REPAIRATIONS [SIC]

REPAIRATIONS [SIC]

I find it astonishing and perhaps a little bit unnerving that with only eleven months of solid sobriety in me that I am considered an authority on anything in the rooms. Yet the other day I shared my desperation about my relationship with my wife and that with her resistance to resolving our marital discord she finally precipitated my insisting that we either come to an agreement to talk or I will file for official separation. Now in truth, I cannot afford to do that but I hoped that the threat would get her to move her ass from this ‘deer frozen in the headlights’ position and move on with her life so that I could move on with mine. But all that is beside the point.

The point as I said, is this notion that I have any expertise in this business of life, marital relations and 'what one does do after 38 years of marriage when it all has started to crumble around you.' And I am just as at fault for the implosion of my marriage as surely as Joshua was for the implosion of Jericho. No doubt at times I felt as self righteous about bringing it all down around me as he, but I have since learned to moderate my anger and self righteousness because I have learned that however justified I may feel about pointing the finger of blame at my spouse for her collusion in this marital maelstrom, I have to suck it up because unleashing that pent up anger, energy and bile will not do either of us any good and surely will redound to our mutually assured destruction.

So when I sat down with Peter for breakfast today, ostensibly because he felt that my experience was one that he shared, I felt a bit ill at ease since I was unsure what he expected of me and doubly wary since we had just finished a chapter in the Big Book entitled 'Working with Others'. Well was I going to be working with others? This was clearly what we call Twelve Step work, which is taking the program to others or in this case helping another alcoholic out. And really I, we, can only help 'others' out by sharing our 'experience, strength and hope' with them so they can try to see themselves in our dilemmas and pain in order to see their way clear of their dilemmas and pain.

What I told Pete was that after I shared at that meeting I had fully intended to confront my wife with an ultimatum and tell her that she had had a full year to determine whether she wanted to get back together. That I was not happy being strung along waiting for her to get her emotional act together. And she had better make a decision or else I would make one for her. But somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that she had not done the emotional leg work that I had done and been doing for the past year. She had basically tread water, and her strength was giving out and she was going under. She was in fact, going to drown.

And I began to be frightened and worried for her. She told me that she couldn't think through all the emotional problems in her life while she was working on her PhD and needed a few weeks to get through this semester; and then we could talk. I guess I'm a sucker for my wife's tribulations and certainly don't want another meltdown, nor be present for her Gotterdammerung or be the cause of it.

And what Pete gleaned from this was that with ninety days under his belt neither he nor his wife yet had the emotional perspective to come to an informed, mature and sober decision about their lives together. They were still wet behind the ears, as it were, and hadn't yet begun to explore their character defects to the point where they could recognize them before they could act on them. Well at least Pete understood that much in his first ninety days, that he needed to keep on coming and that the adage in AA of trying not to make any major decisions in the first year was sage advice acquired from the experiences of thousands of alcoholics over the past many years.

I shared another bit of what I had been thinking which while not a secret was never said outright in the rooms before and that was that just not drinking and coming to meetings would not keep you sober. It will keep you from drinking but not sober. And Pete knows all about that, because for eighteen years he was a dry drunk and as soon as the familial restraints came off, the dry modifier came off and he became just an ordinary drunk. And he realizes that without solidifying his program through spiritual acceptance, humility, and attempting to live life on a completely different energy level among friends, he will never achieve a lasting sobriety and with that any hope for a stable marriage or in the absence of that, an equitable and serene separation.

We have agreed to check in with one another pretty much on a daily basis since we have a lot in common. We are the same age, children about the same age and education and similar marriage situations and certainly married for the same period of time. Slightly different periods of non sobriety but that does not matter as much as finding a common solution.

So I am beginning my journey into twelve step work and it is not as daunting as I thought it would be. But knowing how fragile my sobriety was and how fragile it could be gives me pause whenever someone asks for help. And that's good. For I should never feel so confident in either my sobriety or my abilities to help others in theirs that I should feel cocky enough to place either in jeopardy. A good lesson for me in the coming New Year.

© res 12/22/10