Find Someone You Can Forgive and Someone You Can Love and You Will Find Higher Power – Mary S.

About This Speaker Tape

Mary S. shares her story at the 1972 North Carolina State Convention with unforgettable humor and raw emotion. A menopause baby born into a family of six-foot-four Irish brothers, she grew up loathing alcohol while watching it destroy everyone around her. She escaped to New York and became a Radio City Rockette, but a doctor's suggestion to use whiskey as a sedative opened a door she could never close. Her dancing career ended in alcoholic convulsions at Johns Hopkins, and she returned home to a household that eventually held eleven alcoholics under one roof.

Back in Charlotte, she married her childhood sweetheart, a returning POW and jet pilot, and tried desperately to be a good wife and mother. But alcohol took over completely — she drank through pregnancies, was hospitalized in convulsions while eight months pregnant, bought 38 pairs of shoes in a drunken blackout, and slashed her wrists in the bathroom. After her father was beaten and shot to death by a criminally insane man, she lost her last anchor and became a bedroom drinker on a suicidal path. Her husband took the children and left.

She called AA on December 28, 1951, and three members walked into her home. Her Sunday school teacher Roland — one of the original fifty AA members from the Oxford Group — became her sponsor and kept her silent for three years: sit down, shut up, read the Big Book. The turning point came when Roland told her she had to forgive the man who murdered her father. At a retreat she found that forgiveness, and later, when Earl escaped from prison and was recaptured, she went to his jail cell and told him she forgave him and loved him — watching him transform before her eyes.

In sobriety she faced her son Billy's alcoholism and drug addiction starting at age fourteen, and her son Bobby being shot to pieces in Vietnam and suffering severe PTSD. She nearly drank at Fort Bragg but called Billy, who mobilized AA members to surround her telephone booth and carry her through. She closes with a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a camel ride to the Inn of the Good Samaritan, and a plea to open AA's doors to young people and to stop gossip that destroys the fellowship.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and opening humor — bleeding eyeballs, nervous as a pregnant owl, throwing up at the 1960 International Convention after Chuck C.'s standing ovation
• 5:00 Growing up as a menopause baby with five big Irish brothers, frustration and misery, father as her only God
• 9:00 Becoming a Radio City Rockette in New York, a doctor prescribes whiskey, and alcohol opens up a whole new world
• 13:00 Eleven alcoholics under one roof, hiding pints in a bra from Sears and Roebuck
• 18:00 Marriage to childhood sweetheart, drinking through pregnancies, hospitalized in convulsions at eight months pregnant
• 24:00 Father murdered, becomes bedroom drinker, buys 38 pairs of shoes, slashes wrists in suicide attempt
• 30:00 Calls AA on December 28, 1951 — three members arrive, Sunday school teacher Roland becomes her sponsor from the original fifty
• 38:00 Roland tells her to forgive her father's killer — retreat experience, forgiving Earl, then confronting him face to face in jail
• 48:00 Son Billy's alcoholism at 14 and drug addiction, son Bobby shot in Vietnam and PTSD breakdown, near-relapse at Fort Bragg telephone booth
• 58:00 Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, riding a camel to the Inn of the Good Samaritan, plea against gossip, closing on love and legacy