Step 4: You Made Your Bed and Now You Have to Change the Sheets — Micki B.

About This Speaker Tape

Mickey from Bryan, Texas tells her story with 23 years of sobriety at the time of this recording. She grew up in an alcoholic home with a violent father and a mother who never drank but suffered from the family disease. She started drinking as a young girl after stealing beer with a friend, and unlike her friend who swore it off after one bad night, Mickey found that alcohol quieted something restless inside her. By 16 she was pregnant, gave up her baby for adoption in small-town Texas in 1972, and carried that shame and loss into two decades of escalating addiction — pills, needles, and eventually organized crime charges.

Her bottom was devastating. Living in an abandoned house with no water or electricity, she attacked the last person left in her life — a young man who then took his own life that same night. The next morning she found his body hanging from a tree. Driving away in blind terror, she broke down crying on the side of the road and realized she had pulled over outside an AA meeting that was about to start. She walked in and never drank again.

The Bryan group loved her sober the hard way — detoxing in meetings, shaking and vomiting, while members cleaned her up and told her it would pass. A sponsor named Linda Kay took her through the Big Book with blunt honesty and zero sentimentality. Mickey worked the steps, got a job drilling holes in marble sinks, rebuilt her life from a one-room apartment, and made amends to her community through service. A judge released her early from a ten-year probation sentence, and in 1994 she received a full pardon from the governor of Texas.

That same year she was diagnosed with terminal colorectal cancer and given eight months to a year. She fought it with chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and every form of healing she could find, and has been cancer-free for 15 years. She now works at the same probation department where she was once supervised — her former probation officer Joyce got sober partly from watching Mickey's transformation. Most remarkably, the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1972 found her through email, and Mickey now receives Mother's Day cards from all three of her children.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and thanks to the conference committee, mentions home group in Hearn, Texas
• 5:30 First exposure to AA as an 11-year-old playing outside the bank while adults met inside
• 8:00 First drink — stolen Long Neck Miller beer on a hot Texas day, instant obsession while her friend quit for good
• 12:00 Pregnant at 16, gives up baby for adoption in 1972, returns to small town with a scarlet letter
• 17:00 Geographic cure to Louisiana, jail within two weeks, marries co-defendant
• 22:00 IV drug use begins, daily blackout drinking, daughter's molestation revealed at six years sober
• 30:00 The young man hangs himself outside the abandoned house — Mickey's moment of surrender on the roadside
• 37:00 Detoxing in AA meetings, sponsor Linda Kay takes her through the Big Book with brutal honesty
• 45:00 Rebuilding — first job, amends to community, judge releases her early, full pardon from governor in 1994
• 52:00 Terminal cancer diagnosis and survival, reunion with adopted daughter Kimberly after 35 years