“Going to meetings helped me understand the first step, which I consider the cornerstone of the program. I cannot repay Al-Anon enough for what it has done for me. One thing I did from the very beginning was to serve the fellowship. Service strengthened my recovery and gave me a chance to pay forward what I’ve received.
My loved one has been in and out of sobriety for the more than 20 years since I joined the program, and whether my loved one was sober or not, I never gave up, slackened my attendance, or service to Al-Anon. Today I can accept that my life is important and that I have a choice to continue obsessing or get on with my life. I accept that alcoholism is a disease and Al-Anon helps me to face the disease and not let it get me down. I feel alive because of Al-Anon. Working the Twelve Steps led me to a spiritual life that gives me much peace and joy.”
Lifelines are all around to help us cope with life’s challenges. Exercise, good nutrition, gardening—the list is endless. Fortunately there are many outlets to choose from, and I’ve used all of the above. But the tools—life lessons—that I’ve learned in several 12-Step fellowships have changed me as well as the way that I relate to other people. I’ve heard it said that alcoholism is a disease of relationships, and whether that’s true or not I can certainly see the improvement in how I behave with others. That, in turn, has made me a happier person. So this has been my lifeline, because working the program has made such a big difference in my life.
I was on the tour boat in the caldera of Santorini and we were approaching Oia at the end of the day, hopeful to catch the sunset from that end of the island. Oia, and most of the towns on Santorini, looked like horizontal white jewels, sparkling against the sun’s rays, perched atop this rock in the Mediterranean. It was a stunning sight and can only be appreciated like this from down below.
We disembarked and decided to forego the smelly donkey ride up to the city, deciding to walk up. I was immediately drawn to the Church of Panagia Platsani. After entering the cathedral, I went right to the candles and lit one for my estranged daughter, Annie. I found this to be wonderful nourishment for my soul. The cynical me said, “Oh well, another money maker.” But the believer in me said, “Listen to me, God. I’m talking to you now. This is my prayer.”
I’ve heard it said that prayer is talking to God, and meditation is listening to Him. I did a lot of praying in Greece, in many Greek Orthodox churches. I spent a tidy sum of money, money I could have invested in souvenirs. But I chose to invest in prayer in the country where I began to lose my daughter thirty-five years ago.
“Losing my daughter…” We learn so much by craning our necks and looking backwards. We gain so much clarity through hindsight.
It’s very hard, this practice of letting go, and the faith I’ve been gradually acquiring these past many years has been a lifeline. It’s kept me from permanently free falling into despair—that black hole of uselessness—as I’ve been letting go of having Annie in my life. Only a mother can know the glue that binds her to her child, and all mothers must let go of their children. “They come through you,” Kahlil Gibran says, “yet they belong not to you.”
Letting go is a constant discipline for all of us. But letting go when your child will be coming back is one thing. Letting go when they’re gone—that’s something else. My girl has a brain disease and has been pumping her body with substances that have caused a lot of brain damage. It’s a very cruel thief, substance abuse. It robs you of yourself. My daughter Annie no longer resides in that body.
So I light candles in the country where circumstances threw her into a tailspin of depression. Her parents divorced and she rarely saw her father afterwards. Annie got through adolescence adequately, but she was a grenade waiting to explode. When she was twenty-one and a college graduate, she plunged into the dark world of drug addiction and has remained in that never-never land ever since—that fantasy world where what you want never comes and so you need to get more…
My faith has come to me, not like a burning bush, but in increments over my own years of recovery from this.
“Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.”
Earth’s renewal is manifest all around the globe. Seasons around the world are remarkably varied, depending on climate and geography. Where I originally come from, New England, we have four seasons, distinct from one another. The chilly autumns at that latitude create the deep reds in the leaves in Vermont, for example, whereas the leaves blanketing the Rio Grande River, due to the heat, rarely achieve that color.
I lived in the Rio Grande Valley of Albuquerque for a decade, and though we had four seasons, they were noticeably different from New England, both in their timeframes and their intensity. One could say that New Mexico is a land of extremes, never made more clear than by the prominence of its seasons.
In Albuquerque, the leaves change color from the frosty night air. This is a welcome change from the brutal heat of the summer. But there, the leaves turn saffron yellow, not the reds I used to see in New England.
In New Mexico, autumn is a gorgeous and productive lingering—well past Thanksgiving. It’s harvest season and the farmer’s markets overflow with abundance from the ground. Many holidays come in autumn and on the cusp of winter. These are always poignant times of the year for me, but now more than ever they are times to take stock and savor all that I have.
Winter drops like a curtain, and a couple of weeks before Christmas, Mother Nature lowers the boom. Winter is bitter in the high desert. Where I lived, there was very little snow. Sandia Mountain, across the rift valley from my farmhouse, attracts all the “weather.” At nearly 6000 feet, the air is cold even with the sun shining, though the temperature rarely drops below freezing.
Winter rings in differently state to state. But universal, in the areas where cold weather does settle into our bones, is the wish to smell spring in the air. This is where geography affects the heralding of spring in the Rio Grande Valley. Powerful winds blow up from the canyons like invisible giants blowing away everything in their path. My first experience of this had me amazed and flummoxed by the fierceness and ferocity of the winds, wondering what happened to the gentle spring times from my youth. But they would come soon enough.
I finally enjoyed watching the trees coming out of dormancy and preening like peacocks, their colorful buds in bloom. I thrilled to see the first flowers peek up from the ground. And gradually I saw the resurgence of nature in all its glory. It is the season of renewal, of new beginnings, as though the earth were starting over.
But spring in Albuquerque ends with an intensity of heat and humidity that is unexpected in one of the driest states in our country. This is because the monsoon season is preparing to unleash itself where it is most needed. Summer is ushered in by the skies opening up to a kaleidoscope of colors at the end of each day. This is when I take cover on the patio to listen for the thunder preceding the deluge of water soaking our gardens. On one occasion it was hail the size of golf balls killing all our tomatoes. Buckets of rainwater cause the gutters along the streets to overflow.
The monsoons leave as abruptly as they began, and July and August settle into an oppressive climate of high temperatures and dust filling the air. The blazing sun, which is a God to the indigenous people of the Diné tribes, became my enemy, and I took refuge inside my house, free from the enervating heat that sapped me of my energy.
By September, as the earth’s axis started to point in the other direction, the intensity of the sun weakened, and the relief of cooler nights began, though the days remained hot.
And so began the cycle of seasons starting over. Autumn and all its colors began to peek though the curtain of summertime dust of brown and gray.
Time is relentless; it doesn’t stop for anyone. Time may be finite, but endless are the possibilities we can do with it. As long as we have time in our lives, we have the chance to start over, just as the sweetness of my honeysuckle hedges signaled the starting over of summer.
Life goes on, and we with it. Whether it’s the seasons we observe, or the seasons of our lives, we are always starting over.
The road to my spiritual life began when I was a young child growing up in an alcoholic family. But I didn’t start to walk down this road until halfway through my life when my daughter fell ill with substance use disorder.
I was very unhappy growing up. It’s a classic story of family dysfunction that many of us have experienced as children. But back then I didn’t have Alateen to go to. My father was never treated and died prematurely because of his illness. I, too, was untreated for the effects of alcoholism, and grew into an adult child.
Well, many of us know how rocky that road is: low self-esteem, intense self-judgment, inflated sense of responsibility, people pleasing and loss of integrity, and above all, the need to control. I carried all of these defects and more into my role as a mother to my sick daughter, and predictably the situation only got worse.
I was a very hard sell on the first three steps of Al-Anon, and my stubbornness cost me my health and my career. But once I did let go of my self-reliance, my whole life changed for the better. The Serenity Prayer has been my mantra every day. I’ve learned to let go of what I can’t change. I don’t have the power to free my daughter of her disease, but I can work hard to be healed from my own. This is where I’ve focused my work in the program.
My daughter has gone up and down on this roller coaster for more than twenty years, and right now she’s in a very bad place. But that has only tested me more. My faith grows stronger every day when I release my daughter with love to her higher power, and I am able to firmly trust in mine.
Friends of mine ask me, “How do you do that? You make it sound so simple!” I tell them, “First of all getting here hasn’t been simple. It’s the result of years of poisoning my most important relationships with the defects I talked about earlier. I knew I had to change in order to be happy. Secondly, I fill my heart with faith-based unconditional acceptance of whatever happens in my life. It’s my choice.
Somewhere in the readings, someone wrote ‘Pain is not in acceptance or surrender; it’s in resistance.’ It’s much more painless to just let go and have faith that things are unfolding as they are meant to. There’s a reason that HP is running the show the way he is. I just have to get out of the way; I’m not in charge. I also read somewhere the difference between submission and surrender: submission is: I’ll do this if I get XYZ; surrender, on the other hand, is unconditional acceptance of what I get. Well, the latter is easier because I’m not holding my breath waiting for the outcome. I just let go – and have faith. Again, it’s a very conscious choice.
We all have different stories. What has blessed me about a spiritual life is that I can always look within myself and find peace regardless of the storms raging around me. I’m learning how to dance in the rain.
There’s something about the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas that helps to distract me from whatever cares and woes might be weighing me down. As you know, I resist those woes anyway—gratitude is a powerful tool. But they’re still there. The hype of the season has the power to bring any losses into sharp focus, even as we are celebrating our good fortune. We’re only human.
How can I forget the past twelve Christmases when I knew nothing of Annie or where she was? I can’t. I have pictures of her all over the house along with all my other loved ones. She’s not dead, and even if she were she would be remembered by me in countless ways; using her name as a login for some of my accounts; decorating the Christmas tree with all the ornaments she made when she was still my young and innocent daughter.
Perhaps because of the terrible stigma attached to substance abuse disorder, friends and family members shy away from speaking of her, as though that would erase the pain of her loss.
I seem to be the only one in my family who can remember her without shame or guilt. Only love. Even her brother and sister won’t speak of her. My son refused to tell his children about his sister, and so I finally did. In the most matter-of-fact manner, they had already been curious about the “phantom Annie” in the pictures, and I answered their questions. Not too much information, just enough to tell them that drugs destroy lives, as they destroyed their aunt’s. Take this, I implored them, as a cautionary tale.
And so I put my thoughts of Annie in a back drawer and open the front drawers of my life. I take joy in my two other children, grandchildren, Gene, my family of origin, and many friends, both new and old. From my three memoirs and all my blog posts over the years, I have made my life an open book so that any reader could see how one can rise from the saddest of circumstances to a place of spiritual good health and joy. With work, and dedication, and the desire to make the most of the rest of my life.
“Life is not always what one wants it to be. But to make the best of it as it is, is the only way of being happy.” ~Jennie Jerome Churchill
“‘At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance…’ ~Maya Angelou
We had to surrender to a power greater than ourselves to get to where we are today. And each day we have to turn to that power for strength and guidance. For us, resistance means struggle—struggle with others as well as an internal struggle.
Serenity isn’t compatible with struggle. We cannot control forces outside of ourselves…And when we choose to surrender our attempts to control, we will find peace…”
I often write about the pain of resistance. How the very word carries an aura of courage and strength. Those of us who have addicted loved ones would do anything, it seems, to save them from such a miserable life. I spent a number of years trying to save my daughter—resisting—and refusing to allow her the dignity of her own (poor) choices. I felt courageous then, determined. I couldn’t surrender to the power of addiction; I thought it would be cowardly.
But I tried and failed to save my daughter. She’s been in and out of recovery for over twenty years. And though I pray she reaches for recovery again and comes back to her family, I can’t make that choice for her. She can only save herself. And I truly believe that the addicts who recover do so because it is their own desire to get their lives back—not someone else’s.
So I’ve learned that I can only save myself. When I give up the struggle to change things I can’t control, my life is more peaceful. I find the energy to focus on gratitude for what’s good in my life.
Sometimes letting go—not resistance—takes courage.
It’s a fortunate person who has evolved enough to realize that he needs to change in order to live his best life. I am one of those fortunate adults.
Spending many weekends down in Seattle at my son’s house to bond with my young grandchildren, I was regularly drinking in his basement where I’d been sleeping. I was not ready to work on myself and give up my thirty-year habit. Then one day he and his wife took the time to confront me about it.
We sat down together at their dining room table, and he minced no words:
“Mom, we know what you’re doing in the basement. All our vodka bottles are empty.”
Immediate shock, humiliation, and the realization that I had not been fooling them all these years. If this intervention had happened years ago, I’m sure that I would have responded like this:
Full of indignation, I would have shouted, “How dare you speak to me like this? You owe everything you are, your education, your trips, the love and support I have given you since the day you were born, primarily to me!”
But on that day, April 25, 2017, I responded differently. I said very little, just that I was so sorry that I’d been behaving so recklessly for so many years. They never asked me to join AA. That was my decision. And from that day, I’ve never thought about drinking alcohol. At last, this student was ready for the teacher. I’m so grateful that I’ve remained teachable.
Since then, my life has improved exponentially. I continue to be devoted to my Al-Anon groups. But, a “double winner” I am called, I also attend AA meetings even more frequently. Some of the meetings are just for women, and the other ones I attend with Gene. This awakening on my part has brought Gene and I closer together. He had endured my drinking in all our years together, but knew better than to pressure me to quit. That desire had to be born deep inside of me, and not to please him, or my son, or anyone else. I had to believe that I was worth the effort to stop drinking.
My relationships have improved since I’ve given up alcohol. The twelve steps are essentially tools to help us realize our potential as human beings. The ‘God steps’ I spoke of earlier are a lesson in humility, where I let go of my arrogance enough to admit my powerlessness over people, places and things. The next steps involve looking at ourselves honestly and becoming aware of our defects. This exercise is followed by sincerely making amends to people we have wronged.
Finally, “having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
This is the transformation I write about in all three memoirs, and it’s a glorious one, indeed.
Learning to live well is a skill that many men and women aspire to, especially as we grow older. Some of us are aware of the wreckage we left behind if we were burdened with demons like alcoholism or other forms of substance abuse. Even addictions like gambling, sex and workaholism can interfere with a more functional life.
Ever since I was a teenager, I had struggled with eating disorders, which seems to be a common theme among many young people who grow up in an alcoholic home. That led me back in the 1960’s to diet doctors and amphetamines, which were easy to acquire. And I loved them because they relieved me of my depression, the underlying cause of my misery.
I, nevertheless, proceeded through life doing pretty much what my parents expected me to do: marry a suitable guy and raise children. My husband, three children and I lived a privileged life in the Foreign Service, living overseas for fifteen years. But I wanted a career, and my Cuban husband did not approve. So rather than work it out for the sake of us all, I insisted on a divorce and moved back to Virginia with the children.
This was a very heady time for me. I landed a job teaching English as a Second Language in Arlington Public Schools, and threw myself back into the teaching career I had begun years earlier in Nicaragua. My children were ten, twelve, and fourteen at that time, and I essentially left them alone to raise themselves. Their father was very generous with child support, but he was so angry about the divorce that all he gave us was money. He refused to share custody with me. And that did a grave disservice to our children.
And so continued a period of years where I received great satisfaction in the classroom. But I was a far less successful parent. The kids were hurting badly, but did well enough on the surface for me to rationalize their pain. Annie, my middle child, however, turned to drugs when she had barely graduated from George Mason University, and has been in and out of that hellish life for twenty-two years. Hence, the wreckage I spoke of. I did have her in therapy early on for about ten years, but to no avail. I eventually suffered a nervous breakdown from my repeated attempts to “save” her, and took early retirement from a job I adored. Another price to pay for my self-absorption.
My partner and I moved to New Mexico to start over, and enjoyed a decade running an orchard and selling produce at the local markets. But I had years earlier in Virginia traded my food obsession with alcohol and embarked on thirty years of drinking. I was a pretty functional alcoholic, never missed a day of work, but no more evolved spiritually than the man in the moon.
“The serenity I am offered in Al-Anon is not an escape from life. Rather it is the power to find peacefulness within life.
Al-Anon does not promise me freedom from pain, sorrow, or difficult situations. It does, however, give me the opportunity to learn from others how to develop the necessary skills for maintaining peace of mind, even when life seems most unbearable…
Serenity is not about the end of pain. It’s about my ability to flourish peacefully no matter what life brings my way.”
In the movie, “The Shack,” Mac has a dream and in it he meets God. Mac had recently lost his young daughter, and in his anger and bitterness he lashed out at God. Who else to blame? God (a woman in the movie) came right back at Mac with Her own defense: She didn’t orchestrate all the misery on earth: Ukraine, The Holocaust, children starving in Nigeria. “Don’t blame me for all that,” She said.” My purpose is to help you rise above it.”
Wow, those are powerful words, and they remind me that I am not alone in my struggle, that God (or any form of a Higher Power) wants to partner with me if I accept him.
Al-Anon has the same purpose in my life. God doesn’t have the power to return my daughter to me. But if I continue my daily practice of gratitude, accept what I don’t have the ability to change, and have faith that God’s plan is unfolding for a greater good than I may ever see, I can live peacefully and even joyfully, savoring all the goodness that is in my life. It’s my choice.
