From Beautiful Boy:
"On a Wednesday night in May, Karen and I hire a babysitter. We are going out. Another date devoted to Nic’s addiction.
"We reluctantly drive up to Novato, a rural town on the Northern edge of Marin, to an Al-Anon meeting. These nightly gatherings are the last place I ever expected to find myself. Like AA meetings, they fill church basements and libraries and community centers throughout the country.
"I am not a joiner. When I can, I avoid meetings at which attendees are implored to share their feelings. And yet I am here. I kept our family’s problem a secret for a long time. It wasn’t that I was ashamed. I wanted to protect Nic—to preserve our friends’ and others’ good impressions of him. But I have learned that the AA adage is true: you’re as sick as your secrets. I have learned how much it helps to talk about my son’s addiction and reflect on it and hear and read others’ stories. Most counselors in the sessions that Karen and I attended recommended Al-Anon. Still, it has taken us a while to go.
"The meeting is held in a dingy room, with a dozen people sitting in plastic chairs set in a circle. Another circle. They serve Folgers coffee and powdered sugar doughnuts. Overhead, neon tubes flicker and hiss, and a wobbly fan ticks in the corner. The meeting is called to order. Clichés, some more annoying than others, spill forth. Al-Anon, like AA, seems to depend on them. They say: “Let go and let God.” And those three Cs that help even if I cannot always believe them. “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it.” No matter what they say, part of me believes that it is my fault. It was easy for me to stop taking drugs, but Nic could not stop. Maybe I started him off by giving him, along with my hypocritical warnings about drugs, tacit permission to use them. Now I look back in horror on the time I smoked with him. Addicts want to blame someone and many have plenty of people ready to take the blame. Whatever I did was done naively and stupidly and because of my immaturity, but it doesn’t matter. I blame myself. People outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But there is nothing they can say or do that is worse than what I do to myself every day. “You didn’t cause it.” I do not believe it.
"My first impulse in the meeting is condescension. I look around with something bordering on loathing and think, What am I doing with these women in tinted hair and pantsuits and large bellied men in short-sleeved shirts and chinos? By the time I leave, however, I feel an affinity with everyone here-- my heart breaks for them—the parents and children and husbands and wives and lovers and brothers and sisters of the drug-addicted. I am one of them.
"I have no intention of speaking, but then I do. “My son is gone,” I say. “I don’t know where he is.” Tears. I can’t get out another word. I am appalled by my public display, but also I am hugely relieved.
"As the meeting winds down, they repeat the Serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Please please please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I repeat it silently. Then they chant, “Keep coming back.”
"I go back..."
To find 12-step meetings in your area:
Alanon Alateen
http://www.al-anon.org/
http://www.al-anon.alateen.org/english.html
Nar-Anon
http://nar-anon.org/index.html
Alcoholics Anonymous
http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org/
Narcotics Anonymous
http://na.org/
The Serenity Prayer:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
The 12 Steps
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
