Into Action and the Way She Acted Her Way Into Right Living – Sharon B.

hi my name is Sharon Barker I'm an alcoholic and I'm sober 14 years and 5 months and 16 days and I wear underwear today that's a product of working the 12 steps. It's real nice to be here. I feel nurtured already and God knows I need it because I've been learning to do that in my own life for the last about four years and so I need some clues and tips and need to watch you in action so that i can take some of that home with me and learn to do it in my life and learn how to teach other women how to nurture themselves and um i think it's real important and i feel a lot of strength here and um yeah give yourselves a There's a lot of strong women here, and we're lucky to be here with each other this weekend. I want to thank Carolyn and Gail very much for asking me here. And I wantto thank Diane and Melanie who went to the airport last night to pick us up. and we weren't there. We were in Denver for six hours, but my baby Lori came with me, and she was, you know, they have those carts up and down United where you spend money, you know when you're stuck, and she making everybody's day there. I mean, she was working her program and I'm neurotic and frothing at the mouth at United. So that's why I brought her to be a good example to me as I travel. There's a woman in here, Nancy M., who lives with you now who saw me come in the program and that touches me that there's somebody in this room that saw me. Keeps me honest too. My baby Lori came from L.A., and Robin is my baby from Dallas, who I died with in the French Quarter in the early 70s. Today I sponsor her, and she's got six years. She's here. My friend Debbie from Bellevue, Nebraska has barely made it through the ice to get here, and I want those three to stand up. Right here, these three right here. I had to embarrass them just a little. I lived 80 miles east of here. That was my last cold winter. It was north of Boyceville, Wisconsin on an organic farm which was my one of my answers to my problem but it wasn't my problem as your problem back in those days and that was my last cold winter and I vowed I'd never have another one and I haven't except it was 32 when I left Los Angeles but when I got here this afternoon I spent some time with Nancy and I got lost in the skyways briefly and went to a meeting and got centered and had some breakfast with the ladies from Dallas and and then I got to walk outside for a little bit and catch some snowflakes on my tongue and we watched the Sun go down from our room and it was a real special sunset I've never seen one like it it was like the the light just shone straight up through the clouds it was just the oddest thing and I was moved again by the spirit the spirit of being alive how lucky we are that we are sitting in here tonight with the gift of sobriety because not everybody that once it gets it and not everybody that needs it is so lucky to be in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and I hope you remember that this weekend that we are very lucky to have that special gift and I like to think of it in my life like it's a silver box and if you don't shine silver at tarnishes so my life today is contingent upon my daily spiritual maintenance I have to buff up that box I I have to spend some time alone with God. I have the gift of God. I have this program away. I have To Walk Like I Talk because I go to bed at night with me now, and I'm stone-cold sober, and I want to go to bad with somebody I can respect and be proud of. Most of the time it's just with me, so that's okay. So I hope you remember that this weekend That each of us has a special gift to give Because we have a gift And I hope You share your own particular little gift With somebody else And pass it along And make this what it is It feels real special I grew up in Iowa And that was my There's a few of you here in the back, that's the way we always are but that was my very first resentment when I realized that's where I was because my favorite story as a child was the princess and the pea with all the mattresses and she could always feel the pea and I just always felt like the spaceship was going to come I looked for the mothership in those skies and I am I guess what I am is a dysfunctional adult of a normal functional family start my own meeting they're all very normal my family's all very normal and I never ever fit in, ever. And it was just last summer when I was home in Iowa and I was sitting there with my mother and father at the same house I grew up in with my little son who's five and it was just a normal night in Iowa. The crickets were going, the locusts were chirping, the sun was going down, my mother was cooking her food, and I was sitting around the table with just my mother, my father, my son, and me. Something happened. I got another little gift, and the gift was I fit in. I fit it in with these people, and it was a sense of peace that I've never had in the house I grew up in. That's a gift to the program. That's a lot of working, the twelve steps in my life and making those amends and doing what I have to do. Even though they don't understand alcoholism, they respect the program but they don t understand my disease, but they respect what we have here and that's okay. In the middle of the night, I don't have to call up my mother and tell her all my neuroses. I have you to call up. I can bother you, pay you back because you did it last week to me. And I can be a good example to them and I can let them know I'm fine and what a wonderful amends I can still make to my parents on a daily, daily basis just to let them known I'm find and to see where I can be of service in their life. And they're thousands of miles away but I can still be a good daughter and be of service, and I'm so grateful we have these steps because it has made a big difference in the peace I have within me. When I was 14, I sat on a 57 Chevy with a bottle of Canadian Club in one hand, a Schlitz beer in the other, that's how old I am, in the another hand, and as I got down that beer And as I chugged on that Canadian club, my skinny little legs looked a little more svelte. I noticed that I finally reached puberty that evening. They popped out, you know? We're still waiting, but it's all right. And I could talk to those football players, and it didn't matter what my head had said or how nervous I was or how I wasn't enough or how it didn't fit in. Something happened when that alcohol hit bottom. I became omnipotent. It became something very powerful in my life from an early age. I didn't run off and become an alcoholic that night, but as the years went by, I gave pieces of my soul just to have that feeling one more night, just to shut off that head, one more night. Just to fill me up for those five minutes. And alcohol did make my life technicolor. It made it blossom. Things happened when I drank alcohol. I became very social. I'm an overachiever anyway and as I went off to college I thought I wanted to teach kindergarten. garden. I really thought I wanted to do that. I was going to marry this man. I caught him with his tutor. What I did then was I just didn't feel. I pulled a shade on my feelings and I've done that throughout my life when I was drinking. I ran. I'm a runner. I'm an over and I pulled shades. I pull shades on feelings but nothing came up until I was sober a couple of years But I went to the University of Iowa and I went there with a full intention of being of service in life somewhere, of having some sort of a career. And within that first year, you know, I took off that sorority pin and I put on my bells around the ankles and I started to let my hair get a little funny and I start to dress and antique clothing. And I started to see what was happening across the footbridge at the art classes. They were smoking a lot of pot, they were taking a lot LSD, and they were going to change the world. That's what I wanted to do because I didn't like this world we lived in. I started go to a lot peace rallies, I started to disrupt courtrooms. I started to do anything where you give me a bottle of wine and some good uppers, and I'm very loud, so they would give me the placard, and they would put me out there, and as this first year rolled around, I got mad at God in there. I got bad at my father in there, he came down after a suicide attempt and tried to talk to me with the family priest. The family priest and I got drunk and my father and I had a parting of ways. I sponsor a nun today, so I've made my amends to the Catholic Church. But my father, I started to blame him for everything in my life that started to go wrong. At that point, I just, I held him up as them. I would bring guys home. I remember once it was, I don't know, midnight. I woke them up and I don' t know who I had on my arm, what he looked like, but I told them that we were going, I got them at the kitchen table and said, We re going to have a new relationship here. I was on about 16 four-way hits of orange sunshine, which is some good acid. And so my hair was standing straight up. My eyes were like saucers. And I told them we were going to have this relationship and my name was going to be Cher now. Don't call me Sharon anymore. And that's because we share and share alike in this world. then. My father's jaw flinched when he looked at what I was sharing with, you know? And they just, you know, they didn't know what was wrong with me. They had no idea and I ran to New York City and I got a job there and I thought that was going to fix it and I get strange there. I am one of these people that that has a hole in her psyche you know and that that alcoholics anonymous and having a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps has made me whole I was always not whole and and these Scientologists would find me and and and then in California the Krishna's is finding and and the pentecostal holy rollers wanted my soul and you know as i went along my life these different things and these different answers would always appear right in front of me and they wanted to help me and i liked what they said but when i talked about forever i said uh-uh if it doesn't fit in my backpack i don't own it i don'T DO FOREVER and one of the biggest hooks in alcoholics Anonymous was a day at a time. One of the biggest hooks for me, I kept waiting for that other shoe to drop and they went, no, we just do this today. You know, and that got me because I had been living a day-at-a-time long before I ever came here. And New York City, back to college, you know, it didn't work out. College to Colorado where I wanted to be a cowboy and I thought I had Bob Dylan. And so wherever this man was, it was near Aspen. It could have been. I don't know. But we came to California together and we had spiritual experiences in Utah. That's all I remember. And he wrote a few songs about me. They were on one of his albums. No, it's not. But he was my hero. And I just picked up and left the job and left a place I left and came to Huntington Beach to a commune and he left me there and I stayed for months and I came with two dollars and left months later with five dollars and a dog and I just thought that was it but I was 21 years old I had turned 21 panhandling for my bottles of wine in Westwood, California where I was a peace and love child but on the other hand I was giving the finger to the Bank of America that I wanted to blow up I mean, I was confused all the time. I could never quite get it together. And at 21, I ended up back with Mom and Dad in Iowa. And I was the thing that lived upstairs that winter. I really was. My father and I did not speak because when we did, it was a huge argument. My mother said, you can stay here, just stay out of his way. And I did. And they said, you know, just don't take any drugs in this house. But I drank and it was okay to drink. And I went in those taverns every night in the small town and I watched those losers every night. Not realizing I'm in there every night judging the losers. And I got very, very sick and I knew I was dying. I knew i was dying and nobody knew what was wrong. And the doctor was giving me Valium for my nerves. nobody knew alcoholism I finally met him and he took me to an organic farm in northern Wisconsin where they found out I had pancreatitis and a non-functional gallbladder and when they took this gallblatter out we went through everything the doctor asked me, do you abuse drugs or alcohol by then I'm organic, I don't abuse anything I have a couple of little bottles of dandelion wine occasionally you know, but I was smoking organic pot every single day. Every single day, morning to night, morning to night. But Phil took away my alcohol. This man took away mi alcohol. He gave me 85 acres of organic land. We had 50 head of organic sheep. We had Poncho the organic horse. We had Spook the organic dog. We have Raja the organic cat. Phil was organic and he tried to make me organic. But I remember the second snowfall of the winter And you know how it snows up here When they get those big snowfalls And we're way out in the country Way out where they don't plow the roads And it was the second snowflall And I knew I'd have to sit there and look at him for days And he was over there in the corner With his learn-to-play-the-banjo Pete Seeger record on And Phil never learned to play the banjo but that night he'd be you know he was at the part where you learn how to go bum titty bum titty and he'd pick it up and he started again and he he'd mess up and then he picked it up and pete seeger was making me very nervous with his little voice and the cat looked nervous and the dog looked nervous i looked at phil and i said i'll be right back because i wanted to get to that general store in connersville before the roads were closed and i got two cheap gallons of wine i came home he saw it was in the bags and he went to bed because he was disgusted with me when i drank because by now i'm a rowdy obnoxious fun-loving drunk you know and i get old sloppy then i had a party me and the cat and the dog and the rolling stones we had much more fun that night And when Phil woke up, I don't know what time it was. I had the door wide open and I was cheering the snowplow through. And he woke up and he gave me that look. I saw that look on his face that I had seen on my dad's face, that I'd seen on people that loved me, that look of confusion and disgust and what's wrong with you? You have so much potential. Why can't you just smoke this organic stuff, you know? Why do you have to drink like that? Why doyou have to get like that?" And you know what my head said? My head said, you know what? Alcohol is more fun than you feel. And I made a decision that night that I kept. It took me till the next summer to keep it but I kept it. Alcohol won. All the organic farmers blackballed me for being a drunk and I was alone and I wasn't alone with my dog and my half acre pot we had planted. And I was happy because that's what I was doing drinking and tending my pot every day and clarence the farmer would come visit me and bring the booze and clarens was on his tractor and the reason was was he had too many dwis for a driver's license you know this is my only friend and he would come and he would bring the boos and i would feel just so much better when i saw that tractor turn up the lane a lot of times he didn't put in his teeth or bathe you know but we didn't care and what I did was I harvested this pot and I was going to get out of town because it was August and I knew winter was coming early to northern Wisconsin so I made this this big arrangement to this all of this pot to sell it and I went into Menominee the big college town I drove 45 miles in there me and the dog and we got there and you say the secret words and you meet the people and you do this big transaction except they looked at me and they said where's the stuff and i looked at my dog and my dog looked at me and we had left it back on the farm in hefty bags we forgot it um i was embarrassed and i did the next best thing and that was i joined the carnival that was in town that night and that's where i met him girls if you want to meet him join a carnival i'll tell you I got a job as a shooting gallery girl and he worked on a flat store and we just were a match made in heaven. For two weeks, we loved each other. In the next two years, we gave each other black eyes. It became a very abusive, alcoholic relationship. See, I never understood his heroin habit and he never understood my alcoholism. We ended up getting busted for drugs in Bogalisa, Louisiana. and I spent 31 days in maximum security down there. They put me in jail, him in jail the dog in jail and we had a pet skunk named Crank they put Crank in jail and I thought, you know, my father flew down there my father blew down there and tried to get me out and I couldn't look at him I was sitting there in that lawyer's office in handcuffs and I could not look at them and he could not do anything for me And I just, you know, I just didn't know what was wrong with me. I really didn't. I thought, you now, just bad breaks all the time. And if they'd just leave me alone. And why can't I just do my own thing? And I ended up in the French Quarter of New Orleans where I drank and used for the next three years. And that's where I met Robin. And that' s where I meet Denny who is also sober. five years and is now a public defender for the city of new orleans um i'll tell you we were sitting in oklahoma about a year ago robin danny and me at a conference and it was raining very very heavily that day so we couldn't really go out and share with everybody else so we were in the cabin alone and here were three women the three musketeers they call this um who were drunken, sloppy, on their way to dying alcoholic women years before that were sitting there talking about a spiritual awakening. And talking about all the people I had made it, the ones who were hit by a stray bullet sitting at the bar, you know, the ones whose liver gave the ones who had a brain tumor and there the three of us were and I felt God's grace once again and we all have been plucked from the abyss we really have been to have this special gift of sobriety that's when Robin told me she hadn't done her fifth step yet so I became her sponsor and we've since done it it's because i was there for part of it but i don't remember most of it so but for the next three years i for two years of that i lived in this abusive relationship with this man and uh i danced on piano bars and i fell off more than i danced so I became a bartender it was a lot easier I had two best friends it was Jose for Jose Corva Gold and Amy for Amyl Nitrate and they were always with me on my shift and that's what I drank um I remember being in Florida on the 4th of July and I was at some officers club and I was probably one of the few women in there and and maybe younger by about 20 years than everybody in there, and they were buying me drinks. I had gold lined up on that bar, and I had to go into that bathroom and take the quart out of my bag and hit on it behind a locked door because I just couldn't get enough. I couldn't get enough! I sold out lots of pieces of myself in New New Orleans for just that, just let it work tonight. This guy that I live with, my parents came to visit me when he was, I don't know, I think we both had a new black eye that day, I don t really remember but my mom and dad drove down and I think they wanted to bring me home and what they saw was their daughter living in filth above a biker bar down in Lower St. Peter Street, and the skunk droppings everywhere, this guy put the snake in my father's face because we had a pet snake, and you know, my mother couldn't look at me, she had a tear in her eye, and my dad was flinching his jaw, and they went back to Iowa, and what I wanted to say to him is you know mom i want to come home i am tired and i don't know what's wrong with me and um but it won't change it won t change and i knew that and they left that day and i didn't see them again until i got sober and a big piece of my heart went away that day big piece this guy's parole got pulled he got pulled back to st louis i should have been happy he was gone but i was sitting around in a bar one day and uh it pissed me off that he left me and didn't even discuss it so uh i thought that i would go up and find him and and leave him you know have the last word we're good at having the last word well i had been in town a couple of months when i did find him and and uh i pulled up next to him and he got off his harley and he walked around took his helmet off and he broke the window and he pulled me through and spit in my face said if i ever see you again i will kill you and that's when i knew the relationship was over i don't give up easily i have i have a sponsor uh i had a sponsor from about four years of sobriety to about nine years of sobriete named jenny and jenna taught me about letting go jenney taught me about you know she said Sharon you're like this woman that's got this this precious thing in her hand and you never lose your grip on it and one day one day you trusted me enough to peel back the fingers and let me look inside your palm to see what you had and she looked at me she said but Sharon it's a turd you're hanging on to a turds But I looked at her, I, you know, straightened myself up and I said, I know, Jenny, but it's my turn. It belongs to me. And Jenny has taught me how to let go because I didn't let go. I mean, I was one of those survivors, you've got your boot in my face and I'll look up at you with every ounce of hate I've got, you know. And that kind of survival instinct has brought me into this program. A friend of mine was killed at Mardi Gras. Michael was shot dead by the police. It was an alcoholic suicide. I was two feet inside the door. It could have been me, seconds and inches. You know, I heard a guy named Norm Alfie talk when I was new in the program. I used to love to hear Norm talk because he'd fire me up for a week to go out there and get him, kid. you know and he'd say we're in here by seconds and inches you know think about it when you could have turned right but you turned left. Think about it you know when you passed out and you're right near the edge of that table. You drove home with one eye, seconds and ounces and God I knew just what he meant. I knew who he understood and I ended up in California at a bar called Barney's Beanery which is a real sick place in West Hollywood. Somebody knows that bar On a good Saturday night, I become unemployable. My last job was on Lower Decatur Street. In fact, Robin and Denny didn't even like to come down there to talk to me. You said, welcome. Sit down. Don't drink and use between meetings. And they took care of me. They took care until I realized what was going on, until all of a sudden some hope started to happen in my life. I got a $24-a-week room after these wires came off. The first three months I was here, I had wires in my mouth and I couldn't talk and I had to learn to listen. I'm so grateful for that. I was so grateful for that because listening is such an art. I have to constantly work that listening muscle today to listen to you because that's where I learn is from the sharing we have here. That's how God speaks to me. God speaks to me like the night that they saw me with my washed hair. When I am working with a newcomer, Or I see a newcomer that I'm watching and they walk in the door one night and maybe they've been here a couple of months and there's something different about them. There's something difference about them and you think maybe it's a new outfit, maybe they got their hair cut and then you look in their eyes and what it is is there's somebody home in the eyes. And that's something that you can't buy. That's something I can't hand them. You have to get it so you have to keep coming back to get and let it happen that's having that that spirit the fellowship um that's why i love to watch newcomers you know i'd love to wash them i um i hope we always have new people come i am i got this 24 week room i got a little waitress job i got a sponsor because this guy wouldn't leave me alone until i got one i didn't want him him to touch me anymore, because he's sticking his finger in my chest. And so I got a sponsor and she moved me to her couch. Now that was a spiritual awakening in my life. I mean, I'll tell you, my life got instantly better. And she made me read three pages of that big book a night. She made me get on my knees. And I prayed through a bedspread for a long time, I'll telling you. No feeling there, no feeling at all. And later on after I had my place i got a little cocky and now she said to me you know what sharon she was talking to me outside of a thursday night meeting i remember it and she says you know you better get a higher power or you're going to get drunk and i thought you know okay so beacon's moving van drove by at that moment and i i picked b i said okay janet beacons moving van is my higher power so i thought I'd make her mad see but she said that's fine as long as it's not you you know but I was standing around with another newcomer who was going to be my husband and we were talking about you know this beacon thing and I explained to him see I'm like I've been on the road I've been out there and it's like this moving van is like my god he puts these quilt things around me and moves me along and maybe I got a scratch here and a little you know knob off there of this bureau but i made it and so it made sense to me and all the newcomers are going yeah it makes sense and the old-timers are like going you guys are really sick here and uh i prayed to beacons moving van for a long long time when i was in texas about a year ago and i didn't think i was going to make my plane and i was real upset and i don't want to get back and i'm frothing at the mouth but i was trying to act serene you And I don't want to tear off my clothes and run down the freeway anymore like I used to in bank lines and that kind of stuff. And a Beacons moving van drove by and I knew everything was going to be okay. It still works, it still works. I have this little one they gave me in Iowa. It's a little Beacoms truck. I look at it every morning and every night. And I have another baby that didn't know the Our Father, so instead of Hallowed Be They Named, she thought they said Howard Be They Name. So she prays to Howard, and it works. As long as it's not you. I fell in love with this newcomer. He had six months of sobriety, more than me, 27 1⁄2 tattoos. I had read his inventory, and I was in love. And at two years of sobriety, we got married. I was very active in general service. I was the cookie girl. He was the coffee maker. We had an A-A relationship, and we were out amongst them. And my dad and mom came out to the wedding of my two sisters, and it was an event that was two ex-Catholics by a Baptist minister. We had a day of time, put in the vows. We had Mack the Knife was our wedding song. Everybody brought ham and cheese sandwiches and we had a wonderful day. We had an amazing day. We had wonderful day and my father looked at me and he said, you know what Sharon, if you think about doing what you were doing before Think Twice, you've got it made. And my dad finally gave me some approval. But something interesting happened. I knew I already had some of my own and it made it just like icing on the cake it wasn't like the whole sky opened up and the angels sang because my dad said I was okay, I was starting to find out I was ok because I had started to work those steps now when it came time to the inventory when it became time to do that I was one of those that asked all of you old timers how to do it, you know, and I asked one lady one too many times and she stuck her finger my chest and said you pick up a pencil and you write it i'm sick of you talking about it so then they made me mad again and i ended up at the airport at 11 months of sobriety with my first credit card and i hadn't called my sponsor in a few days just to punish her and um so i called her just to tell her goodbye because i was going to go have my slip so that's what i'm starting to hear i'm so glad i had my slip and if i wouldn't have my sleep i wouldn t learn this so i'm thinking i have 11 months of sobriety and i haven't had my slip yet so i want to call up my sponsor and tell her i'm going off with this new credit card to have my slip and i'll be back see why i have a sponsor today i mean this is my head it is not my friend i need a sponsor louder than my head and i've always had one louder than my head my sponsor today is clancy and he is louder than my head you know but uh janet was louder than my head and what she said there she said that's fine sharon go ahead go out you'll be like my friend stella she went and had her slip at 11 months of sobriety and she burned up in a bed you know it's like they save these stories for when you're real vulnerable so she ticked me off again and i ended up going to one of those little host places and I started to write and I wrote and I wrote and wrote and i got over the hump and I get over the fear and I read in my fifth step and I took my first year birthday cake and I felt like I deserved it because I had done the first thing that was so hard for me but I had absolutely no faith but what I did was I took the action anyway I took the action anyway i sat around waiting to be motivated you know and I got nothing done. And today I've learned how to act my way into right living, how to act my away into good thinking, how to act my way through these feelings into good feelings. You know how to walk into a meeting and say what can I do to be of service here? What can I give to this situation instead of take? I was such a taker. I was so self-absorbed in such a take and I've had that spiritual psychic change where I want to be a giver So you try to even the score, and you get it back all the time tenfold. So it's like, okay, forget it, just give, you know? It's like I'm such a scorekeeper, I have to forget all that. I have about eight people up there that are real accountants, you now, and I have starved the accountants is what I do. I don't give them much to go on, but then I don' t know who' s on my side anyway half the time. So I don't listen to my head a lot of the time. But I didn't have any defects until I was married a couple years, and then his started rubbing off on me, you know? And I got a sponsor named Ginny to be my sponsor. She taught me about being a woman, and she taught me about being kind, and he taught me about things I was afraid of. I found out how angry and fearful I was and how closely attached they were and I got this job with a travel agent and I had to go off on planes and fly all the time and I was so afraid I mean, I was just so afraid to fly and I have no idea and they told me that you can have faith or fear in your heart there's not room for both so I would chant that little chant all the way down I'd have faith instead of fear and somebody else told me take your higher power with you on the plane so I started to do that And then I figured out, too, that you don't wear polyester when you fly because then it won't stick to you when you burn. So you wear cotton clothing and cotton underwear. And I was like really neurotic about all of this. And when I was going to the international convention in New Orleans, I got to go down and see Robin in full form. I got to go make amends to that town and the word was out that I was home Cher was back and I stood in front of Denny for five minutes before she even recognized me and I was an example of Alcoholics Anonymous in that town and you never know when your example is going to land that's in God's time but it's my job to be the example and um but i i was on that plane and there was like alabama and clancy and all these people on the plane and i thought oh good we're going to go down in style you know all of us and um then i went to the montreal convention i went and i had my baby with me and i worried about my baby instead of worried about me and started to leave me the fear And today I just, I got to fly with Vince Y., who's Pat's husband. I don't know if any of you know him, but he's a terrible flyer. And I'm real good at just being real, you know. He looked at me and he was saying, what's that and what's this and which exit are we going to go for? And, I mean, I've got it down now, so I don'T even have to look up in the magazine I'm reading. I tell him we go for the back exit because there's a lot of fat people between us and the front exit. it. I just try to have fun with my fear. I try to talk about it because we're as sick as we have secrets. We are as sick as we have secrets, I had my ex-husband when I was five years sober, he started to become a punk rocker and I was wearing the white hat, he's wearing the black hat. There was a lot going on in our life and he went to flotation tanks instead of meetings and I had to go to Al-Anon And I found out that to release isn't to reject. And I had to learn how to let go of him. And what happened was we started to hike together and we got reined in up in the high Sierras and I got pregnant and I didn't know that could happen. And it's the altitude, I guess. I don't know. Nine months later, Wesley was born and it was June 23rd, 1984 and he had all his fingers and all his toes and I was so grateful. and they put that little baby in my arms. I didn't know how to be a mom. I didn' t know I could be a mom, but I just knew that God was there, and it was going to be okay. Because, see, we can do what I can't do. And I had a real fun time for about a year of just being home and being a mom and going to Mommy and Me classes and sponsoring a lot of women. He left me in January after Wesley was a year and a half old. He left then, and he walked out, and I didn't hang on to that turd. That's not a nice thing to say. I couldn't tell a newcomer I'm working with to hold her head up with dignity to know that God loves her and hang on his leg. It just didn't work, and I wanted to do it, you know? And nobody got custody of the meetings, and he circled his wagons, and then I circled my wagons. And Clancy had been my sponsor now for about a year because when I went to pick up my sponsor at the airport from Paris, she had 21 days instead of 21 years. I had to get a new sponsor, and she's doing fine now. She has over five years, but I wanted somebody who was having fun with their sobriety and who was excited about being sober and giving it away and he became my sponsor and that year that Al left me I was like a newcomer all over again all over I didn't want to get out of bed I didn' t want to show up I didn''t want to do anything and the people in Alcoholics Anonymous rallied around me they made me they showed up they had me put a resume together and we went out there and got a job and um i'll tell you that i one saturday night i was i was at our meeting and i wanted to go baptize him and her because now there's a her in his life and um with my my hot cups of coffee to see how spiritually really we're over the other corner of the room and clancy happened to be in town that night he saw me on one side with that wild dog-eyed look and he saw them on the other side of the room and he saw where i was headed with vengeance you know and he got to the middle of the world and he stopped me and he put the coffee down and he looked me square in the face and grabbed me by the shoulders he says sharon you will walk through this with dignity and grace so you can be an example for others and i heard him and i started to work on me one finger points at them and three fingers point at me i had to take another inventory i had to quit judging. I had to start looking inside. I have to start cleaning my house again. I had to get in touch with what I was so afraid of. I was so afraid to becoming myself. I would so afraid of becoming myself at seven years of sobriety. It was the first time in my life. I felt from the tip of my head to the tip of my toes, like a whole complete human being. When I took that seven year cake, something happened and I felt God's love. And that was gone for that year. It was gone. And I walked through that year with a lot of help, and I'm the kind of person, that's why I drank Jose Cuervo Gold, because it's like starting a Harley, you know? I'll tell you, one door closes, another one better open, you know, right now. I am not a patient alcoholic. And what it was, was for a whole year, I was in a hallway, you know? I was in this hallway. The door slammed shut behind me and I couldn't find the next one, you know? And I came to find out when I stopped judging and started working on me that there's a lot of other people in that hallway with me. So we just threw down some throw pillows, hung up some art, and we started to share, you know? And we all got each other through the hallway. And it was like, you know, did you hear so-and-so got through the next door? I mean, it was like we started to get excited for the next person that came to the next level of living. And in February, it happened for me. I was sitting there waiting for Sheila Ash Wednesday, the nun I sponsor at church, sitting in this Catholic church and it happened. I walked through that doorway. I got God's love and God's healing. It happened for мне again. And I was just rocketed into a new dimension i am not kidding my life from that point on has gotten incredible my uh i have a career now we were talking tonight at dinner i have an actual career i paid so much money to my attorney i went and got a job at a law firm um so that's what i do they trust me they love me i work with their money they uh they value my opinion and that's What I do and they go i am anonymous there but I'm an example of alcoholics anonymous because they can rely on me They know that they can Rely on Sharon and she is a good worker and that she's got a good opinion about things and they come and ask me But they don't know anything about me. Thank God, you know I could call you up and close my door and have a good laugh when they're looking at me funny. Oh I am dating a guy that seven-and-a-half years sober that I watched come in the program that I've been dating Casey for almost three years, and we have a very respectful, fun, calm, passionate relationship, and nobody moved their clothes in. I have a five-year-old little boy that I absolutely adore. He was asked to leave a kindergarten. He's in kindergarten. So I sent him to my sister Sheila's school. And what happened was he wasn't in the right environment. And I kept trying to do something more and trying to do somethingmore, and I finally hit my knees. I said, okay, God, this is my kid. I will ask you for some direction here. And the next day I got my answer, and I moved him, and he's flourishing. I talked to his teacher last week, and she said he's so proud of his work. He's just so proud. He's the kind of child that at the end of Happy Birthday will sing Keep Coming Back. He's a product of us, you know? And what I have to do with him is I have to love him, treat him like a newcomer, let him know I'm on his side, and be with him one-on-one because he can tell when I'm not. You know how those babies are and those new people or they can tell when you're not with them, you know. And he can tell and he wants part of me a lot of the time. He wants all of me and I love to be with him. He's a lot fun. We, my father, I want to tell you about few minutes. I know it's about 925, but when Jenny was my sponsor, she said, do you owe your dad any money, Sharon? How's your relationship with him? And I thought, yeah, I guess I do owe him some money and how do they know these things, you know? They make you grow, you know, I guess. And so she said, call him up and ask him how much and tell him we're going to work this amend step and this is what you do in Alcoholics Anonymous because he has the big book and he's read it and he was probably sitting there waiting for me to call because when I called, I asked him and he had this number on the top of his head he didn't even have to think about it. I called her back and I said, I think it's too much and she said I don't care how much can you afford and we talked about it. She said, okay, call him back in a couple of days. And I did. And he didn't say, I've been thinking about it, I changed my mind. He didn't say that. He said, OK. I called her back up and I said, OK, he agrees. She just said, good, do that and make out your envelopes and get them ready once a month on the first, make sure it's on time. And she said, oh yeah, by the way, with the check, I want you to put a note about your life and what you're doing. I thought, God, they ask for a lot it's like make me grow you know so i did that and we're um we're doing this and doing this in doing this somewhere in my year number two somewhere and i called her up and said jimmy i think i'm overpaying him now i never keep track of payment numbers or schedules and i was doing it and i was writing in big letters down the left-hand corner of the checks that he got and um she said well it doesn't matter he's going to put into a trust fund you can buy your Jaguar and I thought great I sent it early you know my dad doesn't know he just gets the end result of an action of a step of Alcoholics Anonymous so on Christmas one year after we had done this for over three years he called me up and he said Merry Christmas Sharon I said Merry Christmas dad they said you don't have to send me any more checks I said thanks And he said, but don't stop sending me your notes. And I was free. You know, I was freed once again. And when I was home in Iowa last summer, I was sitting there and we were talking and I was driving my mother's car. They had a couple of extra cars and so I was riding my mother. I was just driving her car. And they said, do you like that car? Because my car was getting old and it was small and they got nervous about me being in L.A. with my son in the car. And I said, yeah, it's a nice car. It was a nice big narc-looking car with square ends. It's a Ford, you know. Sturdy. It slammed that door and it shuts, you now. And I say, yeah it's fine car, you kno. I'm not into all that but it looks sturdy and safe. He said, okay, well, do you want to buy it? And so he gave me a price, and you know what? I didn't flinch. I didn' t try to talk him down. I thought it was a good price. I said, Okay, Dad, when I get my bonus in December, I'll come fly out and drive it back. And he said, Great. So I got back to L.A., and about a month later, my car died. My little Mazda with 110,000 alcoholic synonymous miles on it died. And we gave it a good burial, and I called him. I said, well, I've got to do something else, Dad. It just didn't work. It didn't make it to December, and he said, okay. So then a couple days later, he called me back, and he says, your mom and I decided to drive out the car for you, and you can pay me in December. And that's Alcoholics Anonymous. and in December he got the payment too that's Alcoholics Anonymous so I am blessed I am so blessed that if I can get in touch with the gratitude on a daily basis if I ca look at where I can be of service in the world to make it a better place If I can give my son some self-worth and some self love to take out in the world And break that old lineage of having none If I could do that and work these 12 steps in my life And give it away so I can keep it Then I am gifted I am gifted by God and by you There's a lot of love here There's allot of power here there's a lot of healing here we have an incredible thing I hope that this weekend that you take a little piece of your heart and share it with somebody else and I hope that you accept back what they try to give you because today I am a child of God as you are and we are worth it and thank you so much Minneapolis I love you