I am stone cold sober and loving every minute of it. I drank 2 glasses of wine last night. Not tumbler size glasses. At one time, before I stopped drinking for 10 years, back when I tried every which way to rationalize my consumption, I found the biggest wine glasses available and filled them to the brim. But I only drank 2 glasses of wine. So last night, I consumed two 6 ounce glasses of wine. I certainly felt better this morning than I did yesterday. I am stone cold sober and loving every minute of it. I am learning, every day, something new. My teacher, Rod Stryker says it so well. “You only know what you know until you know more.”
I knew so little for so long. Here is a summary many things I thought I knew about myself and the world until I knew more.
My father sexually abused me. He repeatedly beat my grandmother, even pushed her down our basement steps. He forced my step-mother to have sex with him. How do I know he did this to her? My bedroom abutted theirs making me privy to their frequent copulation. He impregnated her 7 times in as many years. My father did not work. My father, Carl, hated my brother, Scott and beat him unmercifully. He also verbally abused Scott, my grandmother, and Elaine, my step-mother. Elaine drank and took pills. I thought these people, the grown ups in my life represented the world.
I lived with 8 other people in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath house for the first 14 years of my life. I shared a bedroom and a double bed with my grandmother that entire time. When we moved, my sister Carrie became my roommate. Random, but important. I started smoking at eleven. I took cigarettes packages from the bottom of Elaine’s Bellaire carton and arranged the rest of the packs to look unchanged.
My mother, Sally, married 5 times. She had multiple affairs. She drank alcohol in excess. She abused me, verbally and physically. I thought I deserved the abuse.
At 16, I moved to Memphis, Tennessee to live with my mother and her fifth husband, Bill Smith. I came in the middle of my junior year. Sometime after that, I started dating Jeff Michael and I attended St. John’s United Methodist Church with his family. I needed counseling. I turned to our minister, Daly Thompson. He told me he could help me find peace. He took me to his cabin in Mississippi. He and his wife had purchased the place as a get-away, a place to reflect and pray. I am chronologically challenged so I cannot tell you exactly how old I was at the time. Let’s say 17. I know I married Jeff at 21, and the visit to the lake house occurred some time before our nuptials. Daly must have been in his early 40’s.
Wait, I know more now than I did five minutes ago. I was 20 when I went to the cabin with Daly. I had just moved back to Memphis from South Bend where I had gone to “save” my family. Having “found the Lord,” I decided He wanted me to return to my family home and help my brothers and sisters find the path to redemption. I failed. Once back “home,” I reconnected with a high school friend, Scott Brewer, who introduced me to his friends, a bunch of LSD popping, pot smoking drug dealers. Reeling from the downward spiral that ensued, including a midnight drive to Chicago to pick up hundreds of pounds of pot, I called Jeff begging him to come get me. He did. As a side bar, I did learn how to swim while I was there. I took lessons at the YMCA. In reflection, I am sure I wanted to balance my 24 hour drug use with something healthy. To this day, I love to swim.
Back to Mississippi. Daly drove me to Mississippi. We studied the Bible. We prayed. We meditated. We talked. We took the row-boat out on the lake. We ate lunch together and then, somehow, we ended up on the couch, me next to Daly. I think he asked me to sit with him. My gut tried to tell me “No.” But where could I go? He kissed me. Did I kiss him back? Maybe. He groped me. He laid down on top of me all the while whispering in my ear. “The Lord loves you. You are so beautiful .” Something like that. He did not penetrate me. I managed to keep him out of my pants. Shaking, I lifted myself from the couch and told him I wanted to go home. To his credit, he complied. At the time, I rationalized this experience by telling myself that it was late 60’s, the time of free love. Today, I know, Daly abused his power as a minister. He overstepped ethical boundaries. He took a mixed up, impressionable young woman, to a remote house in Mississippi and tried to take advantage of her.
My experience with Daly, coupled with my excommunication from a prayer group I attended for over 10 years, culminated in a lifetime disdain for organized religion. The women in the prayer group, women I deemed trustworthy, women I loved and called my closest friends took the “high road,” or so they said, when I decided to leave my second husband for the man to whom I am now married. My choice did not meet their high Christian standards. Wow. I think Jesus said, “Let the one among you without sin, throw the first stone.” Who among us has not made mistakes, has not hurt another, or betrayed another?
Drinking, especially heavy consumption, represses these memories. I want to remember everything I can and tell it all. Mom, I hope I am not disrupting your eternal peace. I know you, at one time, preferred that I not air my dirty laundry publically, but that was then and this is now. I know better.
Writing into the Light 