difficult for me to get here. I am not willing to take that risk. The God that I have come to believe in is not a punitive God. It's a loving God.
It's a God that is not childish, but is childlike. My conception of God was always one, as I learned it in my church, was one whereby if you were good, you were rewarded. When I was good, when I was little, my parents rewarded me, and they bought me an ice cream cone. And that's the way I thought God was. If I was a good person, I would be rewarded. And when I became a bad person, there would be nothing but punishment. And that's the kind of God, if I believed in any, that I came into this program with. And through that second step, my spiritual beliefs changed. And as a result of their changing, my perception in living changed. I don't have any choices now. That's the amazing thing. You get to the point when you're sober a while, I don't have any choices. I don't have any choice as to whether I want to be a good guy or a bad guy. I don't have any choice as to whether I want to have a good day or a bad day. It is imperative to me that I've got to work the program to survive. It is imperative that I have got to carry the message. I don't have any choices. And when I get crazy and screwed up, it's when I think I've got choices. It's living or dying. I have a zest, a zest to live now.
I want to close with one story that's meant a lot to me. There were some young people who lived in a tribe that was governed by the sages, the older, wiser people. And as young people often do, they want to challenge the wisdom of the older sages, the leaders of the community. So the young people got together and they said, we are going to trick the wise old man, and we're going to catch a bird, and we're going to ask him what it is. And he's going to say it's a bird. And we're going to say, ah, but is it alive or is it dead? And if the old man says it is alive, we'll break its neck and kill it. And if the old man says it's dead, we'll let it go and it will fly away.
And so they went to the old man and they said, old man, old man, what is this? And he said, it's a bird. And they said, is it alive or is it dead? And he paused and he said, it's up to you. So my friends in this fellowship, living or dying, it's up to you. Thank you. Yvonne, that was really worth getting up for and gushing up. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of the Lakeside Council, thank you.
Thank you for asking me, or allowing me, I believe it's the way it was, to be your chairman
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and to have the privilege of being a part of this program this morning. And since I have had no instructions because I didn't ask for any, Bill, is there anything that I need to do or should I go to a higher power? Shall we, we are, we are looking forward to Bonnie, certainly. Gosh, I don't know, this is, this is heavy day, baby, so get set. We will stand and be dismissed and then we'll join up here in just a little bit and have the privilege. Ten or fifteen minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes, and I got that from the real horse's mouth. Our 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.
Amen.