An Al-anon Step Study in Bellevue, NE

So I don't think y'all are Yankees. I don't know what y'all are, but y'all ain't Yankees. Y'all remind me like y'all remind me of the Oklahoma Sooners. I knew that I'd get a rise out of you. That's a bad term up here now, especially, isn't it?

Sorry about that. Makes you feel any better, they stomp our ass too. I'm Mary Pearl, and they call me Merp, and I'm an Al Anon who is happy, joyous, and free. Hi, Merp. I'm happy, joyous, and free because I try to live and work the program that was given to us by Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12 steps.

Now I do not work the 12 steps like maybe some of y'all are familiar with working them. Now I'm not here to teach. I'm not here as an authority. I'm not here anything to share my experience and how I work the steps. Now, I am a big book black belt Al Anon.

Long before Al Anon came up with a 12 and 12, I have been using the AA 12 and 12. Having read the Al Anon 12 and 12 had not found it necessary to go to the Al Anon 12 and 12. That's just how it is. We've got several pieces of literature in Al Anon which are excellent, and then we've got some that I'm not real thrilled with, and that's one of them. We have another one, called blueprint for progress.

And for what it's designed to do, it's the most ineffective piece of literature I think I've ever seen. Now I made this, observation to the lady who wrote it. And at the time, I didn't know she had written it. She explained to me real quickly, she had. And I told her, I said, well, I still what I said stands.

That's how it is, you know. That's why I'm saying it's my experience, not necessarily yours. And I am not knocking any of our literature other than those 2 pieces. But for me, for me, and perhaps some of you are like me, somewhat, in that you have not been just a little garden variety, sweet little person that stayed home and martyred while her husband drank. That was not my deal.

I, as I'm gonna share with you, I have in this, step thing. Well, you never know where we're going, but there's a lot of things that I share when I'm working through the steps that I don't normally share. So you're gonna know me real well, chances are, by the time this is over. I want you to know that I do qualify for the online program. And the reason I say I qualify, there's a lot of people who qualify for the Al Anon program.

They are associated, have been affected by someone's alcoholism, but that doesn't make me an Al Anon. What makes me an Al Anon is the fact that I qualify for Al Anon. I attend Al Anon on a regular basis. I work the 12 steps of the program in my life, and I try to help other people whose lives have been affected by alcoholism. And to me, that's what an Al Anon is.

Now, I don't know if you're out there and I may walk on some toes, and if so, that's good. It might get you to thinking. But at home, we have a group of people that go with their husbands to open AA meetings and consider themselves alanized. Well, that's a member that's just a open meeting agenda as far as I'm concerned. And I despise to hear an alcoholic refer to his or her spouse or loved one as my little Al Anon when they don't go and they don't attend and they don't work.

That's one of those things that rubs me the wrong way and that brings out one of my character defects and it's sarcasm. And and I have to tell them about it. You know, I've got another thing. I've been born with a need to tell everybody everything I know all the time, and I know a whole bunch, and I talk a whole bunch. But I'm not a teacher and I'm not an authority.

I'm just gonna share with you this weekend how I work the steps in my life. Now, when I was born, I qualified for Al Anon. Just by the act of being born, nothing I did on my own, but my grand my mother's father, my grandfather, my maternal grandmother, 2, an aunt and 2 uncles, alcoholic on my mother's side of the family. On my father's side of the family, there was 1 alcoholic. So when I arrived, I qualified.

But did you know we didn't call them alcoholics back then? They were drunks. And I don't know that they even knew what the word alcoholism meant. But all my life, I knew what alcoholism was. It was what my grandpa was.

And he was an under the bridge, what most people think an alcoholic is. And when this man drank, he got violent, and he would cause a lot of hell at home when he drank. So therefore, anyone who went out and drank, came home, had a bunch of trouble, this was an alcoholic. Now it's important that you remember that because this is what an alcoholic was gonna be to me, and this was what I perceived alcoholism to be. What are we doing?

What's making this sweet, Peggy? Okay. You fix it. She'll be joining us for the next meeting. Get a beat with that and you got it made.

You ever notice the fixtures of the world? They're right there. Okay. The alcoholics in my life, like I say, my grandfather's drinking embarrassed and humiliated me when I came in contact with him. Now, I didn't come in contact with him that often because he was sort of one of those people that you never went to visit and you hope he never came to see you.

And he lived behind the seawall in an old bus, And this, was like an old school bus, and he had him a little hot plate in there, and that's how the man lived, and this was what alcoholism was to me. So as you see, I was a qualifier for Al Anon. But this drinking did not affect my life other than the few times that I was embarrassed when he would tell somebody we were related. Other than that, I didn't really care what he did or didn't do. I can remember a few times when the man came to our house and he wasn't drinking, and those were pleasant times.

He was a lot of fun. He could tell stories. His family came over in the covered wagons. He was in his eighties at that time. So I had mixed messages about it.

You know, it's funny how somebody can be neat at one time and then be a completely different person over here. But I wasn't around it very much, so it wasn't any big deal. Now, my so I have all those family members that are alcoholic. Now, the man that I married the first time became an alcoholic. Now, he didn't become or admit to alcoholism until after we were married.

That worried me. You know how they say he didn't drink till he met you? Well, he didn't well, he didn't drink till he left me. And how about that? I didn't know till years later that he became dry alcoholic.

And that explains a lot of the irritability, restlessness, and discontent in our home. I've always been a victim. I could find these people everywhere. I have a doctor who is an alcoholic, a dentist who is, a veterinarian is a close friend who is. I have all these people I seem to be a carrier, And I think the reason is it's my own addiction.

Now, my drug of choice is adrenaline. I'm addicted to excitement. And if I don't have some, I'll make some. That's the way it's been all my life as far back as I can remember. I will do anything to get attention.

I will even come to Bellevue and talk on the steps. Anyway, I wanna tell you today that those are some of my early observations about alcohol and what well, my personality, how I was going to be affected. You see, I noticed alcoholics got a lot of attention. And, you know, it's always exciting when you're around alcoholics. So this was gonna feed the sickness that was within me.

Now in order to work the steps, there are some musts. You know, I love it when people say there are no musts. Well, we got an expression at home, there's some damn well betters. And one of those for me is having a sponsor. That to me was one of my most important tools in working the step.

It's very difficult to do anything by yourself. And the premise that we use here in the fellowship is that you no longer have to do anything alone, and then we will try to work the steps alone. You ever notice that? How we fight getting a sponsor? I don't want anyone to tell me what to do.

I know everything. And then there's some smart aleck who say, your best thinking got you here. You don't like that. You know, that's an observation you don't care too much about, but that's the truth. Our best thinking and acting got us here.

So now my sponsor is like a tour guide. That's the way I think of her. Now I love to travel and I love to go on tours. And the reason I love to go on tours is that I have a certain amount of time and a certain amount of money that I wanna spend on a vacation. And in order to get the most for my time and my money, I want to know where to go and I want somebody to tell me where not to go.

All those places that you think they're gonna be wonderful and they'll say, you don't wanna go there because that sucks. You know? Alright. So your sponsor is the same way. This person knows how to work the steps.

They've been there. A tour guide's been there. They know the territory. They know all about it. They can give you this information, and they might can save you going off on these little side in detours that's gonna waste your time and money.

And that's how I was when I came to the program. I wanted to do this thing. At first, I wanted to do it by myself because my ego was such, but then after I tried that and it doesn't work. You know, you can go to meetings. I went to meetings for the 1st year.

I was in a meeting every night. Now that's 365 meetings in 365 days. That's pretty good. Didn't change one darn thing. I was going to meetings.

I didn't have time to do anything. I was going to meetings and I was getting that reinforcement every night at the meeting, but I wasn't changing anything. I was hearing about resentments and I'd say, yeah. And then I'd come home and I'd hear about stuff it in. I'd say, yeah.

And then I'd hear about all this stuff and I'd come home and I'd say, yeah, nothing changed because it wasn't doing anything. I was just going to the meetings. So, you know, it's just like going to the meetings doesn't help in itself any more than sitting in the garage makes you a car. You're gonna have to do something different. And so something different was working the steps.

And I could not understand, you know, they have them on the walls in everyone in the meeting rooms, you know, they have them. I could see where my husband needed to do those. In fact, I'd go with him to the open meetings occasionally, and I'd be there to to highlight the important things by giving him an elbow. Or I would come home and I would, record stuff, and then I would play it in the tape recorder at home so that he'd be sure and get it. And it never entered my mind that I might need this same kind of help.

I would see the things that he needed, but you see, I was perfect. Now I don't say that it takes everybody a year to recognize there's something wrong with them, you know. But when I came in, I did not we did not have step meetings for Al Anon in Arkansas. We didn't have them. It wasn't available.

And every once in a while in one of our regular meetings, somebody might mention or they'd read the steps, but nobody ever talked about working the steps. So it started confusion. It's just that stuff that you that you go through while you sit over there and you do your nails and whatever you get ready to tell them how bad it is at home. That's what the steps work for me. It wasn't a big deal.

Well, my sponsor pointed out to me that the steps were for me. And I said, but which one? I mean, I'm not I'm not powerless over alcohol. I can drink alcohol anytime I want to. And alcohol didn't make my life unmanageable.

And she just look at me, and I'd say, I've come to believe that a power greater than us there is no power greater than me. I can take care of myself. And if there's no power greater than you, why in the hell would you turn your will over to it? I just didn't make any sense at all. And I said, the only thing that makes any sense at all is I can't keep him from drinking and I'll carry that message.

And that's what I did. That's how I worked those 12 steps in the beginning. And my sponsor had to sit me down. Okay. So now you've got a sponsor that's gonna help you.

But the regular meetings are important because you do need to hear what everybody has to say, and that bothered me. Have you ever get in a meeting with somebody that's just never say never says anything you ever want to hear? We've got a girl at home, God love her, and I don't care what the question is. Her answer never fits the question. Y'all got them too.

I see that. Okay. It doesn't make any difference if you said, we're gonna talk on resentment. She'll say, I made a quilt last week. And when she gets through talking, she always says, now I don't know if that fits the question or not.

And I said, no, it never does, but we're always interested in what you have to say. I learned a lot from her. Oh, I learned a lot of patience and tolerance from that girl. These were the regular meetings. I think it's important to have your home group where you go to your regular meetings, where people get to know you.

You know, there's a lot of times you can flip from group to group to group to group and nobody ever really knows who you are. That's real neat. You know, you can just start to swarm in anytime you want to and tell them how wonderful you are and 3 things that I didn't have at all. Honesty, open mindedness, and willingness. I didn't know how to be honest.

I don't know if you've had that problem. I did not know how to be honest. I lied so much. I didn't know the truth. There was no way that I could put a finger on the truth.

And in being an open mind, I had an idea about everything and that's how it was, and I never changed my opinion. Yes. Because if I did, that meant I might have been wrong. And so you can't afford to be wrong, so you don't change your opinion. And that way, you're never wrong.

Can you relate to that? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

I had some other tools that I used along the way besides the sponsor You know You know, if you hurt bad enough, you'll be willing to move from where you're at to another place. And I found that in the beginning when I came into the program, I had tremendous pain tolerance. Thank God today I don't have that kind of pain tolerance. Yeah. That's the kind that keeps banging into the closed door saying, this time, it's different.

I'm gonna make it this time. I had that kind of tolerance. I could stand that till my face got flat. Okay. Now, I believe in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Now, it doesn't make any sense to me to take 12 steps out of the big book and not read the rest of the book Any more than it would be to read the 23rd Psalm and say, don't read the rest of the b I b l e. And in that book, and in the 12 and 12 are the exact directions, the specific directions. And if you are feel funny about that as an Al Anon, read the foreword to the 12 and 12. It tells you that it is a book for anyone who is trying to work the 12 steps. It doesn't say this book was written for alcoholics.

It said it's written for anyone who's trying to recover through the use of the 12 steps. Our Al Anon family groups, the Al Anon, faces alcoholism, the first edition, the dilemma of the alcoholic marriage helped me tremendously in communication. There was just a lot of things. We do have a lot of excellent, excellent alman material. But, I say the big book and the 12 and 12 probably changed my life more than anything.

If you read, especially on steps 410 in the 12 and 12, those two things had more impact on changing my life and making me aware of who I was and what I was doing and where I was going. Now, how did I get to Al Anon? I've got all this qualification and you've heard how I got in the Al Anon, what I did that first period of time, but how did I get there? I issued an ultimatum to my husband. That's how it started off.

I issued an ultimatum. My husband drank and he got in a lot of trouble when he drank. He got me in a lot of trouble when he drank. He would drink in places I'd get thrown out of. He would put himself in situations that it was necessary that I go to jail.

His behavior was just intolerable. And, you know, I got tired of taking the kind of abuse that I was putting out. And so I issued an ultimatum and I said to the old boy, I said, you know, you're gonna have to quit drinking. And he said, or what? And I said, or you're gonna have to get out.

Well, now this terrorized him because I was working and he wasn't. I was providing him money to drink on. You know what I mean? I was taking care of the man, let's face it. And so it terrorized him to know that I was beginning to cut off all these resources.

Now, I had threatened this many times, but you know how there comes the day that you really mean what you say? And they seem to know and sense that this is the day. And so he made this statement, I'm sick. And I said, that's right. You're sick.

And he said, I don't know why I do what I do. And I said, I don't either. And he said, but, there's just something that comes over me. I don't go out to get drunk. And I said, well, we'll take you to the doctor and find out what's wrong.

Now, we went to the doctor and the doctor found out what was wrong with me because I've been coming to him for a long time with a list of complaints. And, he would say, is there everything alright out there on your job? And I'd say, yes. And he'd say, how about home? Fine.

You know that little white knuckle thin lip? Fine. So now he knew there was a drinking problem in our home because that's how my husband expressed it. He said, I have a slight drinking problem. And the doctor said, well, perhaps you may be an alcoholic.

He said, I don't know. All I know is that if you have a drinking problem, there's nothing I can do about it. You should go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And my husband was appalled and he said, I'm not an alcoholic. And I said, that's right, he's not.

I mean, he didn't drink like my mother's family drank. He was not an alcoholic. But he had some friends who had gotten a prescription for some little pills, and they were called Anabuse. And my husband said, that's what I want. All my friends are taking Anabuse.

Didn't he have lovely friends? So I went home and what I heard the doctor say was, here is a pill that if he takes it, he can't drink. Now that's not what the man said. But, you know, we hear what we wanna hear, we see what we wanna see, and this is what I heard and saw. So I went home with my little prescription for Antabuse, and I got it filled, and I made sure that he got a pill every morning.

Now I had high blood pressure. We have an epileptic dog, and JD was on the pill. Every morning in a rush, I can't guarantee you who got what, but everybody got a pill. Now, what have I been saying all these long years of alcoholic drinking? If he'll quit drinking, I'll be okay.

And he had, and I wasn't. Now, that's a bummer. No matter how you look at it, that is a bummer. But it's still his fault. I was not ready to become responsible for my own actions at that point, So everything I was always a victim, and there was always someone or someone else to blame.

Before JD, it was that boy I was living with. Before that, when it was that husband. Before that, it was my mother. Before that, there's always been someone in my life that's made my life miserable, I thought. And I would blame these people all my life.

So now here's JD, and he's not drinking, but my life is miserable because we are suffering. He's suffering from alcoholism, untreated alcoholism. I'm suffering from alanonism, untreated alanonism. And we're having this happy little home. Now a little typical scene in our happy little home is I come in from work, and he's working now.

You know, he has an excuse. He can go to work now, and I took him to work. Not that I didn't trust him, but I gave him a dime for emergency phone call, And I would go pick him up from work and bring him home, and I would say, honey, what would you like for dinner? And he would say, anything. I'd say, how about fried chicken?

No. I don't want fried chicken. Oh, what do you want? Anything. Well, how about spaghetti?

I hate spaghetti. Well, what do you want? Anything. So I would fix anything and he would look at it and he'd say, I'm not eating that. And I'd say, well, you have a choice.

See, even before Al Anon, I knew there were choices. I said, you have a choice, you can eat it or wear it. Sometimes he chose to wear it. It. He would go in to get dressed and he would say, what do you want me to wear?

And I'd say, I don't care. He'd say, lay me out something. I would. He'd say, I'm not wearing that. What do you mean you're not wearing?

I don't like that. Well, then you pick it out. You know I can't pick out things. Well, what do you wanna wear? I don't know.

Now, these are just little things, but these are the little things that drive you insane. These are this little happy time that you're at home. See, he's not drinking. When he was drinking, we didn't have these problems. He never ate.

And he escaped and dressed before I got home. So these were problems that we didn't have. Wasn't sobriety wonderful? He was stark raving sober. We began to play this little game, it's called war.

Whoever dies, the other one wins. It seemed like he was put on earth just like my mother to make my life miserable. I hated him. I absolutely hated him because it wasn't okay. My life was not okay, and it's his fault.

So then I decided, you know, if it's not his drinking, it just must be him. Well, I'll get rid of him. Now divorce was not an option. I'd been married before. I'd had a mistaken marriage.

You know, if you pick one wrong guy, everybody's entitled to a mistake. But if you have another and there's something wrong, you know, you know, it might look like something's wrong with your picker. And nobody wants a broken picker. So I thought, you know, it would be nice instead of being a divorcee, that's such a an x rated word, you know, and all your friends knock on you when you're a divorcee. And so I thought maybe if you a widow sounded good.

So maybe if he'd just die. He wasn't dying fast enough. I'm watching for signs and he'd say, Oh, I'm dying. And I And he'd wake up. So I began to dream about his dying.

It was so wonderful he was going to die. Now, I never planned the funeral. I just got off on the homicide. Now there had been a point in my life back before he ever entered it, I considered suicide very seriously. Obviously, I didn't do very well with it.

But homicide sounded like a better deal. And so I began to think of ways to kill him, and it was not necessarily killing him in my mind, it was ways for him to die. And it was okay for him to die because if you were living like I was living, you would understand. If you were on a jury, how in the world would you convict a poor, sweet thing like me when I would tell you of this terrible way I'm living about the spaghetti and about the socks and the shoes? There's no way that you would ever ever say that there was anything wrong with me having him removed.

And so I began to think about how to remove him. And my favorite was take an ice pick, stab him in the neck, and watch him drip. Doesn't that just give you goosebumps? I loved it. Then there was the back over him of the car routine.

You always keep good tires on the car. You wanna leave those little marks so you can leave your you know, the idea of of, the police catching you and finding I mean, I was going to tell them, I did it. I did it. It was like I was gonna get the gold medal at the Olympics. I did it.

And then I read in the newspaper at home where a woman had killed her husband under similar circumstances and they put her away. And I thought, what a rotten thing to do. And so now I began to get a little sicker. And I said, you know, it has to be the perfect crime now. And that left out all those good ones because you gotta be a little sneaky about it now.

And I thought, you know, he's gonna drink sooner or later. He always does. See, intuitively, I knew that this was not gonna work. And I said to myself, what we need to do is, if a drunk were to pass out and drowned in the bathtub, who would know? I still think it worked.

I've always liked that one. It sounds good to me sometimes even today. And I begin to think on that. I begin to think about that and I begin to wait. Now, I have infinite patience when it comes to waiting for revenge.

I've never had any problem with that. I believe in slow premeditated revenge. I can wait forever. And I knew that sooner or later, he was gonna drink again and I could put the plan into practice. I knew it was going to happen.

And sure enough, the year to the week that he quit drinking, JD got drunk. And we had ice and snow on the ground. And lo and behold, when he came in, he wiped out our hitch imposed horse, which was cast iron at the end of the drive. He came fleeing across the yard, bounced into the redbud tree, and then hit the side of the house. And I thought, gosh, he lost control on the ice and snow.

No. He opened that truck door and he poured out. And I'd seen that too many times and I knew he was drunk. And I looked out my window and I said, I'll kill that SOB if it's the last thing I ever do. Now the significance of this is I don't know about you, but you see the longer I think on something and the longer I meditate on something, the more likely I am to act upon what I've been thinking.

So here I was, JD came through the door. We had a little ritual we used to play when he'd come through the door. He would stand in the door and he'd say, hey, bitch. And I'd say, have you been drinking? The most brilliant statement in the world.

And he would say, no, or only 2. Only 2. When I ask you or hear anybody talk about they had 6 drinks, I know they're not alcoholic. No alcoholic has ever admitted to more than 2. So we didn't play this little game this time.

When he opened the door, I just hit him because that's what always happened before. I would get mad and hit him. And when he fell, he hit the coffee table and it knocked him out. So I dragged him across our floor in the living room, down the hall, into the bathroom, and I took his clothes off of him. I ran the bathtub full of water, and I put him in, and I held him under until the bubbles quit coming.

Because I hated him and I wanted him dead. Until the bubbles quit coming because I hated him and I wanted him dead. And then this voice came inside my head and it said, you can't do this. Look at what you're doing. And I picked him up by the hair of the head and I said, the hell I can't.

And I put him back down again. And then the voice came back and it said, you're committing murder. You're taking the life of someone you once loved, and that like to have scared me to death. You see, I didn't think up until that moment, that was the first moment that the idea that what I was doing was premeditated murder. That was the first realization, the moment of sanity in a long period of mental illness leading up to that point, not realizing I was getting that emotionally sick.

And fortunately, I was able to jerk him out of the tub, and I had worked for the Red Cross years before and I resuscitated him. Now you'd say this got her to Al Anon. No. No. It takes what it takes.

That got him day 8. Now, that act in itself did not, but he liked to die over that particular drunk. He had alcoholic poisoning. I didn't even know what it was. All I know was I heard him scream and beg for help and what have you, and I wouldn't even go in and see about him.

And he liked the hemorrhage to death. But I came home from work. Ain't it funny how I could justify? Because justification and rationalization were differents of mine. And I could sit there and I could look at that situation, which I did for several hours.

I rocked in my chair in the living room and thought about what had just happened. And I said, you know, if he hadn't got drunk, I wouldn't had to do that. And you see, that was a lie because I'd been planning that for a long time, but I couldn't look at that. So you lie to yourself and you swallow down and you put it in a frame where you can stand to live with it. And that's why I had done things that were unacceptable all my life.

Things that I was ashamed of, things that I was afraid of, things that I had done, thoughts, I'd put them back and say, oh, well, if you were in this situation, you'd done this too, and it's okay. And that's how I went. But when JD was able to come out of that room again, I came home from work and I saw him at our bar and he was shaking. He was trying to drink a cup of coffee and he was shaking so hard he was not having much success. And he said, would you call Alcoholics Anonymous for me?

I must be an alcoholic. And that was the beginning of his recovery. Now I was not real thrilled. I took him to his 1st AA meeting, and by the way, it was only 6 blocks from our house, and it was an hour later from the time I called that night. They just happened to be having their once a week meeting at that time back then.

But anyway, I went there and I was appalled about having to go in a room with a group of drunks. God, can you believe that? You know, it's bad enough to have 1 in the house, but they have to go in a whole room with it. And when I got there, they were really weird people too, I'll tell you. They didn't even dress like drunks were supposed to dress.

I didn't see one of them that looked like grandpa, except there was this one guy that had a sweater on that looked like a colander. It had so many little burnt holes all over it. You know? And that, of course, had to be the one that JD Holm did on and asked to be his sponsor. Now, Durwood looked worse than grandpa did when we put him away.

I was not really impressed. And they told me that night there was Al Anon for me. And I looked at them and I said, what? They said, we have Al Anon. It's for you.

And I said, there's nothing wrong with me. And I was very sincere, and I was just very offended that they should they should suggest there was something wrong with me. But they gave me some literature, which I paid no attention to whatsoever. I wouldn't read that trash, but I didn't throw it away. And I put it in my desk at home, and JD started going to those meetings.

Now that's terrible. He was gone more now than he was when he drank. I didn't like it. He was out late and he would say they were talking. I knew what he's talking about.

Yeah. I knew. He's telling everything I'd ever done to him. He's about there blowing his guts. I knew.

I knew. I didn't wanna hear that. And then one night, he didn't come home. Getting lighter and this girl had given me a card, just had little name, said, my name's Arlene. If you ever need to talk, give me a call, and her phone number.

And I picked up that and I called her that night, and I said, Him and that old reprobate that he calls a sponsor, they're both out drunk. I know they are. And she said, no, they're probably not. And when he came in, he told me they'd been playing moon. Now that worried me.

Now if y'all don't have moon up here, it's a domino game. But what I thought mooning was, I thought, my god. And at his age, But anyway, all of this got me so frustrated that JD came home and made the best announcement he could have made in a 100 years, and that was, guess what? I got fired today, And I couldn't believe it. What do you mean you got fired?

You worked 1 or 2 days a week drunk for 10 years. You've been working every day. They told me I'm fired. Well, I'll find out why. So I called his boss and and demanded to know why they'd hit fired my husband.

And he told me that I didn't work there and it wasn't any of my business and hung up. How rude. Now I didn't want y'all to get the idea I was a manager and controller, that I had any idea what was going on. But this seemed to be the last straw for me because it was so threatening. All of a sudden now, that job that JD had had where he'd worked 1 or 2 days a week, I hadn't that was not that much income, but it was the idea there was none, and this frightened me.

And so I went to my first alanine meeting, and I wanted to know how to manage when there's nothing left to manage. That's what I wanted to know. And I wanted to know, how do you keep an alcoholic sober? That's all I wanted to know. And, you know, they couldn't help me at all.

That was so disgusting. They said, we don't know. And that's depressing when you go and you're I mean, all you got is and they should know, my god, they're married to them. They ought to know this. And I looked at them and said, what do you mean you don't know?

And they said, we just don't. And so that's how I got to alanine. Now that's a depressing way to have to get to alanine. But did you know I've never met anybody that when everything was going wonderful in their life that they just happened to notice Al Anon ad in the paper, were curious about what was going on and decide to trip in. I've never known one to come like that, but I have seen a lot that come like me because there's nothing wrong with you.

A lot of us seem to come like that, that there's nothing wrong with us. Okay. Blaming. I wanna talk just a minute about blaming because that has a lot to do with step 1 for me, the blaming. If it's your fault, I've not got any hope at all.

There's no hope because I'm powerless over you. But if it's my fault, I got hope because I can change what I'm doing to me. And it took me a long time to learn that principle as the first step. That blaming you all day long does not change one thing for me. And see, all my life, I'd blame people.

If you hadn't done this, and if you hadn't done that, and if you hadn't done this, or you hadn't done that, I'd be okay. And that's not the truth. The truth is how I react to what you do and don't do. It's what I do in relationship to what you're doing or not doing. So the blaming was one of the things that I had to give up, and I wasn't ready at first.

I fought this program with every fiber of my being. I don't know if you've any of the rest of you are fighters out there. If you just came in and said, lay the Al Anon sheet upon me, I'm ready to go. I fought it, and I would tell them why it wouldn't work. My sponsor had lots of exercises for me to do that I said, that didn't make any sense.

I said, that's not logical. She says, you're not either. She told me that she wanted to start my day off. She wanted me to get up, go into my bathroom, look in my mirror and say, Good morning, Mary Pearl. There's nothing gonna happen to you today that we can't get out of.

Love god. Ain't that stupid? Is that stupid or what? And I told her, I said, I feel like a fool doing that. She said, better feel like one to act like one.

She was a very cruel person. She had me doing lots of little things. I had little signs around the house. She made me put all these dumb little signs. You don't have to tell him what to do.

I said, What do you mean I don't have to tell him what to do? Who will tell him? She said, God will tell him. I hate that. I wanted to tell him what to do.

If I didn't tell him what to do, he didn't know what to do. And that was the truth. I told him so long what to do, he really didn't know what to do. You know, our literature says that when we do stuff for people, we make their failure to do it permanent, and that's what I've done. He has a rotten sense of direction.

Now I don't know if he always had that, but I always pointed it out to him that you're going the wrong way. And I get him so nervous that when even if he was started off the right way, he'd get confused and change it and he end up going the wrong way. And I'd say, see there, you're going the wrong way. He told me, he said, I can't drive with you in the car. I said, well, what do you mean?

He said, you won't shut up. Well, we'll take 2 cars and then I'd get lost. When he was drinking, I was telling him about driving. I said, I'll drive, you're drunk. You ain't got enough sense to drive.

And I'm giving him this little sermonette while I ate the back end of a Toyota. And then I left the scene of the accident. I left to go find the telephone. He's out wandering around with his bottle, you know. And the police came and they tried to arrest me for drunken driving because they found alcohol in the car.

Things like that were everyday occurrences in my life. Not that there was anything wrong with me. Okay. Could you say my life was unmanageable? I'll tell you about your life being unmanageable.

I didn't think my life was. Do you know what my job was? I was a manager. I worked at an insurance, company, the largest insurance legal reserve company in Arkansas, and I was in charge of a whole department, the sales force for god's sake. And so I gave everybody their little marching You know You know, he didn't like the manager.

So it was real hard for me to see that my life was unmanageable when I was paid well-to-do what I did and I did what I did well. Naturally, I left the image. But some of the unmanageability in my life was not necessarily the little acts of things that I did that sort of screwed up, but my unmanageability came from thinking. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a strange way that I think, you know, I'll be laying there in bed. You go to bed at night, most people go in, lay down, go sleep.

I didn't. I'd go in, lay down, not think. I'd go in, lay down, not think. And I plan tomorrow. Everything that was gonna happen, I was gonna say, they were gonna say, he was gonna do, I was gonna do, we weren't gonna this, we weren't gonna that, and then I'd get up and ain't nobody knew the plan but me.