A Voice from Al-Anon
Meetings of Al-Anon and ACA are helping me to recover me, who managed to wander into a swamp called confusion and crisis. It took twenty years of marriage, during which time I drank right alongside my handsome, fun-loving husband. We were glamorous, or so we thought — latter day versions of Zelda and Scott. Our public relations department (s) claimed to relish both working and playing hard, but that was not the truth, which emerged later. Back in those early days of our Zelda-and-Scott style of marriage, we were trying with all our might to never grow up, never grow up never grow up– like Peter Pan. Our agreed upon goal in life was to avoid ever becoming staid like our parents.
It took twenty years it dawned that we might have a problem related to alcoholism; twenty years before I did that math about my husband employment record. When I did finally did the arithmetic, I discovered that he’d had ten jobs in twenty years, with ample down time between gigs. That fact led me to enter the rooms of Al-Anon.
Al-Anon quickly clarified there was such a thing as “functional alcoholism” which had led me into years of Denial (Don’t Even kNOw I Am Lying). I learned that alcoholism is a disease — and contagious. My husband had a problem with the alcohol part; mine was with the “isms” part — of which I had plenty. Start with the letter A: Anger and Anxiety and move through the alphabet to Worry and Xtreme fear! Until I entered Al-Anon, I’d had zero awareness that I had any problems — just a husband who kept losing his job, leaving me paddling solo to keep our canoe afloat.
Al-Anon taught me that I was just as much an addict as he was, except my drug of choice was not alcohol. It was adrenaline, which pumped through me daily at increasingly high levels as my husband’s disease progressed in a distinctly downward spiral. I thank GOD for wooing my husband into the rooms of AA at the tippy-end (no pun intended) of 1990. Approximately fifteen minutes later, we found ourselves pregnant with child, something we (aka Zelda and Scott) had never ever wanted.
The Serenity Prayer saved the life of that unborn child. I had been pointing to the first line, saying we needed to accept the things we could not change. My husband was pointing to the second line, saying we needed to change the things we could. Then came the afternoon he phoned from a Rest Area on he Merritt Parkway hollering into the phone:
“It’s the wisdom to know the difference!
This child is half mine!
I can’t walk out on him.”
It is now twenty-two years later, and said son has been the joy and rejoicing of our hearts. Truly I credit the program(s) of Twelve-Step Recovery for saving his life: our meetings; our sponsors; our recovering friends; the Steps and the Slogans and the Literature; the Serenity Prayer. But most of all, I credit the Voice of God, which managed to overcome the tumult of the Committee of in Our Mere Minds. As we learned to practice Step Eleven, we learned to seek through prayer and mediation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying ONLY for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry it out. It was a noisy waterfall we were heading for when God answered us. Gently and lovingly, He spoke through earthquake, wind and fire His still small Voice of Calm.
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