The 33rd Annual SW Kansas Conference in Garden City, KS

My name is Kaye Gray, and I am a member of Al Anon. Hi, Kaye. Hi, y'all. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here and just so honored to get to meet Rochelle. Rochelle is new to our program, and it is just such great hope and so inspiring to see, the newcomers come in and just jump right in the middle.

And that's what it seems to me that Rochelle has done. Thank you, honey. Jump right in. I just want to thank the committee for asking me to come and to be a part of this weekend. And the 30 is this your 30 what?

33rd conference, and I don't know if it's always been here, but this is just such a great facility and what a great honor it is to be a part of this weekend. We got here and I just want to thank note last night for his talk. It was just a really great talk and I enjoyed it so much. Just echo what he said about the fruit basket. We've been in it since the moment we walked in the door.

I don't know where people in Kansas get strawberries like that, that, but I'm going to be looking for them. They were delicious. You know, we met Mary Anne and Roger some months ago, and we've talked on the phone and Mary Anne had asked us to come and be a part of this weekend. And that's one of the joys of coming to conferences and that's something that Rochelle and I have talked about is the joys of coming to conference and meeting people and you know, when I first came, you all look like you went to the same home group. You all hugged each other, you all laughed.

I had no idea that you were from groups all over, but how you got to know each other was by coming to conferences and go into meetings at different groups. And I just knew that I was never going to be a part of that. And thank goodness, I had a sponsor that I talked to about that and she gave me some directions. She said, just go around and introduce yourself and say that this is your first conference and it's your new. And I did that and I kept doing that.

And as I came back to conferences, I began to recognize some faces. And through doing that, I became a part of and this weekend has been like a reunion, because I have come here and I've seen faces and met people that I have met before and I don't think there's anything that we do that is much more exciting than that and to see each other again. And someone that's here tonight this morning, Margaret, I met a number of years ago that she just keeps showing up and I thought that when we came here, I wondered if Margaret was going to be here and what went through my mind is now for goodness sake, this must be forever away from where she lives and it is and sure enough, she showed up and what a great reunion that was to get to be a part of that and I just am so glad you're here. Joe's gonna talk and, you know, I wanna thank him in advance for his talk that he's going to give and the reason why I want to do that is because I don't want him to have to rebuttal what I'm going to say.

I really do like to talk after him. You know, Al Anon's well, some of us are just sicker and thicker than others. And I like to clean up what he's gonna say. I still like to do that. I have a home group and my home group is the Big Book Group in Dallas, Texas and if you're ever in Dallas, we're listed in the phone book and it's under Joe and Kay Gray.

Please feel free to call us and we'll take you to a meeting and spend time with you. But after 16 years, I still don't have all these gifts that she read and I want them, I really want them. I have I'm a big book Al Anon and I read the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and those promises have come true in my life. Do they all stay true all at the same time? No, not really.

But the book tells me as long as I work for them, they'll come true and they have And I am so grateful for that. But those gifts, wow, there were several on there that I'm not participating in, I hate to tell you all. It's not that I don't want them, I'm just not participating in them. But when I talk second, I can clean up what Joe says and that's just part of our deal. I came to you all November 5, 1986 and as the big book says, I was bankrupt and I was bankrupt in every way and you all were a sorry looking out there.

I can remember sitting in those hard chairs thinking if this is what I'm going to have to do for the rest of my life, I don't know. And I can tell you that I am thrilled to just sit among you today. But I started off and I did what I was told with other people around me said. I had a sister-in-law that insisted that I get a sponsor and I did. And I started off working these steps, and the solution for me is in these steps.

And that's how I have found out everything that I know about myself. Because until that point I had shut the door on every area of my life. I blamed, I complained and just used everything that was in my past as an excuse for how I was. And this program has helped clean that up. I've loved alcoholics all my life, I guess.

The very first alcoholic in my life and I didn't even know he was alcoholic was my father. You know, I knew that he drank and I knew when he drank, he did certain things. If you're the child growing up in a home like that, there are sounds of alcoholism. And alcoholism is a family disease. It doesn't just affect the alcoholic.

It does that, but it affects the entire family and we all get sick together and we all did get sick together. Again, very early on becoming a watcher, I watched what happened. I was 4, 5 6 years old, I wasn't saying very much. I wish it stayed that way. I didn't walk in the door, it's not saying very much, I can tell you that.

But I also was a listener and I listened and I listened intently and I watched the faces, and I tried to figure out what was going on. And that's a dangerous place for me to be then and it would be a dangerous place for me to be today. And through working these steps that has changed for me. You know, at 5 or 6 years old, I knew something was going on. I really liked what he did.

He had fun, and I wanted to be where he was. He is a big part of my story. And, it was the uncles and they were all in the front room, playing cards, or they were playing dominoes, and oh my goodness, they would laugh and slap their knee and hoot and holler and drink. And I want to be in there where they were. And of course, the women shoot me back into the other part of the house.

They were all in the kitchen, grumbling and complaining and moaning and trying to figure out how to make them stop having fun. Isn't that an hour or not? By definition I think. Anyway, some of the things that I watched and heard them do was they talked about getting the food on the table. Now I think that's a myth.

Do you all ever know where food made an alcoholic quit drinking? I don't. But they said if we could just get them fed, they'd quit drinking and everything's going to be all right. And that seemed to be what they said over and over and over about a lot of different things. One of the things was when my mother decided he had drank too much that seems to be another Al Anon thing, we can decide how much the alcoholic should or should not drink and she would tell him it was time to go home.

Now my dad was a big barrel chested guy, there was no doubt about that he was a real man's man and he wasn't going to let a little woman tell him what to do. He'd go home when he got ready, good ready. There's probably no drunks in this room like that, I'm sure. And she would just keep going back to him. And I think, why doesn't she shut up?

Can't she see that he's not ready to go? He she is the reason that there is so many problems here. I just watch them and I just listen to what they'd say. My little mind would begin to work. It wasn't very long till he was ready.

I'm not sure at that point she was, but he was ready. And we'd go get in the car, and we'd start home. And I get in that back seat. And, you know, over time, this was what happened. It was just my experience.

And I didn't know that that the fight was fixing to start. And it started over how fast he drove. We'd get in the car, we lived about 30 miles from where my family in Dallas lived and she'd be saying over and over, you're going too fast. And I'd peek up over that back seat and I'd hear her say you're going 110. Now, I wish I could tell you I knew that we were going 110.

But I just knew that she kept saying it over and over. And you're gonna kill us and I'd lay down that backseat and I began to pray. I grew up going to church and I loved going to church, church was a safe place for me. And that's where I had my first encounter, my first relationship with God. And it was a sweet relationship.

And I took my all of my worries and all of my fears to God at that point and I'd lay down that back seat and I would pray that she would shut up because I was too sure if she'd shut up, everything would be all right and that he would slow down, but that didn't happen and they just kept going on and that is about the disease, the family disease of alcoholism. You know, as the disease progressed and is a progressive disease and it doesn't matter if it's in the alcoholic or in the Al Anon, it just gets worse and worse and down the scale we went and before long, when my dad began to drink, I began to recognize Doctor. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I didn't know that that's what it was then, but that's what the book tells me it is. He would change from being that laughing fun guy to angry and then sometimes violent.

And you know later on as the disease progressed, I spent time in emergency rooms watching my mother's face be sewed up from the disease of alcoholism and as a child I confused that with the man, the man that I loved, the man that I would rather do anything to get to be with, began to do things that I just didn't recognize and a word came in my head that it took the 12 steps and forgiveness to change with it. My dad was sorry. And I began to think of him as a sorry man. And it was when I came to Al Anon that I could understand that he was alcoholic, he was not sorry. And that when I was in those emergency rooms, it was how the disease of alcoholism had affected him and my mother and myself.

You know, one of the things that the doctors would ask is how did this happen. And I'd say she fell, she fell against the wall. I learned a lot at a very early age. No one ever told me to do that. No one ever said when we go, you're gonna lie about it.

I just began to do it. It's just the disease of alcoholism. I don't know how I knew, I just knew to do it. And that happened over and over and over again. I couldn't understand why she didn't leave.

I didn't understand why she stayed. That too is the disease of alcoholism. You can't live with you and you can't live without you and that's the way we are until we can find recovery. As time went on, the things that I began to do was to use the skills that I learned early on to watch, eat and steal and I learned to do that very, very early. In school, it was hard for me to pay attention and so I'd stay up all night listening and watching for the fight to break out because I was gonna protect.

I don't know if I was gonna protect her or if I was going to protect him. She's pretty vicious. You know, she used to beat him up on a regular basis with the newspaper or anything else and I'd have to get up and get between them and try to get them in different rooms and in different beds. And, in doing that, I was up a lot, an awful lot at night. In the morning, I'd get up and go to school and, you know, I couldn't pay attention, and I could I'd go to sleep, and I worry.

You know, worry was a constant companion for me from a very early age. I began to worry about what was gonna happen at home. You know? That didn't do very well with school because I began to make bad grades, but right behind that, what I began to do was steal report cards. I don't know if we have any report cards dealers in here, but you just feel a duplicate set, you keep the real ones, you fill out the ones you stole, you take them home, you let your parents sign those, they all looked good.

My real ones didn't look so good. I find them. I took those back to school, and I did that over and over all the way through school. And needless to say, I didn't get a very good education doing that. But I got an education in the disease of alcoholism, that's for sure.

Sometime around 12 or 13 years old, my mother decided that she'd leave my dad and she took me to my grandmother's. The next day we returned home and I got on my bicycle and I did what I knew to do that was to ride down to his office to convince him not to do this, to convince him that something different was going to have to happen. And he said to me something that he'd done much of the time, he said, let's go have lunch. And I thought, oh, goodness, we're going to get into trouble. And I'll tell you why I thought we're going to get into trouble because my mother used to go look for him.

I don't know if we have any Al Anans that look for him, but when he doesn't come home, we want to know where you are. We want to know what you're doing and most important, we want to know who you're doing it with. And so she put me in the car and she would take me down an infamous road in Dallas called Harry Hines. If you're familiar with Dallas, you might know that street and there's lots of bars up and down it and my dad would be in one of those bars and she'd pull up out front and she would send me in and she wouldn't go in, she'd send me in. He was always glad to see me, he pulled me up on that bar stool next to him and introduced me to his friends and I was just sure that I was full grown, that they didn't know I was a 5 or 6 or 7 year old and we did that over and over.

She'd also get mad at me because I'd stay in there too long And then she'd be mad at both of us and I want to ride home with him, but she wouldn't allow it. So I had to get in the car and listen to her all the way home. And this was something that I knew he and I were going to get in trouble for if we went to lunch this day, but we did leave and go to lunch and she was at home packing. And now I began doing what I knew I should do and that was to convince him to go home and talk to her and to stop doing this. I did not want them to get a divorce and I did not want them to split up.

And what I know is that she extracted the very, very best admission out of him she possibly could, and that's what we try to do. We try to close all the loopholes and to try to figure out how to get you to stop drinking and as I stand here before you, I have not learned that secret. The way she did it that day is that she made him promise that he would never drink at home again and he told her that he wouldn't and unfortunately he just never came home after that and it just escalated the disease of alcoholism. And I began to do things like lie about where I was going and what I was doing because things just weren't right. I began to live in a fantasy world about someday it was going to be different.

I wasn't going to live my life like this. I wasn't going to marry anybody that drank like my dad. And I certainly wasn't ever going to act like my mother. And I can tell you, when I walked in the doors of Al Anon, I was just like both of them. It was just a mix of both of them.

And I didn't even realize it. I closed the door on that growing up time when I was 18 years old, I started dating a young man and he didn't drink like my dad, but he drank And I began to know very quickly know now that I began to act like her and it was just a marriage made in heaven. We started dating that summer, I'd grown up with him, I wasn't real crazy about him, he was a bad boy and I didn't know then that I like bad boys. It wasn't until I worked in inventory that I realized that every boy I'd ever liked had been a bad boy, but that's just the way it was. And one time the reason why I say he was a bad boy is he was a couple of years older than I was and he had a brand new red and white Corvette and he drove across my high school campus and shot a universal hand signal to the student body that was standing out front and I just thought, oh, he is just awful.

And of course this is who I'm going out with and I graduated from high school and with my background I don't know how it was just surely by lying, cheating and stealing and I was enrolled at North Texas University and was ready to move into the dorm and I did that and he moved into his apartment. He was old enough to have an apartment. And I just knew that everything was going to all work out for me and it wasn't very long until I found out that I was pregnant and we got married and in that order. And I began to be scared to death, I wasn't going to go home and tell my family that that's what I had done. They wanted me to get my education, they wanted me to do something with my life and I wanted that too.

And I knew that had come to an end. So I was just gonna not tell anybody, you know, isn't that how we are? We just won't mention it to us. So If it had been left up to me, I would have never told anybody. I would have never told anybody until today if it had been left up to me.

He wasn't going to hear of it, he thought I should move into that apartment with him and out of that dorm and he said we've got to go home and tell your parents from that last class on Wednesday and he said, we're going to Dallas and tell your folks. And I thought, oh, dear God, there'll be a death certainly out of this. And we did, we went to Dallas and my mother was at home and my dad came home and my dad had not been drinking that day. And we told them that we had gotten married and my dad looked at me and said something that for the next 10 years, I absolutely tried to live down. He said, I hope you have enough sense to be married.

And that day and the day I walked out of that marriage 10 years later, I did not have enough sense to be married, not at all. And out of that marriage came 2 children and the disease of alcoholism and, me wanting to know where he'd been and what he'd been doing and who he'd been doing it with. And you know, he said the same thing my dad said. He'd never been anywhere, he'd never been doing anything, and he'd never been with anybody. And I wanna know why he had lipstick on his clothes.

If you haven't been with anybody, how come you've got lipstick on your clothes? You know, the disease of alcoholism was stealing everything out of that marriage already. Those 2 children were born and I was crazy. I was following him checking his speedometer on the odometer on the car, marking the tires, I've seen the police do that in parking spaces, mark the back of the tires with chalk, checking his clothes, checking credit cards, and I've spent 10 years of doing that, staying up late at night trying to figure this out, trying to figure out what to do just one step quicker, one step sooner so that I could get this figured out. And I was dealing with something that I would never be able to figure out, the family disease of alcoholism, insane and crazy.

And I was working as hard as I could as fast as I could to figure it out. You know, I knew pretty early on that there were other women in his life and I'd like to sit here and tell you that, you know, I was just blameless and all that. I just was a wife that just cherished his husband and never did a thing, but it wasn't very long until I was doing the same thing that he was doing and gave away my dignity and my self respect bit by bit to the disease of alcoholism. The things that I had been taught growing up and I was taught morals and principles growing up. You know, sometimes out of that disease of alcoholism, we might not think it's there with our parents, but it was, and I had given all those away.

By the end of that marriage, you know, I'm one of those Allemons that can't let one go until I have one right here and that's exactly where I was. I had another one already and that marriage began to just fall apart, completely fall apart. We separated and that about year number 9 we separated and what had happened was I came home one night it was about 9 o'clock and open that front door and walked in and I don't even know if you're an Al Anon of my type, you know, if somebody's been in your house, you know if that glass in the sink wasn't there when you left, do you know if that towel was moved in that bathroom, you know if that soap had been used and there's some water spots on the cabinet. If you're an alum out of my house, there should be some head shaking out there. And I walked in that night and there had been someone in my house, but they weren't there that I could tell and in a few minutes he walked through the back door and the fight began and he and I have been doing this since day 1, you know, black eyes and broken furniture and you know, I've made a decision a long time ago that I was never going to be hit like my mother and I wasn't.

You know, when there were stitches to be done, he was the one that went to the emergency room. I was a fierce competitor. I'm glad I didn't have a gun. If I'd had a gun, I'm sure that you had another speaker because I had that much anger and rage. And this particular night, the fight began and I don't know how these fights began.

You all may know. Where were you going? I was just leaving, I was scared, I thought someone was in the house. And from there, we dug up every old bone, every argument we'd ever had, cast it about, rediscussed it, got worse about it, had bigger things to say about it, worse things to say about it and bit by bit my clothing began to disappear. He began to rip just one piece right after the other and the next thing I knew I was standing there butt naked and he walked back into our game room and I heard the gun cabinet open And I remember just like standing here today, I remember standing at my kitchen cabinet and saying that prayer.

I thought it was the prayer. God, if you'll get me out of this, I won't ever do this again. And I left that front door butt naked and ran down that street and found a flower bed and jumped in it and laid there for about 2 or 3 hours while he walked with that double barrel shotgun up and down that street looking for me. Thank God he didn't find me, he finally wore out and went in and I knocked on that lady's door. And this is a disease of alcoholism.

I call my aunt and uncle, they come and get me, I'm in an attorney's office the next day, I file for divorce. This is the disease of alcoholism. 2 weeks later, we're in the attorney's office, me with my attorney, him with his attorney. He looks at the 2 attorneys and says, I'd like to talk to her by herself. This is my disease of alcoholism.

I looked up and I said, yes. Those 2 attorneys looked at me like I had lost my mind and I had one more time to the disease of alcoholism. We went into a conference room and he slid a pretty piece of jewelry over to me and he said those magic words, oh, baby, oh, baby, I love you and I'm sorry. And I don't know what happened, and that won't ever happen again. And I just knew that that was what it was, that it was over.

I believe that as I had been believing it over and over each and every time. This time wasn't any different, but I believed that that's the disease of alcoholism. We walked out of that office, we went on that trip, I wore that piece of pretty jewelry, just as I have been doing all those other fights and just as I did the ones the next year. I sold myself for a piece of jewelry and another trip and a promise that he loved me. And I believed he loved me the very best he could, but he loved alcohol better.

And he gave up that family for alcohol. He gave up his children and I gave it up too. And I took off. I had this feeling that I've been missing out and I began to do things that I never thought I would do, leave my children, get up in the middle of the night or not come in at all and tell them the next morning I've gone for bread. I began to live a lie that I had so much shame and so much guilt for that I could hardly look myself in the mirror.

I was about 3 years single and acting like it over in Fort Worth at the Colonial Golf Tournament and I looked up and all the way across the room was this tall, good looking blonde. Now one of the things that I've learned since I've been here is I like bad boys in pretty packages. And there was a really pretty package sitting across the room. Now, there was only one thing wrong with the whole thing, is that he had this ugly blonde sitting in his lap. Now I knew that you shouldn't do that at the Country Club.

Now, if it had been some of those other places that we hung out, of course we did that, but not at the Country Club, you got to have some class, if you're at the Country Club, right. Well, class be darn, here he is just a little bit later sitting at my table, didn't even give that another thought that he didn't have any class. He asked for my phone number and I said no. And it started, I don't know what it is, it started, it's that little twinkle, it's that little electricity, it's that little excitement that begins when you see the person that kind of is interesting to you. And he wanted my phone number and I said no, guys like you are too hard to handle.

And they are, trust me, they are. And we just did that back and forth and he kept asking me for my phone number and my friend that I was sitting there with finally gave him my phone number and then I began to ask him for the phone number back, You all know the drill. I got up to go the restroom and he followed me and he said I want to take you out and I said well, big boy, if you wanna take me out, how about tonight? And he just said the thing that sealed the deal. And it was this, he said, I have a date tonight.

And I wouldn't break a date with her to go with you, but I wouldn't break a date with you to go with her. And I thought, my God, he has character. He did then and he does now, he has character all right, he is a character. So So we just started off and you all know how it is. It's just that little thing that we do.

I can't explain it. It's one of the most exciting I feel alive when I'm doing it. I just feel alive. And, I did something that I've been doing for a while, while, he just moved right in with me. I was not raised that way.

My dad put a box of vegetables from his garden on my front porch that said the K and question mark. I never believed that anything I did affected anybody else. He never knew who was going to be there, my dad didn't. And I know today how it broke my father's heart to watch the daughter that he loved do the things that I did. And see, I climbed right behind.

What I'm doing never heard a soul. Never heard a soul. I hurt my kids, I hurt my family, I hurt people all along the way, but my denial was that I wouldn't hurt my soul. Joe moved in and he had 3 kids and I had 2, we just shuffled them together like a double deck of cards. And one of the things that we thought was, we're just going to do this differently.

Now there was no identification of that, we were just going to do it different than we had done it and we did all right. One of the things that we did different is that he didn't leave me at home and boy I like that. Every place he went he wanted me to go with him and I went with him on a moment's notice. He said we're going, I was up and dressed and ready to go. I was not going to stay at home.

And my idea of taking care of these kids was to give them all 20 dollars apiece and tell them to look for us when you saw us coming. And I'm telling you alcoholism broke out in every room in the house. And I was one busy person many nights, it was nothing for me to put 2 50 or 300 miles on a car looking for him. You them. I grew up looking for that daddy.

I went on to marry and look for him and now I'm looking for them and we had 3 or 4 of them active all at the same time and I was driving all over everywhere looking for him, trying to figure out where they were, who they were with and what they were doing and I was crazier than I had ever been in my entire life. I wasn't looking at Joe and I know Joe is grateful for that today. He really is grateful for that. My kids used to call me Dickless Tracy. I looked everywhere.

I went through all of their stuff. I checked under the mattresses, they had lock boxes that had stuff in it, I break into their lock boxes, I was like an insane person. The disease of alcoholism had made me crazy and I was the main participator in it. It was all just coming to an end and I didn't even know it. On November, the beginning days of November of 1986, I called my mother-in-law and I said, just talking to her, and she burst into tears.

Joe's baby sister had been locked up in a psychiatric ward and this was about the 3rd or 4th time and my mother-in-law was just worn out. She had her kids and I said, if you'll just give us some time and let us get there, we'll see if we can figure this out. Joe and I have been married about 10 years and you know, what's he going to say? No, we're not going to go see about my baby sister. He said, yeah let's go and I packed my bags and laying in the bottom of my closet was a round bronze looking chip.

I picked it up and I looked at it, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know where it came from. I didn't know what it signified. I recognized the serenity prayer on one side and on the other side there was a circle and triangle and blank spot where the AA's year is. I didn't even know it was an AA chip.

Didn't know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous. Certainly, I've never even heard the word Al Anon. I put that in my pocket because it had the serenity prayer on it. It had hung in my family's home all my growing up life. I wish I could tell you that I'd understood it, but I didn't.

But I put it in my pocket and over the next 2 or 3 days, every time I felt like I was losing more control, I'd reached down and I'd feel that little coin in my pocket. And over the next 2 or 3 days that sister-in-law came up from Austin, Texas that had been in the program for about 5 years. I had called her saying I think Jeanne is dying. She said she is, she's being treated for the wrong thing. She's alcoholic and sure enough that's what it was.

We took her AMA against medical advice out of that psychiatric hospital and she went into treatment for her alcoholism. And over the next 3 days, that sister-in-law that had about 5 years sober, sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, so many times talks to the family about alcoholism, and I am so grateful for that. Isn't that the most beautiful thing that a sober member of AA can talk to the family members about alcoholism and that's what she did. She talked about how it was for her and I began to thought just a little bit. I began to my mind began to open.

I can't tell you that I understood anything, but it began to open just a little bit. We came back to Dallas and she and I went to an Al Anon meeting and the next morning I got up and flew to Austin And that daughter of mine had called and said that she was furious with me because we were helping Joe's sister that I knew that she was in trouble. But I didn't know how do you fix something, how do you address something that you don't know what it is. We've been trying to fix lots of things, We'd never entertain the idea that it was alcoholism, not one time. And I said, I think I understand a little bit about what's wrong with all of us.

And so I flew to Austin and went to her apartment and I said talk to her about Jeanne and I said, you know I think that what we're dealing with is alcoholism, are you willing to go get help? And of course she said no, she only had 18 days of the 1st semester of her senior year to finish and she wasn't willing to do anything, but what she wanted to do. And I said, okay, God doing for me what I couldn't do for myself. The miracles were happening in my life then and I couldn't recognize them. I said, okay, and I stood up, she said, sit down.

And over the next about an hour, she was packed and ready to go back to Dallas. And that night she went into the hospital for her alcoholism. And we put it about 10 days, 2 of our sons came to us and said, if you think she's got problems, maybe you all look it up. There was a little theft ring in our neighborhood. We never realized it was coming from our house.

I knew that they had a lot of CBs, this was back in the days of CBs and if you had a retard detector stolen out of your car, even in Kansas, I want to go ahead and apologize, it was probably my kid. Alcoholism was everywhere in our house and we didn't even know it and those kids went into the hospital for their alcoholism just shortly after that And my life, the life that I had spent years being in a not about just fellow part. I thought that my world was over. I absolutely felt so out of control and I began to do the things that I heard DAA say. They said go to 90 meetings in 90 days.

I was going to 1 to 3 meetings a day, every single day, 7 days a week. The only place that I could be okay was sitting in an Al Anon meeting, and I couldn't understand what those women said. I couldn't understand what they were doing. You know, there were some that had 10 years and I could see that they smiled. You know, one thing about us early on is that we have one personality or less.

We talk about the Al Anon's having one person and never smile. We just don't have a sense of humor when we walk in the door. And that's where I was. This was serious and my kids were dying with this disease and I wanted help. And I'd say to these women, I need what that one has, it has 10 years and they were so kind to me.

They'd say things like, oh, honey, you can have that, don't die and come back. I think they're mean. What do they mean don't die and come back? Thank God they told me that, just to keep coming back because that's how I got this thing, one day at a time, just one day at a time. That sister-in-law started telling me to get a sponsor and I did, I got a sponsor and thank God that she was a sponsor that believes in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and she put me in those steps and she didn't let me up.

You know she had me make commitments. The first commitment she had me make was a phone call. I called her every day. We didn't have a lifetime to get to know each other. We had to get to know each other as soon as we could and to establish that line between us and that's what happened and she put me off in those steps and I wish I could stand up here and tell you that I knew that my life had changed.

I didn't know that in the middle of it, in the beginning of it, but as things began to happen, people around me began to notice. My kids were the first ones. They all came out of treatment and they did not like what they found when they got home. I had learned to say some things that I had never said with any thing behind it, the word no. I never said no to them in minutes.

I always just said no and then move it down a notch. I don't know if there's any in here that just keep moving it down a notch, just another notch. And I said no and could mean it. No, I'm not going to do that. I started like I say going to those meetings.

Now Joe didn't go to meetings and I'm not here to tell his story, but he just his husband wasn't drunk. And I thought I'm married to somebody that is brain dead. He didn't even have a husband. Why is he saying his husband isn't drunk? He has drunk kids.

Why isn't he going to Al Anon? Well, he didn't go to Al Anon. He laid on our bed and watched the ball games, anything that had a little round ball in it, is probably nobody in here that does that golf, football, basketball, baseball, soccer didn't matter. I couldn't imagine why he wasn't going more would have been revealed and that's his story. But I stayed in Al Anon and I got in the middle of it and that's what my sponsor told me that I had to do.

I took commitments. You know, the very first commitment that I had was greater at our group and every meeting I was there to greet and then it was literature. I've been doing that ever since. Some 16 years later, I still take commitments. I still am a part of my group just like I was when I first came in.

She told me that I would never get to the place where I could stop doing that, and I'm so grateful for that. As I began to change, I began to get off of Joe's back and one evening I've been to a meeting and I started down the hall, came in the house and started down the hall and he met me and he had that finger up and he said, you don't make me happy anymore. We don't even have a marriage. And you know those meetings one right after the other, I said something to him that I didn't even realize was going to change the course of our lives. I said I'm not responsible for your happiness and I just walked right on.

He says it made him mad to be honest, I didn't even notice. He started going to meetings. He started going to Al Anon meetings and we'll let him tell you about all that, but our life began to change from that point on. And since we've been here, we've had some of the greatest opportunities of our lives and that is to get to meet you guys, to get to sit in a fellowship of men and women and to have it grow up around us and to watch the miracles, to watch the new ones come in and watch the lights come on in their eyes and watch the program of either Alcoholics Anonymous or Al Anon begin to work in our lives. I I go to 3 meetings a week just like I did when I came in, 2 Al Anon and 1 Open AA.