Together Again - The Family's Love

May 1. Well its officially May now that its past midnight & only two weeks to my birthday. I will finally be able to celebrate my birthday as it should always have been, a celebration of my life on this earth & another year of experiences. For over a decade my birthday was a reason to get intoxicated & demand money or things that I could exchange for drugs or buy drinks. I never truly stopped during those spiritually bankrupt years to appreciate the life I was given, the freedom of having my own will, and also never realized that if I chose to use my will to do someone else's (like my higher power's will) that I could feel something greater than any high or drunk could produce. So friday has come & gone, this thought was what entered my mind.

Today was very productive, I got all my work done at my store in preperation for the weekend. I also got to spend alot of time & have lunch with my mother, then enjoyed a dinner with her & my father. When we meet for dinner every friday I feel the fertility of family love, the potential for new things to be born into our relationship. It was something that was absent for me as a teenager and beyond because family dinner was abolished. It was not anyone's choice to do so, perhaps nobody's but my own. My parents were busy working & running a business at the same time, the more we just ate on the fly coming or going the more peices family dinner crumbled into. My sister's had not been home for quite some time & we were only able to have that family kind of dinner for so long without them.. a new tradition for the three of us left behind never was started, until now in my Sobriety.

I also went to my home group this evening & we had our monthly business meeting there as well, but I want to stay on the track of my previous paragraph. Family! Birth of Good Things! Confusion! Misunderstanding! These are all things that can some up the swirl of change that occured back in those years if I were to spew it out as brief one word phrases to describe it. At some point I am sure that I could have made the call out, the cry in the dark to say I want to have a family dinner again. The fact is that I misunderstood what was happening slowly & destructively in my life. I was a young man/old boy however you should say it, I had friends in the neighborhood. Some were great friends, some were bad. No one intentionally lead me in the wrong direction or hurt me on purpose but alot of needing these friends developed in my heart.

I can remember being punished for carrying on about how I wanted to be with my friends not doing work with the family that needed to be done. I never knew that the seperation that grew from that family unit I knew as a child was going to allow room for confusion & a terrible disease to creep into my spiritual life. I tasted freedom at a young age, placing myself at the epicenter of my friends & their activities good & bad. Alcohol was tried by 12, marijuana 13.5, and LSD by 15 years old. All under the roof of my family, all progressing further the farther I inched away from the family unit. I can't say if it was forced on me to be an active & constant family member that my disease would not have ever appeared, I believe if it didn't come to be one way it would have another. I can just say this, if ever I could give advice to any parent out there it would go as follows in regaurds to addiction.

This month being my birthday is no coincidence, from birth I believe a parent needs to know about alcoholism/addiction & the fact that no matter how much love is in a family it can still penetrate even the love of the creator. If you think that because you raise your kids to do the right thing, to believe in a faith & attend a church, they win awards for academics, sports, and place well in school... you don't abuse them or use foul language, you don't drink around them or drink at all, and you seem to have allowed them to have a good social life & do not shelter them so they do not grow weak in society... you can do ALL OF THIS as my family did & the disease can still find its way into your child's life. I never wanted to drink alcohol, I never wanted to do a drug & I certainly never wanted to test the fatal methods of introducing drugs into my body.. the fact is that it happened. If you love your children keep them close, teach them, if you don't know don't be afriad.. there are millions of people in recovery who want you to know all of our secrets, all of the tricks we used to conceal our disease.

If your child is or becomes an alcoholic it is NOT YOUR FAULT. Its not THEIR fault, it simply just IS. As there is a higher power of mystery & miracles that simply IS, so the disease of alcoholism simply IS also. What leads us there is a mystery for certain, as we still don't know how people who never smoked a day in their life get lung cancer.. but doctors have a clue that alcoholism is attained at birth but never awakened until the situations are right. I love my family so much more than I ever have now that I am in recovery, I feel it all the more. I also feel that although we cannot ensure that our child will not be alcoholic, we can keep them so dear to us that we give them every chance for it to never awaken that phenomenon of craving. Love with all your heart & put the children first.. sometimes that means putting down your hardhat or shutting off the vaccum long enough to talk together, eat dinner together, play together & Love TOGETHER. There's a silent liar, theif, & murderer out there waiting to snatch all the beautiful children in our lives.. My nephew & nieces I pray will not be among those taken, if the love of family lives on in my heart. Thanks for listening to my thoughts & hopes, I am so grateful to have friends like you to listen to my opinions & what I have learned as I journey out of the dark & into the light. Good Night.. Good Morning.. <3 Jimmy