Andrew's story...


My story goes back to my parents. Maybe even further back to my lineage. How long have you got? :-)

I started drinking when I was very young by draining the after-party glasses in the loungeroom and on the veranda, the morning after my parents had had another party. I was number six in a big family (Irish Catholic) and most of my parents' friends were childless couples. They were all party animals. We were told to go upstairs to our rooms and go to sleep. We went upstairs all right but we spent a good part of many nights peeking through the banisters at Mrs W taking most of her clothes off or my father singing Sophie Tucker songs or the old bloke down the road trying to smooch up to anybody in a dress. Disgusting! Right.

So how come I was doing much the same later on? Sane? In-bloody-sane. I got deep into the bottle with great glee in my teenage years. Black outs and vomiting were all part of the 'fun'. I added grass/ tea/ MaryJane (that was the lingo back then) and uppers and downers, speed and mescaline. Mandies came later. I used to import Pakistani hash in a small co-operative of like-minded people. We thought we were hip - the rest of the world was square. We even used that pseudo hip talk ... Ah, so embarrassing to look back now. I ran a jazz club for a while, and got to know a lot of people - some of whom I met later in this fellowship! Hah - great laughs of recognition ... But I digress.

The fun times were always soured by a swift change in mood. It came on earlier and earlier. I was Jekyll and Hyde all right. And standing a full 5'6" in the old scale, I was the mouse that roared. I started many a fight other people had to finish because I was on my back or out like a light. To this day, I bear a scar on my right cheek from a bar beating inflicted after minor surgery which was still healing. Long story short, I married a girl from the other side of the tracks just to annoy my staid family, then lived the life of a single man ... and couldn't understand why she was never happy. Didn't I provide well for her and the kids?! Of course I did - in coinage, but emotionally they were bereft. Car crashes, waking up in towns across Australia, blacking out for days at a time, inappropriate behaviour at business functions, trouble with cops over accidents, etc. I didn't kill anyone - but I sure enough tried often enough.

Alcohol was like a big bearsuit that was wearing me inside it and dictating what I did. I'd lost control, and couldn't even keep the promises I made to myself about stopping or slowing down - or whatever the latest senseless defenceless plan was.  I had watched my father die from alcoholism right before my eyes as a fourteen year old. I had seen my mother at death's door from alcoholism, and how her life had changed when she joined AA when I was 16. I had lost the respect of friends, colleagues, wife and possibly children, and kept the company of drunkards and barflies (who I bought with drinks). I was 35 and ill and lonely. I was so much older then than I am now.

I tried shrinks, hospitals, even spoke to a priest about giving up drinking. But I didn't give up. It wasn't a crisis that got me into AA. Well, not an outward crisis anyway. It was self-digust and self-loathing. I was sick of being in that bear suit and wanted out. I wanted to be Andrew again - the true one who had been born fresh into this world, the innocent who delighted in the physical universe instead of the 'old man' shaking and vomiting everywhere.

One day not so different than any others, I left home before sun-up. I was shakey and stinking, and living in a shed on my property while my wife and kids lived up in the house (which was constantly locked - to keep the burglars out. Right). Driving into Perth, I mentally listed the hates I had in the world: self, wife, kids, house and property, and career. Suddenly my mind flipped like a yacht springing back up on its centreplate, and I realised I was listing the things and the people I loved as ones I hated. I shook so much I had to park off the road for a while while I gained
control again. Slowly I drove to the office. There I carefully locked my office door (before 7am - like other workers were gunna appear!) and rang a young AA friend of my mother's. I hummed and hawed and spoke of many things before blurting out why I'd rung. He was shocked, and took a moment to collect himself. Then he asked me to a meeting the next night - the Kalamunda meeting on a Thursday night. That was my first day sober in a couple of
decades, and the start of my journey in AA.

I am very lucky to have had the example of my mother's sobriety before me as I expected AA to work. I harboured no doubt, so it did work. In my early recovery, I never heard or ever thought of 'slips', or going out and coming back. If I'd thought of that I would have done it. My wife took approximately six months to trust me to come home sober from an AA meeting. That was my first big recognition of any change in my behaviour: I arrived home around 10.30 pm to find her asleep. A simple thing to others, but a major step for me.

I've been sober some years now, but I am still an emotional reprobate. I have never done the program to my own satisfaction, and only gradually I have stopped beating-up on myself for my continuing weaknesses. I am now working at a 'job' I like and hopefully putting my talents to use for my own betterment and sometimes for the enjoyment of others. Today, AA is part and parcel of my life, but I don't make it my whole life. That would be self-defeating. I believe AA is here to get us back into the mainstream of society as functioning, valuable human beings. Most days I am that. Some days, the sniff of the old bear suit is in the air and I grow edgy and don't treat others with respect. I try making amends on the run, and have learnt that a new 24 hours can start at any time of the day or night - that is a valuable lesson that AA has taught me, one of many hundreds.

Thank you
Andrew


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