Sweeping

“Simply tell him that we will never get over drinking until we have done our utmost to straighten out the past. We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worth while can be accomplished until we do so, never trying to tell him what he should do. His faults are not discussed. We stick to our own. If our manner is calm, frank, and open, we will be gratified with the result.”

I’ve never gone into any detail about this part of my life but to mention it once here.  It isn’t something that I share, usually.  It has just been too shameful and painful and personal.

And it is complicated enough being a gay man without having to explain your marriage to a woman.  If I’ve left this detail out in the past it is part lie of omission, part simplifying an already complex story.  But there it is.  I was married once.

I met her in 1985.  She was a friend of a boyfriend.  I was leaving him and he was desperate that I shouldn’t completely disappear.  I would come to my senses and come home.  He was sure of it.  He asked her if I couldn’t stay with her awhile; just till our relationship sorted itself out.

Well, that relationship never sorted itself out; probably because MS and I got along great.  We had a perfectly great time together, liked each others company, each had something the other wanted, and we somehow ended up in bed together and were married in 1987.

It seemed like the perfect solution.  If I was married to a woman I would obviously escape the plague that was killing the men in our neighborhood by the dozens.  She had a little bit of money and a good paying job she had to go to for a day every three weeks or so, which freed me to do important things like learn to cook and paint the apartment.  Of course I didn’t have any real skills; nothing marketable.  I was 20 years old.  I dropped out of high school and ran away from home three years earlier.  Like all my other relationships of that period, she met the qualifications to be a rescuer, and I let her rescue me.

In 1989 she got pregnant and very shortly after that we also found out that she was HIV positive.  The thing I was most afraid of had found me in spite of my efforts to evade it.  At her doctors recommendation she had an abortion.  Back then the drugs used to treat HIV were highly toxic and as a result of treatment she became sicker and sicker.

And as she became sicker, I became sicker.  I managed to drive a business we had opened the previous year into the ground, losing her substantial life savings.  I began to drink heavily.  I began smoking pot heavily.  Neither of them helped ease my fear and none of them turned the equation right for me – the one where she was the rescuer and I was the rescued.

And then I did the worst thing I have ever done to any human being, ever.

I left.

That is the point where I dove headlong into crystal meth addiction.

I have hated myself for that for 19 years.  I used her to provide me with safety and security when I needed her and when she needed safety and security, when she needed me, I abandoned her.  There is nothing I have ever done that I am more ashamed of.

Over the last three years I’ve looked for her on a number of occasions with no luck.  I had actually assumed she was dead.  In fact, it is the thing I lied about in my 5th step.  When I read my 5th step to my sponsor I told him that she was dead.  Later that afternoon, doing my 6th step, I called him back and told him the truth; I didn’t know if she was alive or where she was.  He told me not to worry about it.  If God wanted me to set this right He would give me the opportunity to do it.

I figured that’s just a bunch of AA Hocus Pocus that keeps us from having to do the really hard stuff.   But not making any real progress on a 9th step because you’re chickening out or lazy is a terrible place to be, so I kept looking for her.  I thought I might have found her which brought up the whole “except when to do so would injure them” dilemma.  What I did to her was so horrible, I couldn’t imagine that hearing from me again would do much more than hurt her.  At least that’s what my lack of willingness told me.

I got an email 11 months ago, on my birthday, from an address I didn’t recognize wishing me Happy Birthday and saying it was from my “past – coming back to haunt” me.  I assumed it was from someone I had known from my drug-addled recent past and chose not to respond.  I didn’t really want to hear from the people I had used with, so I ignored it.

Wednesday I was doing my annual clean out of my email inbox (5000 items in my inbox seemed like a good time to do that) and I happened to come across that email again, only this time I responded.  “I have long since stopped allowing my past to haunt me – unless it really tries.  Do you have a name?”

I am still in shock that I finally responded to that birthday wish – on HER birthday.  I don’t know what they call those kind of coincidences elsewhere, but around here, in recovery circles, we call them “a God thing.”  A moment of synchronicity or grace that indicates the path ahead of us.

I’ve sent the amends letter and it was well received.  And I feel better about the process and the power of the steps and about a Higher Power than I have felt in over a year.

And I don’t hate myself for that anymore.  Sure, if I could go back in time and change what I did, I would do it in a heartbeat.  If I could avoid this particular wreckage entirely I would.  But I am profoundly grateful that I have a way of cleaning up my side of the street today.