In my time in recovery, I’ve come to admire the women who get sober and stay sober. I’ve sat in meetings and heard women tell stories that made me wonder how they found the strength to walk through the door, much less come back the next day.
Some were abused before they were old enough to make sense of what was happening to them. Later, when they went looking for somewhere to belong, they found people who knew how to use that longing against them. A place to sleep came with a price. A man who said he loved them turned out to be one more person they had to survive. Some found themselves held hostage in the war of the underworld, caught between the people who controlled their next fix and the people who could hurt them if they tried to leave. And when their lives fell apart, people could name every bad decision they’d made and knew next to nothing about what had been done to them.
Addiction can take you to a place where you do the most ungodly things and still wake up the next morning needing another drink or another fix. You steal from someone who’s taken you in. You lie to your children and hear them say they believe you. You go back to the person who hurt you because he has what you need and you’ve run out of places to go. There’s a particular kind of humiliation in remembering what you swore you’d never do and realizing you did it again last night.
I have to be honest about where men like me fit into that story. Some of us fucked up our own lives and did real damage to the people around us. Some of the men doing the abusing were men who would one day sit in these same rooms and ask for another chance. I think about that when I hear how easily we judge the women who come through those doors.
And then there’s the pain of losing your children. Imagine sitting in a room while strangers read aloud the worst things you’ve done and decide how often you’re allowed to see your own kids. You get an hour with them, and when it’s time to go, one of them asks when they can come home. You don’t have an answer. You’re trying to get sober, and at the end of that visit you have to go home and live through the rest of that day sober.
That’s the woman I think about when I talk about my sober sisters in North Orange County. If I had a say in who gets canonized, I’d put a few of their names forward.
I’ve watched them make room for a newcomer who’s using every bit of strength she has just to hold herself together. She offers a broken smile, the kind that says, I’m still here, when that’s about all she can manage. One woman pulls up a chair. Another gives her a phone number and tells her to call even if it’s late. Someone asks if she’ll be back tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, they remember her name.
These women sponsor, answer calls, and tell the truth when it would be easier to say something comforting. I’ve used some of the step work assignments they’ve put together with the men I sponsor. What moves me most is watching a woman finally say out loud the thing she’s sure will make everybody pull away, and hearing another woman say, I’ve been there too.
Before she knows it, she’s swept up in a community of women who expect to see her tomorrow. They call when she misses a meeting. They sit beside her while she tells the truth about what she’s done and what’s been done to her. Little by little, she lets herself believe that these women know her and still want her around.
To me, that’s what it looks like to be baptized into love. That’s where I see God at work. And sometimes, down the road, the woman who came in with that broken smile sees a newcomer standing by the door. She knows how much it took just to get there. So she gets up, pulls out the chair beside her, and says, Come sit with me.
“Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”
— Romans 15:7 (NIV)
