By George, I Think She's Got It!

Remember my sponsee who needed to have some fun? If you missed that post, you can find it here.

I saw her at the meeting we both attend a couple of days later and asked her how the night she was so worried about went.

It went fine, she said.

Downstairs where her husband and his buddies were playing pool, nothing got broken. No drunken brawls broke out. The house did not burn down.

Upstairs, she watched two movies, ate her ice cream and had a perfectly lovely time. Over the weekend, she also went to the gym and spent an enjoyable day with the hiking club she had just joined.

The meeting centered on a reading from Courage to Change. It had to do with trying to control everything, including the pace of our recovery. Lots of people talked about surrender, prayer, those sorts of things.

When it was my sponsee’s turn, she said she was going to go in a little different direction. There was some little bit about self-care in the reading and she seized on that.

She said it used to be that she’d plan her weekends by making a list of all the chores that needed to be done: water the plants, do the grocery shopping. Now, she thinks about the things she’d like to do and plans her weekend around that. The chores still get done. They just get done around the things she most wants to do.

Wow, I thought. She’s really getting it.

When we had our conversation about her husband’s pool party, she said it was like he was rebelling. She took it personally, as we tend to do. She assumed it was all about her.

Sometimes that’s true. When we begin to detach, sometimes the alcoholic tries to pull us back in by acting out. But most of the time, what our alcoholics do has nothing to do with us. They are just trying to live their lives. The trouble is that we are trying to live their lives, too.

I know that was true of me with my daughter. The way I got over my obsession with what she was doing was to get busy with my own life and leave her to hers. That’s what I think my sponsee is learning, and I couldn’t be happier for her.