Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Her Story Benefit for Dr. Bob's Home
- Speaker
- Mary T
- Date
- 2018-01-20
Transcript
Source: Mary T – Her Story Benefit for Dr. Bob's Home – 2018-01-20.mp3 File: mary-t-her-story-benefit-for-dr-bobs-home-2018-01-20.mp3 Duration: 01:11:24
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Hi there. My name is Mary Therese. I am an alcoholic. Are you filled? I mean, I feel so full of the spirit of this program. I'm really honored to be here. I've had the opportunity to get to know Gail pretty well over the last year, and I'm amazed. It's like I get thirsty wanting to know more and more. And the same with James and Billy. I just, what am I doing here? I have no idea. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous on September 13th, 1973, so I have 44 years in this program.
I like to say that I'm a long timer, not an old timer, but anyway. How I got here and what I've heard here, you know, I'm so self-centered. I think everybody has 44 years in this program, and sometimes I forget just exactly what it was like. And I look at people and talk to them as if they came in the same time I came in, and they were surrounded by the heroes of this program the way I was surrounded. And I will start off by telling you a little bit about my drunkalog and how I got to Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I was raised in New England, so. I have a Boston proper accent. Spent a lot of time in Maine. Went to prep school there and lived there for close to 30 years after I sobered up. However, in Boston proper homes, you're supposed to be seen and not heard. And the type of home I was raised in, there was a lot of money, property, and prestige, which diverts you from your primary purpose. Just remember that one. And somehow, although there was lots of alcoholism around where I was being raised, you weren't called an alcoholic.
You just drank a little too much. And even though my father was a commodore of a yacht club where I was raised and stuff, and we used to go on these cruises twice, two times in the summer when it was warm, finally, we would go on these cruises and we used to say the bilge was filled with liquor. And it was, you know, we balanced on booze. And that's pretty much what the cruises were like. So I was around alcohol all my life, all my life.
I don't remember my first drink. It could have been one Saturday where Dad gave me a little glass of beer and we went for a swim off the boat afterwards. So when I first started, I guess would be when I realized I wanted it because it made me feel different, was when I was sent away to school because I wasn't a proper little kid. I was a curious little kid, and I had a lot of questions and a lot of things, and I was supposed to be seen and not heard.
And that's very hard. That's very hard. And I had a lovely home. I had every single thing that people would think that they wanted, and yet I was dying inside. I was dying inside that home. I was raised by nursemaids. There was no emotional anything given to me. Now, it didn't look that way to anybody. It didn't. So I now know. That money is not the answer. Thank you, God, for that one. That's the one thing that I'm grateful for, is that money is not the answer to fill that hole in your gut with a wind blowing through. But when I got introduced to alcohol, really where I used it, I actually made it myself. Because when we're sent away to a prep school up in Maine, there's lots of little roadside places where you can get apple cider. And, you know, for some reason at 12 or 13, I already knew that you could make something very nice if you made that hard cider. And so I believed that my first drunks were on apple cider that I had made in my closet so that I could get through that prep school. And then I would come home on the holidays and I would
[00:05:00]
steal out of my father's liquor cabinet scotch or something. I liked scotch. People didn't like it. Light scotch. I used to have these big theories at the bar about the differences in scotch. And I used it, and it worked, and it made me feel like I could be at that prep school and make one call a month home that they would accept. It was a different area, a different time at that. Anyways, I left that prep school and I came back to Boston.
Well, actually it was just north of Boston, a little town on the seashore. And I was, in those days, my father was in the First World War, and I was a second wife's child, and he should have been my grandfather. So that was the— Information that I received as a child being raised. And what I was supposed to do was to go to secretarial school so that when I got married, I could support my husband. That was what was happening in those days, and that was the mind.
The last thing I want to do is go to secretarial school. And in fact, they had this little ad for professional swimmers in the water follies, and I thought that looked very exciting and decided to do that. Now, that wasn't proper, but so I did it. And, you know, my father even interviewed the people in the water follies. Where are you going? Well, they must have known there was a lot of parents that were trying to keep their girls in line.
But that's where I started to drink and really enjoy it. And thank God, I'd been swimming since I was four years old, and I could swim better than I could walk, because when you're in kind of a show business or something, they give you a lot of booze. You know, you don't have to worry about it. Just walk in, I'm in the water follies. Oh, and set them up. You know, so it was quite a time for me. And in between one of those shows, my father informed me that I wasn't going to sit around waiting for another show to go out.
And so I got a job in his company in Boston. And I was over in Harvard Square. I got an apartment over there, and one of the gals that I had gone to the prep school with, she and I were down in the square having coffee, and these guys came in, really nice-looking guys. And we ended up having some drinks, and I ended up getting involved with one of them. And then I ended up pregnant and married in that order, which is not proper.
And I'm grateful, eternally grateful, that in one moment of sobriety, we decided we would get married and raise that child, because it was the only child I did have. But being typically alcoholic, water seeks its own level, and of course he was alcoholic. And as I always say in these talks, you can't change your drunkalog, I'm sorry. But, you know, he wasn't the fun type of alcoholic. And my weekend guest with the local police, because it was what you might call a battered wife nowadays.
And it was a very, very scary thing to go through as a young woman who was really a child having a child, to be honest with you. And when my daughter was about eight, nine months old, and he had kind of worked me over quite a bit, he picked her up and left, and he had what they called, some of you people remember, a TR-3, a little Triumph. And we didn't even have car seats in those days, for heaven's sakes.
And off he drove with her, and I can remember looking out the window and thinking to myself, I can maybe take it, but she can't. And I called my folks and I said, Mom, can I come home? She said, I've been waiting for this call for over a year. Now, I have no idea, I wished I'd always asked her, why didn't she call me and say, Honey, are you doing all right? I have no idea why that happened. But I was eternally grateful, and am, that they were allowed me to come into their beautiful home and bring this daughter and get away from the hell I was in. And that's when this disease is progressive.
And now I no longer was it to go out and have fun and be with my friends. Alcohol made a change for me, and it worked for me that I could then repress the horrors of what I had just gone through. Because when you're on the yacht club porch and they say, Hi, where you been?
[00:10:00]
I haven't seen you. Oh, I've been being battered and having… It just isn't the proper thing to be saying on the porch there. And so I was, for me, alcohol started to work. What it did is it repressed all those feelings, all those feelings I didn't want to have. And I seemed to be able to act the way you wanted me to act. But then time came and I got a job and my daughter was being taken care of and I would come home from work and I'd want to go out with my friends and they'd say, You can't go out until your daughter's asleep.
And I'd say, Okay, fine. I'd get her in bed and asleep and off I'd go. There was two bars in this town, and they were like my alma maters. And when I'd come in, it was, you know, my folks had said, I think you should be home at 10. To me, 10 o'clock was still happy hour. I'd gotten there just at eight, for crying out loud. What do you mean, 10? And I didn't realize that the disease had gotten me that once I took the drink, I couldn't come home at 10.
But I had a story in my head that it was something else. And I would be there until they said, Last call, and I'd say, Set 'em up, and then would drink those real quick because that other bar had a half an hour more on the one that was closing at 11:30, the blue laws or something. And we had to zoom over to the Molly Waldo and sit there and drink. And if there was a party going on, I didn't get home until after the party.
And after a while, this family that I was raised in said, they didn't come out and say this, but they might as well have said, This is improper, and you're not going to do this, and you're leaving. And they asked me to leave. And boy, did I drink at them. Let me tell you. They lived out on kind of like an island area that was very hoo-hoo, and I was now over in town. I was a townie, as they call it.
I really liked the townies a lot better, to be honest with you. But I drank at them for quite a while, and then what happened for me is that I did what any good alcoholic will do. They'll take a geographical tour. Because by then my reputation had caught up with me in this town. And so I'm going—now I'm going to cure myself, and I'm going to go away. And I had a half sister someplace in Southern California.
And I said, I'm going out there because my friend Joan is an airline stewardess, and she's living out there and says it's really the place I need to be. And I packed up that then four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I went to Southern California. And the last five years of my drinking in Southern California, I can't tell you too much about, because the progression of the disease is mainly that I was a blackout drinker. I always was.
And when I would come out of the blackouts, I'd be yelling at the only thing I loved most in this world, which was that child. I started to sleep with a knife between my box spring and mattress because it was something that was trying to get me at night. I couldn't quite figure out what it was. It was never there when I was flashing the knife around. Didn't know that was the detail. I had no idea about that.
And then I lost a job out there, and you have to take typing tests. Thank God I did know a little bit about that, but my hands had a problem. When I was trying to take these typing tests, and my half sister out there said, Mary, dear, go to a doctor. And so she brought me to the doctor, and he sent me to a psychologist. And the psychologist asked me, Do you think you could be alcoholic? And I said, I don't drink that much.
What is an alcoholic? I didn't even know. I didn't even know what it was. I didn't. It just didn't sound proper. So it was like, No, I, I, no, I'm not. Uh-uh. Call me crazy, but don't call me an alcoholic, you know. So he gave me this wonderful little pill. Do you know that? It was called Valium. And do you know that he probably said, Don't drink. But I didn't hear that. And so for the last five years of my drinking, it wasn't pretty.
And I have little shots of it. That's all. And pretty much when I'd come out of those blackouts, I'd be yelling at my daughter. I'd say, God, I can't do this, so I better go to bars to drink. Isn't that a good solution? I thought it was. And so I then, thank God, I lived in this apartment building that had about 20 units, and there was a teenage kid across the way, and I thought, She will be my babysitter. And she said, Sure, I'll watch Candace.
I said, So tonight when I come home, I'm just going to be gone an hour, and I'll be back. How many phone calls? I'll be back. How many phone calls?
[00:15:00]
Do you think you could watch her another hour? Do you think you could watch her another hour? Finally, they would say to me, or she would say to me, Why don't you leave her overnight? You can pick her up in the morning. That's the last five years of my drinking. I can tell you stories about Vegas, arriving, and then being in a blackout and coming home, and who I went with wasn't talking to me. I have no idea what I did in Vegas, but it was— You know they don't have any clocks? You know there's no windows?
The booze was free, and so were the cigarettes. Wonderful, wonderful. So I could go into all those stories, but why go into all those stories? It was progressive, and it was getting even more so. And so one morning, I went over to pick up my daughter just one more time. And the mother of the teenage girl opened the door and said, Mary. I said, Hi, I'm here to pick up Candice. And she said, Why don't you come in here?
I really haven't gotten to know you, and I'd like to have a talk with you, have some coffee with me. You see, Alcoholics Anonymous in those days wasn't as popular or wasn't as broadcast. There weren't a lot of rehabs in those days. And so they did something very nice. They 12-stepped us into Alcoholics Anonymous. And I am one of those people that was 12-stepped into the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And if you were 12-stepped by anybody, Just know you will not talk. They will do all the talking. And she brought me in there and she talked to me and she told me that she was from Massachusetts and that she had gone to MIT. And I thought, good stock my daughter's being taken care of with, you know, and that she was an engineer and she worked over in Burbank. And, you know, I was thinking, this is really good.
I think I picked the right teenager to have a mother that doesn't. And then she said, and I want you to know I'm an alcoholic. I said, Really? She said, Yes. And she proceeded to tell me her story. And when she was all done, in all sincerity, I said to her, God, I know a lot of people who could use that program. And I, totally other people that could use that program. And she said, Well, we have open meetings.
Thank God we had a little definition about what that was today. We have open meetings, and you're welcome to come. People come to open meetings to see what AA is all about. I said, Well, that's very nice. And she said, There's one tonight, so you can go. I tried to tell her I didn't think I'd have a babysitter. She informed me I did, and to be there at her place at 7:30 or something, and we would go to this meeting.
And I remember I arrived. There's a few bits and pieces you remember when you first come in. That's about all I can tell you. When I went in, for some reason, she couldn't bring me to the meeting, but her husband could bring me to the meeting because her sponsor was a man named Clancy and wanted her to be someplace else. Now, I'm saying her, him for a reason, okay? So I said, Oh, okay. And this wonderful man brought me to my first meeting, and it was the Friday night Winneka group in California.
It's a big meeting, probably as many people as this, maybe more. They all dressed very nice in California. There's lots of bling. Now, all I heard that this was an open meeting, so I was, in my perception, I thought the open meeting meant that everybody was kind of, it was like a talk on AA or something. You know, I didn't understand that all you people like this were alcoholics. I just thought we were kind of like the PTA, the parents.
We're going to go see about how the school is being run or something. And so I walk in, and David immediately says, Mary, this is her first meeting, and this is so-and-so, and they run and they get you literature, and they hand you all these things. And one lady said, Here, here's 20 questions. And I looked at her and I said, Okay. She said, Oh, don't look at them
[00:20:01]
now. Look at them someday when you're all alone and answer them one at a time. And I thanked her, and everybody was very lovely, and I sat down, and this woman came in a little late, and she said, Oh, hi, are you new? I said, No, I'm just visiting. It was very funny. And so in California, they have their very up meetings. You come in, they're very welcoming. They read a lot out there before the meetings, and people were reading.
And then they had birthdays. They call anniversaries birthdays. And then they sing out a tune, and everybody says something. And I found it very entertaining. I thought, well, this is interesting. It was what I would think this is. And then they called up the woman speaker, happened to be a woman speaker that night, and they said, We want you to meet Sybil. And Sybil was the first woman alcoholic in the state of California.
This was my first meeting. Do you know my first Al-Anon meeting, the speaker was Elsa. I look back at somehow I got to sit at the feet of the greats. I really did. So during Sybil's talk, I've heard her several times. I heard her several times after being in recovery. But the one line that I heard actually was out of her sober log. I don't know why, but I didn't know. And it's the one, you know, if you're ready for this program, you'll hear what you need to hear. I mean, that's just the way it is.
But I think her brother texted, said to her, How you doing, Sybil? How you doing? And she said, I'm fine, just fine. And she said, I had a hole in my gut and the wind was blowing through. And that's what caught me. I had a hole in my gut and the wind was blowing through, and I didn't know what was happening to me. I didn't know I was dying of the disease of alcoholism. I didn't know why I cried myself to sleep, cried myself home. I didn't understand anything was happening to me.
I didn't understand why I'd be thrown in the hospital and filled more with more Valium. I had no idea that I was an alcoholic. So as she talked in her story, there were times when I wanted to laugh hysterically or be crying. And you know, it's not proper to cry, so I would just swallow hard. And at the end of her talk, and people were up clapping and everything, David turned to me and he said, Mary, what'd you think?
And I said, I could cry. And he said, Go ahead. And it was just as if the floodgates opened up, and I started sobbing. And I thought to myself, What? This isn't proper. What's the matter with me? You know, it was like, but I couldn't, I couldn't understand. And it wasn't until hindsight that I realized that was the first time in my life I was given permission to have a feeling. I didn't know that then.
And he walked me up to Sybil and he said, Sybil, I want you to meet Mary. It's her first meeting. And she turned around, and everybody hates this, but this means something to me, and I didn't know what it meant until later. She looked me in the eye and she said, Welcome home, honey. I didn't know what that meant, but what happened to me inside shifted, and I couldn't figure out what that was. I didn't know what it was at all.
But on the way home, David told me that the disease of alcoholism was progressive and that I could get off the bus any place at all. I could get off here in North Hollywood, or I could go all the way to Skid Row. That's going to be something that my decision would be. But if you think you have a problem with alcohol, come see us, have coffee in the morning. And he brought my daughter over. I put her to bed. I was sitting on the couch, I remember, and I looked down at all those pamphlets I was given, and on top of it was the 20 questions. And I sat there looking out my window.
I still remember it. And I answered those questions one at a time. And at the very end, it said, If you've answered yes to more than three of these, you are an alcoholic. And I quickly started to count what I had done, and I had answered 17 of them yes. Now, I got a little bit more honest as time went on, and I could answer them all. But at that time, when I didn't know, that was the little tricky thing at the end.
I had honestly, because I was all by myself and I just thought I would do that. And at that moment when I said, Oh my God, I'm an alcoholic, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry because I had just come from a room of people
[00:25:01]
with a spirit that has been felt here all day. And I understood that it was the first time I felt as though I was part of, without… And my sponsor always said, They don't call alcohol spirits for nothing. It's just the wrong spirit. And that's exactly what had happened to me. The spirit had happened to me. And when years have gone on, and that line that Sybil had said to me, she said, Welcome home, honey. About two to three weeks later, there's a whole story there.
The next day, maybe I'll just try to tell the story and get in. Remind me if I've forgotten something, will you, Tom, please? And so, next morning I went over to Rosemary's, and they had brought me a Big Book, and I brought it. And she said, Well, how was your first meeting? And I said, I think I'm an alcoholic. She said, Yes, you are. And now sit down. And I didn't like her very much. At that point, she was fine yesterday when she went to MIT, but now she's going to talk to me. And she said, This is what you're going to do.
You're going to go to 90 meetings in 90 days, and at the end of the 90 days, we'll gladly refund you your misery. And she said, Now you be here tonight. I felt like— and she said, Are you on any drugs? I said, I don't do drugs. She said, You're not on any— I think the other one was lithium, wasn't it? Lithium or Valium? I said, Well, I take Valium. And she said, No, that's a dry drink. Now, this is my story, folks.
Don't all jump up and run away here. This is— I'm telling you my experience. My experience should have been that I would have been thrown into a hospital and detoxed. I wasn't. We didn't do that. For some reason, we didn't do a lot of those in those days. I should have been, but I wasn't. And she said, No, that's a dry drink. Well, I didn't like her at all at that point. And I thought to myself, How did she— you know, maybe her kid was— looked through my— you know, how you get a little cracked.
So anyway, she said, You be here, and we're going to a meeting. And so I, for the first two to three weeks of my recovery, am very familiar with the Pacific Group. Okay? Some people might know the Pacific Group. Wonderful. Absolutely great. I'm an introvert. Not great. Okay? And they're very friendly out there, and as I said. And then after you go to these meetings, they drag you into coffee shops.
Okay? So now we're in the coffee shop. You know, it's 8:30 to 9:30, the meetings— no, not 10, excuse me, 10, hour-and-a-half meetings out there. And then we'd go to the coffee shop, and then after you have your— you wait forever, you get the coffee, you're dead now just about, you know, and I am. I'm like this because I'm detoxing. And they'd say, Now you say goodbye to everybody. So I would have to shake your hand before I could get out of there.
I was, it was not an easy sobering up. They used to say, You only have to sober up once. You have to go through this just once. Well, I think because I had such a bad sobering up, I, thank you, I don't want to have another. I couldn't do it. Now maybe if I was going into detoxes, I would have thought differently. But I was doing it on the bricks. And I said, This is my story. It is not the way I would ever have anybody go through what I had to go through to sit in these halls and earn my seat, but that's the way I came in.
And they used to tell you to drink orange juice and honey. So I was mainlining that stuff, let me tell you. Fill your cup half full. There's a reason for that, because you might spill it all over. There you go. People would say to me early on, they'd say, How are you doing, Mary Therese? And I'd say, I don't know. I feel like a Coke bottle that somebody shook up. I never know when the top's coming off and I'm going to fizz all over you.
I had no idea what was happening to me. They'd say, Sit on your hands, honey, and shake it out. I mean, we didn't have a lot of kindness in those days. There wasn't a lot of patting you into the grave, is the expression that we got. So I was due to go back to the proper town for my father's 75th birthday when I was going to be 37 days sober. And this Rosemary informed me that I would get drunk unless I…
That I would get drunk unless I found a sponsor who was into something called the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve.
[00:30:03]
And what is a sponsor? Do you interview? What does that mean, sponsor? It was a word. There's no absolutely—I didn't understand your lingo. We have our own lingo here. But I didn't want her as a sponsor. I knew that much. But I didn't know that—I didn't even know what this meant. And she said, You'll get drunk if you don't get this. And I was going to these meetings with all the Big Pacific group, and one night I was in one of those coffee shops, and one of those gals must have looked over and thought I was about ready to flip out.
And she said, I go to a little meeting up in the West Valley. Perhaps you'd like to come with me on Thursday night. I said, Yep. Yep. And because, just like the—I always tell this one story. This was just the night that woman said that, we went to a meeting earlier, and Rosemary had said to me, You're going to read something. Could have been chapter three. I have no idea. I said, No. She told me, You never say no to an AA request.
And I went, No. And she turned around, and she stormed over the other side of the room, and I said, That's it. I'm kicked out. There's no way I could have done that. There's just no way. I was too sick and crazy. And there was a little—they had a coffee break, I guess it was. It wasn't—nobody smoked outside of the meeting in those days, so I don't know why, but we had a coffee break, and there was one guy that didn't go outside, and I went over to him, little old guy.
He was probably younger than me now. And I said to him, Can I talk to you? And he said, Yes. And I said— I think I did something wrong, and I told him what I'd done, and maybe I'm going to be kicked out. And he just looked at me and he said, How long have you been sober? And I said, A week and a half. And he said, The only thing you have to do is find a meeting you're comfortable in and don't drink.
I'm eternally grateful to that man. I never ever saw him again, but he saved me. He really saved me. And I'm—sometimes, you know, it takes a while for us to hear what's going on in these halls. I tell this funny story. I left California after five, six years and went back to New England, was in Maine, and that's a story in itself. But there was this little meeting that I helped start over in Lisbon Falls, Maine, and there was a guy there that had, I think it's called agoraphobia.
You can't travel too far or something. And so he would go to that meeting. It was only a little bit from his house, and he had more time than I did, and he would sit there with the Big Book until people actually started to go to this meeting. That's how we did it up in Maine. I feel as though I was like the Akron group or something when I got to Maine. It was weird, but I'll get to that. Anyway, they advertise AA in the newspaper in Maine, and I was working at a shipyard, biggest employer in the state of Maine, and there was a gal there that wanted to go to an AA meeting.
I said, There's a great one on Thursday night. Go on over to it. And she said, I will, I will. And every week for about three weeks, I asked her if she'd gone. She hadn't gone. And finally I said to her, Why don't you go to that meeting? You asked me. She said, Because the newspaper said it's a closed, closed AA meeting. You see, we're so self-centered, we think everybody in normal land thinks closed AA meetings means only the alcohol.
Closed store, supermarkets closed, you don't go to the supermarket, do you? But that's how crazy we get. So anyways, what happened is that woman brought me to that little meeting. I went out there. It was small. There was probably about 25 people out there. There was a man at the end that said, Anybody wants a Big Book? It was a Big Book meeting. Is anybody want a Big Book? Come see me. And I went and I saw him, and he sold me my second edition, because that's all we had in those days, of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And he told me that when he came into Alcoholics Anonymous, his sponsor, which they called abacers at that time, had told him to buy a Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he knew he was a thief, so he wanted to see the receipt. And so he told me this story about how he got his first Big Book. And he told me, he said, You know, I read this book, and, he said, I found the loopholes. I found the loopholes.
[00:35:01]
And I'm listening like this, you know. And he said, So I went to my aversary sponsor, whose name was Larry Blake, and he said, Larry, I want to talk to you about this Big Book. Larry said, I'll talk to you about that Big Book when you can tell me what's on the first page of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And over a period of three months, Hugh went on and, you know, he memorized the preface, and then he memorized the contents, and finally he went in there and he realized that on the first page it said, Alcoholics Anonymous.
And he, you know, this was over a period of time. Every time he quoted this to Larry, Larry would say, Not on the first page, and he'd walk away. And so after three months, he said, Alcoholics Anonymous is on the first page of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And Larry said, Give me that book. And he grabbed the book from him, and he held it up, and he opened it up to the first page, and he said, There is nothing on the first page of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and if it's taken you three months… And you couldn't figure that out.
How long is it going to take you to understand what the black lines of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous say? I was so excited. I was absolutely so excited. I said, Oh my God, here's somebody who knows the Big Book, because it doesn't say Big Book. I didn't know what they were talking about when she said, Find somebody who's in the Big— So I said, Hmm. Now, I knew he was into the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, as you had just told me that.
And I was about ready to go back east, and I didn't want to get drunk. I didn't want to go through any more of this and drink another—oh, it was terrible. And so I took the book and I went home, and of course she said to me, Have you found a sponsor? Because she lived across the way. And I'd say, I think I have. Then to the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve, I said, Yes, I believe so. Have they been sober? I don't know why she said sober for five to six years.
I didn't know, but I said, Yeah. And she turned, she said, Good, and walked away. See, because when they Twelve Steped you, they told you the truth there. She wasn't there to make me feel happy, joyous, and free. I was dying. She was the one that had the answer for me. She's the one that said, Watch what you defend, sweetie. You don't have to tell me why you're defending it, but you better ask yourself why you're defending it. I still use that.
Do you know that? I still use that. She used to always say, Honey, you're the fish you gotta catch. And I am the fish I gotta catch. This is about my growth to be able to be present for somebody else. So I better be able to catch what it is that's blocking me from the only authority, which is a loving God, that I've learned to experience in these halls. I ran back to that meeting the next week, and Hugh Douglas said, How you doing this week? And I looked at him and I said, I'm doing fine.
I want to ask you to be my sponsor. Because, you see, she was being sponsored from a man I did not know any better. Remember? Clancy. She, he. But this man looked at me and said, You know something, honey? He said, Ever since I got married, my wife doesn't cotton to me sponsoring women. And he said, You go over there. She's that redhead over there. She's got kind of a Mickey Mouse program, but perhaps she'll help you out. And I ran over to this woman, and I waited, because usually if they have time, people are around them.
Finally she looked down her nose at me and she said, Yes? And I said, I was wondering, do you think you could sponsor me? She looked down. She said, Did you just ask my husband to sponsor you? I said, Yes, I did. And she said, What'd you do that for? So then I told her this whole story, you know, I'm… She must have thought, This one just got out of the loony bin. And she said, All right. She said, I'll tell you what. She said, We'll get you back to Massachusetts.
And when you come back, you look around, you find somebody you want to sponsor you, you want what they have, and you're willing to go to any lengths to get it. She says, You be at my house on Tuesday night. You bring that big book and a 12 and 12, and we'll talk. And I was at her house on that Tuesday night, and she sat there and she said, I want you to tell me your story.
[00:40:01]
And I told her my story, and at the end she said to me, You tell that story is in the third person, not the first. I had no idea what she was talking about. And I said, What do you mean? And she said, You have no feelings attached to what's been going on with you. She says, But one day, you will share that story, and you will share those tears. She, I'll tell you what you're going to do with that first page that's empty. She says, You're going to write down people's names.
When you meet them, you're going to write their name down. You're going to write down their phone number. And she said, Then on the other side of the page, she said, You're going to read this book, and this is the first 64 pages of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And she said, What you will find as you read through those black lines is that there'll be a line that'll come right up the page, and it's like it was just for you, just yours.
And you're going to write down the page number. My first page number was page 69, which deals with sex. And so that was like the first thing I was interested in. And I was young when I came in, folks. You wanted me to give up the booze. I didn't want to give up the boys. And so I had a little problem there, all right? So. And Beverly was the best sponsor in the world for me. Best sponsor in the world. She'd always say to me, Honey, why don't you stop doing the things that hurt you? She said, You can do them, but don't you drink, don't you use, and don't you kill yourself. I was always going to kill myself.
It didn't work my way. This woman saved my life, and so did her husband. These were the silver threads that came into my life that began for me a journey over 44 years. I went back to New England. Funny little thing, the night, you know, a couple of nights before I left, there was some woman that spoke some place in the valley that was from the other side of the hill, and one of the gals I sobered up with ran in and said, I heard your story. I said, You did?
Who is she? She said, She wants you to call her. And I called her. Her name was Ann, and she was raised in my hometown. She went to the same psychologist I did, who sent her away to school as well as I got sent away to school. She belonged to the other yacht club. She was a little older than I was. I think she had three years in the program at the time. And I said, Ann, I'm so scared. I'm going back there.
I'm going back there for Dad's birthday. I don't even know if they have AA. She said, Well, do you think you can—how long, when are you going back? I said, I'm leaving Thursday. She said, How long are you there? And I said, I'll be there for two weeks. And she said, Well, she said, I'll meet you there, because I'm going to see my folks. So I met this woman in my hometown. You know, you don't get those miracles like that at all.
It's just little things like that that keep you going. If you're brand new, you usually get the miracles, because God can do for us what we can't do for ourselves. The longer we're in this program, we can do something. So, you know. Do the drill and the miracles. It's limitless here. It really is. It's limitless. I got back from California, and I was like glue to Bevin Hugh. Bevin Hugh were my parents, were everything.
I was told exactly what to do, to be in a Big Book meeting and a 12 and 12 once a week. I could go to these other meetings if I wanted to. I experienced a shift in my life. Before I got into Alcoholics Anonymous, I knew of a person, an author by the name of Emmet Fox, and I had had a spiritual experience as a result of something that happened in my family. And when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was sitting in Bev's living room one day, and I looked over and there was an Emmet Fox book.
And I thought to myself, Oh my God, good stock. This is like this, you know. I was three years sober, and there was a long-timer that came that was one of—I don't know who it was, because I was very crazy then. I don't remember names. Some guy from Connecticut. You archivists probably know this. And he talked about the writing of the Big Book, and he said, Of course, before it was written, a lot of us were using Emmet Fox's Sermon on the Mount.
And I wanted to fall off the chair because I realized that there was some spirit that I felt in these rooms. It was the only time I felt safe. In these rooms, it was the only time I felt safe. And as the years have gone on and I've gotten to know what the black lines say, and I've done this drill for quite a while, I've started to see how this
[00:45:03]
whole book is so spiritual, and that it is, you know, the main problem centers in my mind. I'm the one that blocks the sunlight of the spirit. I'm the one that creates the stories. I now understand what happened the first night. I realized that when I walked into the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous, you met my false self, or my survival skills, every single defective character, so to speak. I was riddled with fear, and fear motivated me to find a survival skill, which is my defects of character.
I was not authentic. I was not honest. It was not the Mary theory you see here today. It was another Mary theory that I had created in order to survive in the world as a woman alcoholic that was a parent. And what happened to me when Sybil wrapped her arms around me and she said, Welcome home, honey, she went through every single mask I had put up. She walked through every false self I presented to you and walked right into my heart, and she touched it because she knew who I was.
And for me, the disease of alcoholism is a soul sickness. It's a soul sickness. I'm not the only one that comes into the halls with a hole in their gut and the wind blowing through. I'm not the only one that didn't understand anything about what a moral inventory was about. I didn't understand. I thought it said do a fearful garbage inventory. I could not hear for years it said to do a fearless moral inventory.
Hugh Douglas said to me, What are your morals? Your morals, not your parents, not your priest, rabbi, or guru, not your sponsor's morals, but what are your morals and where are you going against them? I didn't understand that the black lines of the Big Book is on Alcoholics Anonymous, and if you look at page 65 to 70, you will find how to find your morals in that inventory. What are your values and morals?
Why did it say in the 12th Step, you know, we practice these principles in all our affairs? I just, in my mind, interpret that, oh, we just do the steps. Yes, but what are the principles behind the steps? Where was I being honest? Sometimes I go through this in my 10th Step. Not sometimes, I do it quite a few. Actually, in my 11th constructively review my day, I have an idea what my values and principles are today as a woman in Alcoholics Anonymous who has been here for a while.
I know what my values are. I feel as though they were like, when I finally started to do this work over and over again, I started to realize that I had been walking over like a footbridge without any railings. And then when I finally started to do these steps long enough, I started to realize what my principles and values were. And they became my railings or my guidelines on how to live in this outside world and to function as a member of this program and to try to be a demonstration of these principles, not to talk this thing.
Early on in my recovery, there was a sign on a coffee shop wall that I read over and over again, and I used to say, My God, that's what I do. That's what I do. I really want to do the opposite. And in the beginning of my first Big Book is written, after everything is said and done, more is said than done, and try to do the opposite of that. I don't want to talk to you about anything that I have not experienced.
I see, and I've done this now long enough to realize that when I used to go to these workshops and stuff early on, I wanted to get the knowledge because I thought knowledge was the answer. And yet in Bill's story, it said it's not the answer. You know, but I thought if I had enough knowledge and I knew enough about this one or that one or the steps, I would be okay. And I'm going to give you kind of a little demonstration of what I mean here.
So we're here in workshops, like I was in a workshop, and I listened to the greats. I listened to Chuck C. Chuck C. was alive then, and I, you know, I listened to Fast-talking Norm Alpy. We used to go—I can tell you a lot. We did 12-step calls together. We did a lot of work and stuff, so I had a lot of knowledge. But it is my experience of that knowledge that is mine. And for a while, I couldn't understand what was happening.
But for the last 25 years, I've been doing 12-step retreats around the country. Now even the Faroe Islands. I didn't even know where the Faroe Islands were. Do you? I didn't. I went there last year. It's, what is it, 800 or 900 miles between Iceland and Denmark.
[00:50:01]
We went in February last year. They had never had AAs over there doing a book study type stuff, and I did one over there. Wonderful, great experience. Reminded me a lot of Maine because it felt as though that's where I was when I went to Maine. There was no AA there for years. What was I going to tell you? Oh, all right. This is what happens. So when I would go to a bookstore or something, I would hear Karen's knowledge.
I'm going to pick on you, Karen. You would tell me exactly what to do in everything. So I had all this knowledge. And then I would go home and I would tell my sponsee, This is what you do. Karen said to do that. This is what you do. And I forgot the biggest ingredient, which was understanding. And Hugh Douglas taught me that because I went and I realized that when I sat with my sponsor and her husband and they would tell me things, I was very bright. I can memorize that big book almost.
And Hugh would start to say something to me or Bev, and I'd say, Yeah, I know. I know. Page 62. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Page 86. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And Hugh finally looked over at me and he says, You might know this, sweetie, but you don't understand it. And I said, What do you mean? What do you mean I don't understand it? I know it. He said, You won't understand it until you do it. And that has been my experience.
As I've continued to do these steps, because I'm of the old school, I go from 1 to 12, 1 to 12, 1 to 12. I know that alcohol is the thing that persuaded me to stay here, and it's still… I don't want to go back. I just don't want to go back. And if I don't deal with my life where it's unmanageable, and I don't bring God into it. I'm going to drink. I'm going to find a power that will take care of that.
So, in what area of my life am I agnostic? In other words, in what area of my life am I living independent from God? Which is Dr. Bob's wife's definition of agnostic, is where you're living independent from God. Where have you not asked God for some guidance? What's happening with you with this program? Where are you going? Where are you not going? Have you decided to rest on your laurels with all the knowledge you have? I did that for a while.
At 20 years of recovery, I found I was more frightened than ever. I had all the knowledge in the world, but I didn't feel safe anymore. And I read one more time, I was reading Dr. — excuse me — Bill's story, and he said on page 13 that he had a newfound friend. And I remember sitting and pondering that and thinking to myself, do I have an interpretation of my God of my understanding as a friend? Do I think of God as a friend?
And I realized I didn't. I have a best friend. Matter of fact, we co-sponsor each other now. We've known each other since we were six. And she came in six years afterwards, and I've been sponsoring her for 38 or 39, I don't know, whatever years. And we do these book studies together. And after Bev died, I needed somebody that was doing the work and wasn't just doing it once, or just staying in 10, 11, and 12. You know, if you keep coming up with something in Step 10, you better go back to 1, you know, and let's do it again, you know.
It says any business will go broke if they only do one. You have to do a regular inventory. You have to start doing this stuff. These are our spiritual tools. I used to think they were weapons, but they aren't. They really are tools for me. And what are they tools for? Do you know, if you read on page, I think it's page 72, I think it's the second sentence, it says something, Why have we done this inventory? It's so that we can discover the obstacles in our path and to get a better relationship with our Creator.
It's not so if I'm doing an inventory on my daughter that my daughter will like me when I'm done with the 12 steps. That has nothing to do with it. So if you think that's the reason, good luck. I'm here to do God's will. I used to do the— I did the third step prayer exactly as it said. My conduct showed that when I said, God, please take away my difficulties, basically I should have gone on and said, so I can get back to doing what I want. I didn't understand that there was a presence that I had to get present with, that all of these steps are designed so that you will get to be with your very best friend, so that you will be able to do enormous things in this world,
[00:55:04]
enormous things, like we heard these people here that are sharing about what's happened. It occurred to me one day, we're in the first 100 years of this—you heard it today—of this movement that is changing the world, not just our little group. It's the whole world. We're here as instruments here. We're supposed to demonstrate what this is about. And I didn't understand, because you see, I just didn't want—I just kind of wanted to arrive and never have to deal with this again.
But it's because of my experience with my conception—it says conception through the Big Book, it doesn't say concept. Concept means you're done. Conception means there's room for some growth here. And so I have this conception of my best friend that continues to grow for me. And what I had done is what it's on page 53 of the book. I had created a God of reason, rationale, and logic. I had, that's what I was believing by the time I was 20 years sober.
And, you know, when they asked the bedevilment questions and I would say, Yeah, I'm doing okay with personal relationships. Yeah, I can make a living. You know, all those eight questions, all those eight bedevilments. And then when some smarty pants said, Well, now ask the question this way: Has God brought you as far as He can in regard to personal relationships? My first thing was, God, I hope not.
God, I hope not. Eight times. And yet I just told you I was doing okay. And then I read the next page because Bev said the answer is always on the next page of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I read that, and there it was, the God of reason. And as I read about it and the bridge of reason, I saw that reason was capitalized when it didn't need to be capitalized. You read that. It took me 20 years or more to realize that there's a capital R on reason where it shouldn't be.
It doesn't need to be. But if you look on page 54, the R is then again little. And I had, in not consciously, I had created in my mind, when you said, Are you having trouble with personal relationships, logically, rationally, I went to 44 years ago. No, I'm not having any problems compared to the way I came in. So you see what I mean? I did a dualistic thing. But when you get God on board, it's a different story.
And I realized, yeah, I wanted more. And then I read page 129 that says, This is a limitless load. We've struck something better than gold. Do you know that? It's limitless. It'll continue to pay you dividends for the rest of your life. If you mind it and insist on giving the whole thing away, so listen up, because I'm looking for dividends. I'll give you everything I have, because I want the dividends.
And the dividends have done something to me that I didn't understand would happen. First of all, some of you know my daughter. It's not easy to be an alcoholic that is a mother, raising a child by themselves. My name should never be Mom. I don't deserve the title. But I realized when I was about five years sober, the only thing I loved most in this world was that child, Bigamish. By then she was 15. And since that day, when I realized that I had received the biggest gift in the world, I have wanted to be the best mother I could ever be.
I don't have a story filled with a lot of ha-ha in regard to that. I have a very rocky story about it, and we've had a lot of—it's not easy to be a sober mom at all. And I used to hate that chapter to the wives and to the family after and to the employer. I thought it was terrible. And yet Hugh pointed out to me, if your program isn't working in any one of those areas, it isn't working. Well, mine wasn't in the family after.
It really wasn't. And I had done many, many, many inventories in regard to my child, and there were times, there were years everything was great, and then the years that weren't because she's been a teenager. She went away to college. She married, divorced, whatever. Doesn't make any difference. It's her story. In about 32 years, it was one of those rough patches. And I did an inventory one more time.
I sat there, and I started that inventory, and in the midst of it, God entered and said, And in the midst of it, God entered and said, This has nothing to do with your daughter. It has everything to do with her, but it doesn't have the exact nature of your wrong is that you were abandoned as a child, and you did emotional—I
[01:00:03]
don't even know what you'd call it. When she said, I love you, Mommy, she became my mother, my father, everything, and she became the one that had to tell me I was okay in order to be okay. I killed her with that. And when I realized what I had done as a parent, I realized, Oh, I don't blame you, honey, if you never want to talk to me again. Why did she have to be responsible for my happiness? Why does anybody? You know, there was an old-timer that said, The definition of selfishness, he says, is not selfish to live your life the way you want to live your life. It's selfish to expect somebody else to live their life so you'll be okay.
Guilty as a parent. And when I saw that, I didn't think it would ever any hope. And there was some rules on how I was to see her at that time, and I got to see her this one time, and it had been going on for several years, and I hated that chapter. And one morning I went to the book study, and they were reading. I said, I hate this chapter. Everybody gets all their kids to jump up, and they all love you, and I can't stand this.
I said, But I'm going to still come because I've earned my seat, and I'm going to still try to do and still try to be the best mother I can be. And that day I picked her up, and she was coming from another country. She works for the military, and she came in, and I said, Well, how are you? And she said, Mom, I wanted to come and tell you in person. I hadn't seen her in probably about a year. And she said, I have seven months of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I sat there and I looked at her and I said, Do you want to tell me about that? Now, I knew she needed Al-Anon, but I had no idea because in that inventory I realized I knew my child for the first 18 years of her life. I had no idea who she was. And by then she was, I think she was in her 40s, 40, maybe 42 or so. I don't remember what she was. And, well, now she has 10 years of recovery. I should figure this out. But anyway, so I started to get to know my daughter a little bit more. And we're still working on it.
We're a work in progress. We really are. And if it wasn't for the fact that I continued to do the drill, but I had the opportunity one time, I spoke down in Lafayette, and she was with me, and the hostess said, Ask Candace, my daughter, to introduce me. And this was the reason I'm in Alcoholics Anonymous. She stood at the podium. I didn't know she was going to introduce me. I said, What are you doing up here, honey? You want to sit up here at the podium? She can do anything she wants, you know, as far as I'm concerned.
She said, No, Mom, I'm introducing you. I said, You are? She says, Yeah. And she stood at the podium, and it's recorded, which is wonderful. I just love it, and I play it every day. She gets mad at me. I should play it now. But she proceeded to say, Well, this was like four years ago, I guess, because she was going to be 50, I remember. And she said, The woman you're going to hear this morning I've known for almost 50 years. She's not the woman I knew in the beginning.
She's not the woman I knew when I was 10, when she sobered up. You know, when she was 10 years… Not the woman I know. Twenty. She's actually not the woman she was five years ago. He said, When it came time for me that I needed you, it's because of the demonstration of my mother's spiritual principles that I knew it would be safe to walk into the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a good day to die, folks. It was a good day to die.
Now, I don't know if she'd always say that now, but I've been blessed beyond anything I even knew. It's limitless. You will receive things that you didn't even know you wanted to have. One of them was where I live here in Tampa. I didn't know I wanted to live where I live in Tampa. I'm 30 feet from the Tampa Bay. No idea that I would ever want to live there. Remember the first night I moved in there, there was another unit.
It's 55 old people. You know, I'm old now. A long time ago, you know. And you own these, the land even these things are on, but it was another unit, and I went in there and I sat there and I cried all by myself as I watched the sun go down. And I said, Thank you, God. I didn't know I needed you. I didn't know that's what you wanted to give me. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go a place called Turks Caicos.
I remember it was a big family thing. It was just before I moved here, and it was a family thing. My daughter and her husband of then, we all went on
[01:05:05]
a family thing, and he had children, and I have a lot of step-great-grandchildren and stuff. Have you ever been to the Turks Caicos here? I didn't even know where they were. Another one of those places. I didn't know I wanted to go. Last year, when I had the privilege and the honor to carry this message to the people in the Faroe Islands who has never had a Big Book study, and I stood there before I went there, I went to Copenhagen for four or five days because I didn't know what this island I was going to.
I'm sorry I went to Copenhagen because I wished I'd spent the whole time on the Faroe Islands. I wished I'd just been with the people like us that were so thirsty. All they wanted to know is what the Big Book and what you people and these archives have brought so that they could live. Now they're going to maybe even have the young people's thing over there, aren't they, Heather? Heather went with me. Have to have these sponsees to carry the old ones around.
Anyways, just before I was ready to go over there, I was supposed to go over there with my daughter and Heather, and unfortunately, something came in line where I no longer have my daughter here. She got a divorce, and she's now working in the Pentagon with our Secretary of Defense. So whoever gets to have a kid that comes from what she came from, go to where she is. I got to witness her getting a medal in November.
She surprised me with that. All these bigwigs, I thought they should be running the world. Instead, they were giving my daughter a medal. And I found out at the very end when our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was telling her story and what she did. People would say to me, What is your daughter doing? I said, I don't know. She works for the military, and she told me she'd have to kill me. I think she runs the world.
I'm not too sure. And at the very end, when he gave that medal to her, he said, And now our boss has brought her here to Washington to run the world. And I said, Right. It's a long history. It's a long history. Don't miss it. Don't miss the trials and the low spots. There will be some along the way. I promise you, if you trudge, which means to walk slowly with purpose, it does not mean to carry a heavy load.
Dictionary, 1935 dictionary, right, Tom? That's what it means. I used to think it meant carry a heavy load. But if you trudge, if you walk slowly with purpose through these days that seem dark and you don't think there's any hope, I promise you, on the other side of that pain, that you will be closer to the presence. And you will want to be present with that presence because no matter what, you're going to feel safe and connected.
You are going to be placed in a position of neutrality when you have enough faith and enough God on board. That's what it talks about in the 10th step. I would no more be able to do what I've done today after the panel I heard, and I'm going to shut up because everybody's probably ready to go home. I didn't even want to get up here. I was so exhausted. But I was filled, and I was glad it was all taped.
Please don't take that wrong. What I realize is that I cannot do that if there wasn't a God that I totally trust that is deep down within me. The reality is deep down within me. I've learned as I've grown on this program that that thread of faith, that mustard seed, was actually growing now that it's almost like a rope. I can grab it. I can just hang on. I'm going to close with one thing that's always been amazing to me.
We think— That we're the only ones around here. And I want to say how excited I was when I walked in. I probably forgot to say half the things I wanted, but God wanted me to say whatever it was. I came in here in 1973. My first international was in New Orleans. It was the best international you could ever, ever go to. Do you know why it was the best international? Because we had no cell phones. I mean that with all my heart and all my soul.
So what happens when you don't have any cell phones and you're walking around a city with 26,000 people that are all in Alcoholics Anonymous and they all have badges on and they're from all over the world? What do you do? You look down and you read their badge and you say, You're from who? And you have a talk and you talk about what it's like to get sober in the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous. And all of a sudden you're not separate.
You see, the ego wants to keep you separate, but the spirit will always make you
[01:10:02]
know that you belong with somebody else. Always, always. And I looked over and there were two guys, from Ireland, one from Scotland and one from Ireland. And we sat and we talked or whatever. I remember we were in front of that one hotel that had the Alcathon going. I can remember the spot where I met you. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. I walk into, I don't know, it was like a coffee shop place where we're eating or something, and I hear the brogue.
And I turn around and there are those two guys. And here they are today. There was a person called Mother Teresa. She used to say, The problem with people today is we draw our family circle too small. Don't do that. It's a big, big family we are here with. I close with a line that I've always closed with. It's on page 68. Just to the extent I do as my best friend would have me do, humbly rely on that presence.
Does he help me to match calamity with serenity? Thank you, and God bless.