Hi, I'm Eddie D, and I'm gonna try to position this a little so just catch so much of that wind. Anyway, I'm Eddie D, and I am a very grateful member of the worldwide fellowship of Al Anon and and especially the the alcoholic who finally got me here. Boy, I have had all sorts of relationships with alcoholics, starting, I guess, from birth, my my Well, let's put this way, my mom left my dad before I was even a year old because of the his behavior and such due to his drinking. So I didn't realize it at the time, but later on, I realized, oh, you know what? I guess I was affected, because I didn't grow up with my dad. I grew up with a succession of step dads and such. But anyway,
1:02 I guess that might have laid this, put the seed there, I don't know, whatever, and because later on, I didn't grow up with alcoholism in my house, but what? But I did end up meeting this woman when I was about 24 years old. And my god, she was just the most exciting woman I'd ever met. We always had fun. There was always things to do, and yeah, she tended to get drunk a lot, but I just figured it was only when we went out to a bar or something, and figured that's just, you know, you know. Well, we had a great time and had a lot of fun, and little by little, we dated, and kind of things went little. It was kind of on and off. And when we met, she actually had a boyfriend who was had left for going to college in Tennessee, and we worked together, and we just went to a party, and one thing kind of led to another and but anyway, it would just go back and forth. Her, the dating and things like that. And at one point she, at one point, I remember, we both end up going to the same junior college at the same time, and we were had classes. We saw each other there and say, hey, well, let's go have a have a drink, as we go to this place at this bar and and, you know, we meet this other couple there, and then the musicals starts playing, and we start dancing. And then we kind of switch partners. And then I noticed that she got a little upset with that, that I'm dancing with this other woman. Meanwhile, she's got her boyfriend back at her apartment, and just crazy things. And matter of fact, she even said, Well, he asked me to marry him and and I haven't given him an answer. I'm like, why are you telling me this? And then she says to me, why don't you ask me to marry you. We're not even dating regularly or anything. Finally, she's not giving up. And so finally I say, Okay, will you marry me? Says, Yes, like and I take her home to her boyfriend because she looked too drunk to get home on her own. So anyway, but none of these things really registered with me.
3:19 So lo and behold, after a number of years, after a few, about five years on and off dating, we finally get together and actually start make a commitment to each other. And eventually we we get married and and she has a couple of kids, and we have a kid together as well, and and once we got a nice little family going on. And that's when I start to find out that she doesn't just drink at bars. At first, I was confused, because I get home from work and she we sit down, and she have a glass of wine sitting there at the table and, and she drink the glass of wine and, and, but then she'd be drunk, like, 30 minutes later, and I just didn't understand, like, how do you get drunk off of one glass of wine?
4:08 I wasn't getting it yet, and we go back and forth and and eventually I started getting certain behaviors, and I didn't realize it at the time, I started getting upset. I started like, my partner is not really here sometimes, and her drinking,
4:30 I think it like I've read The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I guess it does tend to be a progressive disease and and certainly for her, that was the way it went. Now grant now she always got drunk when she drank, by her admission, actually, and but she didn't always drink, even when we went out, she didn't always drink, but I'd get home sometimes and she'd be we got instead of just waiting for that one guy.
5:00 Wine, she'd already be passed out or or, you know, just not there, not available. And I started getting upset, and I didn't realize this. I can, I can go think back now on certain things that should have signaled this to me, like my daughter, you know, my five, six year old daughter meeting me at the door and saying, Daddy, Daddy, don't get mad. Mom's drunk again. But didn't. It didn't register. One time I got home, God one time I got home and she always had dinner ready, or usually we have dinner, but if she was drinking and she wasn't available, and so I'd have dinner with the kids. And one time I remember serving myself a plate of food, and then seeing her with the door open to our bedroom, she's passed out in the bed, and I was just so pissed, I just threw, flung that plate of food.
5:52 Unfortunately, it has the action of a Frisbee, so bounced off the floor, bounced there, and the food went everywhere. Sold that house about 10 years later, and still found the mess.
What ended up happening is, just after years of this, there's just so many crazy stories of, oh, here's a good one. So one Valentine's Day, I think we're going to have a nice, romantic Valentine's I get someone to sit to watch the girls, and I made plans to go to go to Santa Barbara, because we always liked going to Santa Barbara. And I go ahead and rent a nice hotel there on the beach and the whole nine yards. I get home from work, damn it, she's already drunk. And then and go. So she's drunk, so I get upset. We, I still load everything in the car and including kind of pouring her in there. And we we drive down, and we get on the freeway, and when we get on the freeway is right near there's a California Highway Patrol office right there in the valley. And we get on the freeway, and I'm not on the freeway more than about three or four minutes, then the red lights go on behind me, like, what? And so I pull over to the side, and the officer says, you know, I'm pulling you over because you're just weaving in out of traffic, and I guess because I was so damn pissed, I'm just trying to get out of town or whatever.
7:12 But she pulls me out of the car because they come up on the passenger side, and my wife rolls down the window, and so she pulls me out of the car and I've got to go and take the stupid test, touching my nose in the whole damn thing. And I was so upset I almost failed.
7:30 She had me count backwards or something, and I did it wrong and say, oh, wait a minute, that's wrong. And I did it again. But anyway, it's just like I had to do the damn test. So we go, there we have our weekend, and it went better the next day and so on, which is usually how things went.
But you know, these type of things were, the were becoming the norm of my life, that all these crazy things would happen, and the amount of dinners that we ordered, and we actually never finished, because she was already little, you know, couldn't do it so and we'd have to leave early, leave friends early, a lot of embarrassment and so on, all through that. And then one day, and she did get a DUI and such, but one day, she stops drinking, and she goes to an outpatient rehab type of thing, and and she cuts over.
And I was kind of blown away by that. So I'm thinking, wow. Wonder what happened, and she just stopped drinking, far as I could see, unfortunately, a few months later, her ex husband passed away. She went to that funeral and came back drunk, however, and well, she came back drunk. We have more drama. She fell down, hit her head. We go to the hospital. Cannot tell you how many times I have spent holidays in the hospital, but she bumped, messed, messed up her head, and and, and basically, I guess, relapsed for a couple of weeks, and then she stopped again and again. I have no clue why she stopped, but she stopped, and then
9:17 I can remember. And then one day, we're having dinner, and she's we, it was our practice. We'd have dinner that would go out in the back, and we'd have a cigarette. And one day she says to me, what happens if I start drinking again? And I remember telling her, then we'll just start over again.
9:38 Now I have no clue about alcoholism. There's plenty of it in my family, uncles and so on, but I really have no clue about it.
9:47 Unfortunately, two days later, she passed away unexpectedly.
9:52 Her she had a problem with her heart, it turns out. And when I went she was she had been a nurse, and when I looked it up in one of her book. Bucks. It turns out that it had something to do with long term drinking, the particular thing she died of. So I'm suddenly a single parent, and got to raise a one kid had moved out, but you still have two more at home, and I have to go there and, you know, basically start life over again. Certainly, I'm very, very big in grief and so on, but I'll admit, there is a small part of me that's thinking, at least I don't have to deal with that drinking again. You know, they did go through my mind, and I sometimes would wonder, like, Okay, did she ask me about that drinking thing? As a matter of fact, when she passed away, her actions made it look like she was drunk again. So it was a little bit of time before I could realize to call the ambulance. But anyway,
10:49 so we go on, we start to put our lives back together again, and I'm going to work and and such. And then one day, I started to get calls from the other daughters saying, hey, you know this one's she doesn't was not right? She's going out to the park, she's starting to drink, and she's stuff, and she's still a minor. And I'm like, oh boy. So I'm trying to, we're going this. And then she starts to run away from home. And I'm saying, I asked her, like, Why do you run away from home? She tells me, because I that way I can drink and I can do drugs without you interfering. And the whole thing with a running away from home, we had that it kind of started with that whole thing where you, like,
11:34 she says she's going to be at her friend's house. And then something happened. So I called the friend's mom, and I said, Oh, hey, I need to speak with her. And she says, well, she's not here. She's at your house with my daughter. Like, Oh, anyway, this thing progresses so that she's gone, she runs away, like, on Saturdays, then it's like Friday and Saturday, and then we get to, like, a three day weekend, and now it's gonna be three days in a row that she takes off and she does come back, but she's always taken off, and I'm always out there looking for her. Matter of fact, one time I found her,
12:10 I because I'm out searching instead of doing what I'm supposed to be doing, like work, and I'm and I find her,
12:17 and I on the street, and I pull over and I say, get inside, and to my surprise, she does. So now she's in in she's in my vehicle, and we I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, now what am I going to do? And we start, we're stopped at a red light, and I accidentally, well, the truck stops and and and I, and I'm like, too frustrated not to like, I'll just turn the keys to it and turns back on anyway, the so when that, when we stop there, she jumps out of the truck and and and runs off. Now I'm really pissed, and I know, I figured, you know what, she's gonna go to the mall, because that's real close. So I get in my truck, and I'm on the way to the mall, and I'm really super pissed, and then something clicks in my head.
13:09 I thought, You know what? Let me call the police. I've already been calling the police a few times when he's supposed to call her because she's a minor and she runs away, and I've had multiple conversations with them. So this time I call and I say, Hey, I found her. She I think she was going to the mall. Can you, you know, and can I just, is it okay for me just to go grab her and take her home? And they say, Well, yeah, you can do that, but it's probably not a real good thing to do. I mean, I'm literally thinking I'm going to pick her up and put over my shoulder and take her home. And they say, well, we'll send a police officer to meet you there. So I do meet up with a police officer. We do go through the mall. I go to where I think she might be, but I don't see her anywhere, and I'm still pissing, and I finally just give up and go home. And she's gone again for who knows how long. And actually, later on, she tells me we walked right by her.
14:02 She was sitting in the food court, and we walked right by, like, hey, but I'm too darn I was so pissed I couldn't see anything. So anyway, we get back, I have all sorts of ideas about how to control her, drinking, how to control her, running away from from home. I mean, one time, I screwed shut all the windows. I put new locks on the gates in the back from the backyard of front yard, and I put all my bedding right there by the front door. So I'm going to spend the night in front of that front door. She's not getting out. It's a three day weekend. There's no way. And I go ahead and I put dinner together, and I call the girls for dinner, and one shows up and the other doesn't like Where the heck is he? And I look around and I'm calling her no answer, and I missed one window.
15:00 I missed that little, tiny window up in the bathroom above the sink, and she got out. And again, I'm real pissed again later on, we're talking about that. She says, yeah. She said that really hurt. It's about a nine foot fall to the cement sidewalk below. And she said, I really hurt, but that's how far she needed to go to get out and have a drink.
15:27 So after all this is going on, I've got other ideas. I have my my sister in law moves up to Seattle, so I'm thinking, okay, maybe I call her up. And she says, Yeah, I can take her in for a little while, and she can come and live with me. So it's a Thanksgiving Day weekend hence, of course, that's a four day weekend. So I pull her out of school early. I like, I mean, I take her, like, take her out of school completely thinking now she's gonna move up there. I take her home, tell her, grab her stuff, put her, put him in the suitcase, and we're gonna go on a trip. So we get up and we head out, and I don't tell her what we're going or what we're doing. We leave the other daughter with my other in law, and we have Thanksgiving dinner at some chain restaurant in Sacramento and and that's when I finally tell her, Okay, you're gonna go live with your aunt. And she says she didn't really say anything. She was okay with it. So we get up there, we get there on in the evening, and my sister in law starts showing us around the house. And so you know, here's the kitchen, here's this, here's that, here's my bedroom. And she says, and here's your bedroom. And look, it even has its own door to the outside.
16:38 Another plan gone. We packed up and left the next morning. So, I mean, I tried so many things that I thought was being quite creative, but apparently not anyway. Eventually, one day, one day, she takes off and and she one day I get a text and she says, Dad, I want to come home, but I think I need to go to rehab. And I'd heard about this stuff, rehab and stuff, and I'd actually met a client who had a little piece of paper sitting on their table, and they said something about my child is drinking. And I asked her, and she sat me down at her table and gave me her Al Anon directory, and told me about what was going on with her family, and so I took her to a rehab, matter of fact, not too far from here, and and I go there, and I I've got this directory that I did call the office. They did tell me about some meetings, but I didn't go anyway.
I she, I take her to the rehab, and I sign all these papers, and one of them says, alcoholism is a family disease, and you must go to Al Anon. Now I have not heard that it was a family disease before in my life, and but now I sign this paper. Now I got to go to Al Anon. So I get to that first meeting, and it's, it's very overwhelming for me, very emotional, because I think not only am I dealing with what my daughter, but my wife and the whole thing anyway, I start going to meetings, and they always tell you, you know, if you have a problem, talk to someone after the meeting. So on the way back from the rehab, my daughter says, Hey, I got this ticket, and we got to go to court next week. So I go to the meeting and say, hey, my daughter's got a ticket, and what am I supposed to do? And the lady takes me sign. Says, well, he says, at one point, my daughter was out living in the park, and she calls me and tells me she's pregnant. So I call my sponsor, and I tell my sponsor, hey, my daughter's pregnant. What am I going to do? How am I going to help her? How's she going to have a baby in the park? And she says, her sponsor stops her and says, who's pregnant? So she says, My daughter is pregnant. Are you still listening?
She's, you know, she can't even take care of herself. And sponsor stops her again and says, who's pregnant? And so, like, after the third time I hear this, I think, oh, okay, who's pregnant. Whose problem is it? So we go to the court, and the guy, you know, the judge, guy, or whatever, says, you know, to the officer, what's your what's the story? What happened? He says, what happened? Then he points at my daughter and says, What is your side of the story? She says, Nothing. He looks down at his paper. He says, okay, $750 fine. I've just paid for the rehab, and it's 750 bucks, and I'm about to reach for my checkbook, and that judge looks up from his papers, points at my daughter and says, How are you going to pay for that? I'm like, oh, yeah, who's pregnant? Not my problem. Hey, this stuff works.
19:29 Two days later, my daughter says to me, Dad, I got a job. And about three months later, she says, I paid off the ticket. Like, wow. This stuff works. That was 18, little over 18 years ago, and I will tell you that as absolutely the best decision I made was to start coming down on because I I realized at that point that whole business about this being a family disease, and how it affected me, my anger issues and and so on. And I can even remember, like some friends of mine, one time.
20:00 Him saying just out of earshot. Or they so they thought, God, he's different. You know, he's always angry all the time and but I had no idea how that came to be, or that I even had that. Little by little, I've learned these principles. I've learned I've read our literature, I've gone through all this stuff. The first piece of Al Anon literature I bought was this one that says, you know how Al Anon works. I thought, okay, that's what I need. They do know how it works. I can just take care of it and be done.
20:28 But I had a hard time getting through it. So I went, I saw this other book says Lois remembers and when I got to the part in her story where she throws the shoe at Bill, I'm like that. I can relate to. I know what that feeling is, you know, after he is over and and that's, and that's this keeps coming back, this fellowship love here, the the hugs and the laughter. I mean, I get to be who I really am, and not this person so affected by this disease and the behavior of others that I, you know, like I get to go forward.
21:08 My daughter, a few years back, told me she had 10 years sober, and then a couple years later, she asked me to come and watch her kids. I get I go over there to watch her kids. She lives out of state, and she ends up having a well, I noticed there's a six pack of beer in this refrigerator, and she's single and has couple little kids, and I don't think, oh so at night, she takes a couple of beers and goes in the bedroom, and I'm thinking, huh? And get up in the morning, she comes out, she has one's empty, one's half empty, and she pours it out. I'm like, What is that about? My wife didn't drink that way and but you know, they're nice. Look at see. I looked at the refrigerator. There was still four other bottles in there. But anyway, a couple of things go like this. And basically she's told me that she doesn't think she's an alcoholic. But you know what? That's up to her. I don't It's not up to me to decide whether or not she's an alcoholic. She was 17 when she got sober. How do I know if she was an alcoholic or not, or just affected by other things? I have no clue. But that's up to her, and I get to take care of myself. I don't worry about it. I It is part of my story, and it is something I do look at things, but I get to just take care of myself. I get to just
22:29 be a good dad, be a good son, be a good you know, uncle, whatever, grandfather, whatever it might be. And I'm happy that I've, we've been able to pass, pass this on to the next generation, or if I have a granddaughter, the daughter of my stepdaughter from my current marriage, and and we went to the convention, she's joined hallettin Now, and and really enjoys it. And her even better, her mom says, Yeah, I'm glad she's going. She needs to go. But you know that I'm really appreciative that this program is here, and just grateful to you know, even the the alcoholics for getting us to start this program. Thanks. Thank you.