A Decision Made and Kept

When I got out of the Air Force in 1992, I was reluctant to move back to central Nebraska where I was raised, even though my family was here, I had become comfortable in bigger cities with their multitude of colorful people, shops, restaurants, parks and such but my ex wanted to live by family and I never told my ex “no”. I have stayed around because for years I never could afford to move, being a daily drunk and chain smoker takes up a lot of funds, my daughter was better off in the small town school systems, during my drinking daze my enablers were here as well, oh yeah I was too chicken to try and change the things I didn’t like. Well 17 years have gone by, 10 of those years spent in relapse. My baby girl will be 18 years old in 18 days, she has a baby of her own and a life she needs to start living her own life.

I have been in manufacturing for 16 of those 17 years with 14 of them being in management. I am grateful for what I have learned and working with negative and power driven people has helped me spiritually, they have taught me to be still, to refocus my energy and attention when I start getting upset by their words and ugly behavior. I have increased my people skills and taken the leadership training I learned in the Air Force further. I have learned to sit at my desk and mediate. But the time has come to move on, to practice Right Livelihood. To use my talents for good, to help others, and to use my living experience in a positive way.

I have been kicking the idea of moving to Lincoln around since the first of the year but never set a date, part procrastination, and part fear, part I am providing for my daughter and granddaughter while I am here. I spent a lot of time in Lincoln the spring and summer of 2008, I meet new friends in the recovery community and enjoyed the fellowship there, and Lincoln has a bigger mixture of people in recovery, more alt’s and bohemians than there are in recovery out here in central Nebraska, more options in Lincoln as my buddy down there tells me. I enjoyed the bigger city conveniences of Lincoln along with its small town vibe. All in all I fell in love with this city.

Well the graduation is over, my daughter is working solid hours and making decent money as a waitress, she is taking advantage of the old mans kind heart and not putting any money aside for a phone, insurance, deposit on an apartment, I am babysitting every other evening and on weekends. I don’t blame her for this, I am the one who is allowing it, I have made mention of her needing to spend her money wisely and save it but I haven’t been aggressive about it, I still have a fear of becoming my old man who was overly aggressive, so I finding a balance with her is still tricky for me. As much as I love having Angel live with me and my daughter and I get along fairly well, there are things I don’t care for, boyfriend basically living in my house, them sleeping all morning and a few other minor things that are part generational and part parental. Friday I made a firm decision to have my house ready to sell by July 1st, by house I mean a mobile home. This gives me time to do the few repairs that need done and sets a deadline for both of us. The house should sell fairly fast, it has new storm windows, heat pump, newly remodeled, and it is very energy efficient. I talked to a friend in recovery last night and she is interested in it, I am pricing it to sell and not making any money on it, so if she can get the financing I think I have it sold. I can use the money to help me relocate to Lincoln. I am in hopes of getting a job as a staff support member at one of the treatment centers, halfway houses or group homes, I also have other talents that I can use to find a temp job or two until I find full time employment. The main thing is to move down there before the University of Nebraska starts their fall semester and the town is over run by students.

If I said I wasn’t a bit apprehensive about all this it would be an outward lie. I am sad that I won’t be spending a lot of time with Angel. I am worried about Michelle. I am just a bit nervous about finding a job but not too much, my resume is good and solid and I don’t need much to live on. Michelle has to grow up sometime, she needs to experience life as an adult, paying bills and making ends meet. I am fairly comfortable in the fact that she will probably stay here for one more year, which is only a 2 hour drive from Lincoln. She wants to go to massage Therapy College in Denver but hasn’t made any moves toward starting anytime soon. There is a massage therapy school in Lincoln as well so maybe with the old man down there she may move as well, she likes Lincoln as much I as I do. She has a boyfriend issues she which needs to figure out too before she makes any changes in her life.

I guess what I am trying to say is, I got off the pot, made a decision and decided to follow through with it, well I guess that isn’t true until the pickup is hauling the last load. The decision wasn’t made in haste. It was made with trusting my Higher Power and understanding that it is a good thing to do something for me. Oh yeah Lincoln has a Zen Buddhist temple so I can further my Dharma education. I don’t mean to sound selfish but since I have been back in recovery I have pretty much given myself to the care of others and gladly so but now I see an opening for me to do something I want and possibly need to do. If I can maintain a certain amount of humility in this change then it will be for the benefit of others as well as me.

I wrote this yesterday during a dry spell in the afternoon, by 5:00pm things changed a bit. Michelle has never been the most punctual person and I have long ago quit harping/talking to her about it. Sunday she was 5 minutes late for work and told to go home, yesterday she dropped Angel off at my work so I could take care of her for the evening. Mich was running late for work and called in to let them know. I received a call at 5:00pm from her work saying she was fired for tardiness. Which got me to worrying about moving now with her not having a job and boyfriend not having a job either? I found Mich at her boyfriend’s house and dropped Angle off with her mom. I then got in contact with an older member in recovery that I use as a back up sponsor because my sponsor is really hard to get in touch with before 10:00pm. I sat down and talked with him, told him my concerns and what was going on in my mind. I know I need to let her start experiencing life, she needs to learn responsibility and as long as she is under my roof she won’t do that, intentionally or unintentionally. I can either stop enabling now or keep on doing it and prolong the inevitable and mess up my plans to move on with my life. I have to remember that letting her grow up is an act of love, maybe not a comfortable act but tough love never is, we seem we always seek the easier softer way in dealing with life. We talked about my decision and about heeding the calling for change and how he did the same thing at about my age. I reflected back to my 5th step and that list of character defects, a couple where people pleasing and enabling, both Mich and my ex wife. I am facing 6 and 7th step situations and will follow through with the steps, take step 3 to heart and trust the Higher Power, use step 11 to calm the soul. Oh yeah and a big dose of step 1 because I am powerless over my daughter. It isn’t like I am buggering off to the Pacific Northwest or Norway; I am just moving 140 miles down the road. The date isn’t written in stone but it does give her a date to work on and figure things out for herself. Just because my parents enable me doesn’t make it right to enable Michelle, the old adage 2 wrongs don’t make a right, plus some bad family habits need to be broken. I am grateful I am willing enough to reach out for help, to know that even though my thinking my be on the correct plain I still need to talk things over, that I ain’t too big for my britches and understand it is alright to receive a little reassurance now and again. I talked to my sponsor last night and he reiterated that what I was doing was a good thing and to press on.

Well thanks everyone for letting me bend your ear again.

Peace Love and Light
Scott

Another one of those lessons

I called my sponsor and another elder statesman in recovery the other night about a situation that is new to me. Below is the story and the feedback.

I started sponsoring Fred about 3 months ago, Fred is a periodic, and he doesn’t call on regular bases, only periodically. Fred is new to recovery so the periodic calling doesn’t surprise me, we have sat down and talked a few times, went through some suggested readings out of the Big Book, more or less pointed him in the right direction and figure he will call me when he needs to or is willing. I need to say that Fred has called a couple of time when something was going on he needed to talk about, so he does communicate just not as much as suggested, (suggestions are just that, a suggestion from people who have traveled the road before you and are living a good life in recovery but they are not commands and you don’t have to follow them if you don’t want to, freedom of choice). Fred called last night, he wanted to set a time to meet and talk, we decided to meet prior to the Tuesday night men’s meeting and ended up talking for little over a ½ hour. Fred was engaged to a woman named Linda; they had known each other for 3 years and been engaged/living together for about 6 months. I have known Linda for 2-1/2 years; she has been in and out of recovery, spent time in a halfway house, and spends time in and out of the mental health hospital. Linda is one of those sick people who craves attention, jumps around in relationships and cheats a lot, if she doesn’t get attention she does things to make sure she gets it and some of those things aren’t very health. She is bi-polar with manic tenancies; she goes off and on her meds depending on her moods. I don’t think she has ever had much more than 6 months of clean time since I have known her. She has a hard time getting along with sponsors because of wanting to things her way or wanting to be babied, she is compulsively dishonest too which doesn’t help her relationships with the people who try and help her. Like the elder statesmen said last night she is one of those sick and lost souls. Fred is aware of some of this but the old saying “love/lust is blind” pretty much applies to how he sees things; he is realizing some things though so the blinders are opening. Last night Fred told me about all the games Linda was playing with him. My response was to not communicate with her and remember that both of them are sick people. Both have been going to a couple of meetings a week mainly at the local meeting house and Fred is afraid of running into Linda at a meeting, I suggested going to different meetings which we are blessed to have around here.

Now here is where sponsorship and using the network of solid people in recovery comes in to play. I called the elder statesman to get his views on Fred’s honesty, Fred worked for the elder statesman for quite a while, he told me to take what Fred says with a grain of salt, o.k. so now I can hopefully weed out what Fred is saying and not buy into the exaggerations. Linda has a new AA sponsor; she also has an NA sponsor who she seems to be fairly close with and from what she says uses. The AA sponsor just happens to be my sister. This created a whole new dynamic to me sponsoring Fred. I am not overly close with my sister, in fact since she has gotten sober we have drifted further apart, she is part of the Christian sect of the local AA scene and I am not; I am very active in service work and receive quite a bit of attention from it and also from being insightful so I perceive there is a bit of jealously going down, as I have said before my ability to do service work and my insightfulness are both gifts and I down play them as much as possible. Having said all this my sister is still my sister and I want to look after her best interest. My sister doesn’t know Linda at all; she has only been to a couple of meetings with her. My sister is very naïve; she is sugary sweet, talks a lot about God and not a lot about basic Big Book recovery, she isn’t well versed in AA literature, so her recovery is based more on what her sponsor says, what she picks up in meetings and stuff from her Bible study and Christians in Recovery group. I have a feeling Linda choice my sister because she is so nice and probably subconsciously Linda feels my sister will baby her the way she likes. The things that were going through my head where; do I tell my sister what I know about Linda and maybe save her some emotional turmoil, do I let her know that I am Fred’s sponsor, just in case a hassle surfaces? While waiting for my sponsor to call me back I thought to myself “if Marilyn wasn’t my sister how would I react?” The answer was that with the exception of a couple of very close friends I wouldn’t say anything; to the close friends I would only mention to be careful. The thing with sponsorship is that as we sponsor people we learn things about ourselves, we may not be able to keep the sponsee sober but we keep ourselves sober, we get a bigger picture of our strengths and weaknesses, sponsoring has amazing highs and bitter lows but if we see these highs and lows in the right light it becomes a wonderful act of service and an opportunity for more spiritual and recovery growth. My sister has a good sponsor to talk to, she will have use the tools she has to be as effective as she can with Linda and she still may fail in helping Linda work the steps and stay sober. When I was talking to my sponsor he said that if someone is BS’ing us not being honest, eventually we figure it out. He agreed with my assessment on whether to tell Marilyn what I know about Linda, yes we want to protect our siblings but are we really protecting them when there may be a life lesson to be learn, our selfish desires shouldn’t get in the way of learning about life on life’s terms. Something else we talked about is anonymity and tradition 12; anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions ever reminding us to place principles before personalities. I am responsible for Linda’s anonymity, what she has said in the meetings, what I have observed and heard from her are private matters. What Fred says to me is private, this is something I am very strong on, I don’t have serious conversations with the people I sponsor when others are around, I don’t share information that is told to me in confidence with others with the exception of my sponsor or trusted elders and then I don’t give the persons name. Whatever happens between Fred and Linda is in the hands of the future, if there is “my sponsor says this. Well my sponsor says this” incident which brings some kind of confrontation between my sister and myself then I will deal with at that time and hopefully have the awareness and insight to deal with it a constructive and compassionate manner. I am sure I have probably read too much into the “what if’s” in having my sister sponsor someone who is a complicated relationship with one of the guys I sponsor, but for me the best thing to do is talk it out with someone I respect, also non-action is a great help, just sitting opening the mind to what is going on and seeing all views of the story.

Don’t know if any of this makes sense but another way me to understand things is in writing them out. Grow is so important spiritually and in recovery and it is things like the above that give me a chance to grow, to see a couple of defects that need attention and once again to practice living in the moment, stop projecting and kick your expectations to the curb.

The answer is "yes" not "What"

I just became fully aware of a bad habit that needs to be corrected. It is a habit that is the residue of generations. When my daughter says “hey dad” I respond with “what” instead of “yes”. I noticed this a few weeks back, I had just sat down after an evening of running around, warm supper in my hand, movie just started and out of the bedroom comes “hey dad” to which I replied “WHAT”, I was informed that I didn’t need to respond in that manner!! I did apologize and justified the response by saying I just wanted to relax and that she could come out to the living room to ask the question instead of yelling at me from the bedroom, like I said justification. Today at lunch Mich asked me a couple of questions and my response was “what”, driving back to work I realized how this was an inappropriate response.

There are certain things that my parents did in raising me that I consider inappropriate. Some of these I have either not repeated at all or corrected as soon as I caught myself doing them. My dad was a hard working, law abiding man, who could get along with most people; he was fair in his dealing with others and showed a strong since of social etiquette in public. In private he was angry, physically and mentally abusive; he was a racist and intellectually ignorant. It is easy to weed out the ugly parts of my up bring and make sure they don’t mature with my parenting ways. Some how I ended up being the opposite of my dad, non-violent, open minded, intellectually curious and worldly. Oh I do have a nasty temper, I am the picture of my old man when I lose control, I yell, I swear a blue streak, slam tools or what ever is hand, I even have his evil eye thing. I don’t like this side of me and over the years it has surfaced less and less. But yet there are still the more subtle things like the response to “hey dad” than remind me I am still genetically tried to my parents and some of my actions are mirror images of theirs, mom was passive aggressive and I can go there too.

I guess by being aware of negative actions and reactions I can slowly correct some of the ignorance and wrong doings from the ancestors. Maybe my daughter won’t repeat some of my shortcomings and I will interact with my granddaughter better than I did with her mother. There are still a lot of small habits that I am not fully aware of yet or have a hard time catching myself doing. I work really hard at not using shame and guilt related words when I am giving my daughter constructive criticism, for the most part I can keep my voice clam and even also.

One of the biggest difference between how my parents brought me up and how I have brought up my daughter is the showing of love and respect, respecting her and her input in discussions, hell my parents didn’t allow discussion let alone input. My daughter has been raised open, which has been both good and bad, she probably experienced some things at a young age that was better left until she could fully comprehend things, so maybe this is an area where she can take my parenting errors and correct them with her daughter. So the thread of generations continues, my grandparent’s ways where modified a bit by my parents, my parent’s ways where modified by me, my ways are modified by my daughter and her daughter will probably continue the pattern. Maybe at the end the thread parenting Nirvana will be achieved.
I think I am slow gasping “non self”. I am ever changing, so the self I was at noon is different than the self I am at 4:15pm and when I go to sleep tonight there may be another change take place, yeah slowly I am getting it. Sweet!!!!

Eyes in the Gravel

Stepping outside to take a breathe and clear the mind from the negative energy flowing through the office I glance down at the gravel that is the foundation of the road and parking lot for my workplace. Looking up at me where hundreds of shining eyes, not thick but every few inches another eye shined. The flecks of rocks that make up the gravel where reflecting the brilliant sun that was shining down, bits of rock no bigger than a pin head, vibrant with light. Wow another blessing of learning to be still and see with open eyes!! How many times have I stepped out back to smoke or breathe, yeah I know smoking and healthy breathing don’t go together but hopefully this is my last year of smoking which is a whole different blog post (suffering and addiction to cigarettes), I know I have noticed the reflections before but never gave them a second thought until yesterday when the beauty struck me. With calm mind I moved around, noticed how the tiny eyes and focused on interdependence, how the rocks and I are one and the same and they are a part of me and I am a part of them. Awareness still blows me away and I am just barely touching the wonders of being aware. I don’t strive for awareness nor to a crave it, in the morning I mediate on being open and removed from bondage of self and this helps opens the channel if I allow it to. Yes I do need to push myself on the awareness of those defects of character that are getting in my way. The biggest one I am aware of is ego/self centeredness, sometimes when I am sitting in a meeting listening to a speaker I wish they would just hurry up because I either want my turn or I want to move on to something I find more interesting or just be done with the meeting to I can go about my business, when this occurs I have to force myself to focus on the moment at hand and what is being said instead of my wants. There are other feelings/actions that I am becoming more strongly aware of and do the best that I can to improve them and make a baby step towards the middle path. Every moment is a chance to live in the moment if I open my eyes, seeing the beauty of nature, hearing the sound of a bird’s wings flapping in flight, smelling vegetation growing these are easy but seeing myself is a bit harder, breaking down the individual to become a complete part of the “we universe”. The literature of recovery and Buddhism both stress being patient and practicing to the best of our abilities on a daily bases and I am grateful, it is better for me to work on small pieces of things that need to be done than to look at the big list which will in turn become overwhelming. When I am overwhelmed with something I stopping doing anything at all, part is perfectionism, if I can’t do it perfectly then I won’t do it at all, the other part is pure laziness, seeing there is a ton of work to be done instead of seeing the ounce of work I can do today. I have been talking to a lot of people in recovery about perceptions lately and it has done me a lot of good because the more we talk about them the more I understand my own perceptions and ignorance’s.

Lighter side: my daughter and granddaughter have moved in with me on a temporary bases, could be a couple of months, long enough for her to get a job and a bit of financial stability. I don’t believe that once the cubs have left the den they aren’t allow back in, my parents have helped me out most of my life for good or bad in some cases, I feel my way of paying them back is by helping my daughter and granddaughter. I have set down some rules and also I will not enable her, she has to take action, I will not become a permanent babysitter either. My daughter is really good about keeping the house clean so that is a bit of repayment. The young lady who was staying at my house and turned around and stole from me has disappeared from the recovery community and so has her boyfriend for the most part, sucks to see but hopefully something will happen that will being them back, but like all of us sometimes it takes having life kick the shit out of you before you are willing to change. Starting to itch for spring and day I can put my shoes in the closet for a few months and only wear sandal or flip flops. Visited a place where we are going to camp for a couple of days over Memorial Day weekend, beautiful canyon with lots of trails, it is not a place that gets a lot of people so it is fairly private, there is an awesome fire pit where we can have bonfire meetings, burn some hot dogs and marshmallows, basically just have a very spiritual recovery weekend.

Well that’s the ramble for now.
Namaste
Scott