learning my life was unmanageable pt 1

step 1. "we admitted we were powerless over alcohol (and people, places and things) -- that our lives had become unmanageable."

wow. so many ways to read this step. so many ways to argue with it and try to feel i am better than this. i still have power. i wasn't the one with the drinking problem. i was managing my life just fine, thank you very much. woah. i've been thinking about this step. i have wanted to understand this step. and i kinda had this idea that once i got this step i would be able to move on, sort of check it off and move to the next one. i am learning it doesn't work that way. the steps aren't a checklist. i feel like i haven't even really begun and i am now realizing i will never be finished. the steps aren't a destination, a goal, a thing to do then claim recovery and sanity. they are a way of seeing and living and being.

so i am powerless. i am working on this thought. i can control me, how i react, how i feel, right? i can't control the alchoholic or his situation or his emotions, but i have power over alcohol still, right? i don't have a drinking problem, i have a drinker problem. still not right. that's where i was a few months ago. i am learning now that there is so much i am powerless over, but that does not mean i am not responsible for myself. power and responsibility are different. i was having issues separating these two. learning to detach is helping me see the wisdom of the 1st step.

i had long ago come to grips with the fact that i couldn't control the alcoholic in my life. i couldn't stop him from drinking any more than i could stop the sun from rising. i had begun to accept that his drinking was just a fact of life and that i needed to try to just take care of myself. watch him die, drink his life away, and go on with my own existence. an absolutely impossible thing to do if you are still attached and enmeshed and part of this person. i exercised and ate right and had my own circle of friends and was working hard to be a great mother (and father) to our child, while my alcoholic drank and drank and drank. i took care of our home while he got us further in debt. i removed all my expectations of him, so as to not lead to disappointment. this helped. but i had a skewed view still. if i expected nothing from him, i couldn't be let down. this actually gave me peace. but i neglected to see that expectations were still running my life until i got into al-anon. it was at a meeting that i realized i was still living my life based on my alcholics expectations. walking on eggshells, keeping things "level" and enabling like crazy to keep the peace. ashamed to share even with my closest friends how bad things were, withdrawing into my own world and desperately still trying to control it. but i thought i wasn't. i thought i had it figured out and that i had let go of control.

so i thought my life was manageable. until i broke my leg in october of 2007. that was a big eye opener. i'm out playing soccer, living my life, taking care of myself, with my son on the sidelines cause i had to take him with me everywhere cause my alcoholic was too busy drinking, and there i am in the air with a big defender who has never played soccer coming down on me. and i know it before it happens. i know my life is about to change in a big way. really, i had had the worst summer trying to make progress with my alcholoic. we had been arguing a lot, i had begun to finally really express my inability to continue the life we were living. 12 years together with major ups and downs, and raising our 7 year old son pretty much by myself. i was getting tired. i was exhausted. i couldn't take it anymore. yet i was still trying to reason with a drunk. his health was beginning to fail and on the surface it meant nothing to him. and anytime i would confront the drinking or the debt or the health, he just pushed me away. but i was tired, and i knew i was drowning trying to save him, so i kept confronting, and he kept pushing. he kicked me out of our room. and the night before i broke my leg, he locked me out of the house, then passed out and went to sleep. so here i am, crashing down on the soccer field, just knowing that this is it.....and half the field hears it. its like a shotgun. score: ground 1 - me 0. i'm laying on the field, knowing i should be thinking about my leg and what to do next and getting to a hospital and the FIRST thought that goes through my head is: crap, has the football game started yet (it was sunday)? cause if it has, he has started drinking and who is going to come help me take care of our son while i get to the hospital for an x-ray? so i look like a real goof, laying on the ground, in obvious pain, and the first thing i ask the group of people that now surround me is "what time is it? has the football game started yet?" that is an unmanageable life. really.

now i didn't know it then that my life was unmanageable. it was completely normal for me to think that that was a sane question to ask. and i can still feel the moment, when the doc comes in after the x-ray and tells me "oh yeah, it's broken. it's broken good." and i look up to the ceiling and say out loud. "really? you are going to do this to me? now, of all the moments of my life, you are going to break my leg now?" and i hear back, plain as day, "oh yeah little one. you need to sit and think for a while." crap. kicked out of my room, locked out of the house, only repsonsible parent to my child, on the verge of a mental breakdown and headed for divorce, and there it is.

sit and think.
stop.
be.
learning my life was unmanageable really sucked.