Told My Sponsor the Big Book Needed Editing for Grammar and Gender 🤦 — Karen S.

Welcome, everyone. Let's have an AA meeting. My name's Tim, and I'm an alcoholic. Welcome to the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NABA Club, where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety tells his or her story. Hey, everybody. I'm Lynn. I'm an alcoholic. Hey, y'all. This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in our personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view the way they establish their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives. We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on the aabloochipspeakers.org desperately in need will hear this story. Thank you. I want to hear our speaker and believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say, yes, I am one of them, too. I must have this thing. I'm going to introduce Panny. I mean, Karen. She has two names. To be our speaker tonight. Karen's a very dear friend of mine, and I've heard her story a couple times and enjoy it every time. I can't wait to hear it again. Come on. My name is Karen, and I'm an alcoholic. Hey, everybody. Thank you, Tim, for asking me to tell my story, and I pray that God's breath and words and thoughts and heart speaks, that I speak for him, that I tell the truth, and that you hear something that will keep you sober one more day. That's my prayer. I drank from the age of 27 and stopped drinking. At 57. So I didn't have my first drink until I was 27 years old, which is a little bit different than a lot of people I hear. I'm going to give you just a quick synopsis of my sobriety story, and then I'm going to go into the details. I put the bottle down for good after those 30 years of drinking. The chains of alcohol were broken. I didn't give much thought to how that happened because I really didn't realize I was an alcoholic when I quit. But I had a friend. Well, I really didn't like her. I shouldn't even call her a friend. But she thought I needed an AA meeting, and out of spite, I went to one. And that's part of my story. So on September 21, 2001, I picked up a white chip at my first AA meeting. So I got sober a year and a half before I picked up that white chip. So for a year. A year and a half, I was a raging sober drunk. I was spending money like there was all the money in the world to spend. I was recently divorced, and I had disposable cash, and I bought things I should not have bought. I went places I should not have gone. I did things I should not have done. But I wasn't drinking. I didn't know what was happening to me. So this is part of. This is part of what I'm going to explain. So I don't claim that year and a half period as it really is sober, a sober time. I counted. So I decided to count that day that I picked up my white chip a year and a half after I stopped drinking as my sobriety date. And I was told that it was my choice. I could say it was a year and a half before it was that day. But my life was disgusting up until that point. I didn't want to. You know, I wanted to just. Start fresh. But I've only picked up white one white chip. And I have a sponsor who is Lindsay here. And she has a sponsor and her sponsor has a sponsor. And I appreciate Lynn a lot. She, for one thing, made it possible for me to come here today from Gainesville because I don't drive in the dark very well and you get old and gray like me. And so I'm staying at her house and I'll leave and go home early in the morning so I can chair a meeting first thing in the morning. I love that you're here tonight with me, Lynn. I love that you're putting me up and I love you very much. And thank you for all that you have done for me. Now, Lynn will come back into the story as I go on. So I was born in nineteen forty three nine seventy four. So you don't have to worry about the math. I was raised in Chicago in a very religious Polish Catholic community. Church, school and family and extended family. We were financially insecure. And I, I felt like things were going along pretty well, as best as I can remember. I knew I was cute when I was a little girl because everybody told me I was. And then when my sister came along, she was cuter. And so then that wasn't so good for me. That was bad news. But during the first seven years of my life, I was told to be a good girl because I basically wasn't a good girl. I was called the boss of the house when I was four. And I think what happened was the there was a lot of squabbling between my mom and dad, but nothing violent. It really was a good home. I really had a marvelous childhood. So I'm just telling you what a little child's reaction was to some of this shouting and screaming was. And my dad was not always working and we were always short of money. Bill collectors were calling and so on. And so I started to take charge and I was telling people what to do. And so I think I was a practicing sober drunk back then. When I think about it and as my story unfolds for me, in my mind, I just progressed as a sober drunk until I started to drink. Then I was a wet drunk and now I'm back to being sober again. And hopefully I'm not drunk today, soberly speaking. So but my father had a temper, but he never he never. Well, he spanked the kids in the family. My mother did, you know, did everything else, but he's the one that spanked us. But it wasn't terrible. I'm sure I deserved every spanking that I got. But I remember being very afraid that my father wouldn't like me or that he was going to leave us as a as a family or that he would go away someplace. I wanted to make money or something was going to happen. Mom and dad would split. And I didn't know what I back then. Divorce was not even a concept. And so I had this feeling like if mom and dad split, we would just be suspended in space. We kids. But my father always made it clear and my mother made it clear that I should be a good girl. So my motto at that time, I'm kind of giving myself a model for my life as I go through it to be good or get dad mad. So if I'm not good, dad will get mad. And dad didn't have to spank me to tell me that he was mad. He would just have this awful look on his face like I'm just disgusting. And that just ripped my heart to pieces. And so I think I started feeling a fear of abandonment and a fear of rejection and a fear of not being good enough way back then. So by the time I was seven, though, we moved into this. It's the suburbs of Chicago. And but in the model then was to be good and do good or get dad mad. I was in such fear of doing the wrong thing, being bad. And that that couldn't corresponded with my church upbringing. That it was, you know, you had you could not sin if you sinned and you died to go to hell and I did not want to go to hell, it didn't sound like a good place to go. And so my father was like my image of God. I figured he he must be like or God must be like my father. And my father was trying to tell me what was right and what was wrong. And it seemed like most of what I did or said was wrong or not good enough. And so this developed some pretty big fears in my life. By the time I was 18, I graduated from high school and the fear had grown very, very acute. And so I found my fear. I found myself going to church daily because I was afraid that I might sin or I might do something wrong and I was I was compelled. I was like compulsive about being a good girl. I never did anything like a lot of kids did at my age. I mean, at that age in high school, I guess there were drugs. I don't know, but I know there was some beer, but I wasn't a part of it. There was sex, but I didn't do that. I was a good girl, but the fear was overwhelming. So I decided when I graduated from high school to become a nun. And so at age 20, I joined a convent. And this takes me now to Atchison, Kansas. So I am in the convent and I'm finding tremendous peace. I was there for seven years, just about seven years. It was a simple life. It was a life of prayer and communication with God. I didn't really understand God too much. I knew from my early childhood. I was going to church that the church was beautiful and had shiny things and it had candles and incense and beautiful music. But like I said, if you remember, I grew up in a Polish Catholic church. And so I never heard a word of English in that church. It was either Latin or it was Polish. But I was I was told to sit still and and just be still and behave. And that was this deep. And that was my reverence for for the church. And it had to do with something or somebody called God. I didn't know God. I didn't have a relationship with God. I just knew that God was really important because everybody in my whole family, my neighborhood, my playmates, everybody did the same thing we did. And so that's where I really appreciate what I gained at that time in my life. But along with that came a fear of failure, a fear of abandonment, a fear of rejection, the fear of punishment, a fear of being wrong, being bad and then suffering forever in hell. And I was just overwhelming to me, terribly overwhelming. So I thought I solved that problem. I thought, well, if I'm in the convent, I will never do anything bad. And that's pretty much the case. Unless I had a bad thought, you know, then that was not. So bad is having a bad action. So it was a pretty simple life. And I learned a lot. I learned more about this God, but not like I know him today. I didn't have a I still didn't have a relationship with him there. But my I have to mention, too, that when I told my father I was going in the convent, that made him mad so I couldn't ever please my father. And I'll interject this now on his deathbed. About. Seven years ago, the last words he spoke to me and to anybody while he was alive was that I, his daughter, he called me Penny. I am really Karen to you. He's right now. He told me I never did understand him. And that was that was a tough blow to take while I was there. I flew in out of town from out of town to be at my father's bedside. Now, I had already made my amends to him and I felt fine about my relationship with him at that point. We got I got over it. But my father was a hard person to please. Nobody could please him. I'm not sure if he was an alcoholic, but I think he was out. He behaved alcoholically with his his temper and his anger and his obsessions and things like that. But I don't know. He drank a lot, but he wasn't drunk and drinking and falling or anything like that. I saw him stumble a few times, but you know, he but that's you know, that's all I know. There were probably some secrets in the family that I was never aware of. So there I was in the convent and I practiced being good to keep God from being mad at me. That's basically what my motive was. Now, I have 16 years in the program. I have 17 and a half years without alcohol. It's taken me. Probably 12 of those years to really come to understand myself. It's very therapeutic. If you've told your story to to to come to understand why we did the things that we did, and I think that the whole thing of going in the convent was to it was my drug. Being on my knees four hours a day, praying, singing and all that sort of stuff, I was hooked up to that because it kept me out of trouble. It kept me safe. It kept me in communicating with God. And I felt like I had to do that nonstop, that I wasn't good enough unless I was praying. I wasn't good enough unless I was working with my hands in some way to keep the convent going. So I think that that was like the peak of my fear at that that time in my life. Then I started to have doubts about whether I should say it was time to make final vows. And I decided that I needed to rethink this whole thing. There's a way I don't need to talk to you about how we work it and how they work it in the convent, but I started to think about leaving. And so I went through all the proper channels. I got an honorable discharge. I got the blessing of the bishop and I got the blessing of the mother superior and I got the blessing of the priest. And so I because I wanted to always have to do things just right because I'm a good girl. And so when I left, I went straight to a university campus in Missouri. And I went to the University of Central Missouri because my brother and his wife graduated from there and I knew them and they said, yeah, it's a good school. So I went there and I had no money. The convent gave me two hundred dollars to start my life over at age twenty seven. At this point, I had never had a checking account. I gave up my driver's license when I went in the convent. I really I had no money. And I used the two hundred dollars to buy makeup and a dress and a typewriter and get my hair cut because I started growing it out because it was otherwise it was shaved under the veil. So I started growing it out and then I needed to get it styled. So I felt like, OK, then they hired me as an assistant dorm mother back then, which paid my tuition and gave me a little bit of pocket change within probably two weeks. I decided I needed to catch up with my classmates who were in their early 20s or they were in their late teens or let's say I guess that would have been they might have been like 20 years old because I was a sophomore or junior in college at that point because the convent had a college. And so I thought, hmm, I better learn how to drink and smoke and whatever else, you know, like maybe a little drugs, a little sex, something like that. Just sort of kind of catch up. And I had never done any of this before. I never gave it a thought. I never gave alcohol a thought in my life until that time. I quit going to church as soon as I left the convent. I gave up God and picked up the world and all the worldly dangers that we have in the world. And I did. A friend of mine said, I'm going home to visit my mom in Florida. You want to go down with me? I said, yeah. And on the way, I stopped at a cigarette machine, put 35 cents in, and got a pack of cigarettes and coughed my way on the Greyhound bus to meet her. I thought, this is really gross. But anyway, I was like grown up now. So and she taught me how to drink. We went from bar to bar to bar to bar in Florida. And I didn't discover drugs or sex yet there, but she showed me, you know, she would disappear. We would go visit a guy. That she knew. And then they would be gone. I'm in the living room and they're like somewhere else in the house. And then they would come back out. And I'm like, what the heck is going on here? So I started, you know, that's how you do it. You know, you go off into a bedroom and then you come back up. No, you don't have to explain anything to anybody. You just. So that was my introduction to being an adult. And I had no God in my life. Really, I dismissed him. I said, thanks. It was great. But I'm on to another path now. And I think I have found. I found a new spirit in the alcohol and I kind of liked it. So anyway, I stayed at that school and I still had the fears, though the fears that I had from early childhood on, and so I drank over my fears. The fears never left me. And deep down in my soul, I knew I was doing things that were not appropriate. Deep down in my heart. I knew this wasn't right. And so I really had stuff to fear about now, because if I died, I was doomed. That was where I came from. And so I started to drink, though I started to drink within a couple of weeks after I left the convent, but I drank, I always had alcohol in the house. I had like fourteen dollars left over from my money that I got. And it went to. Alcohol, because I could eat the food in the dorm, but I could get alcohol. And I was off off to the races. I wasn't drinking alcoholically yet, though. And I actually was able to get a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. But I drank. I can still see myself sitting on the floor with my 12 pack and my typewriter typing up my papers. And I thought, well, this is cool. Look at me typing up a paper and I'm drinking, you know, ball game on or something like I have arrived by this time. I was in an apartment, so I thought life is good. I'm going to go on to get another degree. So I went to Northwestern University and I only drank on the weekends because that was pretty heavy stuff. I was in a doctoral program, and so I had some strict rules about drinking. I would only drink on Friday night and Saturday night. I'd sober up on Sunday and I'd really study hard through the rest of the week. And then Friday was TGIF and that's the way it went. And and then when I finished my degree there, I met my husband, my first husband and up in Chicago and we got married and I had my first career job here in Atlanta and he came down here with me and we had a lot of fun. We lived in Little Five Points and Buckhead. It wasn't too fancy, though, at that time for us. We were pretty broke, but we we lived there and we started to drink a lot. Three years after I got married, we got married. I had our one and only son and. He let's see, I was 36 years old when he was born. He is 37 years old now, and by the time he was I think I was drinking alcoholically when I was when he was maybe three or four. I think I drank a lot. I drank a lot more than I had before. And I remember that I did not drink when I was pregnant. But I do remember that. I sat nursing him in the baby's room and I remember seeing stacks of beer cases right there and I could just grab a beer. I remember that. I think there's something wrong with that picture. I think I think that means like I was probably. Drinking alcoholically. I also remember that he would start falling off my lap when I was dozing off and I would catch him. I think that means I was an alcoholic, don't you think? Does it sound like it to you? Now, I would have never thought that back then. I never thought that back then. I thought I need this. I need to relax. It's good for the baby. Well, that baby is an alcoholic today. He's 37. And he knows that he's an alcoholic. And so I'm told that the best thing I can do for him is to be sober. And that's what I'm doing. I'm being a sober mom. So, let's see, I wanted to add a couple of things here. So I'm married, raising a son who is about six at about the time of 16 years of age. He gets arrested for smoking dope. And. And my husband, my then husband and I reach our bottom with him like it doesn't take much. I didn't know what a bottom was, but looking back, I know we reached our bottom. We put him in Ridgeview. You have a problem and you are going to Ridgeview. So we put him in Ridgeview. He came home. He relapsed. I did. I did irregular drug testing and we put him back in there and then he came home and he relapsed again. He's 16. All this is going on within maybe age 15 to 16. And we told him he needed to leave. We had one rule that he could not stay in our house if he was using. And he may have been drinking, too, but I don't know. But I do know he was using. And so he understood on his way out the door with his duffel bag and his friend in the driveway with a pickup truck picking him up. He said he turned around as we went down the steps. He gave me a hug. He said, I love you, Mom. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. I understand what you're doing. And this kind of guy he is, he is an amazing son. So he's out and about for six weeks. He didn't hear hide her hair from him. And he then comes home and we were grateful that he came home. He was happy to come home. We asked no questions, but he did have an announcement to make that his girlfriend was pregnant. So he is. He's 17 now and he had a baby. The baby was born days after he turned 18. So this was going on as my alcoholism really was escalating. And I remember one day standing there arguing and hollering at him with a glass of wine in my hand, and I remember it flushing back and forth as I was telling him how terrible it was that he lied to me, that he that he was doing these things. And I'm on and on and on and I'm staggering and I could not see it. I did not know it. I was in such denial about my own drinking problem. I had no idea. My then husband and I attended Naranon meetings. I've learned about the 12 and 12, learned about the 12 steps, and I learned about not enabling. So those are the seeds that were planted. So when it was my turn, I knew what 12 steps were. I know what a big book is, so I knew that. Just as the baby was born, my husband announced that he wanted a divorce. And he never to this day has told me. But I know through my son that he's gay and he couldn't tell me. It was too hard for him to tell me. And so he just didn't. He just said he wanted to be single. It broke my heart. But the divorce went on. It was going to happen. I could see it was going to happen. My drinking escalated all the more. And I just wish he was able to tell me that it would have made a big difference. But it is what it is. It was that's the way it was. So a lot of things happened right there. He files for divorce or we file for divorce or I did. I don't know. I decide to move out. I take the two golden retrievers. One of them dies and I decide I just don't want to live anymore. I have nothing left. My son is what I felt like my son was on a slow death. My marriage died and the dog died and I became suicidal. And and I was in therapy at the time. And the doctor I called the doctor because I was afraid. And I ended up in the psych ward at Kenistone Hospital for a week. It was a great week of my life. I can't tell you why exactly, but it was good for me to be there and to kind of get. I didn't get sober then. It took me a little bit longer to get sober, like another maybe six months or a year before before that time period where I quit drinking and then went into that that drunken and sober drunken rage. And I picked up my white chip. So that was this period of time where I was in this very dark space, very dark place, and I'm spiritually dead. I have no God. I have terrible fear and I have uncontrollable drinking, but I didn't think that that was a problem. I still wasn't. I was convinced that the drinking was a problem. So I made the geographic move to Conyers with a lot of despair and self-loathing, self-loathing, fear and loneliness for my despicable behaviors, which I'm not going to go into here. Living in sin was I know now that back then I was restless, irritable and discontent. I was spiritually bankrupt. I have language now to put onto all of that. So I go to my first AA meeting in Conyers, and I love the name of that meeting is the 12 Step Sisters. And that was my first home group. And my first sponsor, Kathy, Kathy M, said I needed to start doing service and she had me making coffee before I knew it. I was chairing meetings. I had no idea what I was doing there. And I was secretary and I moved on to GSR and DCM before I left Conyers. But she said the first thing I wanted to do, you know, because I was this this bright academic type, I read the big book and I said, this needs to be edited. It's not gender free. And it's, you know, no, there aren't enough mention of females at all. And I caught a couple of grammatical errors and I thought we got to fix this. So I was on a mission to edit the big book. And and I was an editor and part of my work that I did to put myself through school. And my sponsor, Kathy, said, just keep coming back. It's OK. Just keep coming back. And so let's do the steps. Let's just do the steps and let's we'll work about. We'll get back to the corrections a little bit later. So I did keep coming back and I did the service that she told me to do. Oh, she suggested it. I've never been. I don't know what to do. I never took it that way anyway. I was so desperate because I was just desperate. And we went through the steps. Week after week, I drove up to her house and sat in her living room. Her husband, who is also in the program, took the sun and went somewhere else in the house. And we went step by step by step by step. And I, I felt clumsy doing it, but I did it from beginning to end. And things started to fall into place. She moved away. And so I got another sponsor and she didn't I'm not going to mention her name, but she didn't do the steps herself, but she humored me by letting me do them with him for her and my way of doing it this time was to rewrite the 12 and 12. So I have this spread this paper with two columns. I would I copied exactly what the book said and then I put it in my own words with my name and my places and my things and my experiences. So it was like my own 12 and 12. I made it make sense to me. And she let me do that up until the point where I thought, this is really nuts. I can't believe I'm doing this. I was spending hours and hours doing all this rewrite of the 12 and 12. But I was still so crazy that I couldn't I didn't I still didn't understand much of what I was reading. One of the ways I was able to survive my crazy that craziness that gets in your head when you even though when you're off of alcohol and drugs for a long time, still, I was getting really crazy and hyper. The only thing that would settle me down was just copying a paragraph verbatim. And sometimes I'd have to copy it two times, three times before a word or two or three or maybe a complete thought. Got registered in my head. And that's how I started to rewrite the 12 and 12. Well, I'm here to tell you, I didn't finish it, so I'm not totally crazy. So then I moved to Lawrenceville. I met my I was sober. I mean, I was single 10 years and I went on eHarmony and I met Bob. Bob is not an alcoholic. He doesn't think, but he doesn't drink. And so we don't have alcohol at all in the house. Period. And not even cooking alcohol, wine or anything like that. And I was going to try to keep that sponsor that didn't do the steps as my sponsor and do it long distance. But she was she had the same experience that I did with a husband. And she didn't like men anymore at all. Well, I still like men. I still like my ex husband. He's a good man. So I decided I needed a new sponsor and I met I met Lynn and she likes men. So I said, can you help me be a new a new wife again? Because I was I was 67 years old when I remarried. Well, I'm pretty set in my ways. Bob is pretty set in his ways. And so it was going to be an interesting trip to take. And so in comes Lynn. And so Lynn was my marriage counselor. And I wasn't so much struggling really anymore to stay sober, but to just keep my sanity and to just not take his inventory and to, you know, to make that adjustment that one has to make when you remarry. It's not easy. It's it's it looks good. We look good together. He's got gray hair like mine and everything looks perfect. Oh, my gosh. What a guy. Yeah. But, you know, you really know him like I know him. No, he's a good man. He's a very good man. So how am I doing on time? Anybody keeping track? All right. I got I'm good. All right. So we decided that we wanted to go to church together. We wanted to go to church and we would go to the same church and not him go to his and my me go to mine. So we he had a 22 year old. Well, at that time he was like 16. He had a son. And his son was really. He keen on the youth group in this one church and asked his dad to take him there. So anyway, we all ended up at that church. And Bob and I continue to go to that church to this day. And it has helped us have a greater conscious contact with our higher power. Bob doesn't know the program, but he walks around the house saying, honey, are you restless, irritable and discontent or do you think you need a meeting? Or, oh, sounds like. Your resentment to me. What's your fear? You know, he he's heard me talk about it. He doesn't go to meetings except when I get a chip or something. But he's so gracious in absorbing. He was married to two alcoholics before me. So I'm a breath of fresh air for him in his life. And I'm I'm sober. He's never seen me drink. So he's a great support. And rather than picking on him and taking his inventory over things that absolutely don't matter. And looking at the things that do matter and having harmony, it has been possible to have an awesome marriage. I have an awesome marriage. I had no idea I didn't have to fight. I had no idea we didn't have to have words. I mean, it's amazing. It's really possible, but I can't do it without my higher power. And my higher power is also I can't stay sober without my heart without my higher power, and so that's key for me. My higher power. And just part of my marriage. It is the center of my marriage. And my husband looks at God that way. God is not just a member of our family. He is the center of our family, of our of our marriage. And he's our vote, too. And we don't know what to do next. So Lynn has been very helpful in keeping me emotionally sober as I enter this new phase of my life. Thank you very much, Lynn. Just awesome. Um, then we moved to Gainesville, so that's where I live now. We're in like a retirement community. Well, it's not a retirement community. It's a 55 and older active adult community. And life is very nice there. So I want to talk about, uh. How sobriety is giving me everything that alcohol promised me. You've heard that expression. I can do things today I never imagined that I could do or I could be things I never thought. I could be and I could go through things and tragedies that I never thought I could be for without drinking because drinking was my go to, um, today. I'm when I married Bob, I was a sober wife. I was a sober stepmother and a sober church member. When I went to my other church as an adult, I was I didn't realize that alcohol reeked in the morning I didn't and I was a greeter. Hi. I mean, I look back and I think, oh, good grief. I was one of those people. I was in such now when I drank. So I don't have to worry about an alcoholic breath when I go to church or when I go to the grocery store or when I go to the pharmacy or wherever I'm wherever I am. I don't have to worry about that. This past June, my stepson died. He was twenty two and he had a problem with drugs and alcohol and sorry, he had a problem with drugs and alcohol. And he was found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool at the apartment complex that he was living in in Statesboro. He was a senior at Georgia Southern. He wanted to be a doctor, but by the time he got to the school, he had already gotten the DUI. And before within a year and a half after he was in school, he got a felony for drugs. He had some bad fights, drugs and alcohol related, ended up in the ER. We would find out when the insurance papers would come in. And so he was struggling. He was struggling. I told him my story. I didn't I did an intervention with him on the telephone and said, would I? You know, I prayed about it. I talked to Bob about it. And I did an intervention with him, too, in our home. And I encouraged him, told him there's meetings and he doesn't have to live this way, but he died and it was drug and alcohol related at the age of twenty two. This was just in June. If we didn't have our higher power, God is the center of our marriage. I don't know how I could have gotten. I'm through that. I live in fear of losing my own son. I Bob and I knew that at any time because my son is three DUIs and my husband and I know that at any time we could get a phone call about either one of them and that one phone call came in because we they're adults and we can't. We're not I'm not a hover mom. I'm not going to go check on him. I'm not going to do that. I'm just busy staying sober. I'm just busy doing the next right thing. So that was very hard. But Bob and I decided that we would join the Civil Air Patrol. Someone had approached him, my husband, just shortly before Victor died, to consider joining. My husband's a private pilot and we were thinking about it. He was thinking about it. And as I looked into it, Civil Air Patrol, I didn't know a thing about it. So I'll tell you, you might not just in case you don't know, you've heard of the National Guard and they come to the rescue when we have floods or a national disaster or missing people or whatever. That's an auxiliary service of the army. Well, the Civil Air Patrol is an auxiliary service, total volunteer work of the Air Force, and so we do drug and drug trafficking, sex trafficking searches, missing kids, accidents in the mountains. And there's two purposes of the Civil Air Patrol. One is to save lives and the other one is to shape lives. And my husband is going to be more active in saving lives. I'm going to be active in shaping lives with character development of the young cadets and with aeronautics education because I was a teacher educator. So it's right up my alley. This is where we're channeling our grief and we feel pretty good about it. And so that's one thing that's been possible because I'm sober. It was possible for me to go on a mission trip to the Middle East this last spring. Who would have ever thought I could have? I was flying over there. I thought, how would I have handled not drinking? Because there's no drinking there. There's no I mean, if you drink, it's well, because the people there just don't drink. Not not generally like we do here, though. I did have did here. Of that, there was alcoholism there and they did have a meetings there. But by and large, there is no drinking. So so I cannot today because I'm sober, I kayak, I fish, I fly with my husband. I bike both motorcycle and bicycle, though I'm a passenger on the motorcycle. I do yoga. I couldn't have sat up long enough to do a yoga class. Before and I don't let myself get too comfortable. Even, you know, I thought I thought I was done doing service work. I thought, well, when you're in your seventies, you can just give it up. Oh, no. I just finished two years of being GSR of my home group. And I am on the committee for treatment, not treatment, TPC in my home group. And I still say yes. When people ask me to tell. My story. And that keeps me actually keeps me in a good frame of mind and full of gratitude. So service is really huge. And it was Kathy, my first sponsor, that said, you need to start doing service. So I think I'll end on that note. Thank you for Karen. Thank you for saying yes. And Amanda is going to come up. And give up. Thank you, Karen. That's really good. I'm Amanda. I'm an alcoholic. Here we have a chip system to marker sobriety. It is quantity, not quality. And we're going to start with the white check. Would anyone like to surrender or come back? Three. It's three weeks today. Since I live and let go. Let God give in. To. Everyone tells me it's going to get better. If only they'd tell me when I'm like, I had a good wife, a wonderful life. Now, here I stand, a man, something to say. And everyone tells me easy to tell them and say what I feel inside. I've got to share. There's a place I can go with the people. Everyone tells me just a day at a time. A day.