Trigger warnings: addiction
Written Fall 2017
I have been going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for 17 years. I have been hearing individuals tell stories about the ways that alcoholism has brought them to rock bottom from the age of 5 months old. I have been reciting the serenity prayer hand-in-hand with my mother and those who share her disease for over a decade. My four-year-old hand is traced in my mother’s “big book” — the bible of AA. On September 7th of 2004, the meeting we attended must have gotten boring. But as a 17-year-old, they don’t get boring. I love to listen to the stories of strong men and women who have been through hell and made it back.
As a baby in a car seat and as an overly energetic toddler, it is fair to categorize my attendance to AA meetings as mandatory. Once I hit double-digits, I started to have my own schedule of activities that demanded my time and spending my evenings in various churches surrounded by adults overcoming addiction became a choice. My attendance was not a decision I made consciously, it was my curiosity in people who live with different circumstances than myself as well as an admiration of the values mastered by these recovering addicts that inspired my choice to continue attending AA meetings.
The possibility of alcoholism running in my blood used to frighten me. It took time to realize that what I was witnessing throughout my childhood was not just multiple times in which my mother again fell victim to a substance, but a series of getting back up after she had fallen. Understanding that she had a disease, not a problem, was a lengthy process but it taught me to practice empathy. With titles like “alcoholic,” we often judge how other’s battles manifest themselves externally rather than working to understand them. I am still learning, at each meeting I attend, that behind each appearance is a story and that the judgment that is so easy to give is similarly so painful to receive.
This program has also given me the opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation. Through my experiences as a babysitter at AA meetings, I observed that the behavior of children of alcoholics deviated slightly from the behavior of other children. For an hour, I would sit back and watch the children play—they didn’t rely on me for simple tasks, they had built up the tenacity to brush themselves off if they encountered a conflict. Children at AA meetings are often more rambunctious than other children but also more independent. The circumstances in which a child is raised undoubtedly influences their behavior and it is not uncommon for the effects of childhood adversities to carry in to adulthood. I credit these meetings for my desire to become a child advocate. I have seen how powerful and life altering the right resources and a strong support system can be, two things we rely so heavily upon when growing up.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I cannot change my mother’s alcoholism, I have accepted that this disease will forever play a part in my life. My attitudes towards the program and opinions towards those with addictions and dependencies however, are things I do have the power to control. Until I sat in a circle and laughed and cried at miscellaneous drunken tales, I did not understand that making yourself vulnerable is essential for personal growth. If nothing else, AA has provided me with a model of a healthy environment for recovery from setbacks, a model I aspire to use in my life and apply to the communities to which I belong.
Update in November 2019:
Two years later, a lot has changed in my mother’s life and in mine. For one, the trace of my four-year-old hand I mentioned is now permanently inked into my the back of my left ankle and my mother’s as a symbol of the years we spent together in meetings. But now that I’m in college here, I don’t attend AA meetings anymore, and quite frankly it took me until recently to acknowledge that I miss it. I miss the wonderful people, their hellish stories, and the pride they took in their tokens of sobriety. And two years later, I still know people who don’t recognize alcoholism as a disease and I still know people who joke about being alcoholics when they had a bit too much the night before. But I also still work with children who have significant amounts of adverse experiences and I am still working to understand how the use of labels such as ‘alcoholic’ affect the way we understand and treat mental health. There is so much more to a person than the illness they are labeled with and I continue to find, with my own mental health experiences and from working within the field, that this is often where the system fails. Mental health systems seldom work to understand an individual’s battles, but rather it judges, labels, and often medicates them. But after years of grappling with the conceptualization and treatment of illnesses such as alcoholism I guess I understand why — it sure is a hell of a lot easier.
By Anonymous.