| Let me begin by telling you what I use to be like, what happened and what I am like now. I was born to a military man and a loving and hardworking mother. My Dad was a hard drinking, controlling and very abusive alcoholic.My mom was very subdued, soft spoken and religious.At the age of 8 , I lost my dad to alcoholism and I was raised by my mother and grandfather. I did not have a childhood, I was never given the chance to be a little girl. At the age of 8 , I had to tke on the role of mother, sister, housekeeper, cook, spiritual advisor to 4 brothers, because my mom had to go to work to support us. When I became a teen ager, growing up under very strict religous rules, almost all activities were wrong. I tried very hard to be good. I actually was raised in a shaming family. I was either a victim or victimized , I grew up mystified by a strange big world in which I found no place for me. No place where I could feel loved, wanted, needed accepted. Life even at that age held no meaning to me, no value as an individual. I grew up believing everything was wrong, nothing seemed real, deep, sincere or honest. My parents taught me how to wear a mask. At the age of seventeen, I married the only boy I had ever dated. We have now been married for 46 years. Our 46 anniversary was March 14, 2004. He is original because for our anniversary he gave me a post it not with this wrote on it. Honey, this is not a card, but you know I love you. LoL. He also gave me 46 1 dollar bills and said that was 1 for every year.Lol. After we married, we had 2 children, 1 girl, who is the exact replica of my mother, subdued, soft spoken and religious. 1 son who also an exact replica of my grandfather ( a preacher).At one time in my life I was a Sunday school teacher and I thought I was so spiritual, that I would have flown away if I had not had my shoes on. I became very family, church, community oriented. I worked 38 years on a public job while trying to be the best wife, best friend, best sunday school teacher. I had never tasted alcohol until I was 50 years old. I never went to parties, I never had any kind of fun, I had a very dull life. I ran frantically all day, every day striving for perfection, which I could not reach. I felt that I was not loved for who I was but for what I could do for family, church and friends. Every day I would think, if only it made sense. 95% pretense and I wanted to esccape from the stage of daily playing a role. I was sick of frantic, phony life, which zapped my spirit for living and drained my physical body to the breaking point. Something was wrong, and I became obsessed with trying to find out what it was. It appeared that I had everything, perfect marriaage, perfect children, perfect spiritual life, but deep inside it was not real. I was not real. I became very clever at being a model person. Behind that mask was a novacaine smile, but a deep sense of uneasiness. In order to escape from reality and this world that was killing me I started to drink at the age of 50. But I was an alcoholic long before I took that first drink. But when I took it, I found I could not stop. I began to live in black outs. Stayed in a drunken stupor every day. Drinking became a sacred ritual for me. I wanted to be free, so I would drink to chang the way I felt inside.I continued to drink in order to maintain the illusion that I had found the answer. So after 4 years of hard drinking and ruined relationships, Tarnished reputation, physical and mental illness, I was finally brought to my knees. On July 31, 1997, with red eyes and shaking hands I reached out for help by going to an AA meeting. During that meeting, never before in my life had I sensed so deeply the awful barrier between myself and the God who wanted to rescue me. So in AA I found that I could find my own concept of God, not the one of my grandfather, not the one of my mother's, but my own concept. I was elated. I knew there was an answer. And from that day on to this, I have not had a drink, and the obsession was taken away immediately. I will not say that AA is the only way to find freedom from alcohol and find a new spirituality. god will makes himself know as he wills. I will say that AA is 1 way. AA is a second chance, a chance to live again, but I do believe that AA holds the only secret to release from alcoholism and phoniness because of its rigorous honesty and stark reality of the program. In and through the Grace of God I do believe AA works. There is freedom awaiting the sincere alcoholic who finds that good things happen when we stop living a lie.Failure seeks small answers to big questions and finds cheap solutions to costly problems. Alcoholism is a costly problem, and cheap colutions will bring failure, but costly solutions will bring success. But we must be willing to turn it all over to a power greater than ourselves and especially other than ourselves.
My name is Shirley H. (A real alcoholic in Alabama) Thanks for letting me tell my story Back to Members Stories
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