So my name is Melissa, and my home group used to be in Quartz Hill. It died with COVID, unfortunately. So I have branched out and I go to other meetings. I travel a lot, so I go to meetings in other states, which is super cool.

I recommend that to everybody. I’m going to try and be linear in the way that I speak, but as we know, our lives aren’t linear and neither is recovery. So I ask you guys to just be patient with me. I like to say that I came from an ism sandwich because I have alcoholism on one side and al-anonism on the other.

And for most of my life, neither of those folks were treated. They didn’t identify themselves as having any ism, so they certainly weren’t seeking any treatment for any ism, which is fine. And when I was a kid growing up, we have this huge, huge family. I’m one of over 20 cousins.

My dad’s one of nine children, and we always made jokes about being the CIA, which in my family stands for the Catholic Irish Alcoholics. There’s lots of us. You can look at my family tree if you were to draw a picture and you could say, OK, this one goes to that meeting, this one goes to that meeting. None of them go to meetings, except for me.

But we can decide which one we think that we would like for them to go to if we were in charge of their lives. And growing up with an alcoholic father and an untreated al-anon mother, I didn’t really understand that anything that was going on in my life wasn’t normal. It was normal because it was what happened at my house. So it was normal for me.

But when you grow up, like most of us, I think, probably have had experiences with alcoholic parents or loved ones before us. And you learn things differently when you’re a little kid and you grow up in that environment. I like to joke that I learned how to walk on eggshells before I learned how to roller skate, because that was a really important tool at my house. And a lot of these things that I learned as a little girl, nobody ever told me that I had to do those things.

It was just something that I kind of used my intuition to pick up on. So from a really young age, my intuition knife was super sharp. And I’ll get to the point later on in the story where I used that to cut people off with. But growing up in that house, I learned to walk on eggshells.

I learned that there were different versions of me. There was the me that I was at school. There was the me that I was at home. And they weren’t the same.

The me that I was at school was kind of loud. And she had a lot of opinions. And she got in trouble for talking too much. And the me that I was at home was really quiet and small and did everything that I could to stay out of the way and not get anybody’s temper up.

Because you didn’t know which one of them was going to be upset and why. And then when you’re a kid, it’s not your job to figure that out. But I think most of us try. At least I did.

And I will say this next. And it’s important for everybody to know, I absolutely adore my parents. I love them to death. They are two of the most wonderful people on two eggs.

I love every single alcoholic in my family. Matter of fact, I love every single alcoholic I’ve ever met, to be honest. I prefer my alcoholics in recovery. I like that a lot better.

But I’ve never met an alcoholic I didn’t enjoy at some level. Alcoholics are fun. They’re entertaining. They’re exciting.

You never know what they’re going to do or what they’re going to say. And that wasn’t me. You always knew what I was going to do or what I was going to say. I was going to do and say exactly what I was supposed to.

Because I was the girl that followed the rules. I got straight A’s. I kept my room clean. I took care of everything that anybody needed me to.

I was trying to interpret what you might need from me ahead of time so that I could make that happen so that nobody would be mad. Because I just never wanted anybody to be mad. I wanted everybody to be happy and be comfortable. And so I was going to do my best to make that happen.

So I wasn’t exciting, I didn’t think, like the alcoholics in my life were. And I’m really, really fortunate because all the alcoholics in my life were very functional. Everybody held down jobs. Everybody was pretty successful.

They were all fun to be around. I didn’t experience abuse like so many people in my Al-Anon family experienced. And I’m really grateful for that. But growing up in that environment was still difficult, nonetheless.

Nobody was hitting me, but nobody was really hugging me either. Because that was an uncomfortable thing. That’s an F word. That’s a feeling.

We don’t do those. Keep that stuff down. Put that in your pocket and don’t tell anybody about that thing. But growing up was good.

Alcoholic parent, untreated Al-Anon mom, didn’t matter. Still had a great childhood. We did vacations. We did traditions.

Mom and dad showed up for everything that they needed to show up for. I had a sibling that I loved very much. He’s a super cool guy. I recommend everybody have a friend like him.

And I had a ton of cousins, aunts and uncles, all four grandparents my whole life. Super, super fortunate. And there was still alcoholism everywhere I looked. But like I said, they were functional alcoholics.

And they were funny. And they were kind. So I grew up with this image that alcoholism meant you didn’t have a house, and you didn’t have a job, and you probably didn’t have shoes, and maybe you hadn’t had a shower in a really long time. You probably smelled bad.

I had a bad opinion of what alcoholism looked like. And it wasn’t realistic. And I know that now after coming to Al-Anon. But I never went to Alateen as a kid.

Because in my family, I don’t know if yours was like this, but in my family, we didn’t talk about the bad things that happened. That was family business that stayed in the house. We didn’t talk about that outside the house. And so the main thing was if it looked good, it was good.

And that kind of tracks, right? Because my house was always clean. We always had cute furniture. And mom made dinner.

And we ate dinner together every night. And that got to be a little stifling, though. Because I’m in high school. I’m playing sports.

I want to hang out with friends. But I had to be home for dinner. And I didn’t realize until I got older and had my own family that that was that controlling thing that us Al-Anon people do sometimes, where we have to make sure that everything in our little hula hoop is perfect, all the way down to the kids and their activities and when they come home for dinner. Growing up, going through high school, starting to get into relationships and making friends, not just romantic relationships, but friendships and people that I met, there were a small select group of people that were safe to come to my house.

Because I didn’t know which version of my dad I was going to get when he had had something to drink. If he was drinking the drink that had bubbles, that was probably going to be fun. And everything was going to be cool. There was probably going to be some music on the stereo.

Maybe we were going to dance in the kitchen. He might be up telling stories. And everything was going to be fun. But if he was drinking the flat liquid that needed ice cubes, that was not going to go well for anybody.

And then my mom was going to act a certain way, which meant I was going to have to act a certain way. And I couldn’t have any friends over and see that. Because how do you explain that? I didn’t know until I was a lot older that that kind of stuff was a lot more normal than I realized.

And I wish for all of us at that point that we would have known those things about each other, that it would have been easier to talk about that stuff when I was younger. So I had a core group of friends that were safe to come to my house because I knew they weren’t going to judge me or my parents. And I knew they weren’t going to be uncomfortable if anything should pop off and get a little weird. Because, you know, like I said, happy drunks, right?

So sometimes that meant that my dad was going to wake up early in the morning on a Saturday and cut the grass with his big, giant Pioneer speakers that he put out on the patio and blasted Bob Marley for everybody in the neighborhood at 730 in the morning, whether they wanted to or not. Or maybe that was going to look like my mom was going to put us all in the car and we were going to drive down to my grandmother’s house for the weekend because she wasn’t talking to my dad that day. Which meant we couldn’t talk to my dad that day. So you just toss a coin.

Which one is it going to be? You don’t know. So I moved into high school with my little safe circle of friends. I will tell you that I was always boy crazy.

And I’m not sure why, but I was. And I started picking the wrong ones right away. Super good at that. If there is an unhealed, unhealthy human within a 10-mile radius, I am in love with you.

And I want to hang out with you. And I want to fix you. And I want to tell you everything that you’re doing wrong. And I want to do it all right now.

Like, there’s no boundaries. Like, there was no boundaries with me. If you were in a relationship with me, you were in one. Immediately, like, all the way from 0 to 100 from the moment that we met.

Friends, boyfriend, didn’t matter. That’s not great. Nobody really likes that, as it turns out. But I had a couple of boyfriends in high school.

My parents were very traditional, very strict. So there wasn’t a lot of room for that kind of thing. But I still managed to pick the wrong one. That being said, I graduated high school with honors because I was a good girl.

And I followed rules. And I did what I was supposed to do. And everybody came to my graduation. Also, did I mention I’m the oldest of all of those cousins in the big Irish Catholic family?

Lots of expectations here. I was supposed to go away to college and be super successful. And I’ll tell you later why that didn’t happen. But I graduated from high school and decided I was going to take some time off from being a good girl.

And I was going to do whatever I wanted to for a year. No, that didn’t work out. My mom and dad weren’t having that. So instead, I fell in love with the first guy.

He was super charismatic. He was funny. He was charming. He was handsome.

There was always a lot of buzz around him. There still is. We’re not married anymore. But he’s still him.

And I’m still me. And he was a really exciting guy. And I fell head over heels in love with him and just couldn’t wait to make all of my own decisions, even if they weren’t good ones. And somewhere in my untreated Al-Anon mom’s consciousness, she was like, mm-mm, that’s not the one.

No, not that boy. Nope. And I’m like, but I love him. I love him.

And everything’s going to be fine because I’m going to love him through it, just like you did with dad. Oh, that is not what that woman wanted to hear. Nobody likes to be told about themselves, right? But I married him.

And my parents paid for the big, foo-foo, fancy wedding. And I remember, you’re doing the things. All of those details are so important, right? Especially to an Al-Anon person.

Everything has to be perfect. The flowers, and the napkins, and the way the chairs are facing, and all of this stuff is super important. And honestly, none of it even matters. But we don’t know that initially.

So I’m choosing songs. And the song that I chose to walk down the aisle to was from the movie Braveheart, which was popular at the time that I got married. And I wanted something cultural and that spoke to my ancestry in my wedding ceremony. So I chose the instrumental song from Braveheart.

And that’s what I called it, the instrumental song from Braveheart. I learned later that it’s actually called the battle cry, which turned out to be super accurate, because from the moment I said I do, I was doing battle with that man, and his addiction, and his family, and his girlfriends, and all of the things that came with him until we weren’t married anymore. Beautiful song, though. And it was a beautiful wedding.

We had a great time. But again, back to the Catholic Irish alcoholics. Lots of family, lots of cousins. Had this huge wedding, 325 people in attendance.

My sweet grandfather decided that we needed to have an after party, because the amount of time at the venue wasn’t enough time to properly celebrate. So he hosted an after party at his house. And during that after party, some of my uncles did the things that my uncles do. And they had too much to drink.

And they got into a fight with each other. It turned into a whole huge thing. Cops were called. Their wives were fighting with each other.

And everybody, you know, a picture of the Pope got knocked off the wall. A statue of Mary got knocked over in the living room. Like, it was a hot mess. And my wedding day became known in my family as the May 4th Massacre.

And I might have paid a little bit more attention to that. Maybe I should have known that that was some kind of an indicator of things to come. But I didn’t. I just charged along and went about my business, had a little boy.

And then we had a little girl. And the job that my, I don’t call him my ex-husband anymore. I call him my children’s father, because he belongs to them. He’s not mine.

So my children’s father has a job that keeps him in crazy hours and all over the place. So I didn’t really notice as much the things that were happening in our lives, the stuff that was unfolding. He identifies himself as an alcoholic. And he’s in recovery, so I can say that about him.

But when I was eight months pregnant with our daughter, I was doing this thing that I used to do, because he was a very busy guy. He had a lot of extra time in his day because of his substance of choice. He didn’t sleep much, if you know what I mean. And he was very busy, but you couldn’t ever pin him down.

So in order to talk to him about anything important, I would have to catch him while he was taking a shower. So I would stand on the toilet and put my head over the wall of the shower and peek in to talk to him, because that was about as long as I had to run down anything important and to let him know what was going on in the world, in our home. So I’m standing on the toilet, doing that thing where I’m peeking over the top, trying to get important business taken care of. And that’s when my children’s father told me that he needed to go to rehab.

And I didn’t know what that meant, because at that time, this was like 1999, 2000. So you gotta remember, my growing up years, we saw those commercials on TV for Alcoholics Anonymous, where the woman was being all dramatic, and her husband drives away in the car, and I don’t know if anybody saw that commercial besides me, but I didn’t have a good opinion of rehab. But I thought, okay, well, if that’s gonna fix you, and you say you have a problem, then let’s do that. How do we do that?

Let’s go. So he went to rehab, and while he was there, I did everything that I was supposed to do. I came for the family days, and I showed up for the counseling sessions, and I met with the counselor, and the counselor suggested that I go to this thing called Al-Anon, and I thought, fantastic. Are you gonna tell me what to do to fix my life?

Are you gonna tell me what to do to fix him, and maybe his mom, and probably everybody else? Like, yeah? Oh, cool, how do I go to one of those? And I went to a meeting in Acton, California.

It was a tiny little church, about this big, and everybody in the meeting was the same age as my grandmother, and there was four of them. And I thought, well, I don’t know if I’m at the right place. But I stayed, and I listened, and they made the suggestion that I go to six meetings before I make up my mind about whether or not Al-Anon was for me. So I thought I would take that suggestion, and I went online, because that was just barely at the time where you could Google things, and I found a list of meetings in my area, and I went to the Monday night meeting, and it became my home group for the next 20 plus years.

And I went to that meeting, and I think I spent the first year just crying, because I heard so many people sharing different parts of my life, and I didn’t even know you guys. It was men, it was women, it was all ages, it was all races, and every single one of you had a piece of my life in your head. And I just couldn’t stop crying, but I knew I was where I was supposed to be. So I heard somebody say that you needed to get a sponsor, and I didn’t know what that meant, because I hadn’t been to enough meetings yet, right?

But they said, you know, you should choose someone that you feel like you have something in common with, and so I thought, okay, well, I chose my first sponsor because she had cool tattoos, and she had a T-shirt on that read the name of the same punk band that I really liked, so that’s why I chose her. I did no work with that sponsor, by the way. She hadn’t been to a meeting in like three years prior to the one that she was at that night, and I think I didn’t see her again for a whole year after that, and I thought, well, I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to go. So I chose a different sponsor, and that one I chose because when she spoke, she sounded like somebody who had the kind of life that I wanted to have, which was the direction I was given in choosing a sponsor, and I was with that woman doing work for, oh man, I don’t know, six or seven years.

I would love to tell you that my journey through Al-Anon was always healthy and productive, and it was not. I don’t tell lies. I’ll tell funny stories, but I don’t lie. And while I was in Al-Anon, and while I was still married to my children’s father, I got arrested because I had an allergic reaction to the news that he was having an affair with a woman that he met at rehab, and I tell that joke because I say I had an allergic reaction because I broke out in handcuffs and felony charges.

Me, the one who graduated high school with honors and followed all the rules and prior to having children had a job that required a security clearance, I got arrested for a felony. Messy, messy, messy, messy Al-Anon, whoo. But you know, we know what we know, and when we know better, we do better, right? So even though I had been going to meetings at that time for about a year, I was not well.

I hadn’t done much work with a sponsor. I hadn’t done a fourth step yet. I was very raw. I was keeping all the secrets in the family.

I didn’t tell anybody that he was in rehab. I told them he was on location, because that made sense for the career that he had, and I just didn’t know how to handle what was happening. So I covered it up. You know, I’m a fantastic enabler, and I will keep everybody’s secrets for sure.

I used to. I don’t anymore, so don’t tell me. But yeah, I got arrested, and the funny thing is the officer that arrested me that day was the same officer that had arrested my children’s father a few months prior, which was the reason why he decided to go to rehab, right? Because you go to rehab so you don’t go to prison, because that’s a trade.

So that same officer arrested me, and he did everything wrong, you guys. He didn’t Mirandize me. He didn’t tell me why he was arresting me. All these things wrong, which enabled the lawyer that I had to hire later on to do some magic and kept me out of prison, which I was very grateful for.

I did, however, have to have 1,800 community service hours, which is a huge amount of community service hours, because the felony got pled down to a misdemeanor, and by the grace of God, I didn’t have to go to prison. I was still breastfeeding, you guys. I couldn’t go to prison. I needed handmade Christmas cards.

Like, for Pete’s sake, don’t you know who I am? Like, I’m not the kind of person that goes to prison, but you know what? I am the kind of person that has a really, really strong reaction to bad news and drives straight into the back of somebody else’s vehicle on a public street. That’s what I did.

And I say that because I think it’s important for all of us to remember where we could have come from, where we could go if we don’t take our medicine, and how quickly we can get there. I used to make a lot of jokes about people having those kinds of experiences, where like, oh, it was outside of my mind. I didn’t know what was happening, and I thought, yeah, that’s not real, until it happened to me. That’s usually what my higher power does, by the way.

I call my higher power God, and my God always finds a way to give me the experience that I say would never happen to me. Like, if I’m making fun of somebody over on the other side of the room for whatever, it’s happening to me, or it’s gonna happen to somebody I love, because I’m gonna have to deal with it. My higher power gives me the same experiences over and over again until I learn a lesson that I need to learn, and I tell you that because the first person I dated after my divorce was exactly like my children’s father, only he didn’t have tattoos. He was just the same guy and a different rapper, because I obviously wasn’t done learning that lesson yet, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

I got arrested, didn’t go to jail, had all of the community service hours under the sun, and I did them in West Hills, most of my anger management classes, too, and the only place that I could do the anger management classes was in West Hills, which is how I wound up at the book study meeting, and so I would combine time, right? So I’d go to my anger management classes, then I’d grab an Allen on book study, and then maybe I’d hit the Woodland Hills Friday night meeting, depending on how the schedule was going and who was watching my kids. I learned by going to that anger management class how not to get that angry anymore, and also that I might not have been as bad off as some of the other people, so it was all about perspective for me. I was very grateful.

Gratitude is the biggest theme of my recovery. My third and final sponsor, the one that I still have today, taught me a lot about gratitude. She taught me to do the alphabetical gratitude list, starting with A, going all the way down to Z, and sometimes the only things I could think of to be grateful for was air, for the letter A. B was bed, because I wasn’t very grateful when I started.

I wasn’t grateful to be married to somebody who couldn’t stay sober and couldn’t stay faithful, and everybody thought that he was a fantastic person, because like I said, again, earlier, charismatic, cool, fun to be around, very attractive, still is all of those things, but also he slept with my babysitter, and most of the women that I was friends with at the time, and I was in Costco with my mom once, and a woman came up to me and said, I’m so sorry to hear about your divorce, I just want you to know I didn’t know he was married, and I laughed at that woman in the middle of Costco, I cackled like a crazy person, and I said, cool, you know what, you’re just another one on the list, sister, like, thanks, have a good day, and she just looked at me, and then I thought, oh, wow, that wasn’t the thing to say, huh, did you want me to say I’m sorry? I was like, I don’t know what to do here, I’ve never been in this boat before, but you know, I lived in a small town, and we were big personalities in that town, a lot of people knew us, and it looked like we had the perfect life, I don’t know, it was perfect something, perfect chaos, perfect hot mess, I don’t know, perfect breeding ground to get

me to Al-Anon so that I could get better, because I never went to Al-Ateen when I was a kid, I didn’t go to Al-Anon because of my dad, I went to Al-Anon and stayed in Al-Anon now for 24 years because of the man I used to be married to, and thank God, like absolutely thank God, because I would not be a nice human being if it wasn’t for Al-Anon meetings. My kids used to say, I overheard my son say to someone, another little boy, in the childcare at the Monday night meeting, this little boy asked him, why are you here? And he said, my mom’s over there, and the little boy said, yeah, my dad’s over there, and my son said, my mom’s here so that she can learn how to be a nice person.

And I thought, you know what, that is so true, that is so true, because I wasn’t nice, like I think back sometimes, like I share that story about me standing on the toilet, leaning over the shower enclosure to talk to that man, oh my gosh, you guys, that’s gross, like that guy had no peace, he didn’t even get to take a shower, like I was like, nope, we’re talking about this, like no, we’re having a meeting right now, like we’re gambling this, and I would chase him around the house, and you know, he’d be ready to go to bed, and I’m like, mm-mm, I’m still having an argument, I’m not done yet, we’re getting to the bottom of this. We never got to the bottom of it, you guys, like the bottom doesn’t exist, like it just doesn’t, not for a crazy Al-Anon person like me, thank God I don’t have to give back my chip every time I have a slip, because you know, like it would never work, because I have slips all the time, but Al-Anon is so gracious, and my higher power is so good that I get to start my day over anytime I need to. Some of you may have heard me speak before, and I talk about the crazy things that happen when I was married, someday I’ll write a book, and then it’ll be a movie, and we

can all have a viewing together, but the cliff note version of that is, is that the craziness didn’t stop with me getting arrested, you know, the craziness continued on, like one time, when I was married, a gentleman that worked for one of those three letter agencies and had a gun and a badge showed up at my door in the morning with a search warrant to look for some things, and me being the Al-Anon people-pleasing, co-dependent person that I am offered him coffee, and you know, asked him if he was hungry, do you need breakfast, like I answered the door in my nightgown with a baby on my hip, and I see a badge and a search warrant, and my first thought is, would you like some coffee? What the heck?

Like no, that is not a normal response, you know? Sometimes we had to go on vacation to hide from people that were not pleased with my children’s father’s activities because he, like I said, he was a busy guy, and he had a lot of extra time in his day, so sometimes we had to do that, and one time we were gone for six months, and we had to use different names. That was after I was a little bit better, because here’s what I did. The situation was presented by some gentlemen who were members of the club with vests and motorcycles, and they had some things to say about my children’s father and what he was up to at that time, and I found out about it, and I said, okay, I’m leaving, I’m taking these kids, and we’re going someplace else, and I’m not telling you where I’m going, and you can clean up your mess, because that’s what it looks like when you finally get some boundaries and you have a backbone, and you remove yourself from a situation that wasn’t your creation.

So I went and stayed in another state for about six months, took my kids out of school, and I stayed married to him, because again, still crazy Al-Anon, right? It’s really hot, so I stayed married to him for another couple years after that, but I was learning, I was getting better. I was getting better, and I was getting better, and I was doing work, and I think at that time I was on my second, fourth step, and I had gone to a great retreat in Monterey, where I did some work, and I kept getting better, which allowed me to finally get to the point where I realized I needed to not be married to that person anymore, which was a hard decision to make, because I’ve gone back and forth with him many times, like that whole making threats that we don’t intend to carry out, super duper queen of that. Right next to that was being a doorman.

I have a ton of tattoos, I should probably have a tattoo of a doorman, honestly. But I would do that, we went back and forth, back and forth, and finally, one day, it was our 15th wedding anniversary, and we went to a Dodger game, and we had a great time, and we went to a restaurant, and he told me happy anniversary, and I just looked at him and I said, mm, it’s the last one, dude, we’re not doing this anymore. And it takes what it takes, right? We get to meetings when we get here, and we get better at our own pace, and sometimes it takes a long time, but I decided that I didn’t want to be married, and I didn’t want to live my life like that for one more year, and so I feel really bad for that waitress, in fact, a year later, a year after that day, I went back to that restaurant in Burbank, and I tried to find that waitress so I could make amends to her, because he started crying, I started crying, all she was trying to do was take our drink order, like, poor girl was just doing her job.

But we did wind up getting divorced, and I had to move out of my Barbie dream house, you know, my great big married lady house that I loved, and I would like to tell you that 21 people showed up the day that I moved out of that house to help me move, two of them are in this room right now, and a whole bunch of them were AA men and women who had never met me, they maybe knew who my children’s father was, or maybe they were told by their sponsor, hey, there’s somebody that needs help, you gotta be a service, show up at this address. And that is the miracle of sober alcoholics and healthy Alamance, because we show up just as big when we’re well as we messed up when we weren’t and I think that’s so important to remind people of. I got to see it in action in my own life, I’m so grateful. So we did this fire brigade thing of all these boxes and they were just handed off, like, person to person, all the way down the line until this truck was filled up with stuff, and that was my life, you know, in all of those boxes, and I went from a 3,800 square foot house to a 1,500 square foot house, so you can imagine what the garage looked like, it was like Tetris.

And there was a period of time in between one house and the other where my kids and I had to go and live with my mom and dad. Talk about uncomfortable, because we still had untreated alcoholism and untreated Alamonism and now we had some well Alamon and some kids coming into the house, and I wasn’t playing those games anymore, like, if you wanna be a poopy pants, you can do that, but I’m not playing. I’m not joining you at the table for that anymore. And these are my parents, so I had to balance being respectful, but also having my own boundaries and watching out for my kids.

And then at that point in time, now I’m starting to navigate being a co-parent with someone who was active in their addiction, and let me tell you what, that was a pain in the neck. Did I mention his mom? Because he went and lived with her, and she’s special, she’s a special lady. She’s still with us, and I don’t know what she identifies as but, you know, it’s not my problem, I don’t have to deal with her, so it’s cool.

But we were living back at home with my mom and dad, which is an uncomfortable situation to do under the best of circumstances, and we were certainly not in those. But I’m grateful that I had a place to go, and that my kids and I got to be together, and that we got to figure that out. Al-Anon helped me be a good mother through all of the years that I was raising my kids, but particularly at that really difficult time because I got to go to meetings and listen to men and women share about their own circumstances when they found themselves going through a divorce and navigating co-parenting with a difficult human being. I’m not saying I was always a peach because I’m sure I wasn’t, but I was sober, so, you know, I guess a different set of problems, I don’t know, I’m a big mama bear, and I don’t care who you are, if you come for my kids, we’re gonna have problems, and I’m still like that even in my recovery.

But I was particularly like that with their father. So we’re back to the point where we’re closing down that house, we’re getting ready to leave, and a good friend of mine, that’s the only thing I forgot to mention, some of the best friends I have in my life I found in Al-Anon. I was fortunate to have friends before I got to Al-Anon, but I got some really good ones here. People that I would take a bullet for, and I know they would do the same for me, and they’ll call me out when I’m being crazy, and I can hear it from them because they’re safe.

You know, my marriage wasn’t safe. I was belittled and berated and disrespected, and I allowed all of that to happen. I know now that I had choices. I didn’t know that then, I know that now.

But, you know, one of those friends was with me when I locked the door on my Barbie dream house for the last time, and I had this little coach keychain that had a little hot pink heart on it, it was so cute, and I loved it so much, and I’d had it for like, I don’t know, five or six years. It was one of those guilt gifts that we get sometimes when we’re in Al-Anon person. I don’t know if any of you have ever gotten guilt gifts, but I got guilt diamonds and guilt roses and guilt purses, and this was a guilt keychain, but it was cute, so I kept it. And I put the key in the door, and I turned it, and that little heart broke and fell off the keychain.

And I looked at it, and I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I was like, okay, I get it, I get it, I’m moving on. Like, can’t you see me? I’m locking the door, I’m leaving. Like, I’m going, I get it, because my higher power knows that I’m stubborn, and he needs to give me some really big, neon, flashing, repetitive lessons so that I learn.

And that same night, another good friend of mine took me to Hollywood to go to a punk show, one of my favorite bands. I know I don’t look like it, but my favorite thing to do is to get in the pit and to leave it all there. And that’s what we did that night. We got to go see that band, and we got to just leave all of that ugliness someplace else.

And I’m sure that there’s a guy at the Troubadour who had a broom, and he was cleaning it up, and he’s like, what the hell is this? Like, you know, it was the remains of the person that I used to be, and I left her there, and I walked out of that venue like I was gonna start a brand new life, and that’s what I did. I got the opportunity to work outside the home, which I hadn’t done when I was raising my kids, because even though my children’s father had his addictions and his issues, he did make it so that I got to stay home with my kids when they were little, and I will always be grateful for that. So I got a job, and we got this new house, and I call it my hobbit house, because it’s funky, y’all, it’s weird.

It’s a weird little house in a weird little neighborhood, but it was right around the corner from where my Monday night meeting was, and sometimes we would have the meeting after the meeting at my house, and people would come over, and they would have tea, and we would smoke too many cigarettes and tell too many stories and just hang out with each other, and my kids got to grow up hearing that happen in their house. And that’s not something that I got to experience. My fantastic, wonderful, awesome, super cool dad didn’t get sober until about six years ago. That’s another gift of Al-Anon.

I don’t even know how many years he has sober. I know it’s about six, but I don’t count his days. My children’s father has about the same amount of time, but I’m not really sure, because I don’t count his days either. I don’t have to do that anymore.

I don’t have to pay attention to what you’re doing or you’re not doing, because I’m too busy worrying about me, and I didn’t know until I came to Al-Anon that that wasn’t being a selfish jerk. That’s called self-care. That’s called having my own back and showing up for myself, and I didn’t know that, because when I was growing up, you didn’t do things like that. You didn’t put yourself above anybody else.

You had to be the bottom of the barrel if you were even in the barrel. So that was a new concept that Al-Anon gave me, was self-care. They talked about that in a marathon meeting last night. It was really good.

I got to learn how to be a better mom. I got to learn how to be a better employee. I got to learn how to be a better daughter, a better friend, a better ex-wife, because I don’t think I was a bad one to start with, but I certainly wasn’t nice all the time, so I don’t do that anymore for the most part. I had 24 years in Al-Anon, but I am not perfect and I’m still human, and sometimes the old me still comes out of my mouth, like when my children’s father forgot to wish our daughter a happy birthday.

And it happened to be that he was planning his wedding at the same time, and he had texted her about something to do with his wedding, but he didn’t tell her happy birthday. And I had just flown home from Chicago, and I was tired, and I caught COVID on the plane, and I wasn’t feeling good, and I was just in no position to be having a conversation with anybody, but of course, me being me, I picked up my phone, and I told him some things about himself, because I was mad because he hurt my baby, and I have to make amends to him for that, and I don’t love that, but I’ll do it. I would love to say that I’m a pious and recovered, awesome person, but most of the time, I don’t say the thing because I don’t want to have to apologize for it later. So if that’s my motivation, I’m gonna say that’s okay.

I don’t want to have to make amends for something. I like to feel justified in what I’m doing, right? Don’t we all? But I’m not.

I don’t get to be mean to somebody else just because I’m not feeling well, even if I thought whatever I thought about how he should have treated our child. That’s not my business. She’s a grown adult. She’s 24 years old.

She can handle that situation however she wants, and I need to remember that, so that’s why I keep coming back. You know, 24 years in program and five or six fourth steps, and you know, sponsies, and working with sponsors, that doesn’t mean that I’ve got it all figured out. That just means that I have a place to go to figure it out when I fall down. I got to bring somebody with me last night who had never been to an LNL meeting before, and that was really cool because I remember being that person.

I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t understand the readings. I didn’t understand any of it, but what I did understand was all of your smiling faces. I understood people showing up and saying hi and giving hugs and looking like they were having a good time, and I thought, okay, you guys are all here because you’re either married to, gave birth to, birthed from, all this craziness, but you’re still smiling?

Okay, maybe there’s something to this, you know? I don’t know if any of my kids belong in one meeting or the other. I’m not sure what that looks like for them, but I do know that they know where to go if they find themselves on either side of that ism sandwich because their father is sober, their grandfather is sober, and their mother has gone to Al-Anon for 24 years, so if they find themselves up against a wall, at least they know where to go. Whether they go there or not, I don’t know, and also, by the grace of my higher power and all the people in Al-Anon meetings, I also don’t care, and I don’t mean that in a mean way.

Of course I care about them. They’re my children, but I know that whether or not they find themselves in a meeting is none of my business. Whether or not my people that I love stay in any meetings is also none of my business. I heard people talk about qualifiers, and they say, oh, you know, my dad, or my spouse, or whatever.

I am my qualifier. The mess that goes on right here between my two ears, that’s what qualifies me to be in a meeting of Al-Anon and to speak before you guys and to share my experience, strength, and hope, because I am still me. I don’t live with active alcoholism, and I haven’t for many, many years. That doesn’t mean I’m not still crazy, and that doesn’t mean that I’m not still an enabler.

Doesn’t mean I’m not still gonna justify things. There’s a radio show that I listen to sometimes that they do a thing on there where they talk about the excuse generator. I’m like, oh, no, you got nothing on me. I can give you an excuse for anything.

I can justify whatever nonsense you got going on, including my own, but I don’t do that so much anymore. I go to open speaker meetings for Al-Anon and AA. I heard somebody at an AA speaker meeting share once that gifts come wrapped in a problem box, and I share that with everybody because it’s one of my favorite phrases because that’s what Al-Anon was to me, or is to me still. It was a gift that came in a problem box because, like I said a few minutes ago, I would not have ever gone to an Al-Anon meeting if it hadn’t been for that difficult human that I was married to, and thank God for that difficult human because I have the coolest kids.

They’re beautiful, and they’re funny, and they’re loving, and they make my day every single day, and I wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for him, and I’m so grateful. I wouldn’t have all of these family members and all of these rich experiences and all of this growth if it wasn’t for the alcoholics that I love, and I’m gonna continue to love alcoholics. I will say again, I prefer them in recovery. I did date a gentleman for a very short period of time who did not identify himself as an alcoholic, but I saw him that way, and I saw myself, even at 20 years in recovery, getting in a car with him after he had had alcohol to drink, and I know better than that, but what I did do was the very next day, called that dude up, and I said, you know what, we can’t see each other anymore because when I’m around you, I am not myself, and it’s better for me if I don’t talk to you anymore because I don’t need to tell him what he needs to do with his life.

I just need to worry about what I need to do with mine, and what I need to do with mine is never get into a vehicle when somebody’s been drinking. I know better than that, but sometimes, even at 20 years in recovery, we still forget. You know, we get caught up in the swirl and the sparkle. Those alcoholics are sparkly, they’re like those vampires, you know, when they stand in the sun, they get all shiny and pretty, and they’re like, woo, sparkle, I want one.

But, you know, we don’t have to do that kind of crazy thing anymore, and I’m so, so grateful that there was a Bill, and there was a Bob, and there was a Lois, and they all did the things that they did so that we could do the things that we do, so that we could sit in a room like this and share things with each other, and hopefully just get better every single day. Every single day is not easy, every single day is not fun, but every single day, there’s an opportunity for growth, and there’s always something to be grateful for. I get to take my kids to a punk show next month, and we’re all gonna be there together, and nothing in the world makes me happier than that. You know, I’ve gotten to hear from my children that they appreciate the fact that I went to meetings on Monday nights for all those years.

I got to see them develop a good relationship with their dad in a way that is safe, and healthy, and comfortable for them. Even though he and I don’t have a relationship, they can have one, and that would not be possible if it wasn’t for Al-Anon. Because I know a lot of people that got divorced under all kinds of circumstances that did not encourage their children to have a relationship with the other parent. And I don’t think I would have either if it wasn’t for Al-Anon, to be perfectly honest, because I’m one of those mean Al-Anons.

I want you to know how bad you made me feel. And I’m good at sharing that message. I was good at sharing that message. I’m better at sharing this one now.

And I learned how to do that from all of you guys, and from all of the wonderful Open AA meetings that I went to. I tell the people that I sponsor to go to an Open AA meeting, because it’s important to hear it from the other side. And it’s important to know that people recover. Even if the person that you’re in a relationship with might not be recovering right now, it’s important to know that people do.

Just like I have friends in AA who bring their sponsors to an Al-Anon meeting, because they want them to understand how it felt on the other side. And I think that’s so important. I will always give respect and credit to the folks in AA, because if it wasn’t for them, there wouldn’t be us. We use the same 12 steps, and we’re all trying to get better from the same mess.

We do it a little bit differently. Our focus comes from a different angle, but we’re all trying to get better. And as long as people are trying to get better, there’s room for you in my table. There’s room for you in my hula hoop.

If you’re trying to get better, that’s awesome. If you’re not trying to get better, I’m gonna let you stay over there. I’m not gonna tell you what to do, and I’m not gonna make you feel bad about it, but I’m gonna let you stay over there, because I don’t have time for that in my day anymore. And that sometimes is me too.

I gotta deal with my own funky self. Sometimes I’m not okay. And thankfully, there are people in this room and in other rooms that will tell me when that’s what’s going on. Like, woo!

And my kids, mom, have you been to a meeting lately? How’s your sponsor doing? Have you talked to her recently? And I’m like, ooh, I know what that means.

Okay, yep, noted. I’ll take care of that. And that’s really cool, that they know that lingo, and that they can share that with me. Like I said, my children’s father is sober and works the program.

My father is sober and works the program. My mother is still my mother. She’s still a wonderful and sweet and awesome human who does not think that she needs to go to a meeting, and that hurts my heart a little bit, only because I know how much it’s done for me. And I just wish that everybody would go to a meeting.

Sounds a little cheesy, but I just wish I could take everybody to a meeting, because I know how much good it’s done for me, and I want everybody to feel that good. So, I thank you guys all for listening to me. I thank Krista for asking me to speak. I hope that something that I said resonated with something in your life.

And if it didn’t, that’s okay, too, because we’re all here for our own reasons, and we get better at our own pace. And I just want to say thank you again, and I hope your higher power gives you all a great big hug, because that’s what I’m doing, too. Thank you. Thank you very much.