A guest post by my mother. Annotations by me, from the cheap seats.
My mom has been in Al-Anon longer than I’ve been sober, which is a sentence that explains most of our family with very little effort.
She wrote what follows for her group. I asked if I could put it up here. She said yes, on one condition: that I not “fix” it. If you know anything at all about Al-Anon, that is the funniest possible condition, and I want it on the record that I honored it.
So her words are the body of this post. Mine are the italic interruptions. It’s the healthiest arrangement the two of us have ever worked out.
A Mother’s Words
Today I’d like to focus on the Al-Anon slogan, “Let It Begin With Me.”
I think one of the most powerful parts of “Let It Begin With Me” is that it gives us back something we may have lost — our own choices.
We may not be able to choose whether someone drinks. We may not be able to choose how someone behaves. We may not be able to make someone understand us or get help.
But we can choose how we care for ourselves.
Every other slogan gives you a little wiggle room. “One Day at a Time” is practically a permission slip. “Let Go and Let God” outsources the whole project. “Let It Begin With Me” is a work order with your name already printed on it. It is nobody’s favorite. That’s how you can tell it’s the good one.
For many of us, we spent a lot of time hoping someone else would change. Maybe we wanted them to stop drinking, behave differently, communicate better, take responsibility, or simply understand how their behavior affected us. We craved the respect, the appreciation, the support.
And sometimes, without realizing it, our own peace became dependent on what someone else did or didn’t do. I used to wake up every morning wondering what my ex-husband’s mood would be. How would I prepare for what HE was going to do today.
I want to note that she developed an entire meteorology around this. She could forecast the whole week off the sound of a cabinet door closing at 6:40 in the morning. Barometric pressure. Cloud cover. Small craft advisory. If there had been any way to monetize it, we’d have been fine.
“Let It Begin With Me” offers a different way of looking at things. A way out of the vicious cycle. The cycle of the addict versus the fixer. One person chases, explains, smooths things over, fixes. The other pulls back and generates the next thing to fix. Like any circle, it has no natural stopping point. We can also call this the codependent relationship. The only door out of it is the one that says “Let It Begin With Me.”
Physicists have spent centuries chasing perpetual motion. They could have saved the grant money and come to one of our Thanksgivings. One person makes the mess, one person cleans it up, and the whole thing runs forever on nothing but adrenaline and pie.
It means that my recovery can begin with me.
I can begin by looking at my own reactions. I can work on my need to control. I can set boundaries. I can practice acceptance. I can learn to take care of myself. And I can begin creating a different life without waiting for someone else to change first.
“Let It Begin With Me” doesn’t just take the focus off the alcoholic or addict in my life. It gives me the freedom to have my own thoughts, my own ideas, my own solutions for my own life.
The trick is: how do I do that? I spent fifty years taking care of others. I’m sixty-nine, so I have some recovery under my belt, but it takes constant focus. My mother used to say I was the defender of the underdog. I rose to the occasion to protect and defend my brothers, no matter what they did. I married a man I truly loved, but I was well aware there could be problems down the road. I was right, and I was ill-equipped for what was to come. Many times I befriended difficult people, because I was sure I could understand and help them as no one else could. I volunteered for anything I was asked to, just to prove that I was enough. I was a total type A. I went over and above on everything I did. And still I was craving appreciation. An atta boy.
I don’t have the full roster of underdogs she defended over the years, but I know I was on it for a long stretch, and I know I was not a rewarding volunteer opportunity.
Also, on “type A”: my mother has never in her life brought one dish to a potluck. She brings the dish, a backup dish in case of dietary restrictions nobody disclosed, and a folding table that no one requested and everyone ends up using.
And she never got the atta boy. That’s the part that gets me. Fifty years of over-delivering for people that did not keep that particular office supply in stock.
This “Let It Begin With Me” can be challenged greatly when you’re dealing with an addicted child. Your parental inclination is to keep them healthy, safe and happy, and now you have to take the focus off of them and put it onto yourself. How ironic, and how difficult. But if you are not healthy, you are of no help to them. When they actually are ready and ask for help, you will be healthy enough to give it. Let it begin with me.
I’ve read this paragraph from the other side of the door, so let me translate.
When a parent stops rescuing you and starts taking care of themselves, it does not feel like love. It feels like a door closing. I was genuinely offended that she was going to meetings. Meetings about me, presumably, where a room full of strangers agreed she should stop bailing me out. I had opinions about this. I shared them freely and at volume.
She wasn’t abandoning me. She was making sure that somebody in this family was still standing upright by the time I finally asked for help. Somebody was. That is the entire reason there’s a website here for you to be reading.
After many years of being told by my husband that I was a burden, that the kids and I were a “trap” for him, that I didn’t contribute enough, and that everyone else had it easier than he did, I started to believe those things about myself. I actually believed that I made his life hard and difficult.
I knew, in my heart, that I was a good person. But somewhere along the way I stopped believing that I was enough. That became a theme in my life.
No joke here. I’ve read this paragraph more times than everything else on this page combined and I’ve got nothing.
I started looking at other relationships through that same lens. I questioned whether I was enough for my friends, my family, my job, and literally every person in my life. But when I really looked at those relationships, I realized that wasn’t the truth at all.
I had taken someone else’s beliefs about who I was and made them my own. I was carrying his words into relationships where they didn’t belong.
Emotional hand-me-downs. You wear them for thirty years before it occurs to you to check the tag and find somebody else’s name written inside the collar.
And I’m beginning to understand that this is part of what abuse does. It can make you question your own value and your own reality. That circle again.
For me, recovery is about learning to separate his beliefs about me from the truth of who I am. I don’t have to carry those beliefs anymore.
I am enough. And I’m learning to believe that — not because someone else tells me I am, but because I’m finally learning to see myself clearly.
I fought this phrase for years. “I am enough” sounded like something printed on a mug underneath a watercolor sunset, sold in a store that also carries wind chimes and small decorative signs about wine.
Then I got sober and discovered the mug was correct. This has been humbling in ways I’d rather not get into.
So for me, recovery is learning to separate what someone told me about myself from what I actually know to be true about myself.
I continue to find my own voice again.
And maybe the biggest thing I’m learning is that I don’t have to prove I’m enough anymore. I just have to believe that I am.
So today, I’d like us to think about one simple question:
What can begin with me?
She always ends this way. A question, and then a silence she will absolutely not fill in for you, no matter how long you let it sit there. I’ve watched her do it to entire rooms.
So sit in it for a second. It’s uncomfortable. That’s usually how you know it’s working.
And Mom — atta girl.