What Happened to You as a Child Never Changes — You Just Learn to Live With It Sober – Creta T.
About This Speaker Tape
Creta T. shares from the Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NAVA Club, sober since July 27, 1984. Born in Clovis, New Mexico into a family of 17 aunts and uncles, she grew up poor — living in the family car and in shabby motel rooms along Highway 66 — with a dad who tuned pianos, worked as a mechanic, and disappeared to drink every time a paycheck landed. He died at 42 of cancer in 1956. Dyslexic and ashamed, she skipped school to fish on Padre Island. She married at 13, had her first child at 13, and stayed in that abusive Navy marriage for 22 years and five children.
Her drinking started with pink champagne in Norfolk, Virginia, which made her throw up, pass out, and black out — the pattern that would repeat every time she drank for the rest of her drinking life. Tequila became her drink of choice because it did exactly what she wanted: made her not feel. After a car wreck that sent two sons through the windshield and nearly killed her brain-injured son Danny, and after her neighbor Shirley Bordner lost her little boy Raymond to a house fire, the drinking took hold completely. She tells the story of crawling through the ABC Country parking lot in Orlando looking at wheels trying to find her car, and of an alcohol overdose that landed her in Orange Memorial Hospital with charcoal poured down her and a heart that had stopped, then the psych ward where she wanted to be labeled insane rather than alcoholic.
Two AA women, Jean and Judy, sat in her house the whole day and told her to get to a meeting or they'd know she didn't want to get sober. She walked in July 27, 1984, angry and hating the room. A few months sober she met DeWitt — a man with a "veritone voice" six years sober — who became her husband, her best friend, and the person who showed her how grown people fight (by waiting three days and talking it through instead of cussing and throwing things). He was paralyzed for 15 months and died in 2007; she got to bring him home and care for him sober, and went to a meeting the day he passed because she knew it was safe.
At 34 years she makes living amends to her five kids every day, especially her daughter, who was the only one who told her "yeah, you were that bad, Mom." She sponsors women — Becky for 27 years — watches young people coming in with awe, keeps reading the Big Book and her meditation book, and when her head tells her maybe she isn't really alcoholic she gets to a meeting that same day and tells on herself. Her Higher Power, she says, sent DeWitt to Orlando for her. Her closing: out of everything life has handed her sober, there is not one single thing a drink would make better.
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