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Source: Mike D – North Coast Woodstock 2017 – Steps 8 & 9 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: mike-d-north-coast-woodstock-2017-steps-8-and-9-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:01:29
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My name is Marvin, I'm an alcoholic. My home group, I have two home groups, the Gazebo group meets in Cleveland on Sunday mornings at 9.30 and John Flood group at the Forest City Club on Monday evenings at 8pm. My sobriety date is 2-29-16, so I only get an anniversary every four years. If you could start this off with a serenity prayer please. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Mike D. is going to be our speaker, he's asked me to read this, first full paragraph on page 100. Both you and the new man must walk day by day in the path of spiritual progress. If you persist, remarkable things will happen.
When we look back, we realize that things which came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were better than anything we could have planned. Follow the dictates of a higher power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Mike D. from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Thanks, Billy. Good afternoon, my name is Michael Donnelly, I'm an alcoholic. What a great joy it is to be here. This is like recovery Disneyland, Akron, it's unbelievable. I mean, we've had such a tremendous time since we've been here. I want to thank some people. My wife, who has a number of health problems, and she rarely gets to tag along with me, but we were coming to Akron. And this place, the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, she wanted to be here, and I'm just really grateful that she made the trip. I want to thank Kent, whose friendship with me is growing and I appreciate that. I have a lot of respect for him. Andy, who I've met here, are my Boston friends here? All right, let's just say they are, right? And they're wicked soba, just so you know, they're wicked soba. Just the speakers have been absolutely fantastic so far. I really have been humbled to be a part of this panel. It's a great gift. And any committee members or any people in service, really, thank you very much. And just before I actually begin talking about Step 8 and 9, I also want to talk about something that's very important to me, and that's the tapers. You know, oftentimes they get overlooked, oftentimes they spend their free time recording, you know, sometimes really good speakers and sometimes morons, but they're here all the time, and they give up their weekend and they give up their time, and it's a treasure trove of history and guidance and teaching and wisdom on those CDs back there. And just sometimes I don't think they're acknowledged enough, so thank you very much. I was born and raised in Chicago. My father was a police lieutenant.
He was and still to this day is absolutely my hero. I don't think there was a finer man to ever walk planet Earth than my dad, well, maybe one, but that was about it. It's a very short list. And, I mean, just a great guy. He served a couple of tours of duty in Korea in the Air Force, and when the war ended, he came back and was a TI in San Antonio, Texas for a number of years. Retired from the military and came to Chicago and quickly rose to the ranks. He was the youngest police lieutenant made in the city's history. If there was a man of honor or a man of integrity more than my dad, I don't know. He was the kind of guy that whenever you were around him, you just felt safe. He was just going to take care of things, and he just always did. My mother was a tremendous lady. We're second generation American. We're from our families from Ireland. And, boy, she wore the green deeply. I mean, my mom just wore it all over the place. She had a great smile.
Just she had just a grit to my mom. She smoked Vantage 100s. I don't know if you guys remember those things. They were like the longest cigarette in the history of humanity. If she turned quickly, she could burn your temple with a hot box off the thing. It's crazy. Crazy. And she could huff those bad boys down in like two puffs. It was like, it was gone. And I was always in trouble, and then she'd yell at me, Michael Jude, get in this house or whatever, you know. And the smoke would be pouring out as she yelled at me, you know.
She was just a wonderful lady. Really, terrific. I didn't always see it that way, but a wonderful lady nonetheless. My sister and I, Patty, were the only two kids that my parents had.
[00:05:05]
And I was six years old, my sister was eight, and my dad went off to work as he always did. And he was late, and that wasn't unusual. But this particular time, we could tell something was very different. What had happened was my dad had an artery break in his bowel. And in 1972, they couldn't do very much about that. And at 42 years old, my dad passed away. My mom was 33 years old, beautiful, beautiful woman, two kids, city of Chicago, nine months into a new mortgage, and my mom had no idea what to do. Absolutely no idea what to do.
I had no vocabulary. I had no skill to even express what I was feeling at what had happened to my family. I just didn't have it. Neither did my sister. And over the course of the next few years, I turned to become extraordinarily angry. I wasn't a violent kid per se. I mean, we got in our share of scuffs in Chicago. That's just sort of par for the course. But I wasn't the kind of kid that would just sort of violently attack you or anything like that.
I would just move you. And if I could sort of read you in a way, and if I knew that niceness was what was going to get me to get what I want, I would use niceness. If it was my size, I would use that. If it was my words, I would use that. I'm one of these guys that if we hang out for a little while and we sort of become friends, for some reason I can sort of see maybe perhaps what you're insecure about, which perhaps is even what I'm insecure about. But I can sort of see it. And then if I feel like you crossed me, you may not even have crossed me. If I just feel like you did, or if there's a cooler bunch of people over here that I now want to elevate my social status with, I can cut you to the quick with my tongue. I mean, I can shred you. That's a horrible, horrible thing. And I practiced that from the time I was a kid. I mean, from the time I was a kid. And as far back as I can remember, I felt like a round peg in a square hole.
I was always on the outside looking in. No matter what I tried to do, I always felt separate from whatever was going on, from whatever was going on. It didn't matter. I'd play football, and there would be all the good guys and me. We'd be playing baseball. There were all the good players, and then there was me. None of that was true. I was pretty decent at both. But it was just, I just always, that's how I looked at the whole world. You were over there, and I was over here. I remember when I was 10 or 11 years old, we'd play baseball all the time in Chicago. And they'd have, at the end of the season, they'd have father and son baseball games. And I'd have these tremendously kind neighbor men come alongside of me and go to the father and son baseball game with me. And I remember sitting out there the second year, not the first year, but the second year, because I was convinced that every kid on my team had a recognition of what my last dad looked like. And now this new guy was pretending to be my dad, and what do they think of my mom, and what do they think of my family? And I'm like 11, and I'm thinking this stuff.
Same thing with the Boy Scouts. We'd go to these father-son things, and I was just like, I'm not going. I mean, I am not participating. Because if there was something that would make me feel, excuse me, appear different, I just didn't want to do it. I just did not want to do it. And there were nights I would just sort of cry myself to sleep. There were nights where I would be angry. I was kind of the fidgety kid in school. Parent-teacher conferences, what's wrong with the kid? Is there something wrong? You haven't told the school because he can't sit still for five seconds. Shooting spitballs, throwing things, class clown, just couldn't sit still. I just could not sit still.
And in those moments when I did, and I sort of got, even as a kid, a bit reflective, I remember just sensing an ugliness in me, or sensing something that I called ugliness. It may not have been that, but that's what I called it. And I began to more and more feel distance between my family, between my friends, and I didn't really know what to do about that. One day after a baseball game, I'm 12 years old, we're sitting in a circle at Central Park in Chicago, and this guy comes up. He was the coolest looking guy I'd ever seen in my entire life. He had long hair to his mid-back, right? He had a bandana on, right?
Faded bell-bottom jeans, a macrame belt, I kid you not, right? Black doors concert t-shirt, right? And one of those roach clips with like a peacock feather hanging off the back of it that you, they claim you won at the carnival, right? That kind of thing. And he's like, uh, do you guys get high or whatever? And like, you know, nine, 12-year-olds
[00:10:03]
look at this 17-year-old, we have no idea what to say. We're kind of intrigued and, because we'd seen them all the time, they were always in this circle. They had one of those jam boxes, right, where it took like, you know, 19 D batteries shoved into the thing just to get it going and Ted Nugent and ACDC always blasting out of it. So we don't say anything to the guy. And he just reaches in his pocket and he pulls out a joint and a lighter, he throws it in my buddy's lap. And all of a sudden it starts going around in a circle. And my only thought is, hmm, looks like I'm smoking pot today, you know? And I remember thinking as this 12-year-old kid or 13-year-old kid, whatever I was, that there were two main differences between smoking pot and smoking cigarettes.
And I had heard this from sort of running around in the crowd I did. We had stolen enough cigarettes from our parents so we knew how to smoke. But when you smoke pot, apparently you're supposed to hold it like this and when you smoke a cigarette, you hold it like that. Huge difference. And then the other thing was that when you smoke pot, you're supposed to hold it in. But when you're smoking cigarettes, you just exhale and God forbid you choke on your dope smoke. Like don't ever do that, right? So it's coming around this circle and I have the index thumb finger technique down even though I'm a novice. I feel pretty good about that. Take a couple of puffs and pass it on. Nothing happened. It didn't get high, it didn't get stoned. I have no idea if it was even pot. For all I know, some 17-year-old kid rolled up oregano and then went back to his friends and they're like, dude, I just gave 12-year-old some oregano and they think they're stoned. Like I have no idea what I even smoked that day. And literally the next day walking down the alley in Chicago, I meet my buddy, Timmy. And he says, Mike, do you get high? Well, not with all my drug-using experience. Yeah, dude, I get high. And so he reaches in his pocket and he pulls out a joint. I got to tell you, fundamentally different experience. Fundamentally different experience. And for the next few years, if you could light it on fire, I was smoking it. And I bring that up because of this. It wasn't that alcohol was around because it wasn't. Or excuse me, because it was. It was just much easier, right? And it was the same core group that everybody started. Like the one guy's older brother, he was the connection.
You know, and then I had the friend who could, he had all these contraptions that you could smoke different. You know, it was like all, he just would create things that we could smoke out of. Like it was just, it's all the same group, just a different location, you know? And I bring that up because I put drugs on a list of things that I use to distract me from me. But there's a lot of things on that list that I found in my four-step. Some things that Sheldon talked about, right? A lot, that list is a lot longer than the other list where I put alcohol. When I was 16 years old, the drugs went away. And the drugs went away for a couple of reasons. I've never had a desire to stick a needle in my arm, snort something. I just never did. That stuff actually kind of scared me, right? But man, alcohol was hand in glove for me. From the first times I really drank alcohol, I got to tell you, I drank fundamentally different than my peers and my fellows, than my friends. I was the kid who was always passed out in the back seat. I was the kid with urine-stained Levi's.
I was the kid who would wake up on his lawn. I was the kid who would drive the car and find a piece of shrubbery sticking out of the bumper and not knowing where the hell the shrubbery came from. And that's like from the get-go, you know? I'd have blackouts and didn't know how to tell people that I had blackouts. I didn't know how to say that. And so I just, you know, the routine, you pretend like, hey, we had a great time. Yeah, we did. Remember? Remember that one thing? You know, just hoping they would feed me some data, you know, so I could sort of fill in the blanks or whatever. And that's just what it was. And drugs went away. They just faded away when I found alcohol. Alcohol is on a list of two things because those two things made me feel more fixed than anything else.
I always have felt like something was deeply, deeply wrong with me. And my drinking continued to escalate through high school. And I drank my way out of college as a sophomore. I could not maintain regular life. A teacher would say, hey, there's a test tomorrow on Chapter 4. Take the book home. Do the study questions. You'll do fine on the test. Twenty-nine kids would take the book home. I'd be halfway home going, oh, the test. Like if I could sum up my life, that's my life. Oh, the test, right? Missed it every time.
So you know, all the things that happened to all of us happened to me in some way or another. You know, I used to think that wasn't true. Never been to prison, but I've been to jail, right? Never been divorced, but I couldn't get anyone to marry me, so there you go. A little tough walking down the aisle. A little tough walking down the aisle with urine-stained tuxedo on, you know, it's just
[00:15:02]
not a, photographer tends to shy away, let's move it up a little, let's, just wasn't, I just couldn't find traction in life, and that's just the truth, and we can sit here and tell stories all day about it, but the reality is, is that when I started drinking, for some reason that I couldn't even determine at that time, I couldn't stop, even when I wanted to, even when people I loved begged me, even when I myself, more than anything, didn't want to pass over into drunken stupor, when I digested alcohol, this body demands more, and I gotta tell you, I've been sober for 25 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, thank God, and today, this body is identical. If I were to drink today, that same allergy would kick off, the phenomenon of craving would happen, and I would go through the well-known stages of a spree. Tomorrow, I might emerge remorseful, I'm not sure, but I would guess that's true.
But this body will never be fixed of the allergy. So, anyways, fast forward, I go through all the stuff that we all go through, and we got a lot to talk about in step nine, so I don't need to go through that, I just kind of let you know that I should be here, and I just wanted to lay that out, right? So, I meet this guy, his name is Brian, and Brian sees me contemplating suicide up against a sales, a wall in my sales office, and he says this question to me, now Brian had been sober for seven years, he had a sponsor who had a sponsor who had a sponsor who had a sponsor, he was a big book guy and he worked the steps, and Brian sees me leaning with my two forearms up against the wall in my sales office contemplating how I'm going to kill myself in such a way that my mom, who I hate at this point, won't know it's suicide, because that would have destroyed her. So, I'm trying to figure this out, what do I do? Jump in front of a bus? Oh, the driver, I can't do that to the driver.
How about the L-Tracks in downtown? No, I can't do that. So, I remember going through this thing where I'm going to drive my car as fast as I can into a wall, take my seat belt off, everyone will think I fell asleep at the wheel, it'll be fine, but then for some reason, my head triggers this article I read from I don't know where, that the police know that it's not a falling asleep problem, that it was a suicide issue because there's skid marks right before the impact. And I don't know how your brains work, but that all took like a second, like me talking to you about it took 50 times longer than the actual thought, that whole thing, right? And I'm leaning and I hear from behind me, Mike, are you okay? Now, that is not the first time this guy's heard that question. I've heard that question since I was a little, little guy. And every time I had the same answer, yeah, it's okay, yeah, I got it, no big deal, whatever, it's going to be fine, I got it, I can handle it, whatever wall, barrier that I thought I could put up, I put up. And I have no idea why I said, no, I'm not, that day. I'm really glad I did. But outside of the grace of God, I can't give you an answer why I finally answered somewhat honestly to that question because I've been asked it my whole life and lied every time I was asked.
So Brian says, let's go to a meeting. I go, no, I don't think so. He said, yeah, let's go to a meeting. So we went to a meeting, it was the Lamont Oaks meeting on the south side of Chicago. It's an enormously huge meeting and it's a fantastic meeting. And they had red chairs and there's a little guy named Frank and he's an attorney. And he talks like the penguin a little bit, he's a great guy. And Frank would do these big book studies or these newcomer meetings before the actual speaker meeting across the hall in the gymnasium.
And in the cafeteria back then, they had red chairs and all the new people had to sit in the red chairs for a full year. And there was anywhere between 60 and 80 newcomers when I was there. And you picked up the red chair and you walked into the gymnasium and you sat in the gymnasium with the red chair so that the other 250 members who had more than a year could tell you were new. And they would come up to you and they would ask you things like, do you have a big book? Do you need a phone number? Do you have a sponsor? It was beautiful, right? I was offended, of course, that they wanted me to sit in a red chair and refused to do it, so. But anyways, fast forward a couple of weeks, I land this promotion at work and I'm off to South Dakota, a journey I didn't really think I was going to be taking.
Believe me, South Dakota was not on the list. And I said to Brian, should I do this? I'm supposed to not supposed to make any big decisions, right? Brian said the same thing to me that Brian said to me in every single conversation. Mike, if you're going to be sober, it's going to be about you and God and working these steps. It's not going to be about her. It's not going to be about money. It's not going to be about job or location. It's going to be about you developing a relationship with God. That's the only thing that's going to save your butt. And so I took the promotion. I went to South Dakota. I met this guy. His
[00:20:02]
name was Joe Friday. It's a great name for an AA sponsor. I swear that was really his name. And Joe and I had nothing in common except the disease of alcoholism. He wore cowboy boots and a hat. He was a construction guy, right? Rougher hands, more calcium on his hands than on my heart. That's saying something, you know? And that guy took me under his wing and he walked me through the book. And I asked him one day, I said, Joe, will you be my sponsor? And he said, well, let's go to coffee and we'll talk about it.
I'll tell you my story. You tell me your story. And if at the end of that conversation we decide we can work together, I'll sponsor you. And so we did that. And I kind of sputtered out some story on my side after he finished his. I was only four months or five months sober. And he goes, Mike, it dawns on me you have no idea. You have no idea what alcoholism is. And I go, well, yeah, it's when you're drunk a lot. He said, no, it's got nothing to do with that. Boy, it looked like it in my life. It really looked like it in my life from this perspective. And when Joe went in to tell me and explain to me Dr. Silkworth's explanation and we walked through the next few chapters and we got to we agnostics, he said, Mike, you have an allergy to alcohol, you have a mind that lies to you, and you have a broken soul. And when he said broken soul, it just grabbed me. It seemed to articulate, not that those are the perfect words or the right words, those are the ones he used at that time for this guy and they fit perfect. It described everything I felt up to that point as a young boy, as a teenager, as a young adult, as a drinker trying to stop this ache. When he said that, it clicked with me. And he said, there's only one cure for that, and that's power. Because the number one symptom of a broken soul is lack of power. And I was really afraid that Jesus talk was coming, so I was like, well, maybe I have that, I don't know. And he said, well, let me give you a little test. Mike, is it wrong to lie?
And I said, yeah. And he said, do you lie? You know, well, only when absolutely necessary. I mean, not always. And he goes, if you said not always, it's always. And then he went into this thing, he must have asked me 20 behavior questions about how I behaved. And I got all of those right. Mike, should you be yelling at your mom the way you do? I mean, my mom would say hi to me and it was like Holocaust. I would just rage on her. She couldn't say anything. The way I treated my girlfriends, horrible. Is it wrong to objectify women?
No. Do you do it? Yeah, all the time. Is it wrong to do this? Yeah. Well, are you doing it? No, I'm not. I can't do it. He said, see, Mike, I've heard your story a little bit. And you get a hell of a lot of mileage out of that whole thing with your dad dying and your mom being a waitress. As if income is your problem. As if no dad is your problem. Now, those may be contributing factors into a lot of different things, but we're talking about right now your alcoholism. And man, you play the, I mean, I'm telling you guys, I had this story about my dad dying down so well that you could almost hear violins playing in the background. Like it was really beautiful, I thought, you know? And then when I was six.
So full of crap. So full of crap, you know? And what's bad about that, even beyond the lying of it, is the disrespect it actually showed my father. So Joe said, fine, I'll work with you, but we're going to do it the book and we're going to go through it. We're going to do it the book's way and if you tag along, you'll have something we call a spiritual awakening and you'll be able to get that power that you lack and your life will change. And you'll do very little to have that happen. You'll do very little to have that happen. And so I was in. And first thing we did is we talked about those three parts that Howard clearly laid out. What a terrific talk last night from Sandra and Chris is just great. Weren't they great talks? They were amazing. They were spot on. Wonderful.
We went through the fourth step like Sheldon talked about, right? He fed me the big book, the dictionary, and Joe and Charlie tapes. He said, if you're at home, I want your reading and I want the dictionary next to you because you don't know what you're reading. And when you're driving in your car, I want Joe and Charlie tapes in there. And that's what I did. I went to meetings all the time. And we went to this priest and I gave my fifth step. I took that hour after the fifth step that Bob talked about and asked myself those questions and as best I could at that time, I thought, you know, I'm being sincere and
[00:25:04]
I think that's really what those questions are asking me. We came up to six and seven and there's questions there, Mike, are you willing to let God take everything? And I said, not everything, no. And he said, that's okay. All we do is pray for the willingness that we don't have. But you keep going. Mike, if you wait for the willingness, you're not going to get…it's like waiting to do a fourth step until you're honest. Not going to happen.
Not going to happen, right? And so, we just said the prayers and he kept moving. He said, I want you to get a piece of paper and a pen and I want you to take all the names off your fourth step and I want you to put them on your eighth step. And then I want you to pray for the willingness to make these amends. And I did that. Well, a couple of weeks went by and I had been in an eighth step and ninth step meetings. I've been going and listening and I remember hearing this story about a woman who had been in the mall and a friend of hers from like third grade that she had picked on, she had seen in the mall and wasn't on her eighth step and she went up to the gal and she made some sort of restitution as best she could in this deal and she tried, you know, to make it right and the woman accepted her apologies and they hugged in the mall and she was teary about it. And I said, Joe, this was great. I mean, this was great. I'm in South Dakota now and all the people that I owe amends to because I haven't really done anything except go to meetings in South Dakota.
That was it. They're all in Chicago. So, like I'm supposed to wait until God brings us together, you know, to go do this, right? And he said something very profound that I think is telling in a very strong principle for step nine and that is, Mike, you went out of your way to harm these people. You must go out of your way to make it right. So I got a different idea. Instead of some magical bus appearing at the mall in Sioux Falls with everyone you've damaged on it and ironically have 20 minutes for a short conversation as well, you're going to have to get in your car and drive back to Chicago and make these amends. And I did that for months. Months. And I'd find these people and some were very receptive. Some were kind of like, what are you doing? But the whole experience of step nine was absolutely life changing for me. I can't really express it any other way. I'll start with my dad.
As I said, my dad was my hero and he was the most honorable man I've ever met and I was a slug. I was nearly the antithesis of my dad. And I hated that about me. I hated that about me. And I wrote this letter to my father and I told him that I was sorry for taking our name, a name that he had lived his whole life to bring up with integrity and honesty and service, community service, and I trashed it. And I went to his grave site and I read this letter and it took me about 20 minutes there and I stood there for maybe another ten in silence. And I got pretty emotional at the grave site. And I left there a bit of a different person. Where I always felt my dad was sort of disgusted with me. And always sort of felt my dad was very disillusioned with me. I began to feel that my dad maybe wasn't, maybe he had a little bit of a different opinion. I don't know, proud so much. But I knew that he was with me. And the sky didn't open, nothing happened like that. It was inside.
And I could breathe a little easier that day. I began to get that, what I call a great exhale. I'll tell you, when I was drinking, I would leave work at about 4.30 or 4.45, something like that. And if I couldn't get anybody to go quickly to the bar, I would have about a 40-minute drive home, 20 to 40 minutes depending on traffic on the way home. And my hands would just be clenched in the 10 and 2 position. And I'd be frantically changing the radio station trying to find a song I liked. And what I'd find when I'd turn it up to 11. Any Spinal Tap fans? Turn it up to 11, right? And just anything to sing and to get my mind off of the moment. And when I'd pull up to this place called Brew Bakers and the bartender would slide a Budweiser down to me and I'd pick that bad boy up and I'm really far from being drunk. But this is what would happen to me, not sometimes, this happened to me all the time. I would take a few sips and I would get this.
You're home, baby. It's going to be good. You're home, baby. It's going to be good. It's going to be all right. It's going to be all right.
[00:30:00]
And I stood at that gravesite, and I had a little bit of an exhale. And it wasn't from booze. It wasn't from booze. Next one was my mom, and I went to my mom. And now you've got to understand, my mom and I didn't really speak well, like at each other very well at all. We couldn't communicate. She would say hello, as I said earlier, and I would just lunge at her. I would just scream at her. I would just rage at her.
Rage at her. And now this is a woman. I have this good job now, and I think I'm kind of on my way, right? And I would break into her front room window, this waitress. Barely pay the mortgage. Gave all of her money to the Catholic school system so my sister and I could stay the heck out of the public school system. I'm a chronic misdemeanor. If I had gone to the public school system in Chicago, I would be a chronic felon.
That's how it is, right? I would break into her front room window and take money out of her purse and booze out of her fridge and food out of her fridge. Called her every name in the book. Every name in the book. Destroyed holidays. We're Catholic, so I was really nervous about my drinking one year, so I decided I'd quit drinking for 40 days at Lent. I made it. I actually made it. I destroyed Easter.
It was horrible. I mean, it was absolutely horrible. Brutal. Brutalized my family. I went to my mom and I had a conversation with her. And it went okay. It went okay. So I called Joe and I said, yeah, I mean, can't you see I'm trying? Like she should make me dinner or something. Like I'm really trying hard here. Like she should really be thrilled and applaud this effort I'm making in sobriety. And Joe said, you know, in our book it talks about throwing away old ideas, Mike, and one of the old ideas that you have is that you have a bad mom.
You don't have a bad mom. She had a bad son. And he was just silent. He said, the problem is you don't know how to be a son. You don't know how. So I'm going to teach you. He said, the next time you see your mom, I want you to hug her. He said, I'm not talking to your mom. When you see your mom, I want you to put your arms around your mom and tell her you love her. And I did that. And she did this.
It might be funny, but, man, it gave me an experience inside of me that showed me how much I hurt this woman. And I go, she doesn't hug back. He said, I'm not talking to your mom. Every time you go home, you hug your mom. I remember the doorway in my head when my mom's arms came up and embraced me back. That was Thanksgiving, and I came back at Christmas, and I gave her a hug. And she said, I haven't had one of those since you were home at Thanksgiving.
And I began to understand my mom a little bit better. He also said, here's also what I want you to do. I want you to call her every weekend, and I want you to ask her two questions. One, how was your week? And when she gets done answering you, you're supposed to answer, wow, that sounds interesting. Could you tell me more about that? But early, she's not going to be very communicative. But just keep doing it.
And he was right. The first call went something like this. Hi, Ma, it's Mike. How was your week? Fine. Wow, that sounds interesting. Could you tell me more about that? But I kept calling, and I kept calling, and I kept calling. And here's what happened. The answers got longer. Suddenly, my mom began to tell me about her life. Well, I'm struggling with the MS in my leg, and so Kitty's going to drive me to work.
And after that, Roberta and I are going to go to lunch. It should be a good day. Something happened crazy even months later. I began to give a crap about the answers. And before my eyes, without me knowing it, as Bob mentioned earlier, that something happened without me knowing it was happening. And before my eyes, I became a son to my mother. And what's crazy is I came to Alcoholics Anonymous to not drink.
You certainly gave me that, and thank you for that. But if that's all I took, what a tragedy that would be. So my mom and I carried on this conversation. We called each other every week. I don't know. I was probably 15 years sober, I guess.
[00:35:02]
And my sister calls me, and she says, Uncle Hugh died. And we're Irish, so we're genetically incapable of not being at a funeral or a wedding. I'm just telling you. So Uncle Hugh dies. And I said, oh, well, I'll drive in. And he says, well, I've got to leave town for work. Mom, though, she's got a little pain in her stomach, and she wants to go to the doctor or something. I said, well, I'm coming in.
That's fine. I'll come in. And so I did. The hospital kept her, and they did exploratory surgery with her while I was at the funeral. While I was at the funeral, they called me to tell me that they were going to do exploratory surgery. I raced back to the hospital. See my mom? They do exploratory surgery. The doctor comes out, and he says, there's no easy way to say this, but your mom clearly has stage 4.
I think it's ovarian cancer. And I don't know when, but this cancer will kill your mom. I don't know if it's two weeks, two days, two months, two years. I don't know. We're just beginning this, so we'll see. They went in and told my mom. They said, what do you want to do? We have these treatments. We have this. She goes, I'm good. I'm good. I want to go home. I want to go home. So she was in hospice for six months, and every weekend I would drive home and be with my mom.
During that time, Joe Friday, my first sponsor, passed away. And a couple of months after that, another sponsor of mine, Keith Lewis, passed away, who many of you may have known Keith. I love that man so much, I can't even tell you. But I'd call her, and one day, because of all of you, and because of this book, and because of a guy named Joe Friday, I was on the phone. I was traveling for work, and I was in Indianapolis, and I said to my mom, Mom, look, it's obvious you're going home.
You're going to go hug Dad and the big Dad and all that stuff, and that's wonderful. And I said, but if there's something that you haven't made right, that's sort of pinging your conscience a little bit, I would be honored as your son to go make that right. In AA, we call that steps 8 and 9. And she goes, no, no, I think I'm okay. I think I'm all right. I said, okay, well, if it comes up, let me know.
Two weeks later, she calls me. She goes, yeah, I've got a couple things. Now, my eighth step could have been on a roll of bounty paper towel. You know what I mean? Like this. International paper is cutting down more trees for my eighth step. It's complete hyperbole. It's not true. I'm just kidding. Okay. I walked into my mom's hospice room to go and help her with these things, and it was just so perfect for my mom.
It was so beautiful. It was a little corner of a magazine edge, and there were two names on it. I mean, again, just the sweetness of that. And I went out in the city of Chicago and I found these people and I got to look them in the eye. I got to look both of them in the eye and say Ann Marie Donnelly is sorry and she wants to make this right. And I got to cross off the names on the little corner of the magazine because you taught me how to do that.
Because God showed up in your life to bring a message to me so that he could show up in mine, and I had no idea this was part of the scheme. And, I mean, you talk about feeling like a son. I mean, holy cow, on the way home, right? I mean, I'm balling. I'm not kidding you. And maybe that's pride. Maybe that's wrong. I just got to tell you, I felt so connected, so elated, so joyful in terms of that connection with my mom that day.
I didn't think I could feel any better until I walked in with that little magazine corner. And I gave it to my mom and I said, I found them both and they both send you forgiveness. It's okay. They don't want you to worry about it. See my mom well up. This is the beauty of these steps. This is the beauty of an invisible God who reached out to me when I didn't want him. He's the initiator. He gets the credit.
He moved first. He came and got me. I was in a gutter and he reached out and he picked me up. He brought me to a guy named Joe and he gave me a book. Financial amends. That's something sometimes that plagues us. I had about $40,000 in credit card debt. And I got to tell you, that was like beer and pizza money. There was nothing on it. There wasn't even a big TV. I claimed nothing on that. It was ridiculous, right?
I had student loan debt.
[00:40:02]
I had filed federal income tax in four years prior to joining A.A. I was screwed. I knew it. You can't dig out of that. Bankruptcy. Bankruptcy. Not with Joe Friday as your sponsor. In hindsight, thank God. At the time, it wasn't really my thought. And I just started making payments. I found an accountant in Alcoholics Anonymous who helped me get the accounting part done in the IRS. And we did all the back filing.
And we got a number. And I just started sending checks. And three and a half years later, I don't know the IRS anything. I said, Joe, I'm finally free. He said, no, you're not. You take that money and you roll it to the next one. I paid off my credit card debt. I paid off my student loan debt. I'm free. I paid off my mortgage. I'm free. My wife and I are not rich, but we've got a little bit aside. I have no idea what God's plan is for us.
But if we keep doing what we're doing, apparently, according to people with bigger, better minds than me, we'll be okay. And that matters to me. And I'll tell you why, because my dad died at 42. It used to matter to me so that I could tell you how much money I had. Now it matters to me because my wife is going to be okay. Thank you, God. Because I listen to people smarter than me. When it's about me, I'm going to miss it.
When it's about the people that God placed in my life for me to love, I don't know why this guy who is so inaccurate at throwing darts can hit a bullseye. It's because it's about someone else. It's because it's about someone else. When I look for my bullseye, I lose. It happens every time. Sexual amends. Sheldon talked about the sex inventory and the four-step. This was a problem. This was a problem.
And I'm going to say it again. This was a problem. I got one smirk from my right. I thought, I'm going to go for it. It's a good place to throw in a joke. But I went to these women. And again, I'm not like, these women, like there were hundreds, because there weren't. I'll tell you, I fed my ego more on whether I thought I could than what actually happened. I wish I could stand here. No, I'm glad I cannot stand here and say that.
But the reality is I fed my ego on just getting to the spot where I thought I could. There were some mistakes that I made, for sure. And as I went through this process of trying to seek out these ladies that I hurt, I went to them under the guidance of Joe and, again, under the guidance of sponsorship, big book sponsorship. Joe pointed me to what I needed to say to them. And there was an old guy in the program years and years ago in South Dakota.
His name was Father Rock. And Father Rock would say, there's four parts to an amend, confession, contrition, repentance, and restitution. I was like, wow. So he said, what you've got to do is you've got to go and you've got to confess to them what you really think about this now. And Sheldon didn't mention it because there wasn't time. I know he alluded to it. But Joe had me create a sane and sound ideal for my future sex life in that four-step.
Smack dab in the middle of page 69. He said, well, let God be the final judge. And what I was taught to do is kneel down and read God my new ideal. It was loaded with loopholes. Just being honest with you, right? But by kneeling down and reading it to God, though, some of those loopholes closed a little bit. Over time, more and more have closed. But in making these amends, the eyes on these women, not because of me, just they changed the way I view women.
Some said, whatever. And I thought, oh, my gosh. That's what they think about themselves. And I may not have been the only guy in a line that gave them that message, but I have to take my spot. I was at least one of the guys in that line that gave them that message. Some looked back at me and said, you know, I'm sorry for using you too. Sometimes in AA here, consensual. We're all adults. It's okay.
But when I went to the consensuals, they apologized back to me. We were using each other. We Were Using Each Other. Now, maybe we agree to that, but if I'm using anything, it's selfish.
[00:45:01]
And our book says above anything, above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must or it kills us. Perhaps, I just perhaps, consensual selfishness. Just perhaps. And, you know, but in my case, I can't do that. I mean, I can't, I can't do that anymore. Not because I'm good or anything, because I just, man, what you guys have done for me, this isn't, this isn't about not drinking.
And it's not about, I have a buddy in Sioux Falls named Mark L. He's terrific. Huge big book guy, great guy. And he always says, God doesn't want a beaten and bruised, healed up Mike. He wants a brand new Mike. The big book doesn't say we lose our fear of today, tomorrow, the hereafter, and we were rehabilitated. It says we were reborn. A new Mike. I don't know how close to that I am, but I can tell you from this perspective, still there's some continued birthing that needs to take place.
Believe me, there does. But I'm just saying, like, it's a completely radically different life. I'm not the same guy. And I didn't do it. It just unfolded and was sort of unleashed as I went through this process. And I would encourage all of us to do the process. You know, in a room like this, I'm just going to digress for a second. There's somebody out here, maybe it's their first meeting. And that's wonderful.
Welcome. God bless you. Glad you're here. Get a book. Get a sponsor. We get it. But honestly, the guys today that really touched my heart are the guys who were here for the last meeting. Knocked around 5, 10, 15, 20 years for whatever reason. They seem to be coming out of the woodwork to me these days. If you're sitting in here and you've been to meetings and you're tired of slogans and you're tired of mottos, we've got a bigger solution for you.
Please, please just reach out. Just talk to me after the meeting. We'll go to coffee. It doesn't matter. But if you're in here tonight and you're not sure, you can be changed. This thing can work. Anyways, sorry. I felt like I needed to say that, so I said it. My wife. I have never necessarily overtly hurt my wife. In the process of the tenth step, and there's a principle in here that's reiterated in nine, I found that I love her better when I don't make cheap shots about women at the coffee pot at work.
I found out I love her even when she's not with me. I find that if I act like a married man when she's not there, I act like a better married man when she is. I used to pray in our first five years of marriage because of her. We're really traumatic and a bit challenging for anyone who's ever been married. Those first five years can really be crazy, and it wasn't her, obviously. It was this guy. And I used to pray, please, God, I don't want to get divorced.
Please, God, I don't want to get divorced. Please, God. And something through the amends process changed that prayer to this. Please, God, let me love her in such a way that she knows you do. Let me be your agent of love, like the third step calls us to be. We're supposed to be his agents. Let me be your agent for my wife. I do that terribly. I do that inconsistently. But I'm very sincere in saying that.
I want to love my wife in such a way that she knows that God loves her. That's not the same guy that you met 25 years ago. I mean, it's just not. And it's because of these steps, and I had nothing to do with it. I'm going to close with one last story. I was going through my first eighth step, and there was a guy on there. He was a trucking company. He's a business owner, and I had lied to him. I was in a sales contest.
And I don't know about you guys, but if I can't win, I'm not playing. And sales contests are just examples for me to show you how much better I am than you. And so I'm in this sales contest, and I don't know, I'm a couple of months sober. I'm in the program, but I'm not doing anything. I'm just going to meetings. I'm really new. I hadn't started working with Joe yet. And I ran across this potential customer, and he wanted to buy our products.
And he had been a customer several years before that. And he's like, I just want the minimum package, no bells or whistles. Just streamline the thing for me and get it to me.
[00:50:03]
I'm like, okay. And I added about $750 worth of bells and whistles. Not a big deal, but it raised my average a little bit, and this whole contest was based on average. And as long as I sold him, I mean, that's my job. That's what we do. We're capitalists. We sell. So I lied to him. I put the contract in front of him, and he signed it, and he paid his bill. And it came time for renewal. About the time I'm doing my eighth step.
Funny how that works. So I called my sponsor, and I said, I don't know what to do with this. He goes, yeah, you do. I said, no, I don't. He said, well, first thing, it's not just the customer that you need to make amends to. You have placed your company in jeopardy. You've misrepresented them, and you need to go to your boss and tell them that you've been falsifying documents so you could win a sales contest.
And then you need to go make amends to your customer. So I went to my boss, and I told her what I did. And she said, can't you just tell them that at renewal time it's cheaper? I really like working for you. It's that kind of genius that excels our company forward. And I said, I guess I could. I guess I could. But I'm not going to. I'm not going to. I'm going to tell them the truth. And she said, well, if he has any recourse on this, if he has any problems with this at all, and he calls me, I'm just telling you, you and I never had this conversation.
Wow, time to find a new job. Okay. And so I called him up. I said, Joe, you got a few minutes? He said, yeah. I ran over to his office, and he's like, are you okay? What's going on? And I was just at one of those points where you're almost ready to break. And you're holding on for dear life to not let the emotion come through and not let the change come through. Because I was just afraid of what I would become if I really did this thing.
I didn't know new Mike. I only knew old Mike. And I was scared of new Mike. And I said, well, I stole from you. I said, last year on the contract I added in $750, and you signed it, so I owe you $750, and I don't have it. But what I do is a check for $250. I'm going to give you the check, and in six weeks I get another commission check, and I'll give it back to you. And he said, why are you here? And I was like, well, I stole from you, and I owe you $750, and I thought we covered this.
And he says, no, no, no, no, no, I got that, I got that. But why are you doing this? I think, why are you doing this? I would have never known. I started to cry, something that, you know, tough guys from Chicago don't do, whatever that means. And I said, Joe, I'm trying to change my life. I'm a maggot, and I don't want to be a maggot anymore. And he said, let me tell you a story. And I said, okay. He said, when I was a kid, my brother and I used to go out to this farm, and we would pick peas all the time.
And we'd have a little basket on us on the side, and we would get into this rhythm, and we would just chuck these peas into the basket. And you'd almost do it, and you'd be almost unconscious. Like you wouldn't even be thinking about it, you'd just be going. And you had to stay in your row so the farmer knew which rows were picked, and there were two bells that rang, one with about 15 minutes left to pick, and the second bell was when that pickup truck was going back to the farmhouse, and you did not want to miss that pickup truck.
He said, in every line, every basket that filled up to a line, you got a quarter for. So my brother and I were out there, and we're picking, and we're going crazy, and we're picking, and we're going crazy. It's almost subconscious, we're not even paying attention, we're just going. And out of the corner of my eye, I see a guy jump off a train that's rolling through the farmland. And they would jump and stay in the gullies there and move on down the road whenever they felt like it.
He goes, and as I'm doing this, I can kind of see him, and he's in my row. And he's got this cowboy hat. And he's filling peas in my row into his cowboy hat. And I get completely distracted, and I lose all train of thought, and I can't pick fast, and I'm not going to get my quarter. First bell rings. And I'm turning around and walking back, and I'm just angry at this guy, and all of a sudden I hear, hey, kid.
[00:55:02]
Joe says he turned around, and there's this hobo holding a hat full of peas. He leans over, and he dumps the hat full of peas in my basket, Mike, and fills it up to the line to get my quarter. And he pokes me in the chest, and he says, remember that, kid. Somebody gave you a hat full of peas one day, and you didn't even ask for it. You still got one. And someday somebody's going to come knocking on your door, and they're going to need a hat full of peas, and you better damn well give them one because somebody gave you one once.
You know what I mean, Mike? No. I stole from you. I'm a big guy, right, but this guy is bigger than me, if that's even genetically possible, right? And he comes around, and he stands in front of me and does this. And I stand up, and he puts his arms around me. And he goes, you don't owe me nothing. The honesty in your eye right now is payment enough. As a matter of fact, Mike, we could use an honest guy around here.
If you ever need a job, come call me. An honest guy? No, I'm the thief. Right? He says, you can drop checks off here all day long, never cashing them. If you want, I'll have my secretary write up a letter of recommendation, and I'll sign it, and you can just pick it up. He said, that's not supposed to happen. He's supposed to call my boss, and I'm supposed to lose my job. That's justice. I mean, it was $750.
It's not like we were going to court over it. But it's the point. And he's hugging me. And I have two thoughts, and I'm like, thank you, God, for freeing me of this and having me have this experience. And the second thought was, whatever you do, dude, don't get snot on his tie. Like, just, you know. So he pulls me back, and he looks me right in the eye, dead, dead smack in the eye, and he says, one more thing.
God's bigger than you, and he's bigger than me, and he's sure the hell is bigger than $750. But remember this. I'm giving you a hat full of P's, and you didn't even ask for one. And someday somebody's going to come knocking on your door, Mike, and they're going to need a hat full of P's, and you better give them one because somebody gave you one once. To me, that's Alcoholics Anonymous. It's a book, man, but it's a life.
If I know what date Roland Hazard died, and I have an understanding of all the great addresses, and I see and memorize all the wonderful, incredible stuff in this town, which moved me deeply, and I've been told the best is yet to come from the big man over there. That's all great. Keith used to tell me, Mike, knowledge is the booby prize. Knowledge is the booby prize. Apply it. Put it in your life.
Wrestle around with it. Swim in it. He was right. I have one more story, and then I promise I'll shut up. When I was 7 years old, it was right after my dad died, and we were walking through Toys R Us, and on the end display were stacks of these giant robot dolls. Remember Giant Robot from Lost in Space? Danger Will Robinson. Remember that guy, right? And man, I just turned into an amoeba. Please give me one, Mom, please.
Like that kind of thing, right? On the floor, crying, screaming. And she said, well, Christmas is coming. If you're a good boy, Santa will bring you one. Well, she lied. I wasn't a good boy, but Santa brought one anyway. And I opened that thing up, and it was like the greatest gift I could have imagined. I mean, I'm serious. Like, I loved this thing. And the couch was one planet, and the steps were like another crater thing.
I mean, I don't know. I just was, man, I was into it. And I loved it. About the 2nd or 3rd of January, my mom ran off to Woolworths. And she got 6D batteries, and she shoved them into the ass end of this thing, and it lit up like the 4th of July. A little thing came out of the back, and you push one button, and it rolls forward. Another button, and it comes backwards. And there's a red button on it, and you push it, and guess what it says?
Danger Will Robinson. It was great. See, that was me in alcohol. See, that was me in Alcoholics Anonymous. I came to you batteries not included. I had no power.
[01:00:00]
I had no power. I knew how to live. Mom and Dad taught me the right stuff. This isn't new, right? I just had no way of applying it. None. And I think that's each one of us. You see, that robot had all the potential that it showed once it had power before it had power. It had all the lights, all the bells, all the ability, but no power to actually have it be applied to life. If you're out here tonight and you're looking for power, as I am and I pray to God I continue to seek and to try to understand and to serve that power.
If you're out here tonight and you just don't think it's possible, the good news of Alcoholics Anonymous is that if it worked for me, it'll work for you. The fantastic news of Alcoholics Anonymous is that they wrote down the process in a book. And if we just find someone to walk us through this book, we can get that power too. God bless you all. Thank you for having me. And let's not settle for sobriety alone.
Let's settle to connect with this God who can transform our lives and teach us to love each other the way we've always wanted to. God bless you all. Thank you. Thank you.