When I came into recovery, all I had to show for 49 years of living was a little square table and a tri-lite and eight green garbage bags of belongs to show for living. My attitude was stop the world I want to get off. When I left central Ontario to come to Hamilton I left behind a couch which was part of a $800. suite that my ex-husband ruined by laying down on it in his work clothes after he finished working in a machine shop all day. There was just a "little" bit of resentment there. It may have been left over from my first husband selling the furniture I bought when we were married for pitance to pay to have his car painted and moved us into an unfurnished apartment. The couch in the furnished place was ghastly, black with big ugly flowers on it. When my landlady asked me to leave when my husband left to move in with another woman, and she didn't want a single mother living in her apartment, I was glad my son had peed on it a few times, when I had changed his diaper. My son was two months old and certainly wasn't responsible, but somehow it seemed like sweet revenge in the moment.
When we moved her in 1984 it really was the downhill spiral for me because I knew I had to quit drinking and I started to escalate my pill use. My son got his own place in 1985 and he kept losing his apartments and he always moved in with me until the next time, and it became a vicious circle. Even after I came into recovery, I was still enabling him by allowing him to come home to mother.
In early recovery I didn't have a bed, I had left my apartment to my son and had moved into the YWCA and lived there for two years. At six months sober, I moved into my apartment and I borrowed a mattress and slept on the floor for three months until I could find some kind of bed. The first thing I got was an old chair with no arms that had a huge whole in it that I had to stuff with a blanket so I could lie flat, it was marvellous, I was six inches higher off the floor. It wasn't until I moved into my apartment at three years sober that my aunt made a decision to get new furniture and I got her bed chesterfield. I was put on disability in my first year and they bought me a bed, but I didn't have a couch.
After several years in Al-Anon, the guilt wouldn't let me continue, and it was about five years into recovery that I got the brilliant idea of giving him my couch and then he didn't have a bed to come home to. Then a friend of my son who was in the program relapsed and he lost his place, so I got his couch. It matched my swivel rocker and my easy-boy chair and I was happy. I have a thing about used stuff, it is new to me and if it is clean or cleanable, it is change, just like me.
Then when I moved to my new location last November I made the decison not to take this couch with me because it took up too much space and made my place too cramped. I am stll on disability, and though I quit smoking the exta money wasn't there because it became bridge money.
When I made the decision to leave the AA Fellowship and go to NA on the night of my first meeting in my new group, the gentleman who drove me home asked me if I knew anyone who needed a new couch. The owner was the first person I met in NA ten years ago, and his mother worked in the treatment facility I was at, although I didn't know that until several years later. I now have a two seater love seat, which pulls out into a bed and I am going to have my first guest tonight. The daughter of my unofficially adopted daughter is coming for a sleep over. My friend's real mother lives in a city about two hours away and I was adopted back in the YWCA back when I was using. She has been supportive and a good friend over the years, and is a student of Al-Anon and ACOA.
When I am grateful for what I have, instead of looking at what I don't have, I am at peace. I had nothing, so anything I have today is bonus. I didn't think I was going to live to be 40 and here I am 20 years later living overtime, with all that she needs, which includes a computer, a TV I don't find time to watch, and a life so busy, I have trouble finding time to get here to the site to post.
I love the native culture and I have a meditation I do with a book that is called "The Sacred Path Workbook." I finished a meditation one day, which said, "Give thanks, it is already on it's way." I said the words, "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" As I got up off the carpet the telephone range, it was my friend asking me if a bag of groceries and $20 was enough money to babysit her daughter for the weekend. My prayer was help to see it through to the end of the month until my cheque came in.
He supplies my needs, sometimes my wants, and even my desires, because I desire each and everyone who reads this, another happy, prosperous and healthy twenty-four hours.
(originally posted on
www.another-24-hours.com)
The holiday season is one day at a time.
