We Were a Loving Home When Everybody Was Asleep — the Family Disease Nobody Explains to You – Ray M.
About This Speaker Tape
Ray M. grew up in a small North Carolina mill village with an alcoholic father who drank white liquor from a jar hidden in the kitchen pantry. He learned to drink the same way his father did — sneaking into the closet, turning up the bottle, and singing a little song afterward. By age 10 or 11 alcohol was already taking away the pain of poverty, family chaos, and a mother driven half-crazy by the disease. He was drinking alcoholically before he dropped out of high school at 16, married young, and went to work in the cotton mill he had always sworn to escape.
A conversion experience in his early twenties led Ray into the Methodist ministry, and he stayed sober for roughly 12 years. The relapse began quietly — a doctor friend prescribed sleeping pills, then a second prescription at a second pharmacy, and eventually Ray returned to alcohol. He fell in love with the bottle all over again, lost his marriage, moved into a singles condo with nothing but a bar and a mattress on the floor, and descended into complete insanity. In one memorable episode he fired a shotgun through his own bedroom window to attract the attention of his senior-citizen neighbors, then called the police and blamed two masked men.
Ray remarried Betty after lying to his bishop that he intended to, then spent three more years performing baptisms, funerals, and communion services while intoxicated. After multiple psychiatric hospitalizations and the collapse of every human resource, a 12-step call finally reached him. Three different men — a fellow drunk, a doctor, and a treatment-center worker — each knelt beside him and said the same words: I am an alcoholic and I know how you feel. Nobody had ever said that before. At 50 years old he threw a mattress on his mother's floor and walked into his first AA meeting in Kannapolis, where nobody asked him a single question — they just gave him a phone number and said come back.
Sobriety opened every door that drinking had slammed shut. Ray made amends to Betty at a Burger King, and she answered with two words she had learned in Al-Anon: It is okay. He carried his own father into treatment, gave him every sobriety chip he ever picked up, and for the first time heard the old man say I love you. At his first AA birthday, he embraced his grown son in a parking lot — the same son who had once threatened to kill him for hitting his mother. The church that fired him invited him back, and he now performs AA weddings, funerals, and alcoholism workshops. His grandson Darrell once picked up the Big Book from the car seat and read the steps aloud while Ray wept, knowing that every male on his father's side of the family is alcoholic.
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