Sobriety in Stumptown

Transcription

1 Sobriety in Stumptown Portland Area Intergroup November NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR Volume 6, No Savings in Sobriety by Fran J., Portland OR Most members of AA will tell you that when they got sober, they realized how much money they had been wasting on their alcohol habit. For sure, I was in that category. When I got sober, I immediately had more spending cash go figure! However, I recently decided to add up exactly how much money I began saving by not drinking anymore. I calculated that over the course of a ten-year-long daily drinking habit, I consumed an average of 1.5 bottles of wine per day/evening. I should point out that toward the end I was a housewife drinker so most of my drinking was done at home under cover of making dinner or, on the weekends, making brunch. This was my cover and I stuck to it, and nobody but I was fooled. Nevertheless, I tried to be a thrifty drinker, since the point was not to sip and savor the wine, but the quaff it at a rapid pace so that no one, including myself, would notice how much I was putting away. When I bought wine for myself, it was always two-buck Chuck or something similar wine in a box is a particularly thrifty way to go when you are a maintenance drinker. So, to put it another way I was a cheap drunk. Still, I figure at an average cost of $4.00 per bottle, I was spending close to $200 a month on my alcohol. Now, let s see what kind of add-ons often came with that expenditure. Often, when I bought wine for me, I would think of other deserving people who I wanted to share my habit with, and I would buy them something nicer, say a $10 bottle of wine (woo hoo!), so that I could impress the clerk that I KNEW my wines and was not simply a cheap drunk. Then, there was the constant going back and forth to the store (or to different stores in order to spread the wealth around, so to speak). Sometimes, if I had been short-sighted about how much I needed and didn t want to go back to the same nearby store so soon, I would 1

2 have to drive further afield and use more gas. These expenditures for gas money and extra trips to the store probably added up to another $50 a month. Finally, there was the late night catalog/online impulse buying that often accompanied my drinking. Here I would be, home drunk with everyone else in bed, and wide-awake with nothing to do but with a credit card in my hand. Why, I know what I ll do! I ll go shopping! I need a new rug for in front of the sink, after all, and there s probably other stuff I need too but just can t remember at the moment. What a great idea! And when the order arrives a few days later, if I m sober and don t want the stuff, well, so what if it costs money to ship it back. With luck, it s from a store that I can return it to a store that sells wine so when I take it back for a refund, I can kill two birds with one stone. The only thing I was lucky enough to avoid was getting a DUI while I was driving drunk. However, I know from countless DUI stories; a drunk-driving event can be a $15,000 mistake. Let s say for sake of argument that I had gotten a DUI. If I add that to the monthly costs I ve already calculated of about $300 a month and spread the DUI over that ten-year period I was at the height of my drinking, I calculate that by no longer drinking, I am saving about $450 per month. So, wow, we are talking REAL money here. And in sobriety, we are talking REAL savings. What to do with all the money saved? I have found a lot of uses for that extra money. One thing I have begun to do is the Faithful Fiver program through Intergroup. I set up, through my bank s bill-pay program, a monthly payment that the bank sends to our central office. I originally set it up at $5 per month (an amount that I don t even notice is gone from my checking account) and have gradually increased it a little as my sobriety (and the rewards of my sobriety) has grown. It s a simple way to give back to the program that has given SO MUCH to me. One reason I decided to do it is that I often find myself out of town and not able to get to my usual meetings, so having the Faithful Fiver donation set up allows me to continue to support my very deserving local fellowship even if I am not at a local meeting. Another reason is because it costs me nothing extra to have my bank send out a check for me and it s good for the bank to participate in such a worthy cause (even if they don t know they are supporting AA!). Finally, the Faithful Fiver program is set up as a non-profit 501c3 so the contribution is tax deductible! I hope you will find this little calculation-of-the-cost-of-drinking exercise useful. Maybe when you do your own calculations you will find that your drinking costs add up differently. But I will bet you any amount of money that in sobriety you are dollars ahead every month. I also hope you will consider sending in a few of those extra dollars to support our local fellowship. If you want to send in a monthly donation to Central Office, make checks payable to Portland Area Intergroup, 825 NE 20 th Ave., Ste. 200, Portland, OR 97232, or go to pdxaa.com and make an easy, online payment. 2

3 Sober Mommy by Gretchen V., Milwaukie OR Before I had children, I was the perfect mother. I had grand designs of hand-crafting homemade baby food from organic vegetables I grown in my rambling garden plot whilst wearing a giggling Gerber baby strapped to my shapely body. (Because I would, of course, have shed the baby weight immediately at the moment of birth). I would knit them delicate sweaters from yak hair I personally harvested, speak in a perpetually saccharin-sweet tone, and become a dynamic mother earth type sans mom jeans. I would never feed them fast food. This was a lovely picture, but the moment that Uterus Evacuation Day arrived, I was absolutely horrified at the shocking reality of what it means to be a mother. I was overwhelmed, exhausted, a little chubby, and even this day my belly button looks strange to me. More tragic to me personally than the physical ramifications was my rapid realization that my entrance into mommydom robbed me of my alcoholic desire to play the part of the perfect mother. The Big Book describes the alcoholic as the actor on the stage. I was most certainly a victim of the delusion that I could wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if I only managed well. While I cannot quite pinpoint from where this idea was birthed (pun intended) that I possessed no inherent value as a human being and thus must earn it through perfection, it was deep in the recesses of my six-year old little alcoholic psyche. Perhaps even earlier. In order to be loved I needed to be perfect. At everything. All the time. Including motherhood. It is no wonder, therefore, that by the time I found myself deeply in the grips of my disease I experienced nauseating guilt over not only my lack of perfection as a mom, but my absolute emotional and spiritual absence. The days, and years of my kids childhood began to slip through my desperately grasping fingers as I let go of them as my priority and reached for the bottle instead. My beautiful daughter, at the time four, peered at me through messy brown curls and asked, Mommy, why do you always smell like that? I was sure that she was not only referring to the putrid smell of Vendange wine oozing from my pores, but of rotting guilt. I had willingly traded her innocence for my substance. And for that, I felt I could never forgive myself. My disease told me the only thing that would wash away that guilt was alcohol. But the only thing it washed away was my presence in my kids life, and I once again climbed on the Sick Cycle Carousel, using the poison to numb the guilt that it had planted in the first place. 3

4 Alcoholics Anonymous promised me that I would come to a place of peace and rest, where I would not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it. I m not sure I m entirely there yet when it comes to my children or all that I gave up. What I know to be true, however, is I m able to show up for my children in sobriety in a manner that would have been out of my grasp had I not walked through the Dark Forest of alcoholism to find recovery. You of Alcoholics Anonymous have taught me the skills I need to go with the flow, drop the façade of perfectionism, and get down and dirty with my kids. Sure, my belly button still looks weird. And my daughter announces to my son dinner is ready every time the microwave timer dings from the kitchen. Sometimes I mess this thing up and I lose my patience, or forget to pack the soccer cleats for practice. I put extra cookies in their lunches and let them stay up too late without brushing their teeth because I m too tired to fight with them about it. But when my alcoholic shit fairies start screaming at me that I m not good enough and other moms do it better, I cut them down with AA slogans. Progress Not Perfection. One Day at a Time. Let Go and Let God. I am eternally grateful that I was rescued from the depths and gifted with the joys of my own perfect imperfections as a mother. THIS is what The Promises look like in my life. That s all I ve got. Twelve Traditions: A Brief Historical Glimpse by Bob S., Richmond IN Forward to Alcoholics Anonymous, First Edition, pages xiii-xiv: We are not an organization in the conventional sense of the word. There are no fees nor dues whatsoever. The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking. We are not allied with any particular faith, sec,t or denomination, nor do we oppose anyone. We simply wish to be helpful to those who are afflicted. The above writing is a partial prologue to the Twelve Traditions as we know them today. The long form was written by Bill Wilson and first published in the April, 1946 Grapevine. However, Bill s awareness of the often rebellious alcoholic personality led him to introduce them as Twelve Points to Assure Our Future, thus avoiding the implication of rules or laws. An editorial was added for each point explaining its origin and why it was necessary. Later, Earl Treat, a co-founder of AA in Chicago, suggested these assurances would benefit from revision and shortening. Bill agreed and the shorter version was formed; thereafter, they were referred to as the Twelve Traditions. 4

5 Bill W. found another opportunity to present the Twelve Traditions at AA s first International Convention in Cleveland during the summer of He presented them to three-thousand attendees, in a general manner, without actually reading them verbatim. In a standing vote, the 3,000 attendees unanimously pronounced their yea to the Twelve Traditions. At the next International Convention in St. Louis, July 1-3, 1955, Bill W. presented a resolution to the 3,800 attendees which resolved that the General Service Conference become the Guardian of the Twelve Traditions. The Twelve Traditions were then officially ratified. They were finally published, in both long and short form, in the 1955 second edition of the Big Book. Bill then began a speaking tour of the country in attempt to develop greater interest in the newly-formed Twelve Traditions albeit with little success. Consequently, he developed another idea: Here follows an excerpt from a letter dated May 20, 1952 from Bill W. to Fr. Ed Dowling: A few people think that the Traditions aren't covered with enough dignity -- that posterity may not like them for that reason. However, we feel that we are writing for the information of alcoholics who ordinarily have no time to read anything much except as it concerns their own survival. Our idea is to publish the Twelve Steps and these Twelve Traditions in a small book to appear, I hope, by next fall. If we are able to do a fair job on the Steps that will be helpful and, published along with the Traditions, they may act as a bait for reading the latter. However, we'll see. Bait indeed! So now you know the reason Bill wrote the 1953 book titled, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which, in my opinion, gives an excellent summation of the AA Traditions. As a side note, I find it interesting to note that the phrase honest desire to stop drinking (found on page xiv above) was never included, as is often thought, in either the long or short form of Twelve Traditions. This phrase, however, was at first included in the early Grapevine Preamble, but the word honest was removed in Sponsees Say the Darnedest Things "Acceptance doesn't mean agreement." "The hardest thing I've had to do in sobriety is to put down the script I had for my life." "Give me wisdom to know your will, and the strength to actually DO your will." 5

6 "I can usually get by on a day or two of credit with God before things start getting weird." "For me it s not about balance, it s about a good life blend. "I'm not sure I actually believe in balance. I believe in choices." "Every day is a gift. That's why they call it the present." Suck it up, Sally! Surviving the Holidaze by Jennifer L., Milwaukie OR While the following tips are not original ideas I documented, nor particularly creative, they are time-honored, -successful aids to help reduce internal stressors. And we all know stress makes the holidays even harder. My references were many, and included AA meetings, stress reduction seminars, various AA newsletter lists, and AA old-timer advice for getting thru AA's Bermuda triangle of holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. I hope using these aids help you enjoy sober and safe celebrations. Happy Holidays to you. - Pack your AA phone list. - Always have money in your pocket--at least enough for a phone call to someone on your phone list for a ride or help. - Drive yourself-don't feel stranded. Or make sure you have the phone number of a cab and cab fare. Or a bus schedule and bus fare. - If going to a party, achurch, or any place new, try to make the trip in the daytime prior to the event so you know a good route, landmarks, travel time, etc.. - Leave functions early if you become uncomfortable. It's okay to be the first guest to leave. - If you go to a party, park on the street. Don't park in the driveway and get blocked in. - Bring your fully-charged cell phone, if you have one. - Eat something before you go to a party. Remember HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired). - Slippery slopes -- stay away from them. They can do worse damage to you and your health than just break an ankle. - Create a personal survival kit to keep in your car. This kit can include a spare set of comfortable shoes, a warm coat, gloves, socks, water, and some shelf-stable foods like nuts or raisins. - Prepare ahead of time so you can survive safely. Make a plan and follow it. - There is always, always a place for you during the holidays with your AA family. 6

7 Quotable Quotes "I used to be afraid of failing at the things that really matter to me, but now I'm more afraid of succeeding at the things that don't matter. Bob Goff "You are more than the choices that you've made, you are more than the sum of your past mistakes, you are more than the problems you create, you've been remade. Tenth Avenue North; lyrics from the song "More. "Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn't end there. Bucky Sinister I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn t understand why the happiness never came, couldn t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn t made me feel good in years. Heather King, Parched "We want ecstasy as a way of life, not a liver-poisoning alcoholiday from it. CrimethInc, Anarchy and Alcohol "Achieving true sobriety goes beyond abstinence. It s also about healing your soul, apologizing for damage you did to others, and seeking forgiveness. Lou Gramm Monthly Business Meetings For details about monthly business meetings, contact the PAI Office at Or send your questions or concerns to 1212@pdxaa.com. Portland Area Intergroup (PAI): Monthly Business Meeting, 2 nd Mon, 7:00 PM, 3123 NE 24 th Ave. (St. Mary Magdalene Church), Portland PAI CPC (Cooperating with the Professional Community) 7

8 PAI Public Information PAI Treatment Facilities PAI Bridging the Gap PAI Corrections PAI Website PAI Newsletter Dist 9: 1 st Wed, 6:30 PM, 24 th and Kearney, Portland Dist 10: Last Mon, 7:00 PM, Beaverdam Rd., West Side Service Cntr, Beaverton Dist 11: Last Thu, 7:00 PM, URS Club, Portland Dist 12: 1 st Tue, 6:30 PM, 12x12 Club, 7035 NE Glisan, Portland Dist 15: 1 st Wed, 6:45 PM, th St., Oregon City Dist 18: 1 st Sat, 9:30 AM, 215 N 6 th St., St. Helens Dist 23: 1 st Tue, 6:00 PM, Emmanuel Presbyterian, SW Willamette Dr., West Linn Dist 24: 1 st Thu, 6:15 PM, 2800 SE Harrison St., Portland Dist 26: 2 nd Sun, 5:00 PM, St Charles Church, 5310 NE 42 nd Ave., Portland Dist 27: 1 st Mon, 7:00 PM, SE Linwood Ave., St. Paul s Methodist, Milwaukie Dist 31: 2 nd Tue, 7:00 PM, 937 NE Jackson School Rd., Hillsboro Dist 34: 3 rd Sat, 5:00 PM, 485 Portland Ave., Gladstone Dist 35: 2 nd & 4 th Sat, 7:00 PM, SW Shaw St., Suite A, Beaverton Dist 36: 2 nd Thu, 6:00 PM, 2025 SW Vermont St., Portland Dist 37: 2 nd Tue, 6:30 PM, SW Town Center Loop East, Wilsonville Committee News We have several committee positions available. PAI needs your help. Working on a committee is excellent 12th Step service work. If you are interested in being on any Portland Area Intergroup committee, send an to pdxaa.com with "COMMITTEE INTEREST" in the subject field. Or, just click on Service on the Intergroup website. Intergroup committees carry the message of recovery to the still-suffering alcoholic. Please help yourself and others. Sign up. Thank you. 8

9 Hotline: Openings for Hotline shifts and for 12th Step volunteers. 12th Step volunteers talk to newcomers who have questions. Please note: The calls are screened by the answering service and forwarded to the volunteer's home phone; callers never see the home phone number of the volunteer. Cooperating with the Professional Community and Public Information: The two committees are working together to bring the message of recovery to the public and to the professional community healthcare, clergy, legal, educators, social workers, and others. For meeting details, send to: Subject Line CPC or PI. Bridging the Gap (BTG): provides a one-time temporary contact for people transitioning from a treatment center to AA meetings. BTG meets the third Monday of each month at 6:30 PM at the Portland Intergroup Office basement, located at 825 NE 20th Ave, Suite 200, Portland. "We Bridge the Gap so alcoholics leaving treatment don't have to walk alone across that scary gap between the beginning of recovery in treatment and the continued recovery in AA. Please contact the PAI office via phone, , or 1212@pdxaa.com, if you are interested. Corrections: Our current focus is to carry the AA message to youths in the Multnomah County Detention Center. We need many volunteers to help bring AA meetings to the facility on a regular basis. Please contact the PAI office via phone, or 1212@pdxaa.com, if you are interested. Website: The Website committee is looking for members. Please contact the PAI office via phone, or 1212@pdxaa.com, if you are interested. Newsletter (Sobriety in Stumptown): The Newsletter committee is looking for members. Send an of interest to newsletter@pdxaa.com. Events: The Events Committee needs a new Committee Chair. Send an to Events@pdxaa.com with COMMITTEE CHAIR in the subject field. Become Published Submit your article, poem, or artwork to Sobriety in Stumptown. Share your message of experience, strength, and hope. You can write about your personal before and after AA stories, things that have inspired you in sobriety, a spiritual awakening, a lesson you ve learned in sobriety, or a piece on how the AA promises have manifested in your life. Just tell your story in your own words, written from your heart. Your message is important, and just might save someone s life. Remember, this newsletter would not exist without your input. And being a published writer is fun! 9

10 Visit the Portland Area Intergroup website, select the Newsletter icon, and send me a MS Word document. I am here to help. Please keep your story to around 800 words. And include your phone number or address in case I have questions. Deadline for articles in Sobriety in Stumptown is the end of each month. -In service, Jennifer L., editor, newsletter@pdxaa.com Step Eleven Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. -Reprinted with permission of AA World Services, Inc. Tradition Eleven Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films. -Reprinted with permission of AA World Services, Inc. Serenity Prayer God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. -Reprinted with permission of AA World Services, Inc. 10