Читать книгу Forming True Partnerships - Группа авторов - Страница 19

December 2014

My dad and I have always had a fairly emotionless relationship. Before I got sober, I couldn’t really express anything other than silent anger toward him for not being the dad that I wanted him to be. In return, he was void of emotion because of his own relationship with alcohol. When I got sober, he of course wound up on my Eighth Step list, but it wasn’t until I was nearly six years sober that I actually did something about the amends.

When my sponsor, Kathy, and I were going through my list, we came to my dad. I can count on one hand the number of times that my father has picked up the phone and called me during my nearly 30 years of existence—and that’s only part of what makes me mad. So she gave me this instruction: “I want you to write your dad a letter every week and let him know how you’re doing.” I immediately thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard, but I didn’t tell her that. “Does it have to be long?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Just write to him about what’s going on in your life.”

It sounded doable, and so my amends began. Every week, I wrote a little something about what was going on at work, what my plans were for the weekend, or a good movie I had seen. It didn’t take much time, and I had his address at the assisted living home memorized. When I talked to him on the phone, he never mentioned the letters; nor did I. My self-centeredness half expected a letter back from him in the mail, thanking me for taking the time to write him every week, but nothing of the sort ever happened.

About a year or so went by, and I got a package in the mail that had his aggressive handwriting on the front, even though it looked a little older and a bit shakier than I remembered. I opened it up to find stationary. Nothing else… just a couple of packages of note cards and envelopes. No handwritten note from him saying, “Hey, Robyn. Thanks for all the notes you’ve written me. Keep them coming. Love, Dad.” Nope. And I realized that I was totally OK with that. I loved it. Over the next couple of years, I got a few more packages of stationary, all of them just like the first one. Full of hope, I felt the anger toward my dad melting. The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it, right?

In October 2010, I got a call that my dad had passed away suddenly from a stroke in the middle of the night. Over the course of the next few days, my siblings and I cleaned out his apartment, and I was given the duty of cleaning off his desk. As I went through his mounds of receipts and papers, I kept coming across the letters I had written him. “Can’t wait to see you next week at our wedding!” one said. “School is almost out—it’s been a long year,” said another. One of the more recent ones read, “Tomorrow is my first prenatal appointment!!”

With tears of sadness, I kept cleaning up. And then I came across several packages of stationary lying there on his desk, waiting to be packaged up and sent to me. My heart welled up and a huge smile spread across my face. I realized right then that, despite our inability to communicate our love face-to-face or over the phone, our relationship began healing from the moment that Kathy gave me direction over three years ago. Thirty years of damage from drinking was slowly repaired by following a very simple task from my sponsor.

And as if to remind me of where to direct my gratitude, there buried under a bunch of papers was his copy of Alcoholics Anonymous. I tucked my notes inside it. It now sits on my bookshelf, reminding me of the power of the Ninth Step of our simple, but never boring, program of recovery.

Robyn W.

Cincinnati, Ohio