Sacramento Spring Fling in Sacremento, CA

My name is Sissy Country and I'm an alanine from Alabama. Hi, Sissy. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Yeah.

I wanna make sure y'all hear me. I I just couple of things. Where Valerie, where'd you go? Where Where'd she run off to? In the back.

Okay. Chicken. When y'all abandoned, y'all just go, don't you? A couple of things I just gotta say, Valerie, about about what you just said. First of all, it was told to me a long time ago when I came into this program and started doing this.

I would get up here and I would start share and I would immediately burst into tears because part of it 99% of it was nerves and then then 1% of it, you know, it's just I would get up here and say my name burst into tears. And I had a real problem with that for a long time till a seasoned veteran, not an old timer, but a seasoned veteran. They don't like being called old timers. Where I am. Seasoned veteran, alcoholics anonymous came up to me one time after a meeting and he said, sissy, he said, you gotta you gotta let go with this thing about crying.

He said, because we all know that the more you cry, the less you pee. And that made sense to me. It's not true. But it made sense. And so, I I come prepared tonight with my Kleenex because I know that I will will shed a few tears up here tonight.

And it's not so much about sad tears. A lot of it may be, tears of gratitude about what I have today. But, but I know today, the more you cry, the less you pee. So you're okay. You're okay.

Let me set one rumor to sleep. There's rumor going around here this weekend that a speaker you had last year, an Al Anon speaker you had last year by the name of Beau, is my father. Well, it's true. Well, it's true. That's all there is to it.

Yes, that's dad. And, when they when the committee called me a long time ago and asked me to come out here and share, I picked up the phone and I called him because I knew he'd been out here. And I told him, I said, you know what they want? I said, they want me to come out there and tell them what really happened. So he's in Alabama right now waiting on me to finish up so he can he can get a phone call tonight and I can tell him what really happened.

But that's the joke in our family today is, is that when one of us goes and shares our story and then another one is is invited back to speak another time, The big joke is, you know, we're gonna go and tell them what really happened because apparently, you couldn't handle that. So so that's what I'm here to do tonight. Now, I do wanna thank the committee for inviting me. This is a, doubly special trip for me this weekend, not only to come out here and be a part of your spring fling. But it's my wedding anniversary.

Yesterday Bob and I, he's on the corner over here, celebrated 4 years of marriage so we were able to tie this entire anniversary into coming out here and it's it's been a whole lot of fun. So that was it was neat to to plan to to get to do this. He can't stand up. Usually, I make him stand up and wave at everybody, but he can't do that tonight. He had knee surgery Wednesday and I still dragged him out here.

On 2 airplanes across the country on crutches just so we could, make this trip together. But I promise you I did not push him down those steps. I'm past the homicidal stage. But I did not push him. I did not push him on the ice.

It's just one of those things that happened. But But y'all give him a lot of pity and a lot of compassion this weekend because he's he's hurting. He'll kill me when we get back to the room. My My name is Sissy Country. Like I said, I am from Alabama.

I am from a little town, very little town between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa called West Blockedon. Anybody here been to West Blockedon? Y'all don't get out much, do you? We're famous for one thing in West Blocked and that's being 6 miles from a little a littler town, called Vance that produces the Mercedes Benz M class, which is pretty cool to be a part of. We're neighbors to that little town and we get to see those brand new vehicles running all over our little country town down there.

My home group, is the Bessemer Al Anon family group. At Bessemer, we have, 3 meetings a week. We have a Wednesday morning meeting, a Wednesday night meeting, and a Thursday night meeting. And my home meeting at Bessemer is a Wednesday night meeting. It has been for a long time and I hope it can continues to be that way.

My alanon group at Bessemer will celebrate 38 years, as an Al Anon group this April. And so, that's, it tickles me to be a part of the group that has such history and such tradition with it. So it's a very special thing for me. I hope to be able to share with you tonight a little bit about what got me here and a lot about what keeps me here. I think we all know the pain.

We can all identify with that in some sense. And I like to tell what's going on now and why I keep coming back. Before I go any further, there's a couple other things. I wanna thank Donna for picking us up at the airport, today. She had to wait 2 hours longer than she expected for our flight to get in.

We had, when we got to Dallas, they didn't wanna let us on the plane and take off, because they had hydraulic problems. And I agreed with them. I didn't wanna get on the plane and take off. I told him that was fine. I'd sit there as long as I needed to.

And, so we sat for 2 hours and we finally made it out here 2 hours late. And bless her heart, she'd been sitting there waiting on us. And I'm so glad she didn't give up on us and think we weren't coming. And we get here to the hotel and we just we've got a beautiful room. And a few minutes after we were in the room, kind of relax in a few minutes, there was a knock on the door and there was this gentleman that carried this beautiful it's a box.

The only way I can describe it. Inside this box is just the best goodies you can imagine. You know, I mean, the kind of goodies that you'll eat, you know. You go back to your room and you dig around in that box tonight and and, so that that was a tremendous, special gift for us to get because traveling all day, we had the munchies and it was nice to crack that thing open and get to work on it. My flower is not gonna make it.

But anyway, getting getting back to, why I'm here tonight. Before I get into too much about me, I need to tell you a little bit about how I got qualified for this deal. I grew up in a family that, suffered from the disease of alcoholism. My mother is the I call her my little alcoholic. She's the primary alcoholic in my life.

But I wanna tell you from the get go that I am I'm not an adult child of an alcoholic. I am an adult who has a child had an alcoholic parent. And I and I am a member of Al Anon today. My mother being an alcoholic did not make me an Al Anon. She simply qualified me for this program.

And that's all the credit I give her. You know, thanks mom for qualifying me for this. But in no way did did that just make me what I am today. There's a lot of work that went into that goes into, having the kind of life I have today. I had to do a lot of work in Al Anon to get here.

And, and I say that because I want people to know that I'm not a cheerleader. Yeah. I'll stand on the sidelines and cheer in the game, but I wanna be in it. I'm gonna be in there working steps. I'm gonna be in there sponsoring people.

I'm gonna be active in this program. I'm gonna hold positions. I'm gonna be in service work. I'm gonna do this regardless of how sick it makes me sometimes nervous wise to get up here and do it. This is what Al Anon is about.

So I give a lot of credit to my mother for getting me here. I came into this program when I was 13 years old. That is when my mother, stopped drinking. My mother's sobriety date is July 29, 1982. My serenity date is, September 7, 1982.

That's not the date that I became serene. That's the date that the process started, that my journey began. And, you know, growing up in in my home, when I was a child, to me was just as normal as my friends down the street. Everybody's parents drank. Everybody had an older or younger brother or sister.

Most of the the kids in my neighborhood had 2 parents in the home, had a dog running around. You know, both parents worked. It was a real it was kind of an all American little neighborhood. But I but looking back, the difference between me and my friends at that time was I would go home after school or in the evening to a mom that drank too much. And, my first, you know, real vivid memory of her, of realizing that she wasn't like my other friend's mother, was probably around the age of 8 or 9.

My mother was a kitchen alcoholic. She, she drank in her kitchen. She would stop on the way home from work, get what she needed at the grocery store, come home, and start to drink and somewhere during the course of fixing dinner in the early evening, she'd pass out. And wherever she passed out was pretty much where she stayed for the evening. We just kinda step over her and do do what it is we needed to do.

I had an older brother who was 17 months older than myself, and then there was my dad. And, of course, you know how the old saying goes, you could always look at mom and know what was wrong with her, but dad was a whole another story. You just couldn't figure out what was going on with him. He we labeled him real quickly just a nut. Nobody knew.

You didn't know what to expect from either parent. My brother and I, as close as we were in age, which where the to people that we met or knew that we were not related. We were total opposites. All we did was fight. All we did was argue.

We could not get along. We couldn't stay in the same room together. And I know now it's because early on in my mother's drinking, we my brother and I picked picked sides. And my brother was, very protective of my mother. He didn't like to see her get in trouble.

He didn't like to see her suffer any consequences for her drinking. I, on the other hand, was not like that. I was the one that would run to dad and tell on her. And, and this this thing about alcoholism teaches you very early what your role is. It taught me very quickly, where where my place in this was.

You know, and it was it was from the beginning, it was very sick. I wouldn't leave my mother alone because I wasn't sure what I didn't want her to get hurt. I didn't want anything bad to happen to my mother, but at the same time, I wanted to be there so that when, I needed that extra money or when I needed to get out of that jam I was in, I could play that game really well. If she needed me to clean my room or do whatever household chores I needed to do, then I didn't want to. I simply used her drinking to get out of that.

You know, I would threaten to tell dad, and that would win me whatever I needed for that night. And I learned very quickly how to manipulate people, and how to lie, and how to get out of what I had to do. I learned very quickly, by the by the age I was 11 or 12, how to make deals to get what I needed. And if and if you couldn't give me anything, then I really didn't have anything to do with you. That's why my brother and I were such opposites.

My mother and I switched roles very early on. She became the daughter and I became the mother. Then it was mainly because I was there with her a lot. Like I said, I could use I could threaten her, with her drinking and that would pretty much win me whatever I wanted. One of the clearest memories I have growing up, with an alcoholic parent was that once she was passed out for the night, it was usually around 7 30, 8 o'clock, pretty early.

The show was over, you know. And that's when me and Mike and dad would go in the kitchen and we'd have these witch hunts. That's what I called them. And that's where we'd go through the entire kitchen and find every bottle that she had hidden in the kitchen. And, very proudly we would holler that we had these bottles.

Here's another one, here's another one. And we would slam them up on the counter, and then after we found them all and raided the house, we would just kind of stand back and just be be very proud of ourselves for finding all of her alcohol. And we'd stand there and grin and high five each other and boy, she's gonna get it. You know, I'm thinking to myself, she's gonna get up in the morning, and she's gonna say we found it. And she's gonna be busted, you know.

And we would very ceremoniously, we'd hand them to my dad and he'd pour them down the drain, and then he'd slam these empty bottles up there on the kitchen counter, and and we'd all go to bed pretty happy that we had busted her. And, it was years it was years in sobriety when we learned that we thought she was getting up every morning, coming in the kitchen, seeing these empty bottles and thinking, oh my god, I'm busted. They found it. And we're very confident of that. It was years in sobriety when she told us.

She said, you know guys, I would come into that kitchen every morning and see those empty bottles. And I would think to myself, oh my god, I got up in the middle of the night and drank it all. I mean, that's where we were. That's we we were to the point where we were sending messages and we were screwing that up. You know?

We didn't know who was coming or going. And, but at the time, if you'd asked me, Sissy, how are you? I would have said, fine. Fine. We're just fine.

Nothing's wrong. You know, everything's great. But we were the ones that would go in the house every night and close that big front door and pull those drape shut and keep you out. You know, because we didn't want you to know what was going on in our house. It got to the point in our family where mother didn't want us around her, and we really didn't want to be around her.

You know, she didn't want us, and we didn't want her. We just all kind of went our separate ways. There were 100 of times, that she would come to us and say that she had decided to stop drinking and and, only to to not follow through with that. The low point for me, I I do remember very clearly was when I was, going from the 6th to 7th grade. And, we were changing schools and in this new school, we were going to have lockers and I was going from elementary to junior high.

But anyway, I can remember all my friends sitting around that summer talking about how excited they were about going to this new school and and being a part of all this new stuff. And I kept thinking to myself, you know, you all have a good time, but I'm not gonna be around for that. Because I knew that something was going on so bad in my life that I just wouldn't gonna be around to see any of this stuff they were talking about. I know today that I was actually thinking of suicide. I know today that I had gotten, so sick in this disease that I didn't know what what what else to do.

I completely blamed my self. I thought if I was a better daughter, if I, you know, wasn't this, but if I was this, it was she wouldn't drink as much. If I could keep my mouth shut, if I could not say the things that came out, she wouldn't do these things. And so I come, completely took the burden on of blaming myself that she was the way she was. Very shortly before my mother decided to do something about her drinking, permanently, she came to me one night in the house.

My dad and my brother had gone to a ball game and I was there with my mother. Kinda keeping an eye on her. And she came to me and she said she needed to run to the store for a loaf of bread or something, and I knew why she needed to leave. I knew she needed go, that she was out of liquor, and that she needed to go and get some. And I gave her permission to go.

It's pretty much the way it was. And, the store went a couple of blocks from our from our home and and but time passed, a lot of time passed, she went back. And I thought to myself, well, she's finally done it. She's finally she probably had that suitcase in the car, she's probably just decided to keep right on going, She's not coming back, then I started thinking she's probably in a ditch somewhere. Then I started panicking because of all those times that I would lay in the bed and wish that something would happen, or wish that they would divorce and I could live I could pick.

All these things came flooding down on me that evening. And I remember very clearly pacing the floor in the living room thinking, God, if you'll just bring her home safe, I promise. I'll never say those things to my mother again. I'll never talk to her like that again. I'll never call her those names.

If you'll just bring her home safe, God, I promise I'll change. And I remember saying that out loud and a few minutes later, the headlights turned into the driveway. And she was pulling up into the driveway and I ran outside to greet her. And, the next thing I knew, I was I was over at the car door and I was literally trying to pull my mother through the through the open window telling her at the same time, if you ever do this to me again, I'll kill you. And I was 12 years old, 12, 13 years old.

And, very clearly, I remember to my I I remember thinking to myself, sis, you're this is nuts. You're insane. This is this is way out of line. And I can remember just kinda letting go of her of her shirt collar and turning around and going back in. And it didn't seem to be very long after that point that, that my mother came to me and my brother and my dad one night, and we came in from ballgame, and she said she decided to do something about her drinking.

And it to me, it was just another, yeah, yeah, okay, whatever. But the next day, this treatment center that my mother had called the night before, they called her and they said, Shirley, we'd love to help you, but we need a little bit more information than your Sears credit card number. So I knew she called them. I knew she called them. I thought, well, she's talking to somebody because she's giving them her Sears credit card number.

And from that, she, talked to these people and came to my my brother and my dad and I, and she said, I've decided to go to treatment. Well, that totally confused me, because I thought, what is treatment? What are they gonna do to her? And the only person I knew that I could ask that would tell me honestly was my brother, Mike. And I went to him and I said, what is this treatment thing and what are they gonna do to her?

He said, well, Mike was 15 at the time, I was 13. And Mike said, well, it's kinda like taking your car in for an oil change. He said, you know, a tune up. He she said, she's gonna go in. They're gonna tune her up.

Maybe give her a shot, a pill, something. She'll never drink again and will live happily ever after, and I loved that. I thought, why didn't she go 2 years ago? You know, and then that made sense to me. And so I'm I'm looking forward to mom going to get her oil changed.

And the day that we're taking her is in the summer of 82. And, we had a pickup truck. And in this pickup truck, my dad gets in the driver's side, my mom gets in the passenger's side, and in the back of the pickup truck, sat me and Mike in 2 chase lounge chairs, and a cooler of pepsi, and a big big radio, right between us, taking mom to treatment. And redneck just doesn't fit that scene. I'm telling you.

Doesn't fit it. And we're headed to treatment in my mother's hand She's holding her curling iron in her hand for some reason. I remember that. And it's It takes forever to get to this treatment center. And as we're getting off the interstate, I noticed this billboard.

And this billboard said, last chance. We're going from a wet county into a dry county. This billboard said, last chance. Pull off the interstate now. Get what you need or whatever.

And I poked my head through the cab of the truck and offered her a last chance beverage. Now I know why she was carrying that carolin iron in her arm, in her hand. Because she came at me with it. She didn't want a last chance beverage. We get her up to this treatment center and literally drop her off.

It's like a drive through. We dropped her off and took her suitcase out and we're leaving in this pickup truck. She's standing at this big plate glass window waving. And we're driving off, Mike and I are in the back of the truck, drinking Pepsi and waving. And it was twisted.

It was really a twisted scene. And, it was like a sad movie. You know, because we're getting further and further away, and she's getting slittler and littler, and we're waving. And I thought, you know, problems problems gone. She'll come back completely new and different and we'll live happily ever after.

And, that got me through about 2 weeks, you know, that thought. I still couldn't tell you where she was. I told a lot of you that she died. I'd go to the ballpark and people would say, Susie, how's your mother? We haven't seen your mother in a while.

Who? No. She she died. And then I would tell somebody else that she was at a Tupperware convention or something. And I and then I couldn't keep straight who I told what, so I had to quit going to the ballpark.

Because you embarrassed me by asking these questions. I would go home only to find that it was in the summertime. And despite my mother's best efforts at trying to teach me some things growing up, I was a little resistant. I didn't wanna learn these things, not that she didn't try. But here I am, in charge, so to speak, of this house.

And, with the dad that's working full time and a brother that gets on his motorcycle and leaves, and all of a sudden, there's dinner to cook, and there's dishes to wash, and there's things like clothes to to clean, and I didn't know how to do any of this. And so, that was a nightmare for me. And I got real angry at my mom for being away because I had to do these things now. And, the very first day I came we came home after taking her to treatment, my dad looks at me and says, what's for dinner? And I just kinda looked at him and said, I don't know.

I don't cook. And he he kinda looked down at me and said, get in there and learn. And so, you know, she she stayed in treatment 38 days. Mike said she eventually needed a transmission overhaul, but that's why she stayed so long. But, you know, in that 38 days, I'm here to tell you that we didn't die eating frozen pizza and hamburger helper and instant whatever.

You know, because that's about the best Mike and I could could handle during that time. And, you know, dad didn't mind wearing peaks pink socks and things that colors that went with other colors. He didn't seem to mind that too much. And somehow, we didn't kill each other during that 38 days. We got a phone call during my mother's treatment.

It's kinda ironic thing, but we couldn't wait for her to get out of the house. We never talked to one another. We had an unwritten rule in our home, and it was that was if you couldn't say anything nice about anybody, don't say anything at all. So we didn't talk. And we would have silent every day of the week for weeks because we couldn't find anything nice to say about each other.

And all of a sudden, she's gone to treatment. And we can't wait to talk to her. Because we won't know what she treatment. And we can't wait to talk to her. Because we won't know what she what they're doing to her in treatment.

And she had, like, 3 minutes a week to call home. And if you if you called our house the night that she was supposed to call, we'd hang up on you. Because we wanna talk to mother and find out what they were doing to her in treatment. Every 5 phones in that house, and we're falling over each other to try and get to the phone and talk with her. But, a couple of weeks into her treatment, they called us and extended a very nice invitation to us.

And asked if we'd like to come up and spend a week with our loved one. And my first thought, I wasn't selfish, but my first thought was I need a break from all this housework. This is killing me. It's in the middle of summer. This is killing me.

I thought sure I'd love to go spend a week with my loved one. Get out of this house. So I I packed my bag quick, and I packed my swimsuit and my, you know, my little video games and my quarters for the pinball machines and, you know, head up to treatment for this thing called family week. And, we get up there and they put they put me in this room with this lady I'd never in my life met. Total stranger.

No TVs, no phones, no Coke machines, no pinball machines, no gum, no nothing. And they said, welcome to family week. And I named it hell week from the start because I didn't like it from the beginning. And they put us in things like group therapy for 7 or 8 hours a day, and had a rule about no fraternizing with your loved ones. They didn't call them patients, they call them loved ones.

And I didn't know what fraternizing meant, so I was constantly getting in trouble for breaking the rules. And, and and they started talking to us about this disease of alcoholism. And, what I heard during that family week was was what I heard, It's probably not what they said, but what I heard was that I was there to learn the do's and don'ts of how to keep her from drinking. You know, I needed to know these things. I was trying to arm myself with information on how I can keep her from drinking.

I know today that that's not the message they sent to me, that's the message that I got. They did have a real live Allen on, a couple of them actually, come in and hold meetings. My dad remembers those meetings, but I don't. I don't remember those meetings. I do still have my family week notebook, believe it or not, after all these years of, my responses to questions and my answers to these worksheets, and and, I was a sick sick youngin' and didn't know it.

I had no idea I'd been affected by this disease. We finished out the last day. I wanna tell you, the last day of that family week had a real impact on me, simply because, I heard something. We were in the last day of family therapy and we were in this room not not too much different from this, in a big circle. And your loved one was sitting across the circle from you.

And this counselor came and stood behind me. You just know when someone is standing behind you, and he, very quietly leaned down and he said, Cece, I want you to look over across at your mom, and I want you to look at her, and I want you to tell me one thing that you don't like about your mom. And, I started talking and he said, woah, woah, woah, just just one. Just one. And he said, now look across your mom and tell me one thing you like about your mom.

And I sat there, which seemed like an eternity, and I don't even remember what I said, but I said something. And he walked away and I thought, okay, I passed. You know, they'll let me go home. And he walked away from me, and he went across the room, he stood behind her, and Shirley, I want you to look across the room at your daughter. So I want you to tell me one thing that you don't like about your daughter.

And the next thing I heard was, woah woah woah, Shirley, just just one, just one thing. And, then he said, I want you to tell me something you like about sissy. You know, it took her a minute or 2, it seemed like an eternity. And I realized that moment, that this was something more than just her. That this was gonna involve all of us.

And I still didn't know to what capacity, but I knew that this wasn't just about her anymore. We left, we went home from family week, seems like just a few days later, we went to pick her up, and they called us in the office one last time, and they said something that I hope I never forget. They looked at my mother and they said, Shirley, if you wanna stay sober, you will go to Alcoholics Anonymous. Period. I said, Beau, if you wanna have any sanity in your life, you will go to Al Anon.

Period. And looked at both of them and said, if you're gonna be any kind of parents, you will get these 2 children into Alatine. Period. They didn't say, we strongly suggest or we we hope that you do these things, or it would be nice if you could try. They said, if you want these things, this is what you will do.

And let me tell you folks, when we left that place, we were too scared not to. I thought somebody's gonna come get us If we didn't do because they're very serious. I know today that God led us to that treatment center because even today in our area, there's a lot of treatment centers. And and, we didn't know one from the other at that time. But, we were directed to a treatment center that believed wholeheartedly in the family disease of alcoholism, that believed in treating the family.

How easy it could have been for us to be directed to a treatment center that didn't, and we wouldn't have known the difference. So I know today that God was guiding us, directing us even then. He's taking care of us when we couldn't do it. So we got her home from that treatment center on a Saturday, and that very day, we went to the Bessemer group of alcoholics anonymous. That I had been by a 1000000 times in my life And saw that red brick building, and saw those 2 AAs up on the the side of that building, and for years thought it was American Airlines.

And I couldn't figure out why they always were open at night. There's always cars there at night, but and they said, no. This is not American Airlines. I had a lot to learn. But we pulled up in this parking lot, and, before we could get out of our car, people were saying, you know, get over here in this car.

And so we literally got out of one car and got in another, and off we went to the University of Alabama for what they called an anniversary. And that was my very first meeting, was the Tuscaloosa group, anniversary, their a a and l anniversary. And a couple of things I remember about that day, there were thousands of you there. And, you all looked like you wanted to be there and I couldn't figure out what you had going. But but it immediately got my attention.

Across the room, the room was probably 4 or 5 times the size of this room. And and in the in one section of it, there's these long tables just like this or probably 12 or 15 of them. And there was all these teenagers hanging around them. And I asked what were they? And someone said those were alatins.

And I thought that meant junior alcoholics. I had not a clue. And they said, no. No. No.

No. You'll be going to Alta on Tuesday night. And I thought, okay. I wasn't about to debate you. And, I didn't know even know who you were, but you said that's what I do and that's what I thought that's what I was gonna do.

We spent the evening there at this anniversary and we met a lot of you. Met a lot of AAs and a lot of Al Anon's and a lot of Balotenes. And everybody we met seemed genuinely interested in us being there. It was unbelievable. Like they were waiting on us to get there.

And, you know, they they raffled off the University of Alabama football. I got mad because I didn't win. But second to that, this lady gets up at the podium and she says, hi. My name is so and so, and I'm an alcoholic. And I remember punching my dad in my elbow and looking over at him.

And I said, isn't that neat? There's 2 of them in this world. Her and my mom, I thought, how cool that we get here and hear this other alcohol in that inch is a woman. And not a clue. Not a clue.

We get home that night, we get back to the to the Bessemer group that night, and they they tell us to get out of that car and get back in our car. And we did. And, we went home. And for the first time in years, we did we left the front door open. And we didn't close the drapes.

And it was as if we wanted you to look in and see, we were different. You know? And we we went in that night and and we didn't turn the TV on. I remember it very clearly, very clearly. I we didn't turn the TV on.

We didn't scatter and go our own separate ways into the house. We all sat in the living room and we talked about what we've just been to. And we talked about how it was pretty neat. And how this this wasn't gonna be bad at all. This looked like it was gonna be a lot of fun.

And as a family, the 4 of us for the first time in years sat down and had a conversation and and mother went in the kitchen and she got it's her first night home from treatment, you know, and we she gets a half a gallon of milk and some chocolate chip cookies and she comes in there and we we literally sit around the floor and we as a family, we made a commitment that we didn't know what you guys were on, but we wanted it, you know. We didn't know what you all were selling, but but we liked it. And and we were gonna do whatever we needed to do as a family to get there. And we made that commitment, and that's pretty much what we've been doing for 17 years. The one of the main principles in our family is, goes back to what those people told us at that treatment center.

Surely, if you're gonna stay sober, you will go to alcoholics anonymous, you know. But if you're gonna have any sanity in your life, you will go to Al Anon. If you're gonna be any kind of parents, you will get your kids into Alatin, and that's what they did. The very next Tuesday night, I went to my first meeting. I went into like a sponge.

I was ready for it. I didn't know I was ready for it, but I absolutely was ready for it. I could go into and I could function. I could listen. I could I could talk.

I could I could do these things that it that involved being in an Alatin meeting. I go back the very next night, sit in on an Al Anon meeting, they'd go around the room, say their name, and I'd burst into tears, you know. I couldn't function there yet, but I could go on to Allatoon and function. And for 7 years, that's what I did. I went I was very active in the best moral team group.

To the point that when I got to be 18 years old, they said, alright now, Cece, it's time for you to start making that transition into Al Anon. There was no question that that's what I would do. There was never a time that once I reached 18, I was gonna stop doing this and and not do anything else. It was always that I would one day graduate in the Al Anon. And so, and that's exactly what happened.

I had people around me. I was very fortunate that when we came into this program, people didn't suggest us what to do, they told us what to do. We didn't have a sense to make a decision. No. They told us what to do.

They would call us on the phone and they would say, when we pull up in the driveway and honk the horn, get in the car. And we'll be there at 6 o'clock. They wouldn't say where we were going, but they'd pull up at 6 o'clock and honk the horn and out we'd go. And we'd get in the car and we might go 50 miles down here for a meeting or for a potluck, or for an anniversary, or we might drive up north to Coleman for a meeting. You know, or we might be going down to here.

We would always be going somewhere. And each time, you never had the radio on, you always had the radio off and there was talk going on, you know. And I always had these folks used to be terrified of you members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because you would come up to me and you would tell me things. You very lovingly put your arm around me.

You gotta remember, as a coming into this program, I didn't have a whole lot of discipline. I had a I had a foul mouth on me. I could I could cuss with the best of you. I still can, at times. But it it was it wasn't so much the words that came out, it's the way it came out.

I didn't have a lot of discipline. I didn't have a lot of structure in me. I didn't like the word no. And and these these folk these these guys, these older guys in Alcox anonymous put their arms around me, and they would say, okay, sissy. It's tender late.

Here's 50¢. Go get you a coke, go to little girl's room, come back and get you a seat at the at the table. And I want you to sit there for the whole meeting. Now, you can sit there for an hour. There ain't nothing you got to do, but you can't sit right there for an hour.

And I would. I was too scared not to. You know? And they and they would give me the structure very lovingly. You know?

And these are things that that I brought in Alan on with me today. I I can't remember ever getting up and walking out of a meeting. You know, I can't remember not being ready once that meeting starts. That's just the way I was brought up into this thing. You know, to go with the attitude of wanting to be there.

To go with the idea that I'm gonna get something out of this. You know? And that's the way I still address my meetings and my Al Anon program today. For a long time, I thought the first step in this program was getting the car. This is all I heard.

Get in the car. Get in the car. My first alatine sponsor my first sponsor, she would call and she'd because I couldn't drive, you know. She would say, I'll be by at such and such time to get you. And I'd say, I don't wanna go tonight.

I just want night off. Can I not just lay here and watch TV and didn't know? And she'd pull up and honk that horn to the, you know, to the point that the neighbors would look out the window. Here I go. You know, and I would always benefit, you know, from from just following simple directions.

And what was happening in our lives is is is very lovingly, AA and Al Anon was surrounding us, and Alatin was surrounding us and guiding us through this thing. And and making decisions for us and taking care of us when we we couldn't do that. And then we started getting getting a little better, then we could start doing some of these things. And we started growing and we started getting better. We started getting better individually, we started getting better as a family.

You know, one of the things that I remember very, a lot about those early years is that Mike, my brother, came to my parents one night and he said, Alatine is just not for me. He said, I'm 15 years old, 16 years old. He said, you know, I've got a motorcycle, I've got girls to chase. He said, but I just can't be at those meetings every single time. He said, but, but mom, I support you 100%.