She had asked me to speak, I don’t even know when it was, and over the last several weeks my life has gotten kind of chaotic. And so I’m going to warn you, I’m probably going to cry. It’s been very emotional the last 12 weeks for me. And I didn’t know that I was going to come alone or I was going to bring a guest with me.

And so thank you so much for accommodating me. And I want to say thank you to Krista. I love you and I’m so grateful to be here. If you haven’t had an opportunity to read her note that is inside the pamphlet, when I first got here I opened it and it brought tears to my eyes.

It was very meaningful to me. So I’m just going to read a little bit of it. Krista, thank you. It says, this year’s theme, Sunlight of the Spirit, comes from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and refers to the state of being we reach when we are free from resentments.

Resentments are often described as the refilling of past experiences. In other words, they occur when we continue to have emotional reactions to situations or people from the past which are no longer happening in the present moment. Writing an inventory is a powerful way to become aware of how we may not be fully living in the present. It is through this process that we become the sunlight of the spirit.

This clarity and the effort to maintain it allow us to embody the sunlight of the spirit and enables us to be channels for the divine, to listen for guidance of our higher power, and to serve as we are directed. By living in the essence of being fully present and a channel for the divine, we can carry the message to others and continue to live in freedom. There are certain things that I read in recovery that I just want to cut out and post up in my house as a remembrance. This is one of those.

Like when it said to me, definitely about being in resentment, definitely about being able to write an inventory and to know I get to take ownership of my part. I had never had that experience until I entered the rooms of Al-Anon. I’d never looked at my part. I’d never taken ownership for the wreckage of my past.

I’d not done that until I got into the rooms. I put a box of Kleenex up here right next to me because I use a lot. I came to Al-Anon because of my qualifier, but I did grow up in a household of alcoholism. I had an amazingly, amazingly wonderful father who adored me and loved me.

He was 6’6 and 375 pounds. He was a wonderfully big man who was a police officer. He was a sheriff’s officer. He protected our community, but he also protected our family in ways that I couldn’t have even imagined.

He adored me. My siblings this last year have told me multiple times that I was his favorite. I had three older siblings. My brother was 11 years my senior.

Then my sister was 9 years my senior. Then my next sister, Bruce, Dawn, Debbie, and then Wendy. I came 8 years. There was an 8-year gap between me and my siblings, so I was referred to often as the oops baby.

My mother called me the oops baby. My parents were not planning on having any more children, and then my mom became pregnant. She not only became pregnant with me, but I was born on her birthday, October 9th, which just passed. My mother and I had this incredible bond.

She was one of 13. She came from Minnesota. Her family moved to California when she was 13 years of age. She’d never had running water in her home when they moved to California.

So it was quite a treat for her to come to a new state that was big and luscious and wonderful. They moved, and her and my father met in Upland, in a town, and were married for 46 years until my dad passed away in 2001. They had set an incredible example for our family of two people that loved and adored each other. It’s interesting to me that I was extremely attracted by the twinkle that was talked about earlier, the alcoholic, right?

At 14, that brother of mine was involved in a motorcycle accident. He was coming down out of Big Bear, and he was thrown headfirst off his motorcycle into a tree, and his helmet broke his neck, and he became a C4-C5 quadriplegic. He was 26 at the time of his accident, and he lived another 26 years until he was 52. And I adored him.

He was my brother. We were very, very, very close. He had been drinking that day. It had been Oktoberfest.

He wasn’t an alcoholic, but his decision to drink and drive affected the rest of his life. It affected the rest of our family’s life. And they had taught us, my parents had taught us, when things got tough, we dug in as a family. We bonded together.

I lived with my brother for several years. I adored him, and I was at his bedside when he took his last breath. Actually, I don’t think I’ve even ever said this. They did CPR on him for quite a long time.

I do not believe he was ready to go. But my sister and I made the decision that it was time for them to stop doing CPR because his body was just worn out. And I got to see his spirit rise from his body. I was in the room, and he got a double major pre-law and business administration after he became a quadriplegic.

He was an incredible man in my life. At 17, I married for the first time a young man I had met in high school. I graduated in June. We were married in August.

And my mom had to sign for me to get married. And I know that it wasn’t her choice for me to get married that young, but I was very willful, and I wanted my way and my mother’s sign for me to get married. And before long, it was evident that drinking and driving were his thing. He came from an alcoholic family.

He was a vivacious partier. We had a lot of fun together, but he was physically abusive to me. And at about four years into that marriage, I realized that I needed to get divorced and leave that marriage. And so that’s what I did.

I divorced him. First one in my family to get divorced. My parents had raised us in the church. They had raised us to be a praying family.

We believed in God. We had prayer before all meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner together at night before we would go to bed. We would pray together as a family. And so for there to be divorce in our family was unheard of.

And I was divorced. So 21, 22 years old, divorced. Immediately on to the next him. He came along, and a year into that next relationship, I became pregnant.

And I wasn’t married, now divorced, and unmarried, and pregnant. And that relationship lasted for about a year after the birth of my wonderful daughter, Alyssa. She’s one of the loves of my life. She’s now 33, and I adore her and love her.

But I was on to the next, you know, and that was my track record. It was just the next him who was going to fill that proverbial hole inside of me that I was looking to be filled. I was very attracted to the alcoholic. I was very attracted to the bad boy, to have fun and have a good time.

And the next him came along. This him, let me tell you, and I’ve shared this story before, but I have to tell you because he was extremely romantic, extremely sparkly. He had brought me a bouquet of balloons, and it wasn’t any, just any bouquet of balloons. He had me pop the balloon, and as I popped the balloon, lingerie fell out of the balloon.

So as you can imagine, here’s this gal who meets this proverbial hole filled inside me, and he was looking pretty good. And so him and I got into a very serious relationship very quickly, but there was no room for this little girl that I had. And she was about four or five at the time, and I pushed her aside to be in this relationship with this man because I wanted that hole inside of me filled. And sure enough, a year goes by, and Wendy becomes pregnant, now again for the second time.

My dad used to have this little saying he said to me. He would say, you know, they know what causes that. But my partner did not want me to give birth to that child. You know, he wanted it to just be the two of us, but I decided to give birth, and we had a daughter, another little girl, sweet little girl, Kyla.

It’s actually her birthday today. She’s 26 years old today. October 19th. So Kyla comes along, and I took leave from work to raise those two little girls, and he took leave from work.

And I thought we were going to raise that family together. You know, that’s what I thought we were going to be off, eight, ten, twelve weeks, start a life together, give them what I had had growing up from my parents, what I had seen them, and that’s when the drinking really became full-fledged. He didn’t have to get up and go to work in the morning, so there was a lot of drinking, and then the violence came. And here I was doing the same thing over and over.

And at about eight weeks, I’d gone to see my OBGYN for my checkup, and I went in his office. He was a friend of mine, and I just started crying, and he’s like, what’s happening? And I said, it’s tumultuous. Things are not well, and he said, you need to go home and pack a bag and get those girls out of that environment.

It’s not safe. And so I did what I was instructed. I went home, packed a bag. The next time it got violent, I put those girls in the car and we left.

And when we left, I followed instruction. In the meantime, he reached out to my dad. He reached out to my father. Now, this is the man I’ve looked up to my whole life.

And my dad called me and said, Wendy, I think you need to go back. You’ve got two daughters to raise. He’s made a promise to me that he’s going to get help. You guys are going to go to counseling, and he’s going to get well, and you guys are going to be able to have a family together.

And so I went back. I listened to what my dad was telling me, and we got into counseling, and there was a brief moment of sobriety, but before long, the drinking started again. We did a geographical. We picked up our girls, and we bought a home together.

We moved up to Rancho Cucamonga, where I live now, and we started a life together with these two beautiful young girls, but alcoholism was rampant. It was just rampant through our home. The abuse that was taking place in our home was towards my oldest daughter, Alyssa. And she would do something that he didn’t like, and he would get in her face and scream at her, and Mama Bear would get right in the middle of it, you know, to protect her.

But I wasn’t willing to leave, and so I was sacrificing these two little girls growing up in this home where there was alcoholism and violence, and we did that dance for quite some time until I had enough intuition to get back into therapy. And once again, the therapist said the same thing. You need to pack up and leave. You need to go.

It’s not safe for you. It’s not safe for you to be in that home. You need to get those girls out of that home. And I was scared to death to tell him.

And so I got apartments, and I turned on the utilities, and I had this binder that I kept underneath my front seat because I didn’t want him to find out because I was afraid. And so the day came, and I called two girlfriends, and they came, and we packed up the house. He had gone to work. I moved out.

And I thought for sure that night when he came home and saw that empty house that he was going to take his own life because that was part of the dynamic that had happened in our relationship. He would threaten that if I was going to leave, something was going to happen. And it wasn’t a happy feeling that I had that night. I was scared to death, and by God’s grace, that’s not what happened.

He did not take his life. And I didn’t see him again for a few months until we ended up in court because I had filed for custody of our daughter. And so we both showed up at that courthouse. We both had our own attorneys.

I walked into the court building, and there he was standing there, and he said to me, can we talk? And I was not ready to talk. I did not want to talk. The attorneys went in, and they handled the court case.

And he said to me, I’ve gone to AA, and I’ve got a sponsor. I did not even know what AA was. I knew what AAA was. But I didn’t know what AA was.

I didn’t know what AA was. But he said to me, I’ve gone to AA, and I’ve got a sponsor. And I’m like, okay, that’s great. We stayed separated for three years.

He went to his program of AA. I got on my life with my daughters. We stayed separate. I joined a church, a local church where we live, and I reignited my spiritual passion for God.

Because I had grown up in a home where my parents had taught us to pray, and that if God was in our life, everything was going to be okay. And that was my foundation. I just thought, if I could have enough God, and I could do things right, my life was going to be bright. So we stayed apart for three years.

He went to his meetings. He joined us at church. He stayed sober. And that’s what I saw.

My older daughter, Alyssa, had moved to Las Vegas to be with her dad. And so it was Kyla and myself. And he decided that he was going to propose. I mean, we’d been doing the deal for a little while, and so we got engaged.

We got engaged to be married, and I moved back in with him. And he bought me the most gorgeous diamond ring. You know, I had no expectations of a beautiful three-carat ring on my finger, but there it was, Mr. Sparkly.

You know, there it was again. But within that first year, it became very apparent to me that the ring was more beautiful than the relationship. He’d gone back to drinking. He was hiding it from me.

And now, here I was. I packed up the girls again and moved out. You know, what do we say in recovery? The definition of insanity.

Doing the same thing over and over and over. That was my life. I just kept doing it over and over. And many times for me, I thought I wish I would have found the room sooner, but it wasn’t time for me yet.

Gosh darn it, I wish I would have found it. It just wasn’t time for me yet. So I moved into a new home. I started my life over, and my dear friend at that time, my first sponsor actually, Mallory, invited me to go to a meeting, an Al-Anon meeting, my first Al-Anon meeting.

And I remember walking into that Tuesday-changing-format meeting. I didn’t know a soul. She was not there, but I went. She invited me to go.

And I remember when I heard them say, we welcome you to the Tuesday-night-changing-format meeting. We who have lived or live with the problem of alcoholism understand as perhaps few others can. We too were lonely and frustrated. And I just knew for me, I hadn’t been around alcoholics.

I didn’t know what to do, but I knew you guys spoke my language, and I knew I was in the right place. I knew I had found home for myself. And so I was working full-time at that time, and I kind of came and went and came and went. And during that season, our daughter, Kyla, was diagnosed with a very serious heart condition.

She had gone for, she had been born with a, what they call congenital leucosis, which means that the seventh muscle in her eyelid did not form correctly. And so she had had a surgery when she was four, and then a little bit of trauma, and she had gone in for the second surgery to have her eyelid repaired. And when we had gone in for that surgery, she was in full-blown tachycardia. She’s ten years old, and they come out and say, we can’t do surgery on your daughter.

Her little heart is just beating. We’re going to send you, we were at Jules Stein UCLA. They were sending us over to UCLA, Ronald Reagan, for her to have an echocardiogram on her heart. And so her dad, myself, and Kyla, we go over to Ronald Reagan, and they call the chief of the cardiac unit.

And I knew when they were calling the chief, and this is really bad. So they sit us down and tell us she has this big, long ailment with her heart. Arthrogenic right ventricular dysplasia is what they tell us. And they wanted to do heart surgery on her the following day.

We had gone for eyelid surgery, and now we’re having heart surgery, right? So my insurance said, no, we’re not doing, we need to write up a contract. They put her on a halter monitor. We went home.

Two days later, we get the halter monitor back. She’s been in tachycardia 80% in a 24-hour period. Her little heart was just beating like crazy, and we had no idea. And so a very dear friend of mine, a physician that I had worked with for a long time, sent us out to Loma Linda.

We met the head of cardiology out there, and he immediately admitted her to pediatric ICU, and they scheduled that heart surgery for her. Here’s my alanonism. I thought for sure this was what was going to get him sober. I thought for sure that this little girl and her heart disease, because when we had moved out when Kyla was born, we cleaned out the house, and we were driving down the street, and Kyla said to me, Mom, I don’t understand why we can’t go home.

I want to be with my dad. And I told that little girl, I said, Dad gets too angry and he drinks too much, and we can’t go home. And that little girl said to me, Let’s hide all the glasses, Mom. She adored her daddy.

You know, she adored that man in her life. So for me, now she’s got this heart disease that’s life-threatening. And I thought for sure, gosh darn it, don’t you know, that he’s going to get sober because he cares about her and she cares about him. Kyla had that heart surgery, and it was unsuccessful.

And we were told to go home and get on with the business of living, and that’s what we did. He was working his program at AA. He was going to AA. I was kind of going to Al-Anon.

I was kind of in and out. We’d gone back to therapy because my idea was if the therapist could tell him the relationship was over, he would kind of get on with his life. That was my idea. We went to therapy, and the therapist said, I don’t know why you guys don’t get married.

That’s what the therapist said, right? So the next thing that happens is he proposes. He proposes, you know. And he had some sobriety under his belt, and, you guys, it’s what I’d always wanted.

I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to be a wife. I wanted to have a home. I wanted to have what I thought my parents had, this wonderful marriage, you know.

And so I said, yes, let’s get married. And one thing that came up for me the other day when I was kind of remembering all of this is that by now Kyla’s 14. You know, she’s 14, 13, 14 years old. And I remember she said to me, Mom, do you think you’re doing the right thing marrying Dad?

You know, my daughter, they could see it. I couldn’t see it, right? And I said, honey, I think it’s going to be okay. And so we’d gone to dinner after my birthday, and he proposed, and I said yes, and we got married and had a wonderful marriage, and we merged together and moved back into the house, and we got on with life.

And it wasn’t too long before the drinking started again. Yep, he started drinking again. Now I’m married. Now I’m married.

And I thought, these two girls, one was moved away and one was at home, but I’m going to figure out how to help you stop drinking. That’s what I thought. I thought I could help him figure out how to stop drinking. I thought I had it within me, and what I didn’t realize was that it was none of my business.

It was none of my business that I had to turn him over to his own body, his own understanding. We learn in recovery to give them the dignity and respect that they deserve to find their own way, and I had not learned yet how to do that. Life had gotten very tumultuous in that house. Alcoholism and anger are not a good combination when you’re raising little girls, and that older daughter, Alyssa, who had moved away, broke up from her relationship and had moved back home, Taranta Kukumaga.

She moved back home to the same house she left as a little girl. The same house she’d left as a little girl. Alcoholism and anger. And it was crazy in our home.

I’m not proud to say that, but it was crazy in our home. And here’s my family on the outside watching all the drama go on. Nobody said a word. My parents didn’t say a word.

They didn’t really know the depths of the drama. My sisters didn’t say a word, and we were just crazy. I had worked an evening shift, and I had come home from work, and I always knew when I walked in when he would be upside down in bed, passed out, that he was passed out. And so I came in, I went upstairs, there he was passed out in the bedroom, and I thought, I’m going to go to bed.

I know, cover the alcoholic up with the blanket and go to sleep. I’d learned that. In the middle of the night, he got up to use the restroom, and pretty soon there was a very loud thud in the restroom. And our older daughter walked out, and she said, Mom, what was that?

And I said, Dad, fell down. Well, mind you, this was not the first time he’d fallen. He’d fallen down the stairs. He’d fallen before, and my daughter said, Are you going to get up and check on him?

I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to get up. I was sick and tired of being sick. I mean, we’d been doing this dance for a very long time, and I did not want to get up.

But I got up, and I walked in the bathroom, and it looked like a crime scene. There was blood profusely pouring out of his head, and it was everywhere all over the bathroom. I grabbed a towel and held it to his head and helped carry him to the bed so I could call 911. He laid on the bed gurgling, and there were our two grown daughters watching in horror, screaming, their dad on the bed, gurgling.

I called 911, and the paramedics came out to pick him up, and I said to them, Where are you taking him? And they said the hospital where I work, and I said, Do not take him there. And so they took him to another emergency room. I did not, you know, I did a really good job at keeping my private life private, and I did not want people to know at my work.

At a hospital, it’s like Peyton Place, where people talk about you, and I did not want them to know. So they drove him out to Arrowhead. I followed behind, and the girls followed behind there. We waited in the emergency room.

Finally, we were allowed to go back. I can’t remember if it was 32 or 37 staples he got in his head. He had cracked the whole top of his skull open. And the ER surgeon said he’s very lucky.

He was three or four times below the limit drunk, and he had had major head trauma. I drove home. The next day, I went out to pick him up, and we did not say a word to each other in the car, because that’s what we did. We didn’t ever talk about alcoholism.

We didn’t talk about the night before, the day before, the week before. We just didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about it. You just don’t talk about it.

You just get on with living, because that’s what we were doing. And so the next day, we both got up and in walked my older daughter, and she said, We want to talk to you guys downstairs. And we walked down those stairs, and my older daughter put her finger out to my husband and said, We’re sick and tired of this, and we’re sick and tired of you. And then they pointed their finger right at me, and we’re sick and tired of this, and we’re sick and tired of you.

And she said, I am taking Kyla, and we are moving out. That’s the example. It’s, you know, what I had done, and that’s what they were going to do to me. They were just done.

My daughter did not want to see her sister grow up in a house of alcoholism anymore. She was just over it. She was over it. My worst fear, you know, our whole relationship, I feared our daughters growing up, and that they were going to leave someday, and that they were going to be done, and here it was, right in my face, you know.

That next day, he went back to AA, and I went to Al-Anon. And by God’s grace, those girls stayed in our life. You know, I got in the rooms, and I worked my program very diligently, and very hard. I met with a sponsor.

Every week, I worked my steps. I wanted those girls in my life, and I wanted to have what you guys had. I wanted to know how to take ownership of the wreckage of my past. I wanted to know how to show up for my…

I really deeply wanted to know how to love myself. You know, I had been doing the same craziness over and over and over, and for me, you know, he was drinking. I was thinking. I was the one who was doing all the craziness.

You know, I was making just as big of a mess, if not a bigger mess, than he was, because I was staying in the dance of dysfunction. You know, and by God’s grace, we got well. You know, both of us got well. We stayed in the rooms long enough.

I got a really great sponsor, and we worked the steps, and I met with her weekly, and I got to make amends to those girls. I got to take ownership of my life, and he got a sponsor, and he worked his program, and we got well together. You know, and they got to watch us do that, but it took us a really long time. It took us a really long time.

We made a really big mess, and a lot of people were watching, but nobody was saying anything. You know, they were just watching it get really freaking crazy. So by the time we got sober, they didn’t know if we were going to stay sober, not sober, stay in program, not stay in program. You know, they had just seen it so many times, but this time it stuck for us.

Thank God, by God’s grace. You know, and we got to get together and really start working on our relationship and get better together and get well together, and a few years had gone by, and he had managed to keep his job. He was a very high-functioning alcoholic for 37 years. He kept the same job, and it came time for him to retire from that job.

He retired, and he started riding his bike every day and going to meetings every day, and he was the happiest I’d ever seen him. He was sober. He was living in recovery. He was working a program.

He was going to meetings. We had our daughters in our life, and we had been to an L. A. Rams-Chicago Bears game in L.

A. to watch football, and I was walking into the stadium, and I had broke my foot. I had stepped off the curb and rolled my foot and broke my foot, so I had been off work, and so it was coming to the end of time when I was off leave, off work, and I had been up taking a nap, and he had been downstairs, and I came downstairs, and I said, Let’s go sit outside. Let’s go sit outside and watch the birds.

It’s kind of something we like to do in the evening just to hang out with each other, and so we stepped outside, and we sat in the lounge chairs, and pretty soon he said to me, Head rush, and I looked over at him, and he was white. He was just white as a ghost, and I got up, and I said, Do not stand. I go, Don’t stand up. He stood up, and immediately he fell back in the chair, chin to chest, urinated and defecated, and I knew.

I knew it. I knew exactly what was happening. I yelled to my daughter, Kyla, call 911. I think Dad’s having a heart attack.

She called 911, and I pulled his body down on top of me, and I started CPR. I felt for a pulse, and there was no pulse, and I started CPR immediately, and I was over him, and I was saying, Come on, baby, breathe. Come on, baby, breathe. No response.

The first officer came about 3 or 4 minutes later, and he started compressions as I gave breaths, and I was just praying over him. Another 3 or 4 minutes, teleparamedics came, and they took over compressions, and I just stood back over him, and I just cried out to the God that I know and love, and I said, God, you have taken us too far for this to be the end of our story. I just knew in my heart this was not going to be it for us. For 15 minutes, 15 minutes, he lay lifeless on that ground.

He was white. He aspirated. He had broken ribs and a pneumothorax, a hole in his rib, but sure enough, finally, they got a pulse, and they loaded him up on that gurney, and they took him to our local hospital, and that cardiac surgeon called downstairs, and he wanted a history, and I’ve got to say to him, he’s a recovering alcoholic. He has 5 years’ sobriety.

By God’s grace, by that time, he had had 5 years’ sobriety. It probably saved his life. He was on life support for 3 days, and on that third day, he woke up, and they put him on the screen. He called me because he was being kind of combative, and the nurses said, you know, can we put you on the monitor so that he can see you, and so they put me on the monitor, and I said, hi, and you know, I was saying hi, and he looked at me, and he said, who are you?

You know, he was teasing me. He was teasing me. He was teasing me. He had what they call spontaneous coronary artery dissection, which means that the artery in his heart ripped.

He made a full recovery, and he had a pacemaker defibrillator put in, and you know, we got on with our life, and it’s by God’s grace. You know, it’s by God’s grace. When I had returned to the rooms of Al-Anon, and in that meeting, there was a woman who shared in that meeting, and she had a really great share. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember it was a good share.

At the end of her share, I remember, I never forgot it. She said, don’t leave before the miracle happens. That was a miracle in my life. That man living through that, his sobriety, his recovery, what was going on in our life was a miracle in my life.

I have hung on to that, don’t leave, and I don’t want to tell any of you in the room that our newcomers, don’t leave before the miracle happens, because I promise you, there are miracles in store for you. I’ve had many miracles in my life in the program of recovery. You know, we’ve worked really hard to raise those girls, and make amends, and love them, and be part of their life, and be involved in their life, and we get to still do that today. You know, as I told you, today’s Kyla’s 26th birthday.

You know, we love that girl more today than we ever have in our life, and she loves us, and she’s seen her mom and dad work their program of recovery. She’s seen me go to meetings. She’s seen me be of service. She’s not really heard me speak.

They’re like, I don’t really want to hear all that mom, but you know, they love and adore us, and they know us at a deep level, and we’re so grateful for both of them. You know, my father, my sweet dad, passed away in 2001 from lung cancer. He developed lung cancer, and I got to go home and visit him, and I was there the week that he had surgery, and they removed his whole left lung, and he was a big guy, you know, and I had told his surgeon, you know, don’t send my dad home without home health, because I knew that my mom was going to need help, and sure enough, he got sent home without home health. About two weeks, he had retained so much fluid on his chest that my mom took him to see the physician, and between the time he was at the doctor’s office and the physician said take him immediately to the emergency room, my dad passed away.

It was very traumatic for my family. It was very traumatic for my mother. I won’t go into the details, but needless to say, he passed away in the elevator when my mom went to push him out. My father fell forward and cracked.

I mean, it was traumatic for our family. You know, here’s this big guy who had died, and we loved him, and you know, I went home and said goodbye to my dad, and my mom got on with her life. You know, she, and at the same time, Kyla was having heart surgery. My mom had gotten stage three, four pancreatic cancer.

You know, we had all this crazy stuff going on in our life, and my mom had the procedure called Whipple. She had a full abdominal reconstructive surgery, and then had 30 days of chemo and radiation. All of that was going on at the same time as our daughter was having heart surgery. My mom survived that.

I mean, people don’t survive pancreatic cancer. We’re a praying family, and we prayed through all of that. So last year, in October, and I’m kind of catching you up, my mom had gotten really ill. She’d gotten really sick, and she’d had an atrial fibrillation, and she wasn’t doing really great, and I went home.

I went home a few times. She had GI bleed, and then she just had a lot of complications going on, and she was having fluid drains from her chest weekly because she was building up so much fluid on her chest. It just was not a good situation. So I took family leave, and I went to be with my mother, my wonderful mama.

And we had a drain put in, and I was doing her drains from at home, and I got her set up, and it was a hard decision, but it made the decision that my mom needed to go on hospice. She was winding down her life. And I spent all of December and all of January with my mom, and I’m going to tell you, I have a great group of women that I get to sponsor, and while I was home those two months with my mother, my mother would hear me in the other room on Zoom meetings. She would hear my calls to my sponsors.

She would hear my call to my sponsor, and my mom said to me, You’ve become quite a woman. Your father would be really proud of the woman that you are today. She had seen the mess that we had created, you know, with these girls, and now she gets to see the transformation because of the Rooms of Elinor, and she gets to see who I am today. I’m a totally different person than I was when I walked in the rooms.

You know, she got to hear it, and she got to tell me, you know, how proud of me my dad would be and how proud she was of me. I came back home and went to work, you know, and I was going up to see my mom every month. Every other month I was going up to see her and spend quite a bit of time with her. And my oldest daughter, Alyssa, had decided that she wanted to know more about her biological dad.

His name’s Marcus. She knows Marcus, but she didn’t really know a lot about his family. They’re Portuguese. She wanted to know more.

And so sometime in June, she decided to do 23andMe. And we were going to my mom’s over Fourth of July, and on June 30th, my daughter Alyssa got her results back, and she called to tell me that something was really off, that there was no DNA from my dad who raised me anywhere on her. My maiden name was Francisco, so there was no Francisco lineage anywhere on this side. We were trying to figure it out.

We just couldn’t wrap our head around it. Like, it doesn’t really make sense. Well, by the time I got to leave to go to my mother’s, it was very apparent to me that that man who raised me was not my biological father. And so we drove to my mother’s, and I got to sit down with my mom, and I got to say to her, Mom, I love you, and this changes nothing, but I have some questions.

And she told me right away, she said, Glenn Reddick is your father, and had an affair, and made a decision to not terminate the pregnancy. And I said, Did my dad know? And she said, He did. That he’d had a vasectomy.

Hence there being an eight-year gap, and hence me being the oops baby. So here my mother is carrying me in her belly, which I was from an affair that my mom had had on my dad, and I’m born on my mother’s birthday. You know, it’s just one thing after another. I left my mom’s, well, I have to tell you this part, because it’s pretty important.

Through 23andMe, my daughter had reached out to some of the Reddick family, and my half-sister, who I had never met or spoke to, asked her if I would speak to her, and I said, Absolutely. I would love to speak to her. And so July 2nd, this year, 2024, I talked to my half-sister for the first time on the phone. And I said, Do you have a picture of our father that you could send to me?

And she said, Absolutely. And it’s, I’m looking at my biological father on my phone. It’s July 2nd, 2024. Glenn Reddick, my biological father’s birthday, July 2nd, 1930.

The very day I see his picture for the first time is his date of birth. And then she tells me he died of alcoholism at the age of 41. He had had back surgery, and he was on medication, and he was an alcoholic, and he took too much medication and drank, and did not wake up. I was sobbing.

I was sobbing. But let me tell you, for the first time in my life, it freaking all made sense. It all made sense. You know, whoo, gives me chills.

Everything that I had not understood about myself finally made sense. It was in my DNA. No wonder I was attracted to the sparkly, you know? Aha!

So we came back home, and I’m going to be really honest. I did not… I was really angry. I was really angry.

I went through some really moments of anger. I felt like I’d been lied to and deceived my whole life. And this woman that I adored and loved had hidden the secret from me my whole life. And there’s a lot of that about her that I don’t really want to disclose to you, but I did not do really well with it.

I had a lot of wrestling. All of a sudden, here’s my Avalon brain unwinding everything from my childhood, looking at everything from my past through new lenses. And my mom remarked to my sister, I hope Wendy doesn’t hate me. And I did not.

I adored my mother, but I had kept her on this pedestal my whole life. And now she’s just another normal human being. For God’s sake, no, come on. In August, my husband and I were driving to San Luis Obispo.

I was speaking at an AA convention with the two of these lovely people here. And we were about 45 minutes outside San Luis Obispo. And the hospice nurse calls me, and I answer the phone. Her name’s Becky.

And she said, Hi, Wendy, I’m here with your mom, and I want to let you know that your mom’s made a decision to stop taking her meds, and it’s time. And she’s called to tell you goodbye. I’m on my way to an AA convention to speak, okay? And we’re riding in the car.

And I said, Hi, Mom, I love you. I said, I’ll see you soon. And she said, You betcha, you’ll see me soon. And I said, David’s right here beside me.

And he said, Hi, Darla. He said, Hi, Darla, it’s time for you to rest. And my mom said to him, Take care of my girls. You know, here’s the alcoholic who’s been the shepherd.

And my mom’s saying, Take care of my girls. You know, it just was a full circle for us. You know, and we’re headed to an AA convention. And here my mom is saying goodbye over the phone.

We ended up going to the, I don’t know whether to go or fly home or do what or whatever. But we went to the convention, finished up our commitment. And on Sunday we drove back. And on Tuesday I drove to be with my mother.

You know, thank God I got there and she was still alive. She wasn’t doing really great. But, you know, she was in her hospital bed in her room. And I got to go in and hold her really tightly in my arms.

And because of this program and the program that I worked today and because I called and had a lot of conversations with my sponsor and because I’d done the work and the writing before I got there, I got to hold that woman in my arms and I got to say, I forgive you, Mom. You know, I love you and I forgive you and I will see you in heaven. You know, I can’t imagine who I would be today if I hadn’t gotten to make and give amends to my mom to give her an opportunity. You know, she had apologized to me and I told her, I love you and I forgive you.

My mom passed away on September 9th. And I got to write her obituary and I got to speak at her service. And I got to speak of her fondly. You know, I got to show up for that woman who loved me so deeply her whole life but had this secret 56 years of a secret.

I can’t even imagine. And I had said to her 56 years ago, they told no one. My parents told no one. It was a secret between the two of them.

And so my husband and I got to go back to our daughters and we got to say, no secrets in this family. What we keep. We’re going to be honest with each other. You know, they have seen the wreckage of our past.

They know us. We’ve made amends to them. And they get to see us work a really good program today. But there will be no secrets in our family.

You know, that stops with our family. I’m going to end with this. I don’t know what my time is. Okay.

Two weeks after I talked to my sister, Glenna, she drove out from Arizona and I met her. And this last Saturday I got to drive up the hill and meet my dad’s sister, Joyce, for the first time. My aunt. And I got to put my arms around her.

And we both cried. It was very emotional. We spent the day together. And what became very clear to me is that there’s alcohol and addiction rampant throughout that whole family.

And I get to pray for those people. I get to love those people. But I get to keep my hands off. You know, I get to work my program.

I get to love those people very deeply because that’s what I’ve learned to do in the rooms of Al-Anon. I’m going to read one thing to you. I’m such an ugly crier. I hate when I get up here and cry.

But I can’t help it. It’s very emotional to me. This program has given me something that I could have never dreamed of having. Never dreamed of having.

And that is the grace and dignity to own my own heart, to look at myself, to be sunlight of the spirit. I think that’s why that touched me so deeply. I get to carry the message. You know, I get to carry the message of hope.

If you’ve heard nothing else today, I hope you’ve heard a message of hope. And don’t leave before the miracle happens. You know, in our Al-Anon promises, and I don’t have them memorized. I have a lot memorized, but I don’t have them memorized.

This is what the first Al-Anon promise is. If we willingly surrender ourselves to the spiritual discipline of the 12 steps, our lives will be transformed. We will become mature, responsible individuals with a great capacity for joy, fulfillment, and wonder. And I’m going to tell you something.

This week when I talked to my sponsor on the phone, and there’s all this stuff coming out about family, and come to find out I had a cousin that lived 10 houses away from me. I mean, it’s just craziness, all this stuff that’s coming out for me. My sponsor said, you know, Wendy, God waited for you to be mature. He waited for you to be mature to be able to handle this.

You couldn’t have handled this 15 years ago. He gave it to you at the exact right moment. He gave it to you at the exact right moment that you could handle it. I had to wait until I was mature.

I had to wait until I could take a step back and realize that woman who kept that 56-year secret from me loved and adored me. That my dad that raised me, and I’m going to tell you I’m in the middle of writing a gratitude letter to one of the greatest men in my life, that man. You know, not only did he take me and raise me as his own, I was his favorite. No, come on.

That was his favorite. Like, how does that even happen? Like, I don’t know. But, you know, I never got to tell him thank you.

You know, but I can write him a letter and say thank you. When I’d gone home from my mom’s service, my dad was cremated and my brother was cremated. And my sisters didn’t want to go to the mortuary, but I wanted to go to the mortuary to address my mom. I wanted to spend time with my mom.

And so I took my dad and my brother’s ashes because they were going to the casket with my mom. And I got to sit in that room with my mom and tell her how much I loved her, you know, and how much she meant to me. And I got to hold my dad’s ashes in my hand, and I got to tell him, you know, he’s not in there, I know he’s not in there, but I just needed to be able to tell him how grateful I was for a man who’d shown up in my life and set an example of unconditional love. I mean, he loved my mom.

He adored my mother, you know. I didn’t know any of that before I got in the room. I’d still be stuck in resentment, you know. I’d still be stuck in that place of being pissed off.

But I learned here how to do it differently. I learned how to love unconditionally. I learned that it was okay to forgive, you know, and to be forgiven. I got to do that in the room.

It’s been a tremendous gift of mine to be in the program of Al-Anon, to work my steps and to look at myself and to take ownership for myself and for our daughters to see us grow up and become mature. You know, that’s the biggest part. They’ve got to see us mature. They’ve got to see their dad stay sober for nine years, sobriety, you know.

There’s nothing that I ever expected in walking in the rooms that first night when I heard them say, keep coming back, it works if you work it. What the frick does that even mean? You know, I know what it means. I know what it means.

Work your steps, get a sponsor. You know, I know what it means today. I know that I get to, you know, embrace the sunlight of the spirit. I know that I have fellows.

I know that I can pick up the phone and call at any minute and say, and you guys get me, you know. Those people out there, they don’t get me. They think I’m crazy, but you guys get me. You know, Al-Anon and AA people, they get us.

I’m forever grateful for the rooms at Al-Anon. Thank you so much for having me. Al-Anon.