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Biography:
"Belle of the Bar"
Author
unknown.
(p. 478 in 3rd edition.)
They
Lost Nearly All
"Waitress by day,
barfly by night, she drifted down the years into jail.
Then A.A. showed her the beauty of normal living, in
a whole family reborn."
This alcoholic woman had
been "slinging hash" for eighteen years, and she thought
she was managing. She had a beat-up car that wasn't paid
for, no clothes, no money, no home, no real friends to
speak of, mentally and physically pooped, "but I was doing
all right!"
She began drinking at
the age of twelve and quit at thirty-two. She also had
a pill problem and for two years she was also addicted
to heroin, using as many as twenty caps a day. She felt
she had wasted twenty years of her life, but was fortunate
not to have brain damage.
After being arrested and
serving six months on drug charges she didn't go back
to heroin. Her poor mother had "three of her kids in jail
that year - two sons and a daughter." A few years later
an older brother died in a house fire because of "pills
and booze."
She attempted suicide
on several occasions "making sure there was always somebody
within reaching distance." On one of these occasions her
brother-in-law ran to her rescue but she wound up in a
mental institution.
Finally, she and her surviving
siblings were all in A.A. and her mother in Al-Anon.
In her story she told
of the many benefits she had received from A.A. She had
a happy marriage to a man she met in A.A. He taught her
that in their new life she was the most important person
of all. For her, her sobriety came before his or even
before her feeling for him. He taught her that she must
help herself first, only then would she be able to help
others.
She and her husband were
aware of the nice things around them, things they had
never noticed before in their drunken stupor. She planted
her first flower garden the year she wrote her story,
she was enjoying hockey games with her husband and her
brother without being "all boozed up." She went to church
on Easter Sunday with her husband and "it didn't hurt
at all." (And the church walls didn't tumble down.)
She knew that the biggest
word for her in A.A. is "honesty." "I don't believe this
program would work for me if I didn't get honest with
myself about everything. Honesty is the easiest word for
me to understand because it is the exact opposite of what
I've been doing all my life. Therefore, it will be the
hardest to work on. But I will never be totally honest
-- that would make me perfect and none of us can claim
to be perfect. Only God is."
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