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Source: Nora M. (AFG) Warren, OH – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2025-02-16.mp3 File: nora-m-afg-warren-oh-box-of-chocolates-2025-02-16.mp3 Duration: 00:47:24
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Hi, I'm Nora. I'm from Northeast Ohio. I grew up in a, oh, I'm a grateful, grateful member of Al-Anon. Hi. And, um, I grew up in a little town in Ohio called Newton Falls. I had, um, two sisters and a brother, um, a brother that was, a sister and a brother that were older than me, and a sister that was younger. So, I was absolutely your middle child and my parents were parents, they were amazing. They were not drinkers and I came to find that they were quite boring. Um, I was looking for a little bit more. We went to church every Sunday, you know, it, it just was sort of a white picket fence family. And as I got older in high school, um, I started, you know, drinking because I was the third child and, um, they kind of let down their guard, um, with my sister and brother, uh, after them. So, I kind of had free reign. I didn't have a, um, I didn't have a curfew, all my friends did. So, I got home by midnight, uh, and I liked to party a little bit and that's when I actually got to know my husband because he was a partier and that was fun.
So, when I was 16, I'm going to tell you the things that actually formed my life. Um, when I was 16, my older brother, he was about a year and a half, two years older than me, he went to Vietnam and he was killed. When they sent his body home, it was just pieces. So, we never saw him again and for my parents especially, that was very difficult because they never saw his body and I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember when the POWs came home. Um, they took him, they came and got off of airplanes. My parents were glued to the TV because they were sure that Johnny would be getting off of that airplane but he never did. So, my parents were, I'm going to say destroyed, but they weren't really destroyed. They still had faith in God, but I believe that's when I lost mine because they, they were so hurt by this and I was raised in a church, but now I thought, oh my gosh, my parents are great. My brother was, he was ornery, but he wasn't bad and, and he's dead and, and they're a mess because of it and what kind of a God would do that?
So, I believe that that is when I started not really needing a God. So, I'm also going to say what my profession was because I believe that it formed so much of me. I went to school. I became a nurse. I was a registered nurse and I worked for 43 years. While I was in nurses training, my husband and I decided, he was a partier. I, like I said, I find alcoholics quite charming and that's probably my picker. My picker's probably broken that that's, you know, that's what I found charming about him or one of the things.
And his family was fun. They were drinkers and, and that was way more of a fun life than, you know, my parents. So, during my last year of nurses training, we got married. And, and if you heard my husband's lead, he would say there was something in the wedding cake that changed me. And if I have to say, he's probably right because after we got married, I changed because that's when you're supposed to become more mature. You're supposed to start
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saving money so you can buy a house. You can have kids. That's how I was raised. And that wasn't
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necessarily the way he was raised. Also, when we got married, I wanted to move out in Newton Falls because he had all these friends and what they did was party all the time. And I didn't think he would have time for me. So, apparently I had some inkling of what our life might be like. So, we moved to a little town probably maybe 10 miles away, but I'm also the only child that in my family that ever moved away. My two sisters still live in Newton Falls.
Married Newton Falls boys, so did I, but they still live in Newton Falls. But we moved all the way, all the way to Warren, which was 10 miles away. So, Bob didn't have his same friends that he had in Newton Falls, but of course he found the same kind of friends. And he went to bars and he did all that, but I didn't see it as a problem. But that just wasn't the way I conducted myself because I'm a nurse.
I can't go to work drunk. I can't go to work having had a drink, in my opinion. And so, you know, I would drink with him on weekends, but I didn't drink other times. So, everything, you know, seemed to go along okay. And then we started to have kids after probably four years. We had saved some money and of course we were doing all the things that I wanted to do, save money so we could buy a house. We had a deal that he could have a motorcycle after I got a house, which he never did. Because I'm a nurse, I work in the emergency room, I see what happens to people on motorcycles. I didn't want him to have a motorcycle.
So, then it became you can have a motorcycle after I get a washer and dryer. And he kind of went along with all of this. He was easygoing. And he also was a drinker, but very functional. He always worked, always was the main breadwinner in our family. So, we started having kids and I went from full-time nurse to part-time. I still worked in the emergency room. I apparently liked chaos because, you know, it's just chaos that's there.
But I would say that I saved lives. And so, if somebody said, are you going to work? And I'd say, yeah, I save lives at work. And what happened is that I still didn't have a higher power. And I saved lives. If you hear what I'm saying, I saved them. God didn't. I was trained how to do this. I knew how to save a heart attack's life if it was meant to be saved. I knew how to do this. I knew what medicine. I knew how much. With myself and the doctor, we were saving lives.
And I would go out and say, hey, doc, this guy's doing this. You want me to get some of this? And he'd say, yeah. And we would go and we would probably save his life. So, you can see how I started becoming sick while my husband was drinking. And all of it was, I mean, I was running our house. I was running pretty much everything. And when my son, I had two children, and my daughter was the oldest and then my son.
And when my son went into kindergarten, I had helped with kindergarten registration and met some new people. And one day after work, after this registration, I went to an AA, or not to an AA, to an Al-Anon meeting, because now I was suspicious my husband was an alcoholic. And I wasn't suspicious. I knew it. So, I went to this Al-Anon meeting, and it was a bunch of old ladies sitting there talking, I thought, about, you know, their drunk husband. Well, I didn't need that. I needed answers. What do I do to get him sober?
And they weren't giving me those answers. Plus, I wanted to be anonymous. And when I walked into that room, there was another nurse that I worked with,
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one of the ladies that I had just met at kindergarten orientation, a lady from the lab that always came to the emergency room to draw blood so I knew her, and a lady from the x-ray, when she would come over and do our x-rays in ER. So, there was four people there now that I knew. And I don't want anybody to know that my husband was a drunk. I was doing pretty good at showing that he wasn't, that he drank, but it wasn't a problem at our house. We didn't have problems. We were fine.
So, I never went back to an AA meeting for, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years. I didn't come back until I was 65. So, I kind of just got here. I've been here for six years. So, I never spoke of that meeting to anybody except the nurse that worked with me. And probably 10 years later, we both talked about it, and I never went back, and she never went back. We both felt kind of the same. It was a bunch of old ladies talking about their drunk husbands.
So, in the meantime, my kids grow up. My son just graduated from high school, and my husband gets in his first car accident. And he was drunk, but not only was he drunk, he ran, he passed out, and when he wrecked his truck, he ran into a car with two police officers in it. Yeah. So, that made it, it went from, you know, just being a car accident to being a felony. And he was in big trouble. Now, I still worked in the emergency room. So, the cops that came in, a lot of them knew me because they would come to help if we had a problem. They would come to the emergency room and help us. I knew all these cops. One of the docs, I wasn't working that night, but one of the docs called me and said, hey, Nora, this is Neil. I'm working, and your husband's here. And I said, oh. And he says, he's fine, but he's in big trouble.
So, I went there, and yeah, I knew these people, but it was now them against me, because he ran into these two cops. So, he ended up, you know, it's a long story, and it's his story, but he ended up going to AA and staying in AA for, eh, 10 years maybe. And then he sort of didn't go anymore. He said it got to be political, and so he decided to get out. So, then he was more like a dry drunk, but he stayed sober for, I think it was 19 years.
And again, he went to AA. I didn't think I needed to, because this was his problem. I would support him, but I didn't need to go to Al-Anon, because this was his problem. It wasn't mine. There was nothing wrong with me. I was doing all the things I was supposed to do. So, you know, go. He lost his license for three years, and that was punishment for both of us, because he was in a pain in the neck to drive around. And he was allowed to drive to work, and he was allowed to drive to meetings, but any place else he wasn't allowed to drive.
And he would do things, like if I forgot to turn on my blinker, he would go, yeah. And one time I said, get out of this car. I am your key to the outside world. Get out. And so, we were still married. We were still, you know, getting along. Then he started to become a dry drunk. Oh, he was going to these first AA meetings, and it's the first day of intensive outpatient, and I have to drive him there. At this time, he still didn't have a license for that. And I'm driving him there every day, and I would go sit in a McDonald's and read a book, because it was probably a 20-minute drive.
So, I would sit there while he went to his Drive. So I would sit there while he went to his three hours of AA, and on Thursday he said to me
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on the way there, he says, you know, Nora, I think I might be an alcoholic. And I just looked at him, I said, no shit. You know, because I knew he was. I'd known that for years, but he didn't know it. And he was just, I mean, that's how much compassion I had, though. I don't even want to go into some of the stories when he got beat up and he came to the emergency room and I was working and my kids were small and he got mugged on his way home. It was before automatic door locks.
Somebody broke into, you know, opened the door at a stop sign and got in his car and beat him up. He came to the emergency room that night. I had had to struggle to get babysitter for my babies, my kids, they weren't babies, for my kids at the last minute because I was working midnights and he shows up in the emergency room. And my response to him was as soon as, you know, the secretary comes out and says, Nora, your husband's here. And I'm like, I'm already furious.
And I triage him. And of course, I'm not nice. What's wrong with you? And he says, I got mugged. And I said, did you pass out? And he said, yes. And I said, did you pass out because you're fucking drunk or did you pass out because you got hit? And so when I took him in the room and put him on a cart, he had a broken jaw, but he's on this cart and I'm taking him to x-ray and he's waving his hand saying, I want a different nurse. Of course he does. Of course he does.
Because I was horrible. So, but everybody was supportive of me because they were my friends. It's my, you know, my doctor that I work with all the time, my nurses. So they're just letting Bob, you know, poor Bob, but that's not the way I looked at it. He put me in a spot. I was furious because I had to find a sitter at the last minute to fill in for him and he knew I was supposed to work. So we had our share of problems, but most of the time, nobody at work knew about it until then and until his car accident. And when he had that car accident, it just happened to be the first week of December. So they used his picture on every commercial. I presume you have them here too. The commercials about drinking and driving at Christmas time. It was his picture that was there the whole month. Luckily, a lot of people didn't recognize him because he broke his glasses.
And that was the other thing that ticked me off. Now we have to go and buy you another pair of glasses? I mean, I ran the money and it's Christmas time. I wanted to buy presents for the kids. And now we have to buy you a new pair of glasses because you broke them. So, yeah, I thought I was fine. So, gradually, our kids are grown. They're out of the house and we're getting ready to retire. And our marriage is okay, but he's a dry drunk and I'm an untreated Al-Anon, although I don't know it.
And so his company, he worked in a steel mill and it failed and it went belly up. So he was 59 years old and he just didn't look for a job. Well, I was still working in a job that I'm no longer in the emergency room, but in a job that I didn't particularly like. Actually, I didn't like it at all. I was working in surgery, but I didn't want to change jobs because it takes so long to learn the routine of a different place that I didn't want to have to do that. And I knew I was only going to have to work for a few more years. So my husband doesn't have a job anymore.
I'm the full support. One of the things that he lost when his company closed was his insurance benefits. And we thought that we would always have his insurance because I didn't get any when I retired. So I had to work until I was 63 and a half. And so I did, but I was getting this
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resentment, big time resentment, because he wasn't working. I was working a job I hated and I was a mean, nasty person. I didn't like myself and pretty much only my old friends liked me in this new job. I didn't develop friendships. I just was not a nice person. I was not ever happy. And I didn't see that, but I'm surprised he lived with me because I know I was miserable. So he's not working. I'm getting ready to retire. I finally can retire. And he goes to the doctor because he feels like he has too much stress. He says, the stress is, you know, just killing me. And I'm like, really? You're not working.
And so he goes to the doctor and the doctor orders him out of van. Well, I didn't know. The doctor knew he was an alcoholic. I didn't know how bad out of van was for an alcoholic. And so he took the out of van for a while and then he started drinking again. But I was, I would have never, ever thought that he would drink again. So I was totally in denial. Um, he wouldn't, you know, he wouldn't drink again. He got in so much trouble that last time he spent six months in jail and he wouldn't do that. So, um, I heard him talking to one of his buddies and his speech was slurred. And, um, I thought, wow, that out of van is like kicking his butt. And he caught himself on fire one night when he was using the grill. And these just aren't the kind of things that he, he would do. So I asked him and he said, well, once in a while I was drinking and now I knew. And so now I pretty much hated him because he was drinking and he would walk in the house. Now he was just getting drunk all the time. He'd walk in the house. We would have a fight. He probably wouldn't remember it, but I sure did. And I just got to the point where I couldn't deal with it anymore. So I looked up, it was one Monday afternoon.
I don't remember the date, but I know it was in November. And I looked up an address for an Al-Anon meeting and I went to an Al-Anon meeting and it was in Youngstown, which is about a 40 minute drive from me. There wasn't any, any closer. So I went to this meeting and I'm crying. I want somebody to tell me that it's okay to get a divorce. We've been married 45 years and I didn't want to just throw that out the window. Um, but I didn't want to live this way.
And if you can imagine, they don't tell me, yeah, nor you need a divorce or no, nor you don't. My friends were telling me I needed a divorce, but I didn't, I wanted somebody impartial. So they said, come back, you're sick. And I looked at them and I said, I'm sick. He's sick. Um, I listened to the, um, to the steps. My life is unmanageable. No, it isn't. I'm paying all the bills. There's, I'm managing everything. It's not unmanageable. Um, a higher power will restore you to sanity. I'm not insane. I worked in the emergency room. I saw insane and that ain't me.
Um, so the steps, I just thought were a bunch of bunk. You know, they weren't for me because the first two were already wrong. They said, come back, come back for at least six weeks and, um, don't make any big decisions. But they also, this was a small group. There might've been five or six people in it. I don't think they had a newcomer's packet. They didn't offer me anything, not a newcomer's packet, not a phone number, nothing just said, come back.
So I got on Amazon. I ordered the three Al-Anon daily readers and went back the next week to
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show them that I wasn't unmanageable and I wasn't insane. And I'll prove it to you. So as you can see, I have a pretty strong will and I'm willing to, you know, let them know that there's nothing wrong with me. It's him. And I would go back. I, at that time, I didn't know I could go to other meetings. I thought I went to that meeting. That was my meeting. So every Monday I wrote 40 minutes to get to Youngstown and I went to that meeting. Well, eventually my husband said that he, he was, he got drunk, super drunk, wanted to kill himself, went to his meeting.
On a Wednesday night, went to his home group meeting. His sponsor called me and said, Nora, Bob's, you know, way out. I can't do anything. Could you come get him? So I went and got him. But of course, not silently, you know, I had to berate him the whole way home. And I said, well, I'm not going to take you to the emergency room because I know what they'll do. And if there's somebody that's suicidal, they strip their clothes, put them in a locked room.
And that's for somebody that I didn't think he was crazy. He was just drunk. And I didn't want him to be put through that. So I made some phone calls because I still knew people and set up sort of an intervention for him in the morning. And we went to that and um, she said, I want you guys to talk about this because I believe that he needs inpatient. And he says, no, I don't. Um, I know how to fix this.
And so he did not, he didn't want to go to inpatient, but eventually I said to him, um, both of our kids know that you're drinking. They will not let you around their grandchildren. And I am not losing my grandchildren because of you. So either get sober or lose the rest of our family. And so he said that he would go to, um, inpatient, but not until that night. So that night I drove him to inpatient because he had a class he had to teach. Now he was a scuba instructor and he had a scuba class to teach that afternoon or that evening. So after his class, he went to this outpatient. Um, I let my kids know that, uh, uh, he was an outpatient now for alcoholism. And my daughter who lived in Arizona at the time said, okay, mom, I'm going to come home and be with you for the weekend.
So she arrived home. He's in therapy. She comes home and on Friday afternoon, and she's, she's looking at things online. And she says, tomorrow morning, we're going to a meeting and Sunday morning, we're going to a meeting and I leave on Monday, Sunday afternoon. And I said, honey, that's not my meeting. My meeting is Monday. And she says, what are you talking about? And I said, my meeting is on Monday. She says, you can go to any meeting. Well, that was news to me. I had been going to my Youngstown meeting every Monday.
So now we are going to a Sunday or a Saturday morning meeting, and we're not allowed to see my husband. And, um, she, we go to Saturday morning and I see people, another nurse that I worked with, but now I don't care anymore. I just want our lives to get fixed. I don't care who I see, you know, it does not matter to me. Um, the next day I ran into a couple other people, people are giving me their phone numbers. They gave, you know, even though now I wasn't really a newcomer, I'd been coming for three months every Monday. And, um, so I started going to all of these meetings and my daughter said, mom, we met some people and you need to find a sponsor. You need to reach out to these.
Find a Sponsor. You need to reach out to these people and talk to them and they're going
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to help you. Well, I don't know, it's so difficult to do that, but my daughter was going to bug the heck out of me until I did. So, Sunday morning meeting, two ladies offered to be my sponsors for temporary. So, one of them I called back and I started talking to her and eventually she did become my sponsor. Eventually, I was going to every meeting in Warren that I could go to that was near my house, you know, that was within 25 minutes.
I started seeing they talked about choices and I was like, what? I have a choice? They would talk about detachment, lovingly, that I needed to be pretty nice to him instead of being the punisher because I thought he needed to be punished for his behavior. He was ruining our lives, our future. He was ruining it. I went to an attorney because I wasn't sure if I wanted a divorce or not. And she told me all of these things to do.
I did them. And then when she said, oh, he's in rehab now, this is where we get a restraining order. And I said, so when he's down, that's when I kick him? And I just couldn't do it. Whether I wanted a divorce or not, I didn't know it. But I started realizing that how ill I was. Now I was, I knew that I had isms. And so as soon as I realized that, I embraced this program, jumped in with both feet, read everything I could. Just as soon as something would become aware to me, I would work on it and work on it, trying to get past it.
I would chair meetings. And our meetings are a little bit different than yours. I would chair a meeting, say, on detachment. And because I was having trouble being able to detach. And I would say, make it into a nursing care plan. When I can't detach, these are the symptoms I have. And what symptoms do you have? And what is it that you use for your treatment? What do you do to get better? And so when we would share, they would tell me what their symptoms were, because I couldn't even identify my feelings. I hadn't laughed forever. The meetings that I chose to go to were meetings that I walked into, and they were laughing.
And so those were the meetings, because I wanted to laugh. So they had all of these things I wanted, and I was willing to go to any lengths to get them. My husband comes home from rehab, and he's, I don't remember what step he was on, but it was further than I was, and I was like, what the heck? He's only been doing this for a couple months, you know, for five weeks. And I've been doing this since November. And I can't get past step three for sure. So I realized that manageability in step one was not about paying the bills and all that. It was me. I was unmanageable. I was miserable. And I needed to not be. I didn't want to be. I was tired of it. I don't ever want to be there again. The insanity was that I kept saying the same things to him over and over, thinking that it would get better, that this time he might listen, and he never did. The powerlessness, I saved lives. I wasn't powerless. The big stumbling block for me was step three, turning my will and my life over to a power greater than me. And I knew all the time that there was a God. I just didn't need him. I didn't think he had time for me, even if he did. And I
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knew what he did to us when we were younger. He took my brother away, and it hurt my parents terribly. So step three for me was the hardest step to take, because I wouldn't do it until I actually could make that decision. And some people, I went to a 12-step weekend, and they said, you know, Nora, I might help you if you did the steps the way A does them. So I did that. And what I found was that I understood what alcoholism was, and I was crushed by how I treated my husband. He had a disease, and I was horrible. So now I was starting to see my part. And this brought me to my knees, because I was very, if you couldn't tell, self-righteous. I was right. And I would have never used that adjective to describe myself. So when I learned about alcoholism, and I learned what I was doing to my husband, I could picture him on some of the days when he was drunk and I was beating him up, I mean not physically, but with words. And so it still didn't help me find my higher power.
I had a sponsor, and I used hers, her higher power. She was so, she adored her higher power. And I wanted to do that with a higher power. And so I kind of took hers. I used the group as a higher power, because they've said so many things that resonated with me. They were kind of my higher power. And gradually, I could find a God for me, if I tweaked him a little bit, that I would be able to say that I wanted my thoughts and my actions to be like. So I had to change the words a little. And I was able to do step three, finally.
But I'm going to say it probably took me two years. And I was finding all other kinds of things, where things that I had a part in, once I got over the fact of how I treated him with the alcoholism, all, you know, different things, but my higher power, who I call God, is very gentle with me. And he only gives me as much as he thinks I could handle at the time. And so, you know, when he would give me other tasks that would bring me to my knees, I, you know, would try to get through them. And then we call them AFCOs, another freaking growth opportunity. And so he, you know, he steadily gives them to me, but I am able to handle them now. And I'm starting to feel my feelings. I read my daily readers.
I, you know, do all of the things, anything my sponsor ever told me, she would say, you know, pray for this person, I would do it. And then instead of hating them, and I don't know if I truly hated them, I thought I did, but I, if I prayed for them several days, two weeks, that then I would soften towards them and I no longer hated them. But what I had to do is pray and ask to be, to see them as God sees them, as he sees them, not as I see them, because I couldn't see them as anything but evil. So I would do anything my sponsor said, anything anybody in the meeting would say to do. People would give me ideas of what they did about detachment. They would say, these are the steps that I did to learn how to detach in our meetings. And I would be writing them down and go home and try them until I found one way that somebody did them that worked for me. And I was relentless because
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now I saw how sick I was. So this program for me has been life-changing, probably one of the most important things that, no, not probably, for sure, the most important thing that I've done was gratitude and making a gratitude list and sharing it. I needed to share it because I needed to be responsible to somebody else. So I would write my gratitudes and share them, you know, with you and with you, and I would send them to each one individual.
And if they sent a gratitude back to me, then that was our deal. So we would do gratitudes every day. And if you're looking for things to be grateful for, it's really hard to be negative because you see this beautiful butterfly that flew and sat right on your coffee cup, or you see these beautiful things that I didn't see before, and it's really hard to be negative. So it changed me from a negative person to way more positive. It's hard not to see that there is a God because all of these things didn't happen because of Nora. Nora didn't do it. It was somebody greater than me. So it helped me find God. Gratitudes, I still do them. I've been in the program for six years, and I started at my first year, and I still do them. The other thing was acceptance. I would say that the two most important things for me have been gratitude and acceptance. And being able to accept you where you are.
My daughter was the big thing. My daughter where she was, and she just has different thoughts, and how can that be? I raised her. Her thoughts are supposed to be like mine, and they're not. And so I needed to just accept her where she is because we were growing apart, and that was not okay for me. No matter what, no matter what she believes in, I still love her. So I need to accept her and just don't talk about it. So acceptance was huge, and it took me a long time, months to accept her. But she's here with me right now, and we have a much better relationship than we did a year ago. So, and it's not just with her.
I mean, I know when I start to, when I think, oh, geez, I don't really like her very much. I need to find something about her that is kind of, you know, that I do like, and accept her. Okay. That's how she is. So I am now able to use this, and although I don't work, I am able to use this program in all of my affairs. In dealing with my husband, he hasn't caught on yet that if I say, you might be right, I don't really mean he might be right.
I'm just trying to let him know that we don't have to fight about this anymore. He hasn't caught on to that one yet. But, and we've come to a kind of respectful relationship that if he has a question about something, you know, this is going on, what do you think, we're able to share our ideas. And he had never heard of the hula hoop. And he said, when I explained it to him, he goes, really, tell me you have a hula hoop, because he doesn't think I ever stay in it. And so, I mean, we do have, we share things now that, you know, we didn't get a divorce. We've been married now 52 years. Well, no.
course, we've been married now 52 years, well no, 51, hopefully 52 this year, and thank you.
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So now, I mean, I, he listens to all of these pod, or not podcasts, but meetings on AA history, and I know way more about AA history than I ever thought I wanted to know. Because I listen to, and we just have a good relation, basically, not that we don't fight because we do, but it has changed this program, has changed my life, and in a great way, and I'll be forever grateful. I don't ever see myself as not being in this program, although I probably don't have that many more years, so I'm never going to be a 30 year person, but hopefully I'll be 10.
And so, I usually, I can't think of anything else that I'd like to say, but, and I usually close this with a prayer, but I forgot to bring it, and I don't know it off the top of my head, but it's something about, God, don't let my past hold me back. Let me be able to be open-minded in the future, and be able to enjoy it. And I believe that that is what I do. I laugh, I think that I'm happy, joyous, and free most of the time, until somebody asks me to come and talk at a meeting that there might be a whole lot of people at, and that makes me a little nervous, but I, and when I'm not happy, joyous, and free, I look for the reason that I'm not, and the way to get out of it.
And sometimes I have to sit in that shit for a while, and it takes me maybe a day or two to get out of it, but that's not the way I want to be anymore, and I'm not willing to go back to that, ever. So thank you for letting me tell you my story.