First, I want to say how important blogging has been to my recovery. If I hadn’t had a place where I could just bleed and be supported, I don’t know if I would have been able to stay sober. It might have been different if I’d lived in a larger city; somewhere that there was a larger LGBT recovery community. But I don’t. I live in the Great Redneck Desert deep in the heart of Jesusland. So to no longer be able to write–to have something blocking me from doing it–has been an exceptionally painful experience. But it’s been about 10 months now and I think I’m ready to say what happened. Read the rest of this entry »
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My mom completed her treatment and came home from Minnesota last night, and in spite of walking into a month of mail, an imminent divorce, and more, she seemed OK. It was very late in the evening, and I could see as she went through the mail that she was becoming more and more distressed, her voice tightening and her hands trembling. In the best situations coming home is a big deal. She isn’t coming home to an ideal situation.
Home for me is in many ways the kind of emotional sobriety that I usually abide in. Home is serenity, sanctuary, stability, safety. Home is the place where I can be myself; where I don’t feel like I have to meet someone else’s expectations. I haven’t been to my emotional and spiritual home since before my mom left to begin her journey there. I need to be home and I have been working to get back there with a fervor and I have only just begun to get back there.
Mom coming home hasn’t really caused me to get back here. Coming home has been the product of step work and prayer and honesty and it has been the product of how a Higher Power works in my life. In spite all I have been angry about and hurt by, coming home, coming home to that place of acceptance and forgiveness, has helped me see that I’m free now from the noose I alone created. It has been taken away, root and branch, and even though I occasionally snap back into believing that the memory of it is the thing itself, my conscience is clear. And I am free now of the intense burden and stress that I have been bearing alone for so many months; I am free of it and yet I have kept my side of the street clean.
It is clear to me, also, that I could not solve this problem on my own, that without some work and some people with whom I am able to be honest, I might yet be trapped in an emotional landscape that is a continent away from where I belong.
Now that she is back in the dangerous location where she lives, I am hopeful that my mom can keep using what she has been shown in her own journey to her real home.
My credit score must be improving. I’m getting more and better junk mail. Here’s to clearing away some wreckage.
“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. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m totally double dipping today. Sorry. I spaced it that today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. I’m not Jewish, but I am fascinated by their faith, their culture, and their traditions. And this day is particularly important in the Jewish faith and it speaks to me in terms that I relate to my recovery.
According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each person’s fate for the coming year into a “book” on Rosh Hashanah and waits until Yom Kippur to “seal” the verdict. During the Ten Days of Repentance, a Jew tries to amend his behavior and seek forgiveness for wrongs done against God (bein adam leMakom) and against his fellow man (bein adam lechavero). Read the rest of this entry »
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