Only the Second Time Through Step One Did I Actually Mean the Word Powerless — Paola M.
About This Speaker Tape
Paola grew up in Lima, Peru with a strict Navy father she feared and a mother who was emotionally absent. Her only warm memories of her dad were when he drank at social events — alcohol became linked to safety and connection from the start. She married at 21 to escape the house, and her drinking escalated almost immediately into lying, double life, and shame she couldn't look at in the mirror.
A second marriage and pregnancy did not stop her. She drank through the pregnancy praying her baby would be okay, then moved to Ohio with a four-month-old and found herself alone in a hotel in minus-five-degree weather, driving to gas stations with the baby in a car seat, and crossing a highway with a stroller to reach a grocery store for alcohol. She tried home detoxes that sent her to urgent care, where a doctor saw her bruises and asked if her husband was beating her — the bruises were from her own stumbling.
After 28 days of outpatient treatment in Peru she got to AA in Ohio, did steps one through four with a reservation she never spoke out loud, and collected a four-year chip six months after she had quietly started drinking again. Two more years of binge relapses followed — a week drunk, a month dry, lying to everyone — until her husband told her sponsor and told her he was leaving.
The family moved to Georgia for work, and she walked into Serenity House scared but willing, chasing her sponsor this time instead of being chased. She has three children now — 15, 9, and a one-year-old daughter — a restored marriage, a service position, and the belief she never had the first time around: that this disease will kill her if she disconnects.
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