2012.04.25 The Gift of Alanon

When I went to my first Alanon meeting I was in the midst of my own midlife turmoil, getting things straightened out by messing them up first. You know the usual adolescent passage.

Anyway, all I could think as I sat quietly tense listening to many stories told by people who had lived with alcoholism, some all their lives, some only recently, and all of them stunned that they had never realized what was happening to them, was, “MY MOTHER WOULD KILL ME FOR BEING HERE!” (I was violating the tabu against narking or ratting. I was telling "classified" family info.)

The story tellers were mostly women, stunned, to varying degrees, that they had not realized what was happening to them because of what was obviously someone else’s problem.

Odd and crazy! I hated this meeting. Yet...... odd to find myself so utterly one of them. Odd too that I worried about my mother when wasn’t my father the alcoholic? He after all was the one with the tri-cornered martini glass twisting between his thumb and forefinger nightly.

Alanon, I read in the pamphlet, was initiated in the mid 1900s by Lois Wilson, wife of alcoholic Bill Wilson, founder of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous.) Lois realized that her own life was as affected by Bill’s addiction as his was. You don’t have to be the one vomiting to feel nauseous. You don’t have to be the one lying to feel blame. You don’t have to be the sleep-distrubed one to lose sleep.

AA and Alanon are siblings and, yes, they often rival but they have the same goal: to live sober, serene and happy lives. Transformation is the way out and it can not be done without the help and support of other people and God aka Higher Power.

The meeting went on around me as my mind smashed into its own fears and judgments. Why hadn’t I known and why hadn’t my mother known and done something about it? And why hadn’t my father loved me at least as much as his glass? And why did I fall in love with alcoholics?

But I sat and flinched because my mother would not want me to know or to tell. It was then that I first realized how ashamed and self-condemning she too must have felt at her helplessness. It was then that I began to understand my mother, avoid being “killed” by her, and understand her micromanaging as an effort to make things right not torture me.  It was then I began to forgive her, just a little.

The meeting ended and the friendly women said to keep coming. All you need is the desire to live well and sane.

I left that first meeting vowing never to return. Too much truth blinds—and awakens.

Yes I went back. I kept on listening. I never was at a meeting that I didn’t hear in the shreds of another’s story something that was part of my story, something that enlightened me and helped me feel not so confused, hopeful that insight could bring healing. Sometimes I told my story, too.

What Alanon taught me: 1) You don’t have to drink to be alcoholic. All you have to do is be constantly/secretly anxious, engage in a life mission of controlling the uncontrollable, and alternate between anger (bullying and tempers,) passivity (cold withdrawal and secret scorn,) and micromanagement of your own and other’s lives— all strategies of control. 2) You can’t recover, transform, your life by yourself. 3) How you think about God, or the transcendent dimension of life, is crucial. It’s easy to give your heart to the wrong God or follow the wrong star. 4) Humility is the highest virtue. 5) How to take care of yourself, a little like coming home to your own integrity and worth and knowing that you matter. 6) How to detach with love: to love fully without losing yourself in the other, or abandoning the other to save yourself.

Alanon is like eastering.

2010.11.17 Profile in Courage

A woman recently told me a moving story—hers. It’s a story of mother/daughter love that comes from womb and know no bounds even when a painful relationship break happens.

Once upon a time a woman gave birth to a daughter, dearly beloved. Every day she loved this child with all her heart and did the best she could living with a difficult marriage and trying to manage her own decisions.

Every day the woman prepared meals for her daughter and other siblings, and every day the children ate well and grew up strong and healthy, until something began to go wrong. The daughter started the torturous route of addiction. It began slowly as it does with experimentation, adolescent stuff, maybe hanging out with friends that supported her growing habit rather than her health.

The mother’s response began slowly as it does with the usual parental warnings, hand wringings, and setting limits moving on to more desperate measures to try to control the uncontrollable. She offered advice, rescue and in time money, all good and obvious things to offer.

The daughter got sicker and sicker moving beyond alcohol. The drugs stole her personality, her sweetness, her intelligence, and her conscience. She became hard, unloving, a walled impenetrable brick house, containing terror.

The mother experienced about the same symptoms without the drugs—sick from worry, helplessness, grief, rage. All her way weren’t working to help her daughter. She didn’t stop loving her daughter.

The daughter was losing her life to addictions and the mother was losing her life to her daughter.

One day someone told the mother about AlAnon and she went. At meetings, as well as in therapy and with ongoing support from a steadfast and wise sister (not a nun sister) and her other children, the mother managed slowly to take back her own life and selfhood, which by now she had deeded to her daughter who occupied her mind,heart, soul, and body, leaving no room for herself.

The mother started to love herself as much as she loved her daughter. Years passed. The mother got well but couldn’t quite get the lost daughter off her mind. She wasn’t free.

It happened one day. It happened inspirationally. It happened because of a community of support and because of the grace of what 12-step recovery programs call Higher Power and some people call God, Buddha, Jesus, Allah,Universe, and many other names, all meaning Loving Mystery.

We pray for a rescuer and we got a lover.

Such Love has power in impotence. How odd. The woman connected with her own internal power fueled by her love for her daughter and drove unannounced to her daughter’s house where she encountered a cold hard woman she hardly could recognize, a woman facing a trial and a prison sentence, a much bigger limitation than her mother could ever manage.

Neither God nor mothers are very good jailers.

The woman made a simple statement to her daughter, one that told the daughter about her hurt. She told her “It hurts when........”

She didn’t tell her daughter “You hurt me when you......” The difference in language is subtle but the honest message is the same.

The mother told her daughter she had come to say good bye. I can’t imagine a more painful moment.

She also told the daughter she always had and always would love her.

Then she left. The door closed behind her and she drove away feeling free and weeping, the kind of tears you cry when you have labored long and finally a child pushes through to grab her own separate life. The umbilicus is severed usually by a doctor. This mother had to sever her own to give birth to herself.

Love, human or divine, is never severed however. Its power takes a long long slow time but one day it will show up.

Maybe, as it did for St. Paul, in jail .