What it was like: Year Eight

It was 1991, and I had just celebrated seven years of sobriety.  I was back to Denver, less than a year after getting married.  I guess I could have been humiliated, but I was just so grateful to be back home with my old friends and my family.  I got back in touch with my old sponsor, who I loved very much, and I was grateful for that relationship.

I got a little apartment just a couple of blocks away from my home group.  It was the dumpiest place I have ever lived.  But I loved it.  It was mine.  I could easily afford it on my disability check. It was one of those apartment complexes full of AAs.  I knew a lot of my neighbors.  I got very close to several of them.  We would walk en masse every morning to the 7:30 meeting.  And hang out afterwards.  It was nice.

Somehow my husband talked his way back into my life.  It might have been because I loved him, who knows why this happened, but it did.  Obviously, nothing changed.  But I was commuting between northern Washington and Denver.  I wouldn't give up my apartment, thank God, so I always had a place to go.  But the emotional upheaval was tremendous.  

Some time during this year, my sponsor called me and asked me if I was sitting down.  I was.  She told me she was drinking.  I could not believe it!  This woman had been a superstar of AA... she knew all the "right" people out in California.  I thought I was hooked up with AA royalty with her... and here she was, drunk.  I was flabbergasted.  I sought a new sponsor and my only qualification was that she not be some old prissy Christian hag who was going to shove her religion down my throat.  There was a woman I disqualified just because she wore a cross around her neck.  

So I picked Eva.  Eva was from Mexico.  She was sober 15 years and went to a meeting every day.  She was truly an AA member.  She cussed like a sailor and I suspected she was a lesbian.  English wasn't her first language, it was barely her second language, but she did punctuate nearly every sentence with the word "fock."  I thought she would be great.  

The first time we got together, she floored me when she asked me "You're Catholic, aren't you?" to which I responded "yeah."  She then asked me how long I had been sober and I told her "seven years," to which she responded, "don't you think it is about time you go back to church?"  I could NOT believe it.  My best effort to avoid this whole topic brought me right here to this pivotal moment.  And I saw the hand of God in it.

I went to Church for the first time since I was in my teens.  I heard lots of good stuff there, which I swore I never had before.  I met with the priest and got lots of help from him.  I wasn't quite ready to hop in totally, heart and soul, but I was testing the waters, and found it was quite inviting.

I kept trying to return to Washington to live with the husband.  I was going to Alanon and trying to figure out how I could take responsibility for myself and butt out of his life and learn to live with this situation.  Alanon says that no situation is ever hopeless.  I wanted to believe that.  I wanted to BE the right person, not find the right person.   I kept telling myself that love was an action, not a feeling.  I tried so hard.  So impossibly wrongly hard.    

I celebrated my 8th birthday at my group in Washington.  I loved so many people there.  I was grateful to be there, but very very conflicted, because I knew I needed to go home.  There will always be a very soft spot in my heart for this beautiful valley and the wonderful people in it.  When I think of it, I think of the soft air, so full of humidity, so low in altitude, so full of the scent of moisture and flowers and trees.  I would walk every day under cedar trees, it was incredible.  But I didn't belong there.  And I certainly didn't belong with that man who was continuing to hurt me.  But I wasn't done until I was done....  And I wasn't done yet.  

I would tell you what I wrote on my eighth birthday, but it is all about an argument that broke out at Burger King after the meeting... between my husband and a man he didn't like.  It was heartbreaking for me... but I was getting used to heartbreaking.

Can you stand to read much more of this?  It is hard.  It is hard to write.  This is SO not who I am today. I am incredibly grateful.  But this is where I have been.  It is good to remember, because it seems like another person entirely.  Thank God.