Don’t Drink and Don’t Die

So, I’m still here, at the happiest place on Earth. Today we did MGM for the second time. Having six day passes, we need to repeat two parks. The Magic Kingdom, the hands down favorite, we saved for tomorrow. I should say this is all at the whim of my daughter, Erika. This is her present, and so we go with what she decides.

This vacation is very difficult at times. Today was another hard day, and for me again I think the ultimate factor is the heat. I hate to say I’m just a heat wimp who can’t take it so please don’t take me south in the summer. But maybe that’s what I am. I hear others around me complaining about the heat a lot. I don’t know how close they feel to the edge. I’ve even thought that maybe I’m just being a baby, that everyone feels like death is not a bad option to escape the heat, and they are just soldiering through. I don’t know.

In any case, today most of my difficult moments involved my wife, Carole. As I’m writing this, it is 11:35 at night, so in less than half an hour it will be our 11th anniversary. We count that anniversary as the day we met. That may not be fair in comparing the length of our relationship to straight couples who met and married on different days. Hopefully they did that. It is legal, I believe, for straight people to marry strangers. But we won’t go there.

In our case, we didn’t rush our ceremony, mostly because it isn’t legal. I had to get divorced. I had been separated for seven years, so a divorce was a formality, but it took time. Then Carole’s father was dying, and it wasn’t clear when that would happen. We ended up having a ceremony in church in August, 2005. So we have two anniversaries.

We count the day we met as our anniversary. Lots of gay couples do. I’m sure that if we were straight and of opposite genders, we would say something like we met in 1997, moved in together in 1998, and got married in 2005. Tomorrow we will count it as our eleventh anniversary.

We know three lesbian couples who have been together longer than we have. Every other lesbian couple we know have been a couple for a shorter time than eleven years. We know lots of straight couples, including lots of family members, who have been together longer. These are mostly our aunts and uncles, people like that. I’m afraid those couples are dwindling, though.

Carole has been step-mother/other-mother to my children for all that time. Much longer than their bio father had anything to do with them. My son, Nicholas, has had her as a parent for more than half his life. Carole has lived with them since they were 12 and 10, and at times it has been very, very difficult.

Carole and I are opposite in many ways. We may not seem like a likely couple. We met on the internet, at a gay AA meeting. Our first communications were online, and so we fell in love at first through writing.

This has good and bad aspects, and since we’re together, I think we might as well concentrate on the good. In writing, we fell in love with no physical aspects involved. We didn’t know what the other looked like. Before we met, we talked on the phone and exchanged photographs. This was in the days before digital cameras and fast internet. The context of our communication was at first AA. I was 11 then 12 years sober. She was no years than one year sober. AA was the foundation of my life. When we finally did commit to one another, I told her that she had to continue in AA in order to be with me. It was a non-negotiable. It’s that important.

So the ways we are different. She’s an extrovert who loves to meet people, I’m an introvert who hates to meet people. She likes to dance and sing, I won’t dance or sing. She likes to watch and play sports, I don’t like to watch and I won’t play. She likes vacation, I don’t. She likes to talk things over right away and until they are resolved. I like to deny and ignore the fact that something is wrong, and hope it will go away.

Our similarities are more important, though. Beginning with AA and all that entails, it is awesome to be in a relationship with someone who is trying to work the same program. We speak that same language in that respect. Our politics are similar too, and that’s very important to me. I have a hard enough time with friends who disagree with my politics, I can’t imagine my partner disagreeing. To a certain extent we share spiritual beliefs enough to belong to the same church. She participates at a much higher level than I do, but we can belong together and attend together.

As I’m writing this, midnight has passed, and we’ve been together for eleven years. Just like long time sobriety, it causes me to wonder from time to time what we have that has enabled us to make it this far when so many other fail to do so. It is, honestly, often, wonderful to be with her, very much like at the beginning. Most of the time it’s just comfortable and at times it’s very difficult. I’ll give most of the credit for keeping us together to her. If something is wrong, she won’t ignore it or deny it, like I probably would do until it was too late. She makes sure we work on it, and for my part, I usually cooperate with the work eventually. I think we both understand that the intoxicating, falling in love feeling doesn’t last. I accept that more than she does.

Speaking just for myself, I love the comfort of the history we share as it gets longer and longer. At Disney, people travel for the most part in families, and I wouldn’t trade mine. Sometimes I actually fear what we have as we become more and more comfortable, because that would make it more unbearable (and I do know that isn’t a correct construction as things are unbearable or they are not, there aren’t degrees) for it to end, which it will have to, at least by death. I look at old couples sometimes and wonder how long they’ve been together and if we will make it that long. I want her to be the one I hobble into church with, the one I take the grandchildren to Disney with. I can look at those old couples (and really for all I know they just got together last week) and I picture a nice new phase of life as a couple.

We actually are in a transition to a new phase as the kids finish college. I know some couples fear this and fall apart when it happens. I’m looking forward to it. As much as I have loved actively mothering these two for all these year, the time coming of simple couplehood will be something we haven’t experienced yet. I’m so glad that we get to do it with all of that mostly nice history behind us.

It’s almost one in the morning, but I want to get a few notes about today down. Today was one of the worst days I’ve had in a long time during which no major catastrophes occurred. Meaning it was all small or temporary stuff, but there was so much of it, at one point I really couldn’t cope.

I’ll give my daughter a pseudonym for the blog and call her Erika. She’s 22, just graduated from college, and it is in honor of that event that we are at Disney for six days.

ARG! I had a long post written and the computer ate it and only saved the above. I’ll take it as a sign that I should be more concise.

Now it’s 9:30 in the morning after the aforementioned bad day. The main factor in the bad day was the heat. I think I got just about to where I couldn’t take it anymore. During the height of the heat, the main activity at Epcot was shopping. I really hate shopping. Much of this Disney vacation involves shopping after shopping after shopping after shopping. Also, Erika bought a beer. This after I asked her not to, and thought for a brief and happy moment that she wouldn’t, just because I asked her not to.  We’ve also been together 24/7 for six days now.  And our feet hurt.  And I don’t think I’ve eaten a vegetable since last Thursday.

But like I said, the main factor was the heat. Looking back, I probably should have parked it in a restaurant with a soda until the hottest part was over. It’s really difficult. I don’t want to ruin everyone’s time. I don’t want to pass out. Physically I feel I’m at the edge. I tried just moving along with everyone, but my wife was too solicitous in trying to help me and she asked too many questions, offered to do whatever I wanted to do, then when I stated what that was, she said she was going off on her own. So all in all, not a good few hours. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. I would have rather been almost anywhere at that time than on my Disney vacation. And oh yes, all this in the context of I really don’t even like vacation.

Also, all this was in the context of the day that Hillary Clinton was probably really done. It brings tears to my throat now, when I think about it, though it has been a long time in coming. My oldtimer skills and learning have told me from the start that she was a long shot. We (Democrats) have an awesome candidate who was unimaginable for me four years ago. We (my family, especially my wife) have been part of an amazing historical event. She (Hillary) did more than I thought possible by a female. We (Democrats and in my opinion Americans) have to get behind Obama and do everything we can to help him win.

I’m going to try and muster all my will power and strength - I was about to write I will muster them to have a good day. But just writing the words, will power and strength, I realized right away what my error is. My will power and strength have to be turned to the direction of letting go and letting God.

It’s Mother’s Day, and my mother and daughter are here.  My daughter graduated from college yesterday, which is why my mother is here.  My daughter hasn’t looked for nor found a job yet, which is why she is here.  We’re going to Disney as a graduation present for my daughter at the end of the month.  She’s worked at one or more jobs since she was about 15, sometimes against my will, so I’m not terribly worried about her not looking for work yet.  She also had the option of going straight to grad school, which she decided not to do.  I’ll guess we’ll see.  This isn’t much of a problem except for the blasted American dilemma of health insurance.  As of June 1, she’ll be on Cobra.  I’m grateful it’s an option and one we can afford for now.  I’m anxious that there’s nothing more permanent or doable for the long term in place.  And my son will hopefully be in the same boat two years from now, so the Cobra funds may be needed then.  Yuck.

Anyway, after graduation my wife and I were able to make it to our home group AA meeting.  The topic was anger, and at first I thought I’m really not very angry, rather I’m on a bit of a pink cloud from the graduation.  As I thought about it though, I realized that I had had two flare ups of anger over the past two days.  One involved my wife, and one my wife and mother.  They were quick, insignificant flare ups, and they were brought on by the stress of the situation - trying to balance the wants and needs of all the people involved in the graduation.  Lots of the group looked to me to ultimately make decisions about where we went and when and how.  I was already stressed by leaving my dog (long story) and my utter hatred of spontaneity.  Things went better when I told them to tell me where to be when, and to do their best to take care of the dog.  My daughter ultimately decided what to do after the ceremony (there’s a concept, having the graduate decide) and I was able to go along and be pleasant and try to push my dog anxiety away.

So at the meeting I was able to say that although these anger issues were there that day, they weren’t serious.  They didn’t threaten the relationships and all the relationships are pretty good.

At the diner after the meeting, to which my wife and son went with some people from the meeting, my wife told us how my mother had put me down during their car ride home from the ceremony.  This isn’t surprising or new.  I’m an only child.  I’m not the most stellar specimen you’ve ever seen.  I make plenty of mistakes, I’m average or below average in most ways.  My mother has always put me down.  Often, to others, she’ll talk me up.  But not to me or the people close to me.  She’s always liked my friends better than she’s liked me.  She likes my wife better than she likes me.  She likes my kids better.

What she told my wife about my faults was fundamental and cutting.  She criticized the way I have mothered my daughter, and she blamed my daughter’s mental health issues on me.

Without getting into it too much, through the years of my daughter’s struggles I have taken her to doctors and therapists a-plenty.  I have always asked them to please let me know if there was anything I could do better, do differently, stop doing or start doing.  I am not mother of the year.  I have never been. But …….. I really feel I’ve done a much better job than my mother.  She has always criticized me.  In all these years I have not answered her with a recitation of her own sins and lacks.  I haven’t yet.

So often I hear people say that their parents did the best they could with what they knew or had at the time.  I don’t believe it.  I wanted my children and made them number one in my life.  Still I could have done better.  And so often real parents were bad, or wrong, or careless or dangerous.  I don’t know why pop psychology says we must love and forgive.  Resentment against my parents occupies hardly any of my mental energy, but it’s there, and I don’t see how getting over it or denying it would help any.

At the diner, my son said he knows he had never been physically hurt by me, and I’m very grateful that that is his picture.  And not to derail this, the accusations are not that I was ever physically punishing or cruel.  Even the example that my mother has at times shown my children, her grandchildren, has been very bad, and I haven’t said anything.

The AA program only goes so far in helping us parent, I think.  But the legacy of behavior I have shown my children and given my children is so far superior to what I was given.  Because of AA.  My son said moderation would be the best example to give your children regarding alcohol, better than abstinence.  I told him that I cannot show moderation, and my example may actually change his life one day.

As I had this conversation with him and heard what my mother had to say about me, and considered what she has shown me through the years, I am filled with gratitude for the program, for my children, for the power to break away from that diseased and sick example.  My son, at 20, and my daughter, at 22, are so much healthier than I was at their ages.  I was actually getting sober at 22, having spent six years in a drunken hell.  I didn’t graduate on time, due to drinking.  I stopped drinking then and I started having them then and I feel that their health and happiness have been made possible by AA.

There must be something to this stuff, because I don’t want to write it and I don’t want to remember.  I picture who the people are who know me and read this and I imagine what they will think.  It’s all terribly silly.  It’s nothing I wouldn’t say at a meeting or to a close friend.

The first one is not as awful as the second.  My birthday party in I think third grade was a barbecue in the backyard.  Before my father died, he had grilled famous ribs for my birthday and other times.  My birthday falls around Memorial Day.  Maybe they were trying to keep a little of that atmosphere, but when he was alive, my parties involved relatives who wanted to get together and gab.  Third graders who spent all day with each other were not so keen to do that.

I have pictures of this party and I’m wearing outrageously floral, unfortunate pants.  Some of the girls are wearing ponchos, which were fashionable at that time.  My mother’s side of my family did attend.  My father’s did not.  The trauma for me involves the fact that beyond eating, there were no planned activities.  For a bunch of eight year olds.

Now I’ve raised my own children beyond the age of kiddie parties and believe me I understand that are a truly awful duty of parenting.  If I had my life to live over again, we would have had a no party policy, as I know some others had.  In my experience with these things, there are bound to be awful moments, if not an awful whole thing.  But why my mother didn’t plan any activities is beyond me.  I guess she probably didn’t think it through, and realize that eight year olds just don’t like food and each other enough to spend a few hours with food, each other, and nothing else.

So the memory there is more the memory of the feeling that everyone was dying of boredom.  My mother’s sister, my aunt, did pull it out of the awful by quickly devising a scavenger hunt.  The kids then ran around the neighborhood looking for ……. stuff.  Imagine doing that today?  Not likely.

The other awful party memory involves my birthday in fifth or sixth grade, or I may have combined them in my memory.  This was the time of the sleep over, and it was also a time when I had friends.  Two awful things.  Maybe three.  One was playing some kind of stripping game, in sleeping bags, of course, and threatening to (I hope we didn’t actually do it) deprive one of the girls of her sleeping bag.  I hope she’s over the trauma, since clearly I am not.  The other was a girl that we (it was my party, I should take total responsibility) invited just to pick on.  How awful.  Memories like this fill me with fear for people in general.  I’m a pacifist, as peace loving as I can be, but I participated in this.  I remember taking her glasses.  I know we did other stuff as well.

The third disturbing memory of the two parties during fifth and sixth grade may actually tie into my loss of those friends, though probably not.  The first year my mother’s husband totally lost his cool about the noise all night.  The next year, either my mother had told him to cool it, or he spent the night elsewhere, but he didn’t complain and I yelled at my friends all night to be quiet.

I’ll try to make some sense of this later, in terms of drinking, sobriety, and oldtimerishness.  Now I’m going to go somewhere to cry!

So children were what I wanted most out of life. After six years of drinking and failing in AA, I began a sobriety that would stick. I met a man who was nice enough. I got married to him, and I had two children with him. I made these decisions in sobriety, knowing and understanding as much as I could at the age of 21. In many ways, and in most ways, I did this as a young but responsible person. I chose the man and he chose me, no one was tricked or pressured into anything. I knew and he knew that our actions might result in children. The children were wanted and planned for. I took my responsibilities seriously and did not drink or take any drugs at all while I was pregnant. I quit smoking at that time too. I read, talked to people, and gave great thought to the issues of pregnancy, childbirth, infancy, babyhood, toddlerhood, preschoolerhood. I approached those children as the most important job of my life, as I feel all children should be approached.

These decisions were made possible by sobriety and the AA program. When I was drinking, I did take one half assed chance of getting pregnant in bad circumstances. Had I not stopped drinking, and had by some miracle lived, I can’t imagine what kind of life I would have given any children I had. Every horrifying image I can conjur springs to mind if I try to find what that might have looked like.

I had a friend in AA who had a baby a year before I did. She married a nice guy in AA, and many times I had felt jealousy over the way her life was turning out. The nice guy she married had family, property and roots in our home town. They went on to have four children, and to live where I would have wanted to live. One day after I had moved back to our home town (and was renting a very expensive, very small house there), I was taking my kids to day care because I was working on my master’s and had to be at school early. I felt very bad about this situation. It was not what I wanted for my kids or myself. There came the husband of the situation I had described. I asked mutual friends about him and his wife, their four kids and my dream house and dream life.

The dream house was falling down. It was trashy and neglected. Their marriage was over but they were still together because she was incapable of caring for herself or the children. She had gone back to drinking and taking drugs, and had actually been arrested and been in jail for something drug related. She wasn’t working, but the four kids were in day care anyway because she couldn’t care for them. She and he had stopped going to meetings.

One of the keys to my long sobriety has been paying attention to these alternate routes that lead to nowhere. My life had not turned out the way I had wanted or expected. I got some of what I wanted, but really, not much (not much in number of things, that is - the actual things, the children, could not be quantified). From here I can see that never stopping meetings, never stopping AA, made it possible for me to get through in one piece, and to maybe actually have my children benefit from my alcoholism rather than suffer because of it.

Through the years I’ve known many people who have had sobriety babies. I have also known people to have babies in active alcoholism, or to relapse at some point in the early years. There is no question in my mind that sobriety babies are blessed in many ways. Their legacy is one of recovery, and the alternate route these children don’t have to travel is one that no child should have to know.

Of all the blessings of sobriety, my children have got to be the biggest, best, and most important. If, as a young adult, I had been told I could have only one thing in life, I would have chosen to have children. I always wanted them. My ideal fantasy life would have been to be a stay home mother of around four. Complications…. My only child status has much to do with this. I have always hated being an only child. I still do. It’s much more common now, and that must make it easier, but I still think it sucks as I am the only child of my mother still. There’s no one to share her with me, and if she becomes someone to be taken care of, that will be all on me. There’s no one who shared my growing up experience and I’m alone with many of my memories. Of course I understand that many people have siblings who are a negative presence in their lives, or worse. The siblings I mourn are the idealized, Brady Bunch siblings but also the average and special siblings that many people have, appreciate and enjoy.

There’s lots of infertility in my family, and one reason I’m an only child may be because my mother couldn’t have any more. I think she may have tried with my father and then with her second husband. When she was around 40 she was diagnosed with endometriosis and she had a hysterectomy. Her sister, my aunt, was never able to have children. She speculates that the endometriosis prevented my mother from having more. That aunt adopted two children. Their other sister, my other aunt, neither had children nor did she adopt. Her husband is, to say the least, a piece of work. I remember my grandmother saying it’s best they didn’t have any, since he’s such a nut. I don’t know if they tried to have one or not. I would guess they did, but I don’t know. My grandmother, their mother, had four children, with lots of miscarriages and a premature baby who died after a few days.

All of that factored into my desire to have children as soon as possible once I was an adult. I felt I had to finish college before having a baby, and I did that. I would have liked to have owned a house, but not badly enough to wait to do it. I got sober in May of 1984. I met my kids’ father around that time. I graduated in August, got engaged in September, married and pregnant in December, and my daughter was born in September of 1985. This is not recommended, but I had been going to meetings for five or six years at that time, so I wasn’t really new.

Many of those details will fit better in “my story.” For the purpose of this topic, I’ll say that I think being pregnant had much to do with my ability to stay sober this time. I DO NOT recommend that, and I realize that many, tragically many pregnant women are not able to stay sober even though they are pregnant. And of course the last time I was pregnant was 21 years ago, so it did not keep me sober.

I remember the frightening thought that I HAD TO stay sober at that time. My drinking had been so bad, and I had tried so many times to moderate, that I knew then the baby had a good possibility of being damaged or killed by my drinking. Still, that thought was fleeting. I don’t even remember ever considering drinking for a moment with the second.

And so, babies, toddlers, children. Many of the tenets of AA thinking do not fit or work with your own children. We do not “live and let live,” “let go and let God,” “take our own inventory.” We guide, teach, punish, reward, shape, control, and socialize our own. Or try to.

During my kids’ early years, I moved many times, living in each place for usually a year or less. That was difficult, and I at first moved far away, so the only family support I could get was over the phone. I never stopped going to meetings, and even with giving birth, I don’t think I stayed away from meetings for an entire week until recently, actually. I took my daughter with me until my son was born, then I left her with her father, and later a babysitter for them both, in order go to meetings.

I could list endless awfulness that having an active alcoholic parent brings that thankfully my kids didn’t experience. I remember a particular sermon in church when the pastor asked what kind of legacy we had been left, as well as what we were leaving for our children. I thought of my experiences with my drunken father and the fact that my kids have never been endangered by my drinking. I still of think of that often, with so much gratitude there aren’t words. We had moments when their wellbeing was threatened, but not by that. At times I find this difficult to share at meetings because so many people have suffered the consequences of drinking around their children and grandchildren. I often tell young people that this experience makes all that goes with sobriety well worth it.

I care in a sense about every person who walks through the doors of an AA meeting seeking peace. I take it seriously that “when anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA to always be there.” I wish them all well. I also wish I could give them what I have. That’s what I try to do, in a sense, when I talk to people in the program. What I have is mostly good, and want to share it.

There are special people from time to time who I care about on a different level, and who I would really like to see “get it.” There’s not much more I can do to help them get it then to share on a bigger and deeper level than I would at a meeting, and of course I need to be a power of example. Sometimes (and it happened today) there is a concept or a notion that I would like to surgically implant into their soul. To ease their way, yes, but also because through the years I’ve seen so many people succeed and a few people fail. Most people actually fade away, and I don’t know if they’re drinking or dead or living the good life somewhere out of my sphere. As time has passed I have heard from friends of friends who are out of touch that there is a considerable number of people who are not drinking but who are no longer going to meetings. Why? I don’t know. That’s not the way I want to do it.

Ann was my second sponsor. My first sponsor was a good sponsor - really good. She “made” me do 90 in 90, call her every day, call someone else every day. This was in the days before answering machines. Calling someone meant calling until someone somewhere picked up. So then actually speaking to the person. Just because. It was practice for the tough times, and it made me get connected.

Anyway at one time my first sponsor felt ……. I don’t know what. Overwhelmed by my needs, or too busy to give me enough attention. She made me get an additional sponsor. So I asked Ann. Ann was very different from my first sponsor and had no rules or actions that I had to fulfill. She was one of the kindest people I have ever known. Some people who read this blog may know who I’m writing about, and they may well have a different view of Ann. I’m sure she showed me a limited view of herself. But I remember her as consistently kind, willing to help, a good person taking care of her kids and working as a nurse.

As the years went by, it became known that Ann had really never stopped taking pills. She went to a long term rehab more than a thousand miles from her home and kids. She came back for a time, and went away again. I guess I knew all along and should have known that people don’t leave kids and jobs and lives like that unless it’s very serious. Ann stayed away after rehab, and she died fairly young. I don’t know how much, if any, clean time she ever had. She could not stop taking her drugs.

Pat was a friend of my wife’s. He lived near her for a time before she and I lived together, and she went to meetings and did lots of other stuff with him. He helped her get our house ready when I was moving myself and kids and cats to be with her. From what I remember, he was friendly, outgoing, often happy. He had a fairly low bottom in that he had lost family, jobs, money, homes. He may have had post traumatic stress. I called him one day to invite him to a surprise party I was giving for my wife’s 40th birthday. He was drunk. I remember how he went on about me, being really nasty, talking in a mean way about the long time I’d been sober. He was in and out of touch after that, mostly out, and he, like Ann, died young.

Craig was very recent in our lives. He went to our wedding in 2005, so he’s in the digital pictures, so he shows up on my screen saver on a regular basis. He was a very nice man. For months he and I went to the same Big Book meeting, and I got to know him. I don’t know what association he had with my wife that made her invite him to the wedding, but it must have been close. He lived near us so he was often at the same meetings as us. He lived with his father, and I don’t remember the details of his daughter, but he had a daughter who was around six years old a few years ago. He had chronic back pain. I don’t know what condition gave him that. He struggled with it and with pain pills and of course with alcohol. He died young, recently.

I never saw Marjorie at an AA meeting. I saw her at school plays and concerts, and I went to her house several times to drop off my son. Two of her children are in the same grades in school as my kids, and they all went to school together. My son was a friend of Marjorie’s daughter when they were tiny. They lived around the block from my mother, so we’d also see them in that neighborhood. I don’t know if she ever went to an AA meeting. I guess I would have heard if she had.

She was very pretty, very talented, very nice, fairly wealthy. Her kids were adorable. One time after I had moved away, I went home and my mother handed me a newspaper article about her. She was walking on a highway, drunk, and she was hit by a car and killed. I don’t know if this part is official, but I believe she was walking on the highway because her family prevented her from taking the car, because she was drunk. I hear this had happened before, that she had taken or tried to take the car.

It’s because of these stories and many others that it sometimes makes me feel a bit frantic that someone I know follow the suggestions. It is certainly a perverse attitude that causes some new people to hear suggestions as some kind of punishment. Or at times it seems like they take these suggestions to mean they are somehow slow about AA, behind, or needing extra attention and care. No, the attention and care is standard. And if some people do need extra, what of it? We need what we need.

In general this doesn’t bother me, though I often think it’s sad. I see newcomers come and go constantly. The ones who stick are few. I know it’s just part of it. It’s when I have a special interest in someone that I feel much more desire see them thoroughly follow our path, and that I feel sad and a bit fearful when they won’t.

But most of our other difficulties don’t fall under such a category at all. Every normal person wants, for example, to eat, to reproduce, to be somebody in the society of his fellows. And he wishes to be reasonably safe and secure as he tries to attain these things. Indeed, God made him that way. He did not design man to destroy himself by alcohol, but he did give man instincts to help him to stay alive.

Interesting that someone who was childless lists reproducing along with eating as something that every normal person wants. I know plenty of people who have no desire to reproduce. Oh well, different time and all. I can also struggle with the idea that God didn’t design people to destroy themselves by alcohol. There’s a self destructive urge in so many of us that expresses itself in so many ways. Is this not put there by God? I don’t know, and this actually leads to the question of why there is evil in the world. Did God design it? Allow it? Fail to prevent it? Is it here to test us? I’ve come a long long way with spirituality, but I don’t know how close I will ever come to feeling like I know the answer to that. I can see it each and every way, and no one explanation beckons me very strongly. At the same time that I can ask why am I an alcoholic and so many others aren’t, I can also ask why did I achieve a reprieve when so many others did not.

In order to continue with the step I’m going to try to make some sense of these questions and move on. It seems certain to me that either God designed evil as part of the human condition for reasons I cannot begin to understand, or that God allows evil again, for reasons I can’t understand. I also hold out the possibility that there is no God, and that we humans are just high-order animals. It doesn’t distress me too much to think that. Most days I live my life as if there is a God, and even a sort of judgment day. If I’m wrong, it’s better to make the mistake this way, rather than to think that there is no God when there is.

One of my favorite Bible verses kind of fits here. I’ve briefly looked for a link, but I can’t quickly find one that uses the words I learned or imparts the message I understood. It’s from 1 Corinthians 10, and in my mind it goes like this: So if you think that you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. No testing has overtaken you that isn’t common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not test you beyond your ability to endure it, but with the testing he will also provide the way out. Again I run into trouble. Many people are tested beyond their ability to endure it, and they do not endure it. Not being able to endure, though, would apply to the final problem that kills a person. Each problem up until that one is somehow endured. It has been the way out that has interested me in AA. The solution seems to be there for people who will grasp it.

A woman who attends my home group often asked last week if alcoholism is hereditary. Her memory is not 100%, and since it felt to me like she was directly asking me, I answered her that it may be. Why then, she asked, would some of her children and grandchildren have it, and others not?

So that urge to drink to destruction was not God given, but the urge to reach out (and throw up) is. Most twisted desires don’t pound us into the ground like alcohol did. Most of our desires go wrong, but they begin in a place that is healthy, moderate and human.

Or not.