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Source: DICOBE-00670 – Ruth H – GOPHER STATE RNDP VII – 1980-05-24.mp3 File: dicobe-00670-ruth-h-gopher-state-rndp-vii-1980-05-24.mp3 Duration: 01:16:14
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A long time. And I can tell you a few things about her. I'm not going to tell you her story in any way, shape, or manner, I don't think. But I can tell you a few things that probably she would not tell you herself. And it would help you, I think, to know this. I first met Ruth in 1970 when she came to the World Service Conference as a panel ten delegate from the province of Manitoba. Now I always thought Manitoba was a soft drink or a candy bar or something like that because anything west of Ontario or Quebec I didn't know all that much about. And I was very interested in this lady from that strange part of the country.
And when she stands up you'll see that, you know, you've got to be interested in somebody who is very visible when they're, what, four foot nine, Ruth? She came to that conference and remember that you don't go to the World Service Conference unless you are elected by the Al-Anon members of your area. She was their choice to go. And so she went and she was very visible. She was, in my opinion and the opinion of many of the members of the World Service Office, all of the members of the World Service Office, a very fine delegate.
And though Ruth and I haven't talked about it, I do remember that in her last year she was asked to give a talk at our opening banquet, which was a new tradition, if you will, at the World Service Conference, because that privilege had been reserved for so many years for Bill Wilson. And with his passing we had to find some other way to open our banquet. And Ruth gave one of those early outgoing delegates talks. And I remember it well and what a fine job she did.
Delegates can serve for only three years. And there have been some who have come to the World Service Conference that the World Service Office is very happy that they can only serve for three years. And there are some who leave after three years who are very happy that they don't have to come back and work with that bunch of kooks in New York anymore. It's mutual. It works both ways, believe me. But most of them, there is a sadness when they leave, the feeling that we will probably see them again, but certainly not as regularly, nor will we have the opportunity to work as intimately with them.
Ruth, however, made it possible for us to pick up our relationship all over again on a very intimate basis when in 1976 the province of Manitoba submitted her name as their candidate for the position of regional trustee. And Ruth was elected by her peers at the World Service Conference to serve a three-year term as a regional trustee, which she did. And when she finished in 1978, the province of Manitoba took a look around, shrugged their shoulders, says, oh, what the hell. So they nominated her and she was re-elected and she's back again. And you know what she did? She moved to British Columbia. I guess she'll tell you a little bit something about that.
I hope that you have been able to pick up in these few remarks of mine the great affection that I feel for our speaker this morning. And I was told in no uncertain terms that Chairman Chair, and I think I have chaired, and my time has elapsed, and the rest of it belongs to the little one on my left, and it is with a great deal of pleasure that I present to you your Al-Anon speaker for this morning from the province of British Columbia, my buddy Ruth.
Thank you, Ted. You know, I'm going to be hard-pressed to say nasty things about you this afternoon. A beautiful build-up. My name is Ruth. I am a very grateful member of Al-Anon. I wouldn't like… Hi, good morning. I wouldn't like to take up your time telling you all the Al-Anon groups that I have been a member of. At the moment, I attend the Al-Anon Monday Evening Group in the small city of Mission, British Columbia. I'm very grateful
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to Lorne and to the committee of the Gopher State Roundup for giving me the privilege of sharing with you this morning. And there's a little bit of interest there. Lorne phoned me, I think it was in February, and told me that this roundup was going to come about. And of course, this was no news to me because the Gopher State Roundup has always been big in Manitoba, you know, just up north here. And so I said to him, how come you didn't phone me once in the 20 years previously when, you know, you could have got me there at much, about a third the rate it's going to take from British Columbia? And he said, well, you were living too close then. So that's not really the reason I moved to British Columbia, but it was an interesting sideline. And all I have to share with you, of course, is my own story. You know, I look at the theme for this conference, for this roundup, I am responsible.
And wonder, now, what can I say that relates to that? And it comes to me that, of course, my responsibility is the factor which has me here this morning to share with you. And also the fact of the great gifts that Al-Anon continues over the years to offer to me. And one, of course, was to open the door to this conference and to meet new people in Al-Anon, all of whom feel like old friends. It's just the greatest thing.
Two weeks ago, as some of you will recall, was Mother's Day. And I was on my little farm with my daughter and some of her friends in British Columbia. And I live there in a, well, I don't really live, but my space out there is a small 16-foot trailer. And when I went into the trailer on Saturday night, there was a large basket of flowers and a beautiful note which my daughter had given me for Mother's Day. It's a very moving note, and I'm going to share it with you. Because to me, when I reflect on this, and especially after the very fine talk that Mildred gave us last night, and she talked about relationships, and I saw that perhaps another of the tremendous gifts that Al-Anon had given to me was the first half of the first step, that I was powerless, first over my beloved alcoholic, and then that came to be extended to my family members and to all of the other persons in my life.
And I saw that indeed the reason, or one of the reasons, why I enjoy such a fine relationship with our children was a gift of this program, namely that fact that I had learned long ago that I was powerless over our children, that I must respect their right to do with their lives as they chose. And so I'm going to read this note, this Mother's Day greeting that accompanied this gorgeous hanging basket of flowers. It says this, May the 10th, 1980.
Mothering comes in many forms. Your nurturing of me when I was younger, your care and love for the plants and the animals, your compassion and concern for the growth of Al-Anon, all reflect your commitment to life, to joy, to the forces of love. I appreciate you today not as a mother, but as a wonderful woman whose mothering and nurturing capacities have enriched me, my friends, the farm, and much of North America with love and respect. Now, if I had not been given the tremendous gift of this program years ago, it would not have been possible for my daughter to have the kind of respect that you can see she has for me today. And I recognize my great good fortune. In order to let you know how this came about, I have, of course, to go into my story. It's a long story. I've been around this program a long time, and I've been around life a long time, and I just hope that I can stay within
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the bounds of the time limits. If I can't, Marie, you just tell me. Shut up. I knew absolutely nothing about the disease of alcoholism 25 years ago. As a young woman, I was one who liked to drink, knew full well what the ingredients of any given glass that contained alcoholic beverages would do to my frame. It changed me when I was young from a shy, plain, inhibited, heavy-footed Presbyterian girl to something quite the opposite. I became glamorous, or at least I felt glamorous. I became light-footed. I could dance. It changed me. There was magic in it, and I knew it. But I had presumed, of course, that all persons in the world reacted to alcohol the way that I did. And when I met my husband in the 1939-46 war in the city of Ottawa, where both of us were in the armed services, I thought this man had to be one of the most tremendous persons I had ever met because of his capacity to drink.
I, as I said, I liked to drink. I had already, when I was seven years younger, dismissed a young man that I was engaged to because I recognized in the first one that he loved booze more than he loved me. And after about a year or so of that, I broke that engagement. But Huey was another matter. He was a supreme con artist, I guess, and I never recognized until I hit Al-Anon, indeed, what the nature of our problem was. I remember as though it were yesterday, being in a large social gathering, and sort of standing off to the side and watching this man. You know, everybody else was under the tables. They were really, they'd had it as far as the party was concerned, and here he was cleaning up the ashtrays, putting people in taxis. And I thought, isn't that phenomenal? I have never seen anybody with that capacity. And it was great admiration I had, you see, because I was standing there or sitting there just struggling to keep my eyes uncrossed, and here he was. And I thought, that is just the greatest. I've never seen anybody that can drink the way he can. But you know, most of you know, that a few months later, after we were married, that admiration changed to something else. It changed to consternation. And I thought, what have I got myself into here? And I tried with reason, sweet reason, of course, to point out to him the error of his approach to drinking. I would say kindly, you know, most people eat their breakfast. They don't drink it. I mean, in my background, this was the way it was. Everybody that I knew ate breakfast. What's more, you know, it is usual, it is customary to go to a restaurant and eat lunch. You don't just make for the closest bar, you know. And the clincher for all of this little lecture was to look him in the eye and say, and you know, dear, it would be just fine with me if you would come home and we will have a good dinner and then we will go out and have a few drinks. And you know how that proposition went over? Just like a lead balloon, he would just then look at me and say, what is this, you see? And right from perhaps the fourth or fifth month of our marriage, that communication barrier came up, because this was a subject on which we did not see eye to eye and he was not going to listen to what I had to say about it. So I started out way back then with this feeling that, you know, every other subject on earth we can talk about, we can share, but no.
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Well, we moved from Ottawa way out to British Columbia at the end of the war. And there it was that I began to feel just what it was I had got myself into. My husband was a teacher, and he got a job teaching veteran students at a large university in British Columbia. And we were in this kind of rarefied atmosphere of the campus of this particular university. And it was no time at all until people began looking at me.
And this is why I say that I required a program of recovery for myself. Because way back then, this would be 1946, friends, first it would be the wives of my husband's colleagues who would look at me and say to me, Ruth, we don't like it when your husband takes our husbands home to your place to have meetings, because they come home and they have been drinking. They looked at me. I was supposed to do something about this, you know?
And then, within a period of just a few months, they were looking at me again. They never looked at him. They were always looking at me and saying, why don't you make him stop? Can't you see what he's doing? I could see, but we could not talk about this thing. And they put it on me. And way back then, I began to wall myself off, because I was already in this box where we didn't talk about this factor.
I could not get through to this man at all. And that continued. And I can tell you, way back then, too, perhaps 1948, a little story that I will leave with you, because perhaps some of you have driven here, and this little image will give you something to laugh at or to think about as you drive home. My husband would sit up at night, allegedly marking papers. He had a very low chair in our living room, and he would spread the papers all around in a semicircle in front of him.
And behind him, behind the chair, he would have an assortment of bottles, and on the side, a table, a glass or two, you see. And he sat there marking these papers. And I had, even way back then, being a practical person, decided if I'm going to get any rest at all, I go to bed and I go to sleep, because he's doing his thing, and we both can't stay up all night. There was this one night, I heard him come to bed, and it seemed to be very shortly thereafter he got up and went into the bathroom.
And a lot of you maybe identify with me here when I say that I did not just go right back to sleep. I kept one ear open and one eye half open, because heaven only knew what was going to come after this to see, waiting to hear him come back into the bedroom. And he did not come back into the bedroom. Instead, I hear the front door close. And I jumped out of bed, ran to the front door. It was dawn. A lovely sunrise was coming up.
And we lived then in a kind of a U-shaped housing development. Every living room and every bedroom, master bedroom in the whole development, faced onto a long, long sidewalk leading up to the main road. And I look out here, and what do I see? Oh, what a vision I see. There is my husband. He is wearing his black shoes. He is carrying his black briefcase. And behind him are paddling our two black cocker spaniel pups, Bubble and Squeak.
And up the road they are going. Now I say to you, he is wearing his shoes, he is carrying his briefcase, and the dogs are following, and that is exactly what the vision was. My predicament at that moment was this, that in those days I slept in the same type
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of apparel as he did, and I didn't know just what to do. Do I make a dash for it, try and get him? Or will every eye in this enclosure be on me and us? Or do I run back in and get a dressing gown? Now I don't know this long afterwards what happened. But I do know, and I remember well, that the next day when he came home from his teaching, I said to him, do you know what you did last night? He looked at me, no, what did I do?
And I told him what he had done. And he looked me in the eye and said, I did no such thing. Now this is a man that for the next perhaps 20 years denied that he had blackouts, you know, he didn't know what blackouts were, and way back then he was in this state with his alcoholism. Well, as you might guess, things went from that stage on, and the things that happened to me are not in any way different than happened to all persons who love alcoholics and whose lives are entwined with alcoholics, and who are caught up in this bind of no communication, no talking about this.
Needless to say, we did not spend a second term, three-year term at this particular university, and in the next 15 years, my beloved and I took the geographic tour across this magnificent province of British Columbia, which probably most of you know is the westernmost province in Canada, out on the Pacific coast, a very beautiful part of Canada, the California of Canada, we call it, and we did a lot of moving.
And again, there was a factor in this moving constantly that I believe contributed to the need for me to have a program of personal recovery for myself, because I cannot recall an instance where we sat down quietly and discussed whether we would move to such and such a place or not. It was always a crisis situation. It was presented and we were on the way, and every time we moved, hope would spring up in me.
I would think, uh-huh, now this is going to be the time, this is going to be the place, these are going to be the circumstances in which he will be happy, and he won't have to drink that way. Well, you all know what happens to that kind of wishful thinking. It just doesn't come about. But there was an instance once where I guess I was at a very low ebb in my life, and my husband was following his pattern.
When he would get into trouble in teaching, he would revert back to newspaper work, because of course he always had a million excuses as to why he was drinking, and one of them was that, was that those school boards and all that. So he'd go back into newspaper work, and this was one of the phases where we were into newspaper work. And a school inspector came by, who greatly admired my husband, and I was as if I was sitting in a dark room in a hopeless despair, and I heard these words, hadn't heard anything up until these, but I hear the inspector say, you know, H., there are the Queen Charlottes up there, north.
They're marvelous hunting and fishing. You would just love it. And they're just crying for teachers. He said, I think it would be ideal for you, but he says, there's only one disadvantage. There's no liquor outlet up there, and boy, did I come to life, just like a light going on. I hadn't heard anything else, but I had been waiting years and years for this wonderful opportunity, because if we could be somewhere that there was no booze, everything would be ideal, wouldn't it, eh?
Oh, I came to life. We were going there, whether we had to get up on water wings and these two black dogs and make our own way. So up we went to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and I don't know how many of you have spent time up in the northern parts of the country, but you know what I found up there, eh? You know what we found? It is true there was no liquor outlet closer than across the Hecate Straits and Prince Rupert, some hundred miles or so away over the roughest water on the Pacific coast.
But every person in that little island, in those small communities, had a still, in the
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basement, upstairs, the spare room, out in the garage, anywhere. Well, there were two ministers on the island that, you know, I might concede, perhaps they didn't have stills, perhaps they weren't making their own booze, although about the Anglican one, that's the Episcopalian down here, I had my doubts even then. And here we were. This was a real small community, 125 people in the town. If a stray dog came down the road, everybody remarked on it.
And here was my husband, the principal of the school, a pillar of the community, so called, and he was always drunk. So what did I get? I got these looks at me again, a hundredfold from everybody, looking at me. I should do something about this. What kind of a wife am I, letting him misbehave in this manner? And the wall around me grew higher and higher. I could not talk to anybody about this situation.
There was nothing I could say. And around that same time, I remember now, and have always since, looking backward in my inventory, taking in Al-Anon, I remember occasions there in the Queen Charlotte Islands when I was setting the table, because guests were coming to dinner, and not being able to see the table, or the silverware, or what I was doing, because the tears were pouring down my face in such profusion.
And wondering even then, why is it that this sensitive, intelligent, loving man cannot see what he's doing to me? And wondering about it. We moved from the Queen Charlotte, happily, across that Hecate Straits to Prince Rupert. That was our next move. And there our son was born. I couldn't come out of the hospital until my husband was hospitalized. It would be by any knowledgeable doctor today that he was hospitalized for alcoholism, but the doctor then didn't know what was wrong with him, because of course he had the capacity to con even the doctors.
And there it was in Prince Rupert that my own resources began to be threatened. You see, my husband was a teacher, but he was having trouble almost from day one in Prince Rupert. And so he decided that our problems were all economic. I mean, that was what was wrong with our life and our marriage and everything. It was just that we never had enough money, because teachers, you know, they don't make enough and all this sort of thing.
So he had met some buddies in a beer parlor, and these were fishermen, and this was a fishing community, and he was going to go out on the herring boats, and he was going to make a killing, and all of our problems would be solved. Naturally, again, I had no input into this little decision that was made, and I was presented with the accomplished fact, and out goes this man on a fishing boat. They took all kinds of food with them.
I don't think they ever ate it, but they took an equal amount or more of booze, and they sure were into that. On this period of my life, I was cut off, of course, totally from friends. You know, I had this kind of pride and this lack of understanding of my own situation, that even then, when I was left in a strange city with two small children, they were both under school age, I tried to keep up a front.
There were occasions in which there was no money, and I would not, because of my own pride, write to my family in Winnipeg and explain what the situation was. I was singing in a church choir there. I've always been very interested in music and singing, and there were loving and caring people there, and I would never tell them what was going on. Instead, I would lock myself up in this house in Prince Rupert and just cry, because I didn't know what to do.
Because I didn't know what to do. And already, the scene of the bill collectors and the finance companies and so on were after me.
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I tell you, when I came into Al-Anon, perhaps the first, greatest, single gift that was given to me was the fact that the women in that group said to me, Ruth, you're not responsible for your husband's debts. When the bill collectors knock on the door and they ring the phone, you just tell them that your husband is an alcoholic. And do you know, sure enough, the opportunity presented itself pretty fast, and I picked up the phone and I listened to the spiel holding the phone way over here, because I'd heard this a million times, and usually I reacted with great, oh, you know, very indignantly to all this. Out of my own frustration, I couldn't do anything about it.
I let this person go on and on and on, and then I brought the phone back and said very calmly, you know, I'm very sorry. There's nothing I can do about this situation. My husband is an alcoholic. And there was dead silence on the other end. What a gift. I thought, oh, why hadn't I found this out years ago? If only I had known this. It just worked like magic. Now, I really was only learning what alcoholism was and what an alcoholic was, but these people out there in the world, they obviously knew this was a clincher.
They didn't bother me anymore. Tremendously. Way back in Prince Rupert, this would be 1957, I was in this scene. Taking on responsibility, another thing that came to me when I got into the program and in the fourth step and I was looking for some of the good qualities in my character, my personality, and I thought, well, I'm a highly responsible individual, and I put that down as one of my positive characteristics, only to have that shot down by somebody telling me, well, Ruth, you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.
But in Prince Rupert, took the children down to a little garden, little park, and I was really in bad need. And I remember the day very well, putting my hand behind me. There was kind of a little shelf there in an arbor-like thing, and pulling out a book. And that book was the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I looked at it and glanced through it and put it back. Now, I tell you this because way back then, the hand of God was extended to me and I rejected it. Perhaps this signifies why I was one of the wives of alcoholics who never did break the bond between my husband and myself.
But I saw this very plainly later on. Aha, there it was. You could have reached out then, but your pride wouldn't let you. Your pride and your ignorance. And this was my pride and my ignorance. Nothing to do with my alcoholic partner. Well, my husband came back from this wonderful sojourn out on the rough waters. He'd been gone the best part of a year, and I had been sitting in that house without coal half the time. And Ian, our son, the first word he ever said was hamburger. And it's not much wonder because we never had anything but hamburger, non-stop.
He got off tired with his baby food one day and just slapped the whole thing on the floor, and we swear he said hamburger. From overexposure. However, you know, came through that period of time and back comes my husband, and what do you know, this is the time when instead of making money on the fishing boats, the fishermen end up owing the company money. And this was a little bit too much for my husband. And here too was an instance when a professional person, a person outside of our family life, looked at me and put the blame on me. My husband came back. He was in a very bad emotional and mental state.
In fact, he took a gun. I came down from putting the children to bed, and there he was in the living room. I was in the darkened kitchen, and he had this gun pointed at me. And I ran out of the door and up the street to a neighbor.
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She called the police. When I went back into the house when the police had come, what do you suppose I found? The cop says to me, this is a violent man? There he was with Ian in his arms. Ian was our baby, walking up and down the living room floor, singing to him. And of course then, this tremendous shock, I said, I know he is not a violent man, but he's sick or something. He did have the gun. But again, you see, they put the blame on me. What are you doing calling the cops when this man is behaving in this manner? What did they know about alcoholism? Nothing. It was always that I was a neurotic, hysterical wife.
And when I went to the doctor to explain what had happened and to try for a little insight into this incident, he says to me, you should never have let him go out on those boats. Again, it was me, you know. Well, that was almost the end of our family. I did then what I was prone to do for many a year after, and that was to run from the situation. Again, my pride prevented me from being any way honest about it, but I wrote to my mother, who was an old woman then.
And I said, Mother, wouldn't you like to see these grandchildren that arrived so late in your life? Oh, well, I'd just love to bring them to visit you, but of course I just don't have the money right now. Couldn't be honest. So the money was forthcoming, and I tell you, I left Prince Rupert with a great sense of just getting out in time. But it wasn't too many, perhaps three months later, and my husband had pulled himself together, got himself another job. He always could do this. And he phoned me and said, would you come back? And I said, oh, yes.
Oh, yes. This is going to be the time, eh? This is going to be the situation. This is going to be the place now. It's going to be different. So back we went for a little more of the same thing. And, you know, I came to recognize that it would not matter then, and for all the years we were together, what I did. I could lay down my life, and believe me, I made a few attempts to do that, as many of us have.
And it would not have altered his drinking pattern. And yet I believed then, as I believe now, that this man truly loved me and loved our children. I could see in some kind of intuitive way that he was in the grasp of some force that was greater than himself, but I knew nothing about alcoholism. We left British Columbia, came back to Manitoba, which had been my home province, and had perhaps a half a year more of the same kind of behavior which had been going on for many years then.
And I began to crack up. I tell you why I began to crack up, and this I became pretty well aware of the first or second time I tried to do a fourth step, too, because I looked inside myself, and what did I see at that stage in my life? Kind of a three-ring circus. Here I was. I had, of course, realized a lifelong cherished ambition of mine, which was to have my mother share our home in her final years of life. And mother was with us.
Had two young children, and then I had this husband who relied day after day, night after night, on booze to get him through life. And I saw myself as kind of the ringmaster. I was there with this big long whip and trying to keep them all moving. I wasn't really involved. But I was cracking up. And the incident that made me reach out for help for myself was one where our daughter, who was perhaps eight or nine years of age at this time, came from school and made some innocuous remark or statement to me.
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And I went chasing after her with what the kids told me when they got into Alateen. I heard it a thousand times, but I heard it once was the fly swatter, running after this little girl. And when I caught her hitting and hitting and hitting, from inside me at a depth I didn't know existed came this terribly destructive urge I wanted to destroy. And my alcoholic partner had to come and hold me, restrain me. And when I came out of that, I thought, my God, I'm going crazy. Because this is totally outside of our behavior. We never hit our kids. To his everlasting credit, my alcoholic partner never raised his hand to the children. I did. Yes, driven to desperation, I did.
But I knew this was totally foreign to my way of operating and that I was going nuts and that I had to do something for myself or my days as a useful human being were coming to an end. And I was 46 years of age at this time because not being content to do things the way most people do. I had my first child when I was 39 and the second one when I was 43. And here I was, as I say with this, my 90-year-old mother, my alcoholic partner and young children. And my nerves a little worse for wear.
Now, even then, at that period of my life, I reached out. I thought, surely there's somebody out there that knows what's going on inside of me, what to do about this situation. So I went to the family doctor and told him my nerves were bad and I couldn't sleep in one thing and another and that I was worrying about my husband because he drank too much. And this lovely doctor leans across his desk and says to me, I'll tell you what to do. When he gets with his buddies and he's drinking, you just get on the phone and you get him out of there.
Now, I knew nothing about what was going on, what was wrong with our marriage or our lives or something. There was a downhill slide, but I had known for a long time if there was one thing I did not do, it was try to get him away from his drinking buddies. So I had reached out and met with this and I thought, uh-uh, nobody understands. Nobody out there understands at all what's going on inside of me.
Same thing with the minister that I made an attempt to explain the financial situation in our household. He looked at me in the same kind of a way and said, uh-uh, always wondered why such fine women marry such, and he didn't say SOBs being a minister, but that's exactly what he meant, eh? And so, no, he doesn't understand. Nobody understands. I had two friends in Winnipeg, because it's where I had grown up, who were professional social workers. They looked at me on the one occasion in which I did reveal something of what was going on and said, what are you doing staying in that situation, Ruth? You don't have to. You can get out and you can make your own life. Leave him.
Now, I was one of those tied to my alcoholic by the bonds of blood and affection, as it says in the AA Big Book, and I didn't know what was wrong with our marriage, what was wrong with our life, but I could not break the bond. There are other reasons for that. I can't go into them all. They tie in with having lost my father when I was about two years of age and always searching for this beloved father, which I had found in my husband, eh?
But this was the state I was in, and I remember well the feelings I would have when my friends would phone me and say, Ruth, got tickets for a play or a show, things that I'd always shared with them, and I would lie and I would say, I'm sorry, I can't go. You know why I did that? I did that because I had this tight wall around me and I was terrified lest some artist up front on the stage would reach through to where I really lived, and I would just go berserk and I would lie down on the floor screaming. That's the kind of a hold I had on my feelings.
I was functioning on the surface. I thought I was doing great until this incident with my daughter. And I knew, of course, that the situation had come about in our family because of my husband's drinking pattern. And my two or three feeble attempts to see if anybody understood had met with no success.
[00:45:04]
So I looked in the phone book and at that time in Winnipeg there were seven AA groups and I thought Alcoholics Anonymous. I think it's a kinky, a kooky religious organization. Pardon me. That was way back. And then I saw these words, The Alcoholism Foundation of Manitoba, and I thought, aha, that'll be a more scientific approach to this problem. And so I phoned there. And indeed, just three months earlier, an Al-Anon group had been formed in that very facility. And the first gift, you see, was this, that it was said to me, Ruth, there are a few women, meet downstairs on Tuesday afternoon, and I think you'd find that they understand. Well, you know, that has to be the understatement of the century. And when we say in our preamble, we understand, as perhaps few can, if I live long enough and I'm successful, which I won't be, you know, I would like that changed to we understand as no one else can understand. Because I walked down, I walked down the steps to this little room and opened the door and indeed there were three or four women there.
I saw in their eyes that they truly understood. They knew every step I had taken following this beloved man across the continent. They knew every tear I had shed, and they didn't even ask me what my name was or where I came from. I looked around and I thought, I don't know what this is I've stumbled into, and I did not know it was Al-Anon. I did not know that for a few months, that it had a name and that it was separate from this thing upstairs, counselor. But I knew and I saw in their eyes, they want me. I thought, whatever it is that I've stumbled into, it looks to be for the rich because they were, you know, had diamonds and mink jackets and all. It was a few of the rather well-heeled types around the city of Winnipeg. But they want me, and I plead with you, my Al-Anon sisters and brothers, don't take the feeling out of Al-Anon. Because I know for a fact that there are Al-Anon groups today that if I had stumbled into that type of a group when I did about almost 22 years ago, I would have said to them, as I said to the doctor, thank you very much, and I would have gone out and that would have been the end of me. It was the feeling, it was the caring, it was the love that shone in their eyes as it's shining from yours today that sustained me and I didn't even know that the name of this was Al-Anon. We had very little literature, we had the 12 steps, but they understood. And you know one of the immense lifts that was given to me? They told me very early on that it was likely, possible and even likely, that my husband was alcoholic and that alcoholism was a disease. And you know, you hear a lot of people have great difficulty with the term alcoholic and alcoholism, but to me, I thought, how high class can you get? I mean, he's an alcoholic and alcoholism is a disease. He's not just an old good drunken son of a… As my friends, my relatives, everybody's been telling me all these years, it is a disease. And not only that, but the censure was this.
Alcoholism is a family disease. That's not only what's wrong with him, but that's what's wrong with you. And the walls began to come down. The walls that I had built up over all the years, they took down the barriers of ignorance, told me that I would get better. They gave me the opportunity to serve. And I say to you this with all honesty, don't say no to service. Doors are still opening for me and only because that long back I was willing. I was eager. In fact, I wanted when I found this tremendous thing of Al-Nan to stand on the intersection of the main streets in Winnipeg and shout it out because I'd been on my way out of life and this thing was given to me and I thought people should know about this. But of course they had then, as they have now, the traditions and it was pretty
[00:50:01]
soon told, no, you can't do that Ruth, but you can serve Al-Nan. And what a tremendous gift that has been for me. They gave me hope. And particularly, I think I have to say, if there are any members of Alcoholics Anonymous here and even if there are not, that perhaps it was the members of AA and listening to them in those early years that raised the greatest stream of hope for me because I would listen to them and I think they're exactly the way my husband is. Their stories are identical and they've made it. He too may make it. In fact, I used always to end my talks with those words. I have every confidence that someday my alcoholic partner will be here with me. And indeed, this came about. It took a long time. He was a slow learner. I was 14 years in Al-Nan. That's beside the point.
Al-Nan restored me to relative health. I had a fine inheritance of physical strength from my mother and father and their ancestors. I went back to work perhaps a year or a little more after I came into Al-Nan. And I was then 48 years of age, if you can believe it. You see, I tell you these age factors because to me this is the part of the miracle of my recovery. I went back to work and the only work for which I had been trained other than music and I wasn't good enough to make it in that field was office work. And every ad I looked at in the paper said, you know, apply if you're under 35 years of age. And here I was, 48. But our government gave me a gift just around that time. They were promoting this propaganda about mature workers and how you wouldn't leave because you were going to get married or get pregnant or anyway, something about stability. And I got a job.
And I stayed in that job up until almost three years ago. It was a great help in our life. It not only helped out economically, which had always been the big factor for us because of everlastingly moving and no stability economically. It was good. It also got me out of the house, as my counselor at that time could see. It would be good for me to get out from that crazy house with a drunken husband, young kids and an ancient mother.
And for a long time, I was the example in Manitoba. Perhaps this is why they gifted me with the opportunity to serve as delegate and then as a regional trustee. I was always hauled in where there was great reluctance on the part of certain Al-Anon members to be the group representative or whatever, because after all, they would say, my partner is still drinking. So the GR or the group chairman or something would get on the phone to me and say, come on out, Ruth. And they would say to me, see, listen to her. No, she is doing it. You can do it too, you see. So this was my role. I was the person who could handle a full-time job, a very full-time job in Al-Anon and have young kids and keep going. And so if I could do it, anybody else could. That was the theme. And 14 years later, when my husband sobered up and became an AA member, this was one of the hardest things for me to face, was that now, I tell you, when six months after he was sober and I got a phone call, picked up the phone in this little voice and the other sense and says, is that Huey's wife? Well, after all, I had made it, you know. And I was an example around this, you know, even in the United States, the northern parts here, of a person that could do it, you see. So if she can do it, anybody can. And here he was. He deprived me of this by getting so. That's sort of jumping the gun. And of course, that's not the way it was, but it was initially a tremendous shock. I had to deal with this thing. Hey, hey, this is something to gain, you know. I don't stand on my own two feet. I'm Huey's wife. He loved doing this. He used to give the greatest Al-Anon pitch you ever, ever heard. And, you know,
[00:55:02]
I'd come home and hear him telling callers on the phone what group to go to and how much benefit they would derive from Al-Anon and so on. He was dearly beloved. And as far as Alateen was concerned, the Alateen kids, this was another thing I had to contend with. I'd go to meetings and here would be these Alateen kids talking and they'd sit there and they'd say, oh, you know, Ian's dad. Oh, gee, he's such a, we just love him so much.
And I'd be sitting there waiting for them to say something about Ian's mother. Never a word. Never a word. Anyhow. Seven years ago, Ian and I were attending an interprovincial Alateen conference in Saskatchewan. Now our kids had gone into Alateen and they had derived from Alateen the same help that I had in Al-Anon. It had helped the entire family, you see. I should have told you earlier that the change in me was so visible that after the fourth or fifth meeting that I had attended Al-Anon, when I came home and I had, for the previous week, got my courage up enough to say to my husband, I'm going to Al-Anon. And he said, what's Al-Anon? I said, well, it's a fellowship for the relatives and friends.
And I didn't say alcoholics because I'd add that word, but people that have drinking problems. And he said, oh, I'll bet you have a hell of a good time telling them what a so-and-so I am. And I said, no, no, we don't talk about you. We talk about how we feel ourselves, you know. Well, the same thing had happened to the kids. When our daughter was 14, she was causing all kinds of tension. She hated her father with a passion. And finally I suggested to her that perhaps, you know, I couldn't take any more in the family. And she was the one that was causing the tensions at the moment and that perhaps she should try Alatine. And she went to her first meeting and came home and said to me, Mom, you have no idea how some poor kids have to live. Aha, she had got the message. She'd gone, left that house thinking she was the hardest done by kid in the whole of Canada. No one else had to live in such a crummy district and such a crummy house and not have the kind of clothes and everything. And one meeting, one Alatine meeting, and she saw that indeed there were kids that were locked out of their houses and didn't have food and whose parents and others mistreated them. She got the message real fast. And within a few months of Nim's attending Alatine, my husband said to me, I don't know what's happened to Nim, but I'm so glad she doesn't hate me anymore. And I said, I can tell you what's happened to Nim. She's been going to Alatine.
You see, again, nothing had changed as it had not in me. Fourth or fifth meeting when I came back and he said, don't tell me you're going into town to talk with a bunch of old biddies. You got a lover in Winnipeg. Come back looking 20 years younger and nothing had changed but my attitude. And the same thing with our daughter when she went to Alatine. Nothing had changed but her attitude. But the change in attitude was a visible thing, so visible that the alcoholic in our family saw it and was impressed with whatever it was we had the hold of. Mind you, I made all kinds of attempts, as you did, to get him to share this. I brought my Al-Anon friends and their AA husbands home by the score and he would listen politely to them. And after they had gone, he would pat me on the shoulder and say, nice try, dear, but I'm not an alcoholic. Yeah. Well, anyway, Saskatchewan is seven years ago. And Ian had been in Alatine six years by that time. He'd gone in when he was about ten and a half years of age. And I hear this boy who had been the peacemaker in our family, who seemed instinctively to understand the nature of this family problem.
Because when he was just a small boy, he would hear his father and I He would hear his father and I, well, I thought we just had little arguments, maybe sometimes it got a bit heated, but listen to those kids, they said we fought. Anyway, Ian would get out of bed and come up and put his hands on his father's knees and say, Daddy, we love you.
[01:00:07]
And what a reproach that was to me, because love was the only thing in which I had ever believed. And love and God are synonymous for me. And I realized in listening to this child, uh-huh, no, he sees that we as a family unit have pushed the alcoholic outside. And this was the boy, he never was hostile to his father. He did not show that he hated him the way the daughter had. But this particular Alateen conference, he made this remark that only his membership in Alateen prevented him from taking a butcher knife to his father on occasions during the past two years.
And I was devastated. What have I done to these kids, keeping them in this situation? And here is this gentle, sensitive boy who has had these murderous feelings. And I came back from that thinking, well, it's got to be about the worst decision I ever have made in my life. I've done all the wrong things, staying with my alcoholic partner. And I did what I always do, and which many of you would do, that is I started again with the steps from step one and up through fourth and taking the fifth.
Saw that indeed I was in great despair again. Talked to a very knowledgeable, with a very knowledgeable person in Winnipeg about this. And he said to me, Ruth, I can see that you're very despondent right now. But he said, I know you well. He said, you will never break the bond between yourself and your alcoholic partner. He said, I would suggest this, that you go home and you look on your alcoholic husband, not as your husband, not as the father of your children, but as a very sick, very willful child.
He said, I think if you do that, you'll get through the rest of your life. Now, there's nothing too significant in that. But I've gone into that appointment feeling this is the end of the road for me, and I came up feeling real high as if there was again hope and a possibility. And the significance of this is that just a month from that very day, Ian, our son, had to pick his father up out of his sickbed and carry him to the car and to the hospital.
And to admit him and say to the admitting staff, my father is a chronic alcoholic. Please put him in detox. Because a detox had just been set up about six months earlier. And even there, my particular alcoholic, by the time I got there and my daughter, he had outwitted the doctors and they were going to give him some more guck and send him home again. Came out and looked at me and said, Mrs. H., your husband says he drinks, but he's not an alcoholic.
I'd been there, you know, how many times before with him, and he'd pull this thing. But my daughter is much sterner stuff, and she looked the doctor in the eye and said, Doctor, don't you know that the first stock in trade of any alcoholic is his ability to con? She said, he is an alcoholic, and what's more, we are not taking him home. Put him in detox. That's where he was sent. And that's where he found sobriety, very rapidly, because his conning days were over.
And in that facility, nobody, he couldn't out-con anyone. They would say to him, what, you mean you're not an alcoholic? Your wife has been an al-nan 14 years, your children have been an al-tan, and you're not an alcoholic? These were psychiatrists and, you know, the whole schmear of professionals, and he couldn't. Or else this was again just the time in his life and in my life for the miracle of AA to come about, yes.
And he devoted the balance of his life from that day on to being 150% AA member and working on behalf, tirelessly, of alcoholics and their families. Set up a detox unit in that, not unit, what was that, drop-in center, yes. You know, ran this thing until the day she died. Tommy B., who many of you would have heard, I'm sure, used to say, well, you know, Huey got the program through the process of osmosis.
[01:05:05]
He stood too close to al-nan for 14 years. And, of course, he had read everything because he was a reader. And at first, you know, I always had the big book and everything else, all kinds of AA literature, as well as al-nan. Now, he'd never give me the satisfaction of looking at that when I was up, but he would stay up all night reading. And he would say when he was telling his story that he did this so he would have the right answers to give to me.
But that's his story, and that's the miracle of AA, and it was a wonderful period in our life. It was sort of the icing on the cake because al-nan had saved my life, had saved our family life, and certainly had saved our marriage, had saved everything. And I was making out all right, but I had always wanted for my beloved to have the benefits and the joy, joy in recovery that is in this program. And I always knew that the satisfactions he was looking for in the contents of a thousand bottles lay in the opportunity to serve his fellow men and women, if he would but reach out for it.
And he did, for five years. And then, two years ago, he died. He had been ill, he had been failing for a period of time before this. I knew that he was dying. I had commented on it to some of my al-nan friends. But the medical profession could not diagnose this problem. He even came with me to the World Service Conference two years ago because he had loved New York and he had loved al-nan so much. I had to take him back from there before the conference was over.
And after he got back into the hospital, then for the thousandth time, and just perhaps one new bit of gadgetry, they discovered indeed he did have cancer of the esophagus. He lived only six weeks after that. Our daughter, the one who I read her note to me from two weeks back, as soon as she became aware of this, quit her job or left her job in British Columbia to come home to be with me. And, of course, she was the one who had left home before sobriety came, and so she had all sorts of things she wanted to resolve with her father.
Marie, who is here with me today from Winnipeg, was kind of like a presence in our home at that period of time. Huey was home from the hospital because there was nothing they could do for him. I don't know where it came from, but there was always coffee and food and so on, and it was Marie who was there like a tower of strength. And other al-nan friends. I share this with you not to make you cry, please believe me, but to tell you that here, perhaps for me, was the greatest of all the gifts of al-nan that I had ever been given.
It was not given just to me, because the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon and Al-Ateen again became in our lives such a visible force that a public health nurse who came in daily to see my husband commented once. She didn't know what it was in our home. She said, you know, I've nursed hundreds of terminally ill patients with this problem before. She said, I have never seen a family or a patient that can accept this the way you people are.
She said, there's no hysteria here, there's no anger, there's no resentment. She said, I look forward to coming to this house. And I was humbled to be able to say to her, I think I can tell you what it is. What you see here is the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon. She said, it's flowing through this house like a living stream. It is visible. It's allowing us, each individually and collectively, to accept what we cannot change.
Now, what greater gift could be given to anyone than the ability to die with dignity?
[01:10:06]
To the very last moments of my husband's life. It was Al-Anon that was there because an Al-Anon friend volunteered to stay nights with him when we put him in the hospital for the last few days of his life. And she understood the process of dying very well because she'd specialized in death and dying. And she gave myself and Ian and Nim this tremendous gift of the last few hours of my husband's life, explaining very gently to us the process of death.
When this was over and I went out to my daughter's farm in British Columbia, children drove me out there, I thought, I don't think I'll ever speak again. How can I? I've been speaking for 19 years now. This was two years ago. And the last few years were so good when Huey and I would go to gatherings like this together and we would share and it was mutual and it was so good. And then I saw, indeed, that perhaps it was the most painful of all the things I had endured in my life, but it was also the greatest gift that this program had given us, that to face, to accept what we could not change and to go on.
So I went on and am going on because of Al-Anon, because this was the gift you gave me. And I want to close now with reading from a statement that Ian, our fine son Ian, made to Huey and I. Ian was with us, of course, when sobriety came and he saw the miracle and he saw the changes and he knew all of the changes. But in April of 1976, Ian was in a stage of his life when he wanted to turn right and we wanted him to turn left and so on, you know, as happens with teenagers.
And we talked one night into the wee small hours, his dad and I, and fortunately again for the program, the first half of the first step, that we were powerless over any other human being. We finally said to Ian, we respect your right to live your life in your way. We will continue to love you, to support you in any ways that we can. And he knew, of course, that he was doing something that we did not want him to do.
And so he went up to his room and he wrote this note to us, which I will end, because it says to me exactly what this program does for us. You know, first of all, when I came into Al-Anon and I read in Living with an Alcoholic that we come to Al-Anon not to sober up the alcoholic, but to help his family lead a saner, happier, more productive life. I think Ian has illustrated this and I'm going to close with his words.
Why is it that when you want to say the most, words can say the least? It is a rare thing, understanding, yet it seems this family abounds in it. I guess it grew out of the love that was always there, or perhaps the love grew out of the understanding of two people who met and shared themselves with each other and those they loved until their love produced a family. A family that has been the most sustaining experience of my life.
And I would like you to hear those words, a family. This child says, now this was a young man who had never known a sober father for the first 16 years of his life. And yet he could make that statement. He does not say a mother or a sister. He says a family that has been the most sustaining experience in my life. Pity those who cannot or will not understand a family. Not or Will Not Understand Our Understandingness, Theirs is the lacking of a love that cannot be merely devotion or loyalty, but surely something that transcends any boundaries, definitions that those who wish to contain put upon love.
[01:15:06]
I am sorry I cannot say this in any other way than on paper, but I know that the understandingness, the love, can accept, as it always has, the limitations and abilities of all. Why can't everyone be like you two? Love Ian, P.S. Thank you for life, not just creation of my life, but life as you have taught and showed me. You both are beautiful. I love you, and I love you.