Before AA All I Could Do Was Have Babies — You Taught Me to Be a Mother – Sarah I.

Hi everyone, I'm Sarah, I'm an alcoholic.
First of all, I want to thank everyone who, you know, took part in this event, putting
everything together, who invited me out here to be able to speak.
The welcome that I've received here has been absolutely amazing.
It's actually been a really difficult week.
I had to put my cat down earlier than this week, and I spent, you know, the better part
of the week just sobbing and being absolutely heartbroken.
And this morning I had to wake up at two o'clock in the morning to travel, you know, all over
the country to end up here.
And the second I get off that plane, I see my people standing there in a row, and I know
you're my people because we speak that language of the heart, and I can see that light in
your eyes.
And I connect with the person who has welcomed me and had a kind word for me and like loved
me into this room.
I really appreciate you.
I also really appreciate all the hard work that's gone into this.
So, you know, thank you for having an event that allows us to connect like this and carry
this message that is absolutely vital to my existence and to the existence of so many
of us.
And, you know, I have to start off always by telling the truth because I wake up in
the morning, especially when I have to do something like this, and my head does this
thing where it immediately wants to separate me from you.
I have an ego that loves to separate me and wants to tell me I'm either greater than or
less than, and in a situation like this, it's less than.
I'm going to get up here.
I'm going to make a fool out of myself.
Listen, I've heard Randy speak before.
I've known Randy for a while, and he's one of my favorite speakers in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I know for a fact he brought so much joy and laughter into this room last night along
with a powerful heartfelt message.
And I come in, I'm like, I have to follow that?
I promise you, like, I'm not going to get up here, and I'm not going to be able to follow
something like that, something with that joy and laughter.
I mean, I'm here to bring the room down a little bit maybe, but I have to tell on that
part of myself because that's the thing that always kept me separate.
That was the part of me that always tried to separate me from society and people long
before I picked up a drink that had me living in those hundred forms of fear itself, delusion,
self-pity, even as a small child, in that place of disconnection, in that place of isolation,
because all I've ever wanted my entire life was to feel a part of something.
All I ever wanted was to connect with something greater than myself.
I wanted to connect with you, but I couldn't.
I felt like there was something wrong with me.
I felt like I just didn't belong in this world and I didn't fit.
And that was long before alcohol even came into the picture.
And I had a conception of God.
I've had a conception of God from the time I was a little girl, but that conception didn't
work for me.
I would go to church every single Sunday.
My father was a Presbyterian minister and God was talked about all the time.
We were in church.
We were in Sunday school.
We prayed over food.
And I had this idea of God, that this God was transactional, that I had to be a good
little girl to earn this God's love.
And if I was a bad little girl, this God was going to punish me.
And even as a small child, I was convinced that there was something inherently bad and
rotten about me, that I wasn't good enough and I was never going to be good enough.
So a long, long time ago, I abandoned this conception of God and I thought I had abandoned
the God idea entirely.
So I would come in and out of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and I would look around
and see all you happy, joyous, and free people and I hated you.
I hated you because you all had something that was never going to be available to someone
like me.
I believe deep within my soul, you had a freedom, you had a forgiveness, you had a redemption
that was never going to be available to a garbage piece of nothing like me.
Not after what I did to my children, not after what I did to my family.
This gift that you had was never going to be available to me.
You know, I've since fallen in love with this fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous but I spent
so many years coming in and out separating myself and not knowing what it was that I
suffered from because for so long, I believed that if you just separated me from alcohol,
I would be perfectly fine.
The only problem with that is I kept getting separated from alcohol.
There are various methods that outside forces will use to get me separated from alcohol.
Either it's threats from loved ones, it's rehabs, eventually incarceration.
Those things are effective at separating me from alcohol.
The problem with that is the second they open the door to that treatment facility or that
rehab or that jail cell, I drink again and I can't figure out why.
I don't know that over any significant period of time, I get worse, not better.
I don't know that I suffer from a fatal and progressive illness that is just, you know,
as time passes, becoming more and more of a problem and I don't know that the second
I put alcohol down, I am so full of selfishness and self-centeredness that I'm driven by a
hundred forms of fear, self-pity, self-seeking, self-delusion and that that is what is creating
my suffering, that I have this spiritual malady, that I have this disconnect from you and from
God and that I'm craving this.
I'm craving this connection with a power greater than myself and the only thing that
ever gave that to me prior to coming into Alcoholics Anonymous was alcohol.
That was it.
Because I remember suffering in my sober skin, suffering in my skin as a child, feeling
so off, so weird, so different and then picking up that drink as a teenager and experiencing
the effect produced by alcohol and for the first time in my entire life, my skin fit,
the world around me was okay, I connected with you, I felt love, I felt all those things
that I ever wanted and in that moment that I felt that, where I had that experience,
I made a decision, I didn't know I was making a decision at this point, but I made this
decision to turn my will and my life over to the power of alcohol for the next 20 plus
years of my life.
Because in the beginning it didn't look like that.
In the beginning it didn't look like I was abandoning everything to this.
It didn't look like that, it was fun.
Now in the beginning I didn't drink like normal people.
It says in our book that many of us started out as moderate or hard drinkers and then
progressed to the real alcoholic and I'm not sure that I was ever a moderate drinker because
it says in our book that a moderate drinker, and I'm paraphrasing, can stop if they need
to with little trouble and that's just not my story.
Because the first time I ever needed to stop or moderate was when I got pregnant with my
daughter at the age of 19 and here's what separates me from the normal drinker like
my sisters.
It's like when they're pregnant, what they're doing is they're picking out baby names.
They're decorating nurseries.
They're doing this thing called nesting.
I think that's what good mothers do, right?
They're excited about this.
But what I'm doing is I'm counting the days that I'm, every single day that I'm carrying
this child, like it's a prison sentence, checking off these days on a calendar so I can, you
know, awaiting that beautiful day where I can get this kid out of me and I can again
experience that sense of ease and comfort that comes with that first drink because I
feel like I can't breathe.
And that's exactly what I do and as soon as my daughter's born I pick up that drink and
I experience that ease and comfort that comes back and, you know, as time passes I start
crossing these invisible lines I don't even know I'm crossing because in the beginning
it's fun and it's a party and it's a good time.
But at some point I cross over this line where it goes from being this party and a good time
where it goes to being this full-time job where I can't function without it.
I can't go to work.
I can't have conversations.
I can't get out of bed unless I have alcohol in me.
And then as more time passes and I'm starting to experience some of those external consequences
and things are getting uncomfortable for me I cross over another invisible line where
it goes from being this full-time job to being this nightmare that I can't wake up from.
It gets very, very dark.
And that started to happen, you know, when my daughter was about seven years old and
I was on to my second marriage, second pregnancy, and I've already lost custody of my daughter
at this point.
And during this pregnancy I don't want to stop.
I drink the entire pregnancy.
I have no ability to stop.
I have no connection to the child that I'm carrying.
I'm lying to every single person I know.
I'm lying to the man I'm married to.
I'm trying to dress up this outside life because I think that's what's going to make me okay.
If I just have this perfect little family, if I just have the husband, if I just have
the kids I'll be okay, but I'm dying inside and I can't breathe a sober breath.
I can't connect to the child I'm carrying.
I can't tell the truth.
I know I'm a scumbag.
I know this.
And I know that if anybody ever knew the truth about me they would despise me as much as
I despised myself.
And I drink this entire pregnancy and as a direct result of that I give birth to a baby
who's three months premature and he's two pounds.
And I remember the first time I laid eyes on my little boy, he was in a NICU and he
was in an incubator.
And as soon as I saw him there, all that love and connection that I couldn't feel for him
when I was pregnant, I felt for him in that moment.
The only problem is what came with that love was this overwhelming sense of shame and guilt
because I knew that I did this to him.
I knew he couldn't breathe because of me.
I knew he couldn't be held because of me.
I knew that was my fault.
And the only thing I had at that point, the only solution I had in my life that would
remove that kind of guilt and shame was more and more alcohol.
But here's the problem.
At this point, alcohol is not producing the same effect anymore.
It's not removing that shame that has me covered, that wakes me up in the middle of the night,
that wakes me up in the morning, that tells me I should just kill myself, that my children
would be better off without me.
I get those very, those short periods of that quiet mind that alcohol gives me but that
voice comes right back and I need more and I need more and I need more.
And so many different places in our book it talks about this thing that we have moral
and philosophical convictions galore but we can't live up to them even though we want
to or we could wish to be moral, wish to be philosophically comforted.
We could will these things with all our might.
I don't have that power.
See for a while I thought this was some sort of moral failing on my part that I was just
a terrible human being because what kind of person does the things that I do?
I put my children in harm's way.
The kind of mother that I am, I nod out and I drop my kid on the floor or I take my child
into some of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I need to clarify that, but
the city and I throw a blanket over his head to run around the corner and go get what I
need to get and get back in the car.
I'm the kind of mother who gets arrested with my eight month old baby in the car and
my husband at the time had to drive to a police station and pick up his child.
And I remember what happened that day.
I got bailed out the next day and I come home and my husband's sitting there in the living
room because he's had enough.
He's finally had enough of this and he has everything packed and he's going to leave
and he's going to take my child and in that moment I am crippled with fear.
He cannot leave me.
I've already lost one husband, one child, I can't go through this again.
And I beg and I plead and I promise.
I make all of these grand promises and in that moment I meant them with every fiber
of my being.
I will do anything you tell me to do.
Please do not leave me and please don't take my baby from me.
I'll do anything.
I meant it.
Up until the moment he said one thing to me, I'll stay on one condition, if you go to treatment
today and you get sober today, I'll stay.
And I looked at that man and I looked at my little boy and I knew he was going to walk
out that door and I said no.
I said no.
Because here's what my alcoholic brain will tell me and this is what it told me.
I can fix this tomorrow, I can get him back tomorrow, but right now I need a drink.
In that moment I needed alcohol more than I needed that roof over my head, more than
I needed my marriage, more than I needed my child, more than I needed oxygen.
I needed alcohol.
And I got that drink and he walked out that door and they never came back.
And when they're gone, I sink into this pit, that mire of self-pity that it talks about
that I can't pull myself out of.
And I suffer for so long under this delusion that I am this worthless human being.
I'm vile.
You know, I can't believe what kind of mother, what kind of woman chooses alcohol over her
family, over her husband, over her children.
I suffered under that delusion for so long and it wasn't until many years later when
I came into these rooms completely broken and a woman in AA opened up that book with
me and explained to me, showed me in black and white what it says and there is a solution
that for reasons yet obscure, most alcoholics have lost the power of choice when it comes
to a drink.
See, I didn't know I couldn't choose my children.
I didn't know this wasn't some moral failing that, you know, because I'm not a sociopath,
I felt all the shame of what I did.
I felt every second of that shame, but I didn't know, I didn't have the power to choose that
I was beyond human aid and that I needed a power that much bigger than alcohol.
And when I saw it in black and white, that started to convince me because for the first
time I knew I wasn't garbage and I wasn't beyond saving and I wasn't beyond redemption
and that maybe, just maybe I belonged here with you.
And what I want to sit here tonight is and tell you is that, you know, losing custody
of my children was enough to get me here, but it wasn't.
I want to tell you that like losing every job, every relationship, every home was enough
to get me here, but it wasn't.
Ending up on life support multiple times and all these other, you know, health problems
was not enough to get me here or the 11 felonies that I racked up during my drinking career
also was not enough to get me here.
Now, if you haven't had any of those outside consequences, it really doesn't matter because
none of those things are what make me an alcoholic.
What makes me an alcoholic is that I have a physical allergy to alcohol that when I
have one drink I cannot stop and when I'm stopped, I can't stay stopped because that
feeling of disconnection is so great, that spiritual malady is so uncomfortable for me
that the only thing I have in this world that will fix it at that point is alcohol.
That's what I suffer from.
That's my problem.
The only reason I talk about these external consequences is to illustrate how powerful
alcohol became.
What a monster it became that it was my master and it had this hold on me that there was
no human power.
There was no threat.
There was no consequence great enough to separate me from alcohol.
If you told me that you were going to lock me up, I'd be like, okay, catch me when you
can.
If you told me you were going to take my children from me, I would say things like, well, they're
better off without me or I don't want the responsibility anyway because that's the truth.
That's the truth.
I didn't want to take care of my children.
You know, every time I lost custody of my kids, I did.
I threw those fits.
I fought and I kicked and I screamed.
How dare you take my babies from me?
But the truth deep down, the truth that I couldn't say and the truth I probably didn't
even know is that I was relieved.
I was relieved.
So those consequences aren't enough for me.
And if you tell me I'm going to die, I'm like, when can we hurry it up, please?
Because I'm too much of a coward to kill myself, but death sounds like a really good idea right
now.
I just wish it would come to me.
So what happens is, is I just suffer this way and I come in and out of the rooms of
Alcoholics Anonymous and I use this place as a dating service, right?
And I come in and out and I drink your coffee, I date your men, I dress up the outside, I
do no work, I just lie to everybody.
And the second you start talking about an actual solution, I shut down.
The second I walk into a meeting and they're reading that big book, I'm like, I want nothing
to do with this.
And especially when people start talking about God, everything shuts down.
Everything shuts down.
And what I love so much about Alcoholics Anonymous is, along with so many other things, and along
with these traditions, especially that tradition that says the only requirement for membership
is a desire to stop drinking.
What I love even more than that are the amazing, beautiful people in the rooms of Alcoholics
Anonymous who never judged whether I had that desire or not because I didn't.
For so many years, I come in and out of the rooms of AA and I don't have an honest desire
to stop drinking.
What I have is an honest desire for consequences to stop happening.
That's it.
But I don't want to stop drinking because drinking is the only thing that has ever worked
for me, that has ever made it okay to be me, that has ever made it comfortable to live
in my skin.
And then something happened that I wasn't seeking, that I wasn't looking for, that I
wasn't expecting on May 2nd of 2012.
And I remember this like it was yesterday.
I remember getting up in the middle of the night, getting on the highway, driving to
go get a drink.
And for the first time in my entire life, I have this overwhelming and overpowering
desire to turn my car around and go home and stop lying to every single person that I love,
stop hurting my children, stop hurting my family.
But even with this overwhelming and overpowering desire, I cannot physically turn that wheel
around.
I want to and I can't.
I just can't do it.
And in that moment, I knew powerlessness like I had never known before.
And I did something that I had never done before.
I cried out to a power that I did not believe in and I certainly didn't think cared about
me in absolute sincerity.
Now don't get me wrong.
I have prayed my entire life, but this conception of God, this transactional God that I had
been holding on to, my prayers look something like this, like God is Santa Claus or here's
my wish list.
Here's what you need to do for me, God, like get me $20.
Please make the judge in a good mood today.
Like all of these, like it was always get me out of this, do this for me, fix this for
me.
And when this God doesn't fulfill my wish list, I assume this God doesn't exist and
this God doesn't love me.
But in that moment, in that moment of absolute desperation, that jumping off point that it
talks about in that book, when we know, like I knew I can't live with this and I can't
live without it and I don't know what to do anymore.
My prayer was simply this and I apologize, but this was it.
Dear God, please fucking kill me or stop me.
Screaming and pounding on the steering wheel, begging God to kill me or stop me because
I can't do this anymore.
I can't do this.
I can't turn the wheel around and I can't keep going the way I'm going.
And 12 hours later, I have handcuffs on.
Now, I don't know how God shows up in your life, but God has no problem showing up in
mine is law enforcement because it is a very effective power greater than myself.
Right?
And here's the, here's the insane part of this.
Like I want to stand here tonight and I want to tell you, well, like I experienced this
beautiful gift of desperation, right?
Where I'm begging God to kill me or stop me.
And I want to tell you, I had this complete psychic change and everything shifted and
everything got better.
That's absolutely not what happened.
What happened is, is that I experienced the, you know, remarkable recuperative power of
the alcoholic ego.
And 48 hours later, I realized that I'm going to fix this and figure out a way out of the
consequences that I've just gotten myself into yet again.
Because what happened is I got, I had 11 felonies at this point and I got locked up on this
little minor charge.
And I thought my ideas were the judge was going to take it easy on me because this time
I didn't burglarize a home.
This time I just shoplifted.
No big deal.
Right?
Well, the judge had other ideas.
She sentenced me to one to three years to the state correctional facility, right?
And so what happened is the only thing that happened is for the 18 months that I was incarcerated,
what I have in hindsight is empirical evidence that what I suffer come, suffer from does
not come in a bottle.
It's that being driven by a hundred forms of fear, self delusion, self pity, self seeking
that stepping on the toes of my fellows, it's trying to run the show for everyone else.
And I know Randy talks about this because I've heard him so many times.
I do this thing where I like I'm in jail and I call home on a phone account my mommy and
daddy are paying for and I tell them what they need to do for me.
And I write really long amends or apology letters home about how sorry I am.
But if maybe if you were better parents or siblings, I wouldn't be here with a whole
PS send money, right?
You got it.
Like that's what I do.
You know, and I'm shocked that people aren't taking my calls.
I'm shocked that people are angry with me.
I'm shocked.
You know, we step on the toes of our fellows, they retaliate seemingly without provocation,
but I'm like, wait, why are you mad at me?
Why are you hanging up on me?
Why did you block this call?
I can't understand that my problem really starts when I put the drink down that sobriety
is my problem this entire time.
And until I learn to treat that sobriety, I'm always going to have a problem and I'm
always going to go back to that drink always, always, always.
It's not a question of if I'm going to drink again.
It's a question of when I'm going to drink again.
And during the time that I'm not drinking, I'm just going to run around causing a bunch
of harm.
And this is what I do for 18 months.
And after 18 months, I get released and I'm full of fear and I don't know where to go.
But I still have ideas like this is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to get back together with that boyfriend and I'm going to move into this couple's recovery
house.
I mean, these bizarre, insane ideas I have.
And after, you know, about 48 hours of me being home, every idea I had for my life got
ripped out from underneath me and thank God.
And I'm left with absolutely nothing.
Nothing outside of me, no job, no phone, no car, no friends, my family doesn't want to
talk to me.
How shocking, right?
And what happens is I'm curled up in the ball in a fetal position on the floor of a recovery
house bathroom, suffering sober in pain, crying out again to a power that I really don't believe
in and I don't think cares about me because I don't know what to do.
And if this is sober, I don't want this.
I haven't had a drink in 18 months.
Why do I want to die?
Why do I want to put a bullet in my mouth?
Why does sober hurt this bad?
What am I supposed to do now?
God, help me, show me what to do.
And then I have this power greater than myself in the form of a recovery house manager come
in and say, go to a meeting, get off the floor and go to a meeting, right?
And I walk up the steps of my old home group and something happens that hadn't happened
in all the years of me popping in and out of the rooms of AA.
I walk in and all those happy, joyous, and free people who I judged and who I separated
myself from, they weren't strangers anymore.
These were the people I drank with, people I got high with, people who had been living
on the streets of the city, like homeless, and they were in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous
and their eyes were lit up, and they were walking around with that beautiful blue book
and they were talking about this power working in their lives.
They were talking about these 12 steps.
They were helping other people.
They had purpose.
They had joy.
They had freedom.
And for the first time in my entire life, I believed it because I knew these people
and I knew they didn't have the power to do that.
I knew that deep within my soul.
Now, the one thing I didn't know deep within my soul is whether this was going to work
for me because my ego is working overtime.
It's separating me from you still.
Again, either greater than or less than.
Coming in, I'm still less than.
I'm still so much worse than you, but I'm out of ideas and I don't know what else to
do, so I'll do anything anybody tells me to do in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.
That was my first real surrender to this program, my first decision to turn my will and my life
over to the power of something and just asking someone to take me through these 12 steps
and taking that direction.
And nothing about it was comfortable.
Like I didn't have the heaven's opening experience.
I had that educational variety experience going through these steps.
And a lot of it was really painful.
I remember my first third step experience, and I say first because I've had to go through
the steps more than once and maybe I'll get to that, but there's a reason for that.
But my first third step experience where I'm making the most important decision I've ever
made in my entire life, to turn my will and my life over to this power that I can't see,
feel, hear, touch, right, I'm making this decision.
And I miss the moment because I'm too busy thinking about myself.
We're like kneeling on the floor holding hands together in front of other people.
I'm saying words I don't understand.
I don't know what is happening here.
I'm just following direction.
And I don't feel anything.
I don't get up from that prayer and the whole, you know, room shifted and I didn't feel anything.
But what did happen was when she put paper in front of me and told me to start writing,
I did exactly what she told me to do.
It says it right there.
If you turn that page over from that third step, although this decision is a vital and
crucial step, it would have little permanent effect unless at once followed by a strenuous
effort to face and be rid of what was blocking us, what was blocking me from you and blocking
me from God.
And she kind of set me up.
She said, you know what, just go write a list of all the people you're angry at and why
and leave columns at the end.
And I'm like, I'll do this.
Here's 27 pages.
I've got some stuff I want to talk to you about because that's what I bring to Alcoholics
Anonymous, you and what you did to me.
I have a victim story a mile long, you know, and, you know, my mom gets a page to herself,
right?
Anybody get that?
Anyone else have a mom who made them an alcoholic?
Yeah.
That's how I, that's how I show up here.
And as I sit there in this, you know, for hours and hours and hours in this fist step
inventory and walk away from this, I don't necessarily feel the nearness of my creator
immediately or, you know, that was not an immediate.
I did experience that later.
My first experience with this, I looked at that and I felt worse, I felt worse.
It was the first time I saw the truth about myself.
I couldn't deny it.
I couldn't look away from it.
It was right there in front of me in black and white.
But what did start to happen was this for the first time in my entire life, I saw the
truth and my perception of reality started to change just a little bit.
For instance, like talking about my mother, that the greatest resentment on my list, she
got a page to herself.
I had a lot to say about what she did to me.
Let's just, I'll sum it up.
The worst thing, I guess, was that when I was a teenager, these three men did something
to me that was awful and my mom's reaction to it was, how could you be so stupid?
Why did you put yourself in that position and full of shaming me?
And from that moment on, I spent the next couple decades of my life doing everything
in my power, making her pay for that.
Wanting to wound her and hurt her and make her suffer for what she did to me.
But as I move through these columns and I get to that fourth column and I resolutely
look for my mistakes, seeing this from a new angle, what I see is this, the truth, that
I took this one thing that my mother did, this one decision she made when I was a teenager
and I allow it to blind me to every beautiful, wonderful thing that woman ever did for me
my entire life.
Every single time she showed up at that rehab or detox with a fresh bag of Target clothes.
Every single time she answered that phone.
Every single time she invited me to Thanksgiving dinner when nobody else wanted me.
That woman loved me as best she could and completely unconditionally and I allow my
resentment to blind me to the truth of that.
And when I saw that truth, I was willing to let go.
I wanted to be done with this.
I go into six and seven and I'm completely broken and step six, it asks us, is there
anything that we're still clinging to?
Coming in, the bar is really low when it comes to defects of character.
Like I come in, I'm a liar, a cheat, a thief.
I'm not willing to, I don't want to cling to any of this anymore.
God can have all of it because it's all causing me consequences and I'm suffering as a result
of holding on to these things.
12 years sober, it's a different story.
I'll have little things I want to hold on to for dear life as long as I can feel some
power or some control on the other side of it.
And oftentimes I have to be suffering.
I'm here to tell the truth.
I'll have to be suffering to go back to that step six and ask God for that willingness
to have these things removed.
But coming in, I'm broken and I'm on my knees and step seven, God, you can take all of it.
I don't want it.
This is not who I want to be anymore.
And I completely surrendered in that moment and was willing to go out into the world and
start cleaning up that mess to make whole what I had destroyed or attempt to.
It talks about sweeping away the debris that had accumulated out of our efforts to live
on self will and run the show ourselves.
It doesn't even mention alcohol because I promise you I can cause just as much harm
sober.
I don't need alcohol to hurt people.
I need self.
I need fear.
That's it.
And I go out and I start seeking out these people who I harmed and I sit in front of
them and I don't say that I'm sorry.
I tell them I'm wrong and I admit what I did to them and I and I listen to what they have
to tell me about how I hurt them and then I take action to make whole what I have destroyed
or what how I, you know, make these things right again.
And when I started doing that, I start to experience something happen within me, that
power, that God that I'd been seeking my entire life, that fundamental idea of God that is
deep down within every man, woman and child that I had been seeking in all these external
places and a man and a in money and a bottle and everything out here.
I started to feel within me.
I started to experience these promises that you were talking about, promises that I thought
were never going to be available to me, promises that I believe are extravagant because I'm
being told and I'm experiencing that I'm going to know this a new freedom and a new
happiness that I'm not going to regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it anymore.
That means that shame is being lifted, that shame that had me covered to a point where
I couldn't breathe was being removed from me and I start to to actually live this.
I start to feel that God and by the time I get to step 12, when I'm sitting with other
women attempting to carry this message to the best of my ability, I experience the power
of alcoholics anonymous and I see what these 12 steps and what God has done.
All of those vile, disgusting things, those things that I thought that I could never be
redeemed for, never be forgiven for.
My most shameful, dirty secrets are now my greatest assets and my greatest gifts because
when a woman comes to me and tells me she drank during her pregnancy or she abandoned
her children, cheated on her husband, I don't look at her in judgment.
I look at her in absolute love and understanding and say, me too, I get it.
That was the love and the connection and the power I had been seeking my whole life.
All these places I couldn't find it.
I found it here in Alcoholics Anonymous through you and through these 12 steps and I'm on
fire for this program and I start going out into this world and living the life beyond
my wildest dreams and I and I never understood what that meant until I started actually experiencing
it because when I heard a life beyond my wildest dreams, I thought it had everything to do
with the outside.
I thought it was all like, oh, job, money, car, you know, I started to get that stuff,
right?
I have a mortgage on my home today.
I'm employable.
I have a career, you know, all that stuff.
I went back to school.
He's a fun fact, right?
When I started going to work and not robbing my employers and nodding out of my desk and
like actually showing up, people were willing to give me jobs.
When I opened the bills that people sent me and paid them, I got things like good credit.
Like those things started to happen, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Like anybody can do that.
That's kind of basic life skills.
I probably should have been doing my entire life.
I'm talking about the life beyond my wildest dreams that I never expected and I never knew
that I was looking for and some, you know, some of the gifts that I've received in my
sobriety, they don't look like gifts on the outside, but they're the things I hold most
dear to me.
Like when I got a phone call from my mom coming up on Four Years Sober that my oldest sister
was dead.
In that moment, intuitively knowing how to handle a situation that not only would have
baffled me, that would have absolutely crippled me.
I intuitively knew that I needed to show up and be of maximum service to my parents and
help them bury their daughter, that I needed to show up and be of maximum service to her
children and help them bury their mother.
And I get, God gives me this incredible gift where he puts me in the room with my parents
when they see their daughter in the casket for the first time and my mother is doubled
over in pain in the worst moment of her life and I get to run to her side and halt her
and comfort her in the only way that I know how.
What a gift, because all my power, I am not capable of that.
Without Alcoholics Anonymous and a God in my life, I am incapable of that.
I am in the bathroom, I am in the jail cell, I am in a rehab, I am anywhere, but in that
moment I am running and I am hiding.
But something happens with this power working in my life where I feel this loving, guiding
presence that directs me to do things that I've never had the power to do before and
be present in these moments.
Not only that, I got the last year and a half of my sister's life, a friendship that I
had dreamed about my entire life.
I was able to build with her as a direct result of the ninth step.
When I reached out to her to amend my wrongs, I had this beautiful conversation with her.
That conversation where feuds of long standing just fall away in one conversation and we
became closer than we had ever been.
And it was all I ever wanted from my big sister was to have this relationship and she suffered.
She suffered at the end of her life.
She had a disease very similar to ours with a spiritual malady.
She was severely anorexic and the gift that I received and that she received is I got
to be not only a friend to her, but she was able to share things with me that she couldn't
share with another living, breathing soul.
Not her husband, not her children, not my parents, nobody.
You guys taught me how to show up and tell the truth and carry a story of depth and weight
and that gave her comfort and peace until she died.
And I get to carry that with me for the rest of my life.
And if I lived to be 150 years old, I could never repay that debt, ever.
That is a direct result of what we get here in Alcoholics Anonymous.
These are gifts, right?
And I experienced this beautiful, powerful experience around my sister's death and I
absolutely know of the existence of God and I know how these 12 Steps work and I've seen
the power of this program.
But what happens is, you know, life starts to get really good on the outside.
I start to get complacent.
I start thinking that I've created this beautiful life as time passes that I'm living.
And I start doing this thing called two-stepping and I don't know if you're familiar with
what that is, but I'll sum it up quickly, is like I admit I'm powerless over alcohol
and I come to AA, collect a bunch of sponsors that are trailing behind me and I save everybody
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I forget that there is a spiritual body of work that needs to continue, continue.
And I start to get disconnected from this power, right?
And I start to get a little uncomfortable.
And I start to be driven by a bunch of fear and self-delusion again and I don't know that
it's happening.
And I start to fall back to sleep in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous as an active member.
And then something happened in March of 2020.
I don't know if anybody remembers that, but the entire world shut down.
And what happened when the world shut down is I realized I had placed all these human
powers above the highest power and I didn't even know it.
And it all got ripped out.
Like I couldn't leave my house, my relationship started to tank, all of this outside stuff
that I had become so reliant on to feel OK was removed from me and I was left in my sober
skin again and I was suffering sober and I was in pain and I experienced this moment
of grace.
And I know it's a moment of grace because a lot of people that I love and respect had
a similar moment during COVID and they're still out there trying to find their way back
to Alcoholics Anonymous and they may never get here.
But in that moment, I knew something.
I knew that if I didn't take some action and I didn't ask for help, I was going to drink
again and I picked up a phone and I asked another woman in AA to help me and that woman
took me through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous from the very beginning like I was
a newcomer, like I knew absolutely nothing.
And when I tell you this was the most humbling, sometimes humiliating, but beautiful, painful
and freeing experience that I've ever had in Alcoholics Anonymous, like I can't describe
what happened on the other side of this.
Because there's one thing coming in and having this, you know, inventory that is piled up
after all this stuff I've done drinking.
It's a totally other thing when I, you know, have to look at all the stuff I've done stone
cold sober and I have to make a ton of amends to a bunch of AA people.
And I will tell you, that's not easy, but thank God for that gift of desperation that
showed up again and that willingness and on the other side of that, that freedom, that
absolute beautiful freedom that I experienced.
Because since that moment I have had this love for Alcoholics Anonymous and this fire
for this program that has not gone out since.
And no matter how painful and uncomfortable that experience was for me to go through that,
I'm forever grateful that I had it because it taught me a couple things and most importantly
is how important steps 10 and 11 are in my life.
Now I know when I was talking about these steps and I'm sort of running through them,
it looks like I kind of skipped over steps 10 and 11 because I spent many years in Alcoholics
Anonymous doing this work but not doing steps 10 and 11.
And what does that mean?
What do I need to do for steps 10 and 11?
Like I had a prayer life, it was like thank him in the morning, okay, like what shall
I do today?
And maybe thank him at night, check in here and there, but there was no real seeking God.
You know, 11 steps as we have to go further, we have to seek God through prayer and meditation,
we have to seek to see where religious people are right, read other books, seek God in all
these other ways.
And I wasn't doing any of that.
But even more important than that, I wasn't doing what it says in step 10 where it says
we continue, continue to watch, watch for selfishness, resentment, dishonesty, fear.
What is that?
I'm watching these thoughts, these thoughts that enter, you know, every conversation I
have that are directing me and guiding me and maybe questioning them and doubting them
and bringing a power into them so I'm not reacting off of them.
And as I start doing this, my reactions to life starts to change.
I'm not reacting the same way I used to, I'm not snapping on people, I'm pausing more.
I'm able to see a little bit more truth and question like is this, you know, is this really
something I need to be upset about?
And life starts, I start getting placed back in that beautiful position of neutrality,
not just with alcohol.
I love these 10-step promises, it says, you know, we are like, that ceased fighting anything
and everyone, even alcohol, like alcohol is the afterthought.
I'm talking about not fighting life.
Because I come into AA, I take life personally.
It's all happening at me and to me, not around me.
So I'm so grateful I have this experience where I'm living and breathing this 10-step
into my life.
Because a little over a year ago, I'm on the phone with my little brother and he's an active
alcoholic and, you know, talking about it before the meeting, an alcoholic in his cups
is an unlovely creature and he was really difficult to deal with.
And we were having this really stupid back and forth.
We were disagreeing about how my youngest brother should handle his marital problems.
Now I'm going to stand up here tonight and tell you that these are perfect principles
that I absolutely practice imperfectly.
I have a tendency to gossip.
I fall into bad behaviors at times.
And this was just a stupid conversation and it wasn't really going well and at some point
my little brother said to me, well, why don't you tell me what you really think of me?
And in that moment, my ego shows right up.
So what I do is I tell my little brother in the kindest, calmest, and most condescending
voice what he needs to do to get his life together.
Well, it's time for you to start taking some accountability and, you know, it's time for
you to stop blaming mom and dad for your problems.
And my brother is pissed.
He's furious.
He's angry.
He curses me out a million different ways and finally says, I'll never effing speak
to you again, hangs up on me and blocks my number.
And the reason I bring up the 10 step is my first thought when I got off that phone call
was this, I'm right, he's wrong.
And without AA and without a 10 step, I will stay there.
I cannot move from that position.
My ego will not allow me to move from that position.
But when I'm practicing step 10 and I'm watching the thoughts and I was watching the thoughts,
my first thought is I'm right, he's wrong, he cursed at me, I was calm, I was nice, I
was honest.
He needed to hear that, right?
He asked for it.
Like, that's my thought.
But when I'm watching, there's something underneath that, a disturbance that I don't like, a
disconnection from my brother who I love dearly.
And I'm watching that and I'm afraid and something's uncomfortable.
So I pray and I pick up the phone and I call my sponsor and I'm on the phone with this
woman for an hour trying to get to that truth, that other side of it, that new angle, that
different angle.
And when I get to the end of this, the truth, what I saw was I was absolutely terrified
that my baby brother was going to die of this disease.
And I would have said or done anything to keep him here.
I would have selfishly done anything to keep my brother here.
And I see this truth and my sponsor tells me, you know, you have to clean this up immediately.
That's our third part of our 10 step.
When we're wrong, we promptly admit it, right?
And I tell my sponsor, well, you know, he has me blocked.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
And she says, well, I, you know, text him for the next three days if he doesn't unblock
you.
You need to write him a letter, get a stamp, put it in the mail and mail it to him.
And that's exactly what I do.
I followed her instructions to the letter.
And after the third day, I wrote him the note.
And I wouldn't give myself the full sheet of paper because I knew if I did, my ego would
find its way in there, ways to explain why I was wrong for what I said.
I was wrong, bud.
I was wrong.
But instead, I gave myself a tiny little note card and I wrote three sentences.
Dear Benjamin, I was wrong to speak to you that way.
You didn't deserve it.
I love you very much.
And two months later, my brother died as a direct result of this disease.
And on the morning of his death, I was on the phone with his girlfriend for two hours
because again, this is what we get to do here.
We get to show up and we get to be of maximum service to God and the people around us, even
in our deepest pain.
And I'm on the phone with this woman who's suffering and I'm talking to her and I'm comforting
her.
But she shares with me the story of my brother getting that note, that he read that note.
And she told me his reaction to that and, you know, it was his reaction to everything.
He was arrogant.
He was cocky.
He was like, I'm going to keep her blocked and make her sweat it out.
But here's the gift I received in that moment, the gift that only Alcoholics Anonymous and
this program could have given me.
In that moment, I knew something.
I knew that up until the moment my brother took his last breath, he knew that I loved
him.
And I know that he loved me.
And I do not carry the shame of that last conversation around me.
Do I wish it had been different?
Absolutely.
Do I wish I could have told him the truth?
That I was too afraid and too delusional to see the truth that I was just terrified of
losing him?
Do I wish I could have said that to him?
Absolutely.
But I don't live in that regret.
And how could I ever repay a gift like that?
And I got to do the things that we get to do here.
I got to carry my baby brother's ashes to his funeral.
And I got to stand up and I got to give his eulogy.
And I got to comfort my parents again in their horrific, never-ending grief.
And I continue to get to show up in that way.
So when I was talking about this life beyond my wildest dreams, this was it.
This life that I get to be a part of today, I ran from everything.
I ran from everything.
And the life beyond my wildest dreams is the right here, right now, being able to be present
for every moment of this.
No matter how joyful, no matter how painful or sorrowful, I get to be here for all of
it.
And I never thought a life like that was possible for someone like me, somebody who literally
just drank or got loaded over the most minor inconvenience.
That's the power of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And it's not all heartbreak and sorrow.
There is so much joy in my life.
I get to experience relationships today that I never imagined.
That I'd be able to experience, like the relationship I have with my parents today.
I get to be that daughter that they've always wanted.
They rely on me.
They trust me.
My mother doesn't have to worry about when she's going to get that phone call from the
medical examiner's office.
She knows that if they need me for anything, I'm going to be there.
I get to do that today.
And with joy in my heart, with love, I get to have a relationship with my mother, that
woman who I had my greatest resentment towards.
I get to experience this with her.
What a beautiful gift that is.
I get to be a sister to my remaining siblings.
I get to be an aunt.
I get to show up for my sister's children because she can't.
A couple weeks ago, I got to be there for her daughter's wedding because she's no longer
here.
I got to stand with her daughter.
I get to be able to do that and be present for that.
Her other daughter who just gave birth to a little boy.
I get to be there for these moments and show up in the roles God assigns me today.
And that I was incapable of before having this experience with Alcoholics Anonymous.
I get to be a friend.
I get employable today.
And I get to sponsor women.
We talk about this frequent contact with newcomers being the bright spot of our lives.
I can't even tell you what the women I sponsor, what they've done for me.
When I first read that line in the big book that said, they're probably helping you more
than you're helping them.
When I first read them, like there's no way.
Like I'm imparting so much wisdom on these women.
Like I'm taking time out of my precious day.
There's no way that's possible.
When I tell you these women are my mirrors, they are my heart, they are my soul, they
are my connection to this world, they have saved me.
Watching them come in, watching them broken, being transformed from the inside out, watching
them fall in love with the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous with these steps and
carry this message to other people.
Watch them be reborn.
I get to witness that miracle.
And not only that, I get to watch those women who are on the way out the door, just like
I was at eight years sober.
And I get to hold their hand and try to lovingly pull them back into the room and tell them,
I understand we can walk through this together and we can come out on the other side of this.
And I get to do that with them.
What a gift.
I always wanted to be a part of something greater than myself.
I always wanted to be connected to something bigger than me and AA has given me that gift.
And it is so incredibly beautiful.
And my daughter, my daughter is my best friend in the entire world.
My daughter has every right to hate my guts and she trusts me more than any person on
this planet, including her father, the man who raised her.
Not because he's not a good man.
He's a wonderful man and he's a good friend of mine.
In fact, you know, I have an amazing relationship with him today.
I was at his wedding.
I'm good friends with his current wife.
I babysit their midlife crisis baby.
We celebrate holidays together.
We have this beautiful, my daughter gets to experience this beautiful blended insane family.
And it's, it's an all a result of Alcoholics Anonymous and the ninth step.
But the reason my daughter trusts me more than she trusts him is because you guys taught
me how to be a mother.
Before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, all I could do is have babies.
You guys taught me how to show up and love her for who she is and how she is and not
try to fix her or change her or make her anything else.
And because of that, I am the safest person she knows and she tells me everything.
Another gift that if I lived to be even a thousand years, I could never repay ever.
I get to experience that today.
This life that I've been seeking my entire life, I didn't know why I was coming here.
When I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I thought I came here just to stop drinking and stop
getting loaded and stop going to prison.
And I had no idea the doors that were going to open up for me and how my heart was going
to open.
And this experience I was truly going to have.
And the outside of my life is never going to be perfect.
Never.
And no one's is.
All the things that I've talked about today, the losses and the pain, that's stuff everybody
goes through.
I'm not different.
I'm not unique when it comes to that stuff.
Everybody experiences pain and loss and death.
AA doesn't promise us a life free of pain.
It promises us the ability to walk through that pain and that sorrow no matter what it
looks like as a free person and experience it and still be okay.
I didn't know that coming in here.
You know, I used to hear this whole thing when I came in and people were like, oh, life
shows up.
Well, here's a fun fact.
Life's been here.
It's been here this whole time.
What the 12 steps have done for me is there's a design for living to allow me to live in
present in this thing called life today, no matter how imperfect it does look.
Like I have a son who I haven't seen in 18 years now.
I used to say I lost custody of my son when he was six years old, but that's a lie.
I abandoned him.
I hurt him.
I confused him.
I caused him more pain than I could ever know or understand.
And I walked away from him and allowed another woman to raise him and be his mother.
And when I was first going through my steps, I reached out to his father and stepmother
through a letter and I asked for the opportunity to make this right and sit there and make
an amends and they did not respond and I tried again and they did not respond.
And a few years sober, I'm starting to get a little angry about this.
There's a story in the big book, there's like a farmer coming up out of a cellar.
I don't know if you've ever read that.
He comes up, everything's destroyed and he's like, well, it ain't grand.
The wind stopped blowing.
This is me at a couple of years sober, like I ripped through the lives of my son.
It is a miracle he survived having me as a mother.
And I get a couple of years sober and I'm shocked that they want nothing to do with
me.
I'm just shocked.
I'm like, I don't get it.
Why am I not getting this stuff back?
I don't understand.
And so what I do is, you know, this fun thing I used to do when I was first getting sober,
it's like I'd go ask for 20 different people for advice and then I would pick, yeah, I'd
pick the one I like the best.
I get, apparently other people have done this, I thought it was unique.
And so I'm doing this and I had well-meaning people in and out of the rooms of AA saying,
do this, get a lawyer.
You never fully lost your rights.
Sounds like a good idea.
And I sat with this for a little bit and then I have this intuitive thought that I know
comes from a power greater than myself because it certainly isn't me.
And this thought was maybe you don't get to do what you want to do anymore.
Because I'll tell you what I want to do.
What I want to do every single day is I want to drive to that house because I know where
he lives, where I send that card and that check every single month and have been for
years now.
I want to drive to that house and I want to throw my arms around my little boy and I want
to tell him how much I love him and how sorry I am.
But I don't get to do what I want to do anymore and in that moment, instead of doing what
I wanted to do, I did what the big book suggests we do, which is ask God for an intuitive thought
or decision.
And I can't tell you I relaxed and took it easy.
I'm still a work in progress.
I know I hadn't seen my son in a decade at this point.
I wasn't even sure what he looked like.
So I started badgering God a little bit.
I'm like, can you show me, please?
Help me, help me, help me.
And then one night I typed my son's name into Instagram and there he was, this beautiful
loved boy living a beautiful loved life.
And this peace that came into my heart, you know, that peace that passes all understanding
came to me and this knowing that comes from God and not me, that this knowing and understanding
that the restoration of this relationship will happen on God's time and not on mine.
And I have a deeper knowing today that the restoration may never look the way I want
it to, but I will still be at peace because I am just as free today as if you were standing
right next to me.
It says in our book that we have to burn the idea into the consciousness of every person
that we can get well, regardless of anyone.
All we have to do is trust God and clean house.
And when I'm well from the inside, I don't need alcohol to fix me anymore, no matter
what the outside looks like.
The 12 steps produce the same effect as alcohol.
It's a lot more work, but it's so much more beautiful because I get to be here and experience
all of it.
And these gifts I've received are available to every single one of us.
All we have to do is work for it.
I love you guys.
That's all I have.
Thank you.