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Source: DICOBE-00600 – Dee M – SUMATANGA CONF – 1980-06-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00600-dee-m-sumatanga-conf-1980-06-15.mp3 Duration: 00:59:35
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I'm a member of Al-Anon. My name is Dee. Hi, everybody. You all look good. You smell good, too. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be anywhere. After having lived in an alcoholic situation, I really am. I'm glad to be in Alabama. This is where my husband's family grew up, in Alabama, in Selma. I was hoping there would be someone here from Selma, and I haven't met them yet, if they are. I want to thank you for inviting me to come.
It's been so good to see some of my friends of longstanding, and when I came, I wasn't sure I'd know but two. And I have met a great many that I've known for a long time, and it is such a joy. I'm sorry I messed up your program. I had a big decision to make, whether to get the only plane I could get out of here, which was in the morning, or stay over. And then, after I met my guardian angel at the airport yesterday, I was rather sorry I didn't plan to stay over, because I think he would have looked after me, wouldn't you, Raleigh?
But then, that might not have worked either, because when we got back here from the airport, I noticed some of the girls eyeing us, just as jealous as they could be. And as a matter of fact, when they said, how did you and Raleigh get along? I thought they were getting kind of personal. But you know, in the Bible, God promises us that he will send an angel, his angels to watch over you, to take charge of you.
And I feel like that Raleigh was my angel yesterday, and I thank you. I thank you for all of your kindnesses that you have shown me. You even gave me a speaker's ribbon, and I decided to put it on tonight in case there was some doubt when I finished. So here we are. I would like for you to think that I was a beautiful, brilliant child, child prodigy, a child of rich, well-traveled parents, but I wasn't.
I was a child, all right. I fitted in that category. I was shy. I'm still shy. And if you don't believe it, stick around, because it comes out. I have not outgrown that. I guess I'll be shy for the rest of my life in some respects. I don't worry about that anymore, particularly. I get nervous, like now. And I carry my books and my glasses in case I have to read. But I grew up in a family, the second child, first daughter of a family of seven.
My parents were what we would call today undereducated. They were as educated as their neighbors. We were poor. I heard a great deal about depression at the time I was a child. We never went hungry and we didn't get cold. And so there was a lot to be thankful for. But I came to be grateful for this later. As to being a pretty child, which I always wished I could be, I remember as a small child crying because I was ugly.
And all I could see when I looked in the mirror was the scar on my face that had happened when I was a very, very tiny child. And I have friends who say they've never seen it. Those are the people who love me. Now, it doesn't make any difference whether you're really pretty or not. If you think you're not pretty, you aren't pretty. And that's where, you know, as I look back on pictures as a child, I didn't look so bad.
I really didn't. But that's the way I thought, and that's some of the negative beginnings that I had. My family, my parents were a loving, fine, respected set of parents.
[00:05:00]
They were moral people. They loved me with a love that would not let me go. They did not give me much freedom as I grew up. And I didn't understand this, and I thought it was because they didn't trust me. I later found that it was out of their own fear of what might happen to me. And being the first daughter, I can understand it pretty well now. It was their means of protection. I was not allowed to date until I was 16.
And my goodness, the way it is now with 16-year-olds, a lot of them have been married by that time, sometimes more than once. So I am grateful today for the way I grew up. I was, as a result of being the oldest child, oldest daughter, often sent to look after family or friends who were ill or who needed help simply because my mother was tied down with small children. So they taught all of us to be caring for other people.
I'm grateful for this. Being a family that was loved, I have learned, even since Al-Anon, especially since Al-Anon, that there is no love without an element of justice. So we were disciplined, and I'm grateful for that. Now, there were times when I thought the fences were too high and the restrictions too strict, and I felt strangled. But I know it was for a reason. I graduated from high school and went into a school of nursing.
I was a good nurse. I worked in an operating room as a surgical nurse after I graduated. And it was during this time, the time I was a student, that I met Bud. Now, I had dated a lot of people. I had never been close to marriage, never really thought about it, never been that enamored with anyone. But there certainly is something attractive about drunks. Now, no one knew that he had a drinking problem.
But there is something very attractive about alcoholics. And the more of you I meet, the more I realize this. He brought a patient, when I was a junior student, he brought a patient in from one of the local universities, and I admitted this patient. And this was a conversation that was related to me later, and sometime later, because I really wouldn't have bought any of it if I'd heard it then, the patient to my future husband.
I'm going to date her when I get out of here. And then Bud said, Jack, you can't get well that fast. I'm going to marry her. So you see, I was in demand early. Well, that wouldn't, as I say, wouldn't have gone over very well if I had heard it. And we did not date for a good little while, and I never dated Jack. But he says today, we've been friends for a long time, but he says today the best thing he ever did was to get the two of us together.
I wasn't so sure of that for a lot of years. But anyway, we dated. Now, you know the uncanny thing about this, of course, this I found later to be very, very embarrassing. Here was this arrogant somebody who said he was going to marry me, and he was still married to someone else, and I didn't know anything about that until after we, you know, time had passed and we had been dating, and I found this out.
And here we had been sashaying around the country club, and he was introducing me to his friends and his family's friends, and they all knew about him and I didn't. And I thought after we became, after he was divorced and we were getting married, I thought those people will never, you know, and never accept me because one of the things that nice girls didn't do was date married people or people who'd been married.
Now, you see, I came from an era different from what is socially acceptable now, but that's really the way I grew up. There were so many things that nice girls didn't do, and I heard about it all of my life.
[00:10:00]
And these were things that I understand now are called now fear tactics, manipulative efforts to keep their little girls morally straight. And that's okay, you know, if it works, if it keeps your head on straight until you're old enough to make decisions, I guess that's all right. I have tried, we have tried not to do that with our children. But I also know that all of us do the best we can do with where we are and what we have to do with, and this is where my parents were.
That was the best they knew at the time with what they had to do with. Bud and I married after a two-and-a-half-year courtship, so we did not rush into anything. And we, I never saw him have too much to drink. But one time during that time, and again, we were at the country club. The country club was something new to me because I didn't grow up in that environment. And I was terribly embarrassed that he was obnoxiously tight.
And I did not allow him to take me to the door. And we double dated, and his friend had to take me to the door because I just really looked down my nose at people who drank liquor. And, you know, I guess I was destined to marry an alcoholic and have to come to grips with that kind of attitude. Self-righteousness can kill you. It really can. But that was just one of the things. I never looked at it as being self-righteous.
That's just one of the things I was never going to be involved in. I never had a highball, I was telling somebody today this, until after we were married. And, but the thing about it was that why would I be humiliated or embarrassed because he had had too much to drink? That's sick to begin with. I had to get into Al-Anon to learn that you don't have, you're not responsible for anybody else's behavior.
You're not responsible for other people's decisions. Why does one take on other people's problems like that? No point in my getting humiliated. It's something he has to, a consequence of his behavior that he must assume. No one thought any less of me because he had too much to drink. It was obvious I wasn't drinking. It probably was obvious that I was looking down my nose at him, though, which tells you a whole lot.
I'm convinced that you can get just as drunk on self-righteousness or fear or resentment or bitterness or self-pity, any of these character defects that we have, as the alcoholic ever gets on booze. And I have stayed inebriated for longer periods of time from self-pity, for instance, than he ever did on one episode with a bottle. And I think perhaps in many respects it's more devastating. It really does something to one's personhood, and I came to know about that.
My family was not very pleased that I was marrying someone whose marriage had failed. The thinking was, although they never condemned him and they care a great deal for him, their thinking was that if he was not successful in one relationship, how could he be responsible or successful in the next one? And I really was terribly naive. I did not know anything about alcohol, as a matter of fact. I grew up in a society where social drinking was not acceptable.
We were not part of what is referred to as a Bible Belt. It just was not done. Maybe they were too poor to drink. Now, the interesting thing is that in the years since Bud has been sober, we've had two deaths in my family as a result of alcoholism. Both of them were suicides. My brother-in-law at the age of 36 and my daddy's youngest brother. And this in itself tells me that we weren't from a real whole situation, that there was some emotional problems within the context of our family life.
But somebody in my family also needed to have this message. to have this message. Now, another interesting thing that has happened as a result of those two deaths
[00:15:04]
is that a child from each one of those families has lived with us. One was there three and a half years and went to school. Another one for four summers while she was in college. And she was there and worked as a secretary in my husband's office to make enough money to go on to school. Now, she could hardly stand it. She was the one whose father committed suicide and she could hardly stand living at our house until she got used to us because we taught program all the time.
And it just did not suit her. But she was in a bind. She had to listen. She just graduated from law school last year. She is sober in AA now for, what, five or six months, going to meetings every day. So that's probably why she couldn't stand to hear what was going on. Now, she did not drink at that time, but she was a product of an alcoholic situation. She was as we all are. Those of us who come in contact with the alcoholic are affected in many respects.
And oftentimes we don't know how until way down the road and it catches up with us. So we need to be introduced to a program that will offer us some alternative as problems arise in our lives. But I'm grateful to her for what is happening. I'm grateful to God in AA for what's happening in her life. I hope we'll have a chance to really sit down and do some visiting. She's on the West Coast now. When Bud and I were married, the fences were down for him because he had been regulating his drinking, I came to find out.
Not knowing anything about alcoholism, I did not know that he was regulating his drinking. He didn't know he was regulating his drinking. He knew it didn't suit me. And he knew that I wouldn't have much to do with him if he continued drinking. But once we were married, and shortly thereafter, like four months, he started drinking and he just went to hell fast. I mean, really. You can't regulate your drinking but so long.
And I have been told that alcoholism progresses, you know, whether you're drinking or not. And when you start again, you don't start where you left off. I mean, you don't start that day. You start where you left off with that last drink. And he just went down real, real, real fast. And I started all the manipulative efforts that I knew about. The crying and the arguing and the begging and the rational discussions that only those of us who are married to alcoholics have.
Except they're not rational to anybody except those of us who are doing it. But it makes sense to us that we could talk them into sobriety. Love is no match for the desire to take a drink. I did not know that then. I know that for a fact now. I thought he didn't love me. I thought I was responsible for his drinking. He told me so in very subtle ways from time to time. Well, I thought everything. I really felt that if he had married somebody else, he might not drink as much as he drank.
And as time went along, he again regulated. I guess he was a periodic. There were times when he was sober and could do the job. And we were reassured that everything was going to be all right, if we could just get the financial thing straightened out, if he just didn't have so many problems on the job, if the bosses were nicer to him, if I would quit work. Now, that was a good one. And he finally made me quit work, and I still don't know what he would have done if I hadn't.
But he said, if you were just home to look after me. Well, I'd been waiting for somebody to look after me. I was hoping I'd find somebody to look after me. Raleigh, you should have come along then.
[00:20:03]
But he didn't look after me. It seemed that all he wanted to do was to do what he wanted to do, whatever that happened to be at the time. But I became more disturbed and sicker. And I quit work, and it didn't help a thing. We just didn't have two paychecks to live on. We only had one at this point. And I began to become involved in volunteer work and this sort of thing as a means of recreation. We didn't have any recreation.
I didn't find his drinking very much recreation for me because I sat on the sidelines and thought bad things about those people. And that didn't help me either. But I missed work. I did teach some Nurses' Aid classes, and I enjoyed that. We had family illness in our family for several years too. But it wasn't long before I began to know that something had to happen. We had to have some help. And it was obvious that he didn't think he needed any help, but I sure needed some.
I got acquainted with being alone and being left alone. I know what it is to be frightened because I was scared to death. I have been abandoned in hotel and motel rooms in big cities, and here I was a little country girl, and I didn't know where he was. You know, I didn't know where he was until, you know, 36 hours out here and too afraid to get in touch with anybody at home and just afraid and not knowing whether he was dead somewhere or what.
And it really is frightening. I was afraid of his losing the job. I was afraid he was going to die. And he was one of those loonies that played with guns. He's still a gun nut. But he would sit around and look down the barrel of a gun and talk about he'd be better off dead. Well, this creates a lot of anxiety. One day I walked into his bedroom, and this particular time he wasn't moving too well. He reached the point where he really did have to do some crawling to get to the bathroom and various places.
But this particular day I walked in, and he had this revolver pointed down his throat, and he said, you know, if I pulled the trigger, that'd probably be a good idea. And then started talking. And I had just, I was tired. I really was. And I just said, well, if you're going to do it, do it and get it over with. I'm tired of hearing about it. And I turned and left the room and walked down the hall, and I had the most awful feeling of fear because I did not know whether he might.
And I knew that he very well could. And it was sort of like I listened for the shot and I was paralyzed. It's the most frightening thing. I would never tell anybody else to do that. Al-Anon wouldn't teach you to do that, I don't think. But do you know, he never threatened that again. I came home one night from work, and there was a bullet hole in the ceiling. You know, just things like that create a whole lot of fear and anxiety.
And that's hard to live with. This is part of my sickness. I didn't know what to expect. Inconsistent behavior, inconsistent attitudes, promises. I never asked him to quit drinking entirely. Just don't drink so much. Everybody ought to have an opportunity to take a drink, but just don't drink so much. That doesn't work either. There were many other things that bothered me, many other of his behavior aberrations that bothered me.
You know, he was arrested for the drinks robbery. You know, you young people don't know about that, but that was a big deal. And he could have been really set up because there are a lot of people in prison that are innocent, I suspect. But I didn't know where he was then for about five days. And when I found out where he was, now this is irrational on my part because to me it was ridiculous. But maybe it would teach him a lesson.
I know what it's like, too, to come close to suicide myself because this is where I was. We were on a trip to the Indy 500. Again, I was left on the way out there to fend for myself.
[00:25:05]
I was filled with fear. And once we got through the races, the people with whom we were playing that weekend left us. And I just took his gun in my bag and drove out into this country. I don't know where it was, but I was going to finish it. And I still had enough sanity to pray. You see, I had learned to pray when I was a child. I grew up in the church. I came to know a loving God. I really did. But it was as though this God could not deal with alcoholism.
How is that for limiting him? But anyway, I prayed. And I got a specific answer. You know, his parents had been through too much. That was all it was. It was just like big bold print. We got home from that. I never tried to go through that again, but I really came so close. But this tells you something about the disease, the family disease of alcoholism. I was ready to leave before we had had our first Christmas because I was feeling so threatened.
And so I had missed something. I was being saddled with something that I did not understand. I had walked into it with what I thought was wide-open eyes, and I didn't know what I was dealing with. But I started looking for some help, and I found AA. Now, you must understand that this was a long time ago. We've been married 31 years, the 18th. That's this week. Before the end of the first year, I was beginning to look for help and knowing that something drastic was wrong.
I found help for him. Now, he wasn't looking for anything except another drink. But I found AA for him before he had been sober. I mean, before we'd been married two and a half years. And he didn't… I didn't tell him I'd found it. But through his father, this person came to see him. And this friend, who happened to be on the board of directors of the place where he worked, was in a pretty powerful position because he couldn't refuse not to talk to him.
But he said, Your daddy sent me. And his father protected me for a long time. And I had rigged that up. And his father had sent him, but it was because I had been to see him. But I knew the minute that I left that man's office that alcoholism was the problem. You see, we had not put a label on it yet. If I were different, we'd have a good marriage. If he were different, if he'd quit drinking. But he quit drinking, and we still didn't.
So we put a label on it that day. I put a label on it that day. When he got into enough trouble, and his trouble had to do with the law and various things like that, and the job, when he got into enough trouble, then he knew where to turn. I'm grateful to this man who carried the message of AA first to me, then to him, even though he died coming off of a drunk. Although he had some years of sobriety.
But I'm grateful to those who have attempted to help along the way. I'm even grateful to those people in the old auxiliary group of Al-Anon. It was AA auxiliary group. It was not Al-Anon. Who lit, you know, a little spark that later turned into what we know as Al-Anon today. When I began looking for help for me, I went to those groups. I did not find any help for me, but I am still grateful that they were in there trying, trying to find some kind of help for families.
Now, I didn't stay very long with them because it did not suit me to talk about my husband, and this is what they seemed to do. There was no literature available at that time, and discussion about the alcoholic did not reach me. Discussion about the alcoholic did not, was not, was not suitable with me because I had grown up, again, having learned that you don't talk about people.
[00:30:06]
And then he had drilled into me this thing about you've got to be loyal to me. You know, don't you tell mother and daddy because you've got to be, you're my wife and you must be loyal to me. And I thought I was being disloyal when I began to hear these episodes of drinking behavior at these meetings. Thank God we don't do that in Al-Anon. Thank God we have a program in Al-Anon because I don't know of anybody who needs it worse than we do, including you.
I really don't. But we had a lot of illness in our family for a long time and I had, at this point, after he got sober, we had some children. We had two children. These children who were born after he got sober have grown up in Alateen and I am deeply grateful to Alateen because Alateen began to give them a handle on what they were dealing with, although there was sobriety in the home. We were both in the program at this time.
I feel like today that the children during those informative early years were affected more by my behavior than they were the alcoholics because although he was sober and in AA and doing fine, he was on the road, away from home, and I was the one who, when they were little, did not have Al-Anon. See, Bud was sober in AA about eight years before I came into Al-Anon. He's been sober 27 and a half years now and I've only been in, what, something like 19.
And so he got a good start on me. So what brought me to Al-Anon? Things still weren't going to my way. You know, he was sober and doing well and I was hurting like the dickens. I hurt so the marriage was not turning out like what I thought marriage ought to be. He was not being the kind of parent that I thought he ought to be. So these expectations that I was having of him were killing me. They weren't helping him either.
They really weren't. So I came quite accidentally into Al-Anon. I had somewhere along the way prayed for God to show me and bring into my life whatever it was that I needed. And this person who was to be my sponsor came to our town. And the thing that really drew us together was that she was in a prayer group and I was in a prayer study group. That's what brought us together, not alcoholism. But she was in Al-Anon and she was a cagey gal.
And when she left, I was in Al-Anon and I've been every week since then. And during this period of time, it had really gotten started. And Al-Anon really began in a vital way with that girl coming to Roanoke at that time. And I will always be grateful to her for that. But she served as my sponsor for a long time and even though it was a long-distance sponsorship, we did a lot of writing and a lot of calling.
And then I found sponsorship closer home and I get it from all ages now, AA, Al-Anon, and L-Team. And I can get it from the very new and I can get it from those who've been in for a long time. And I get it often and I get it told to me straight. And I have been trying to practice honesty for a long, long time. But that was the beginning of the opening up of my life. That was the beginning of my finding out who I am.
I'm one of these step-people. I really am. The steps made sense to me before anything else in Al-Anon made sense to me. The slogans didn't mean anything to me. The serenity prayer, the only thing the serenity prayer meant to me was God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and I knew I couldn't change the fact that we were in an alcoholic situation. But boy, if you don't start behaving, there are some things I am going to change.
And it came across pretty much as a threat. Oh boy, if you don't behave, you're going to know it. And that's no way to be. And that's no way to be. So nothing in the program really meant anything to me until I started working the steps. And they are not, they're very simple.
[00:35:04]
But some of us are too smart. And I thought, it's all so elementary. And I've been hearing so much of this. But boy, it's not elementary when you start practicing, I found out. But I never began to really know who I was and what made me tick until after I'd been through the first written inventory and gone over it with a sponsor. And I began to see what Bud had been having to deal with. You know, I'd been caught up in what I'd been having to deal with all these years.
Those of us, I won't say those of us, I have to speak for myself. I thought I was a very unselfish person. I have learned since I've been in this program that I am and have been one of the most selfish, self-centered people that ever walked down the road. And I didn't know it, along with my self-righteousness and all the other things. I began to learn so much. I began to see negative patterns that began forming when I was a child.
Resentment. I've often said that the first time I went through that fifth step and talked about that string of resentments which went back as far as I could remember when I didn't get my way about something or when the world didn't revolve around me, it was like opening up a whole string of paper dolls. And I used to play paper dolls when I was a child. It really did, and it went all the way back to my earliest remembrance.
So I had a lot to deal with when I got here. And when I began to work on this program, I did not have as much time to find fault in him. Now, it's interesting to me even now that when I look at that, that we were getting along better at that time than we ever were before, you know, prior to that time. Everybody was saying, you know, what a marvelous family they are. Best-looking couple on the dance floor and, you know, that kind of thing.
They didn't know how I was hurting, and they didn't know what a phony I was. They really didn't. But they, you know, I don't have to phony it up anymore. I am what I am, and I like what I am, interestingly enough. I had really never liked me, and I am beginning to like me. And I like what I do, and I like my place in the world, and I like my place in the program. I like being Bud's wife. I like being the mother of his children.
And that's saying a whole lot because I thought, man, there must be something more to life than this, and I thought that for a long time. I got into service work fairly early after I got into Al-Anon. I'd had a lot of training in leadership work. I guess I was qualified for it. We had found through testing, I was telling someone last night that we found out that the four of us are all managers. And finding that out, we discovered while we were always at each other's throats, we were trying to run each other's lives for a long time.
Just knowing that we all have managerial ability has been helpful because now I don't have to get you straightened out or you straightened out. I can use the managerial ability in creative ways. So I had been doing this thing in leadership in the community, and I still do it, and that has been very, very helpful to me. So I got into service work after I got a good chunk of Al-Anon under my belt, and I liked that.
Al-Anon was very, very young in the state. We actually didn't have any structure. We were just beginning to get, we had our first delegate who was on the experimental basis at this time, and so it was wide open for development. Al-Anon was just really being birthed in Virginia. It has been one of the most satisfactory things in my life
[00:40:00]
to have been able to work at service level. My favorite is still one-to-one across the table, and I'd rather do that than anything. I have worked in all areas of service. I have loved all areas of service. I have served as an Allotine sponsor, which I loved. I grew a lot. I learned a lot from them. I'm still learning from them. They have so much to offer, and I am grateful for the two that spoke this morning, LaDonna and Victor.
And I thought, what would have happened if Allotine had not come into his life? But then I thought, what would have happened to any one of us if the program hadn't come along? This is the most magnificent program in the world, I believe, and I believe, too, that it is influencing more people in the world than we may ever know about. People aren't even conscious of how AA and Al-Anon, Allotine, are influencing the whole world, the Church.
It's amazing. I've been in Church all of my life, and I love the Church. I am an elder in the Presbyterian Church, a membership of 1,500 plus, and I love it. Bud and I, in recent years, have been in leadership, in teaching, in leading some groups. They don't realize how much AA and Al-Anon they're getting, but they just love it and they keep coming back. And the interesting thing is that we practice in this program what I've been learning about in the Church all of my life and was just looking for a group with whom I could work and learn and share.
We are even doing some of this in the Church today, so the Church is being influenced by AA and Al-Anon. Most people around our town know we're in the program. We get calls from everywhere. We do a lot of 12-step work. A lot of people end up at our house. I've often said they come out of the cracks. I'm sure it's that way with your place, too. But it's a joy. A joy and a challenge, and if I don't get to my meetings, I can't make it.
I have never decided during all of these years that I wanted to try anything else. I've never decided that I had graduated. I've never decided I was going to not go for a while. It has been a vital part of my life. It's that thing that I look forward to every week, and even though I get so tired sometimes, I have walked into a meeting literally so tired I could hardly sit down in the chair only to be completely revived and renewed and restored before I left that place.
Well, now, there's something working in a situation like that. God is at work in this program. Our higher power is at work in this program. I choose to call him God because I came to know him as a small child, as a heavenly father, and having had a daddy, an earthly father who was a dependable, loving, caring father, it was a natural thing, it seems to me, for this transition to happen at a time when I needed to come to depend upon this invisible heavenly father at some point in my youth.
And I have been grateful for that. I've often thought that if I had not been reared the way I was, if I had not been loved as a child the way I was, that I might have gone under very rapidly when I got into this alcoholic situation. I don't know what would have happened to me. But once you have experienced love, it is easier to begin to give it away, to begin to share it, To begin to give it away, to begin to share it, to know that it's real.
This is what I found so beautiful in this program.
[00:45:01]
I didn't like hearing, I love you so much when I got here, because I thought it was funny. It did something to me. I felt uncomfortable with it. I felt like, well, if it's that good and if there's that much love around here, why isn't it coming home through a bug? I've been in this program for a long time, and it's not happening. You know, one of the, and I do believe, I do believe that we need to, I need to, as I begin to get this thing, whatever it is in this program, that I need to begin to carry it home to the people around me first.
We had been in the program, Buddy had been in the program a long, long time, and I was in Al-Anon before he ever made any apology to me. And I kept wondering why, when the steps, his steps, you see they were still his steps, his steps said you make amends, why he had never made amends. Now, I had never taken into consideration that he was making amends in demonstration all the time, and had been from the very beginning.
He really was. He was still supporting us, even. But I didn't, I was so caught up in my, some preconceived notions that I had of what he ought to be doing. I'm trying to get away from some of the oughts and the have-tos that I grew up with, and that I have imposed upon myself, and those that I have allowed society to impose upon me. Because you're in a certain social structure, you ought to behave in a certain way.
And you ought to go to this, and you ought to go to that. And you ought to belong to this, and you ought to belong to that. And, you know, that takes away my freedom, whatever freedom of choice that God has given me. And I believe that that's the single thing that God has given to each one of us, the power of choice. To choose what I need to do. And he has blessed me with some ability, some power, over the past years to make some choices.
Now, the choices I make really may not suit some of the people around me, but you know that's their problem. And for such a long time, I was so concerned about what they were going to think, how they were going to react, whether they were going to like me, that I could not make choices that I knew were right. And it is the most freeing thing to be able to say, Today, I do not choose to go that way.
Today, I do not choose to do that thing. Because for me, it's not the best for me. I have found one other thing, too, in recent times, and that is that when it comes to choices, the most difficult choices of all are those choices between the good and the better. And I find that those better ones are sometimes the hardest to make. When it's easy and soft to make this good choice here, and you know you're going to get a lot of approval, people are going to admire you and pat you on the little head and say how great you are.
It's so much easier to take that route than it is to take the better choice, and the road's going to be tougher, and you're going to have a lot more within to deal with reactions. I'm talking about negative reactions, some more fears, more dependence upon a higher power. The longer I'm in this program, the more I become dependent on him for everything, the very breath I breathe. Man, I can't make it.
I can't make it without him, and I can't make it without you, because he operates through you, and it's that simple. And I think I would just curl up and die if I ever thought I had to give you up.
[00:50:00]
I really do. I don't expect ever to have to. I heard Bill W. one time make a reference to maybe this fellowship would have to go underground at some point. Do you remember that? And that scared me to death. That concept had never entered my mind, and I don't think we will. I sure hope we don't, but I'll be underground with you if we do. I sure will. Our children have been greatly influenced and blessed with this program.
They had a hard time identifying when they became of age because they had never lived in a drinking situation, but they stuck with it. Our son, once he went away to college, began to find that there was an exciting life out there, and when he came to himself after some trouble of dealing, playing with the chemicals in the booze, we found out, he came, he knew where to come to. He came to us, and we were grateful for that.
And he's all right. He finished college, and he's in a graduate program, but working full-time and only able to take one course at a time. This is his choice. He says that since it's his choice, it's the only time in his life he's ever really enjoyed school. This time, he's being married next Saturday afternoon at 5 o'clock. This time next week, I'll be a mother-in-law. I really hope that I can be the kind of mother-in-law that Bud's mother has been to me.
I have failed to say anything about his family. They have loved me all of my life since I've been in that family. His mother has been ill for two years now, and that's one of the reasons he could not come, because his sister was away this week, too. But that's one of the great blessings, and I did not realize until after I got into this program that lots of families do not feel that way about their daughters-in-law.
And she has supported me. They've supported me emotionally and oftentimes financially during his illness. And sometimes I think they kind of chose me over him, and I like that. Maybe that was my ego. And you know that my own family never criticized him during all of his drinking. They did not live in the same town, so they were able to avoid knowing a lot of what was going on, but they never condemned him.
They care a great deal about him. And my father told me an interesting thing before he died. He was sick for several months, and I spent a great deal of time with him as I did Bud's father before he died. He was sick for about five years. But Daddy said when I was a baby that he and his buddies were drinking on the job. And see, they never had any drinking around my home and in my family, as I mentioned.
But he said they were drinking on the job, and one day he left the job in the middle of the morning and headed out to get some alcohol because they didn't have any. And he said before I got, he described the place, before I reached the gate, it came to me that if I went after that whiskey, I would never be able to put it down. And he said, I never went. I turned around and went back to work. But God was working in a beautiful way in his life that saved him, perhaps, from becoming an alcoholic.
So that was interesting for me to find out because, you see, at this point Bud had been sober a lot of years, maybe ten, eleven maybe at this point. But he shared that with me before he died, and we were very grateful. Daddy and I were very, very close. He embarrassed me, too, sometimes because he loved me so good. And I'd go home, even as a mother of young children, and he would just hug me and tears would run down his face when I would leave, and I would think, you silly old thing.
[00:55:03]
And I only lived 75 miles down the road, but he just loved me so good. And I really am grateful for that. But we really are close, were close, and we became closer when I let some of my defenses down and when I began to share with him who I was. That was part of my protectiveness, my defensive mechanisms that I had used to keep people away, to block people out, because I was afraid of risks. In some ways, I'm still afraid of risks.
I'm not nearly as afraid with the people in this fellowship as I am with people outside. But I don't like to become too vulnerable with the world, and I am careful. But I am learning, and I'm trying, and I'm becoming more and more dependent upon the higher power as my security, and to make me secure in relationships, enable me to depend upon him, and take the risks, because a lot can be gained by taking them.
I don't know where we are. I think I've been here a long time, but I really do get carried away with this program. To me, it is the most magnificent thing that has ever happened, the single thing that's happened in my life, because without it, I would not have what I have. We are a family. We've been a family for a lot of years, and we are a loving family. The children, and I didn't tell you about Catherine, but she is a beautiful, beautiful child, grown lady now, finished college three weeks ago, and will go to work at Johns Hopkins later this month.
She has remained in the program since she turned 20, and is very dependent upon it, and it has given her the ability to make choices. It took me a year to get ready to allow her to go away to college, having seen what was happening to a lot of our young people, and seeing what happened to Edward when he was off in a place where there were no restrictions. So I worked for a year at releasing her, and the one thing that enabled me to do that was the fact that she had been in Alateen, and that Alateen being a part of Al-Anon works, and God has shown her, he has taught her certain things and certain principles, and she will in a pinch rely upon them, and I knew that, and I had to operate on faith with that, and they saw her through, and she has often said, and during that first year in particular, she would call home and say, thank you for making me go to young people's, this is a church, Sunday school, and thank you for insisting that I go to Alateen, although I wanted to go, but there were times I wanted to stay home and watch that program.
The Wizard of Oz was really about the only thing, and the Nutcracker Suite, those are the two things that we ever, I believe, let her stay home to see, but she might not have had, she might have missed the whole thing. So this program has been vital in our lives. It remains that. I hope it always will. There is a certain mystery about it, and a certain majesty about it, and if you are new here, stay with it, stay with us long enough until you get a glimpse of it, because once you get a glimpse of it and really begin to see it operating in your lives, whether the alcoholic ever gets sober or not, you will never regret it.
Thank you. I love you, and I don't feel uncomfortable saying and hearing I love you anymore. God bless you.