Another Milestone Passes By...

I miss the routine of blogging regularly and just wanted to check-in with my blog site just to let those who visit this site that I am well and progressing in my recovery.

October is my birthday month so there's been much reflection on what these last eleven years have brought me.  Gratitude is one of the most important spiritual tools in my recovery kit.  And gratitude is not a feeling -- it's a decision, a habit.  And it involves lots of work.

Anyway, I recently completed my eleventh year of recovery.  I've gone to an average of 10-14 meetings a week for all these years--which totals up to almost 8,000 meetings and $8,000.  AA's expensive when you think about it longer term I suppose.  I sponsor a ton of  active sponsees (people I meet with anywhere from every two weeks to every months or so to talk about what's going on in their recovery and see what I can do to help) -- I've joked about how many men with bad sponsor picking skills have latched on to me since i finished going thru the steps 7 years ago for some time now, but yesterday it dawned on me that it is literally true given that they each weigh around 200 pounds.

I do my best every day to help someone, a suffering alcoholic most specially, in some way.  It always distracts me from what I mistakenly think as problems or challenges that require my direct involvement and expertise.  And inevitably, while I'm being distracted by someone else's problems and/or life challenges, my own so-called problems transform into blessings and the challenges pass and become grist for wonderful and healing stories.  In fact, I'm sitting here in a Seattle hospital now helping an old friend and his get thru the challenges associated with his fall last week which left him, an 81 year old man, with a broken hip.  I flew up for the weekend to be helpful to them.  Absolutely to expectation for any return or payback.  You see, I've already been more than fully compensated for anything I might do to help someone else.

I owe an unpayable debt to Life:

My 27 year old son still has five months and ten days more clean time than his dad and now he's dad to his own daughter, Harriet Charles.  (FYI: my name is actually Charles Michael....and, No, ChuckMikeLRecovery doesn't flow off the tongue does it?)  He's a far better dad than ever was back when my children were little.  He's able to be present to her and his almost wife in a way which was beyond my capacity back then. My youngest daughter continues her journey thru the grief after the death of her stillborn son in April the day before he was due to be born.  She's a wonderful mother and the epitome of courage.  And now my oldest daughter is pregnant with her second child, a boy, due in February.  My fourth grandchild.  We're walking thru this pregnancy a wholly different family than we were just six or seven months ago.  The following month my wife and I will celebrate 32 years of marriage.  The woman I sometimes jokingly refer to a my future ex-wife!  The absolute love of my life!

Ken F. -- Rest in Peace with Oliver and Help Him Laugh

Today I went to a Pleasant Hill noon meeting before heading back to Sacramento.

I got to the meeting a little early and while I was enjoying a little quiet time, I noticed there was a notice on the wall with a friend's picture on it -- never good news for the person with their picture on such a piece of paper in an AA meeting place. They are always about members who no longer need to worry about their anonymity. Typically an obituary. Such notices fall into two types: they are about members who died sober or about members who died drunk/high.

The good news today was that Ken Finnegan, an AA member for over 37 years, died sober. Not sure, but I don't think all 37 years were sober years -- but I'm pretty sure he had over 20 when he died. Doesn't really matter either way. It is what is and neither outcome is based on some moral accomplishment or the lack thereof.

I write about this tonite though because of one sentence in the announcement: "Ken died in the loving presence of his family on April 10th at 8:15am."

That hit me like a ton of bricks. A low gutteral sound escaped from my throat before I could keep it quiet. I immediately walked out of the meeting place and sat on a bench outside where I could regroup. You see this last Tues at 8:15am is about when my daughter was sitting down at the hospital, getting hooked to the fetal monitor and having its silence tell her what she already suspected: her baby boy was dead.

Ken died at the same moment in time.

For several reasons, this fact, coincidence or moment of grace, this truth brought me a wave of peace. You had to know Ken to understand this. Ken was a funny funny man. In every way! He was probably 70+ years old and didn't give a shit what he looked like: he had a very almost Albino skinny ostrich looking frame. Usually wore a old tee shirt of some color totally at odds with 1970s style basketball short shorts. I'm sure there are State laws somewhere that make his attire illegal or at least requiring some sort of permit.

He was also always sharing some hokey joke at the end of a meeting that made all of us laugh no matter what tragedies had been shared during that same meeting -- and somehow all of them would strangely include some weirdly wise truth about life.

This all brought me comfort. To know Ken might be there for Oliver in whatever follows death. Neither Ken or Oliver will be alone. And they will be laughing their little asses off!

My moment of peace was then interrupted by a guy who's been struggling to get/stay sober since I came into AA: He came out and stood in front of me and then leaned down to give me a bear hug, telling me that he hoped I was ok. He'd heard me talk about Oliver's death several days ago. He was worried about me. Told me that he had always appreciated my kind and supportive shares ever since he first met me ten years ago.

I returned the compliment by saying I'd always been pulling for him to get and stay sober since I met him and that I hoped it would click for him soon. We hugged again and then joined the meeting.

The healing continues...

Take care!

Mike L.

Apparently, 40 Out of 86 Affirmations Were More Than Enough...

Two years ago, as I was getting closer and closer to the birth of my first grandchild, I was finishing another David Richo book called, "When Love Meets Fear". Of course, as luck would have it, the more I progressed through the book, the more I became aware of fear and fearful things in my life. It was clear in each case that the fears were already there before I'd even touched the book, I was just becoming more aware of them and less afraid of most of them. Including some fears directly related to the impending birth of this first granddaughter.

At the end of this book, Richo included a list of "fear affirmations" and I ended up memorizing all 156 of these just in time for Harper's in November 2010. While Harper was coming into this world, I waited in the waiting room and wrote a blog on fear and quoted all 156 of those affirmations. http://mikelrecovery.blogspot.com/2010/11/taking-advantage-of-richos-fear.html?m=1

Not long after my youngest daughter's marriage to Daniel in June of last year, Rachel became pregnant and she was ecstatic! She seemed to live for having a baby. She, like her older sister Katie, always wanted above all else to be a mother. Me on the other hand? I started experiencing a resurgence of fear. I refreshed my memory of Richo's 156 fear affirmations, but that only seemed to increase the fears. I tried re-reading When Love Meets Fear and other than discovering that all 156 fear affirmations we plagiarized by his own book, that didn't help much either! But as I got toward the end of the book I discovered that Richo had also included another list of affirmations: 86 of them. I read through the first ten or so and nothing really struck me as insightful or beautiful (these being the usual requirements leading to me deciding to memorizing something...). But I was getting desperate as the baby was due in about a month. So I began memorizing them in groups of five.

I'd memorized 40 of them when Rachel learned that her son Oliver had died in her womb one day before he was due to be born. One day shot of 40 Weeks. Oliver was born the following day and that was five days ago. Yesterday, after the funeral service, I had to drive my son back to Berkeley so he could work today. On the way back to Sacramento today, I started reciting these initial 40 affirmations. As I did this I began to realize how each and every one of these affirmations had been a huge part of how I successfully walked through all that I have in the last five days, especially

#27: I accept the losses in my life and grieve them fully.

And

#28: I allow every human feeling.

This is precisely what I did as I began saving Yes to Grief Tuesday morning...

I will soon resume memorizing the rest of this batch of 86 affirmations, but for now at least these first 40 are more than enough!

Thank you David Richo!

Take care! Glad to be back blogging, even if by iPhone thumbing.

Mike L.

A Lesson on Grief...

My world got a major jolt earlier this week, one that can't be fitted into a 164 character Tweet and one that can't be adequately conveyed through a post on this too long ignored recovery blog.  My youngest daughter was due to have her baby boy (my 3rd grandchild) this last Wednesday, but for some unexplained reason, her baby Oliver stopped moving in her womb early Tuesday morning and after a quick trip over to the hospital, she learned (her husband was still outside entangled with an unknowingly cruel bureaucratic registration process) that Oliver had died sometime earlier that morning.

Our family has walked through a grief in the last six days that has transformed each of us.  We've all gone through doors which seemed impossibly difficult to pass through, but each of us did.  And on the other side, we each took a breath and then realized there was yet another door, different for each of us but similar in the sense that each of them all appeared to be things we could simply not go through or endure.  But, each of us did.  And the grieving/healing process has repeated itself in each of us many many times in these last few days.

Yesterday, we had a funeral service for Oliver.  It was simply amazing.  I can't go through all of it here right now, because I need to finish cleaning up our house, washing my clothes (not normally a task I'm permitted to do because I tend to have a habit of making clothes come out of the wash in different colors than they went into the washer with...which never causes me a problem because I'm gleefully colorblind!) and then heading back up to Sacramento to be with my wife, daughter, son-in-law for another day or so.  Sometime this coming week, we will be burying Oliver: in a Catholic cemetery not more than 2 miles from my daughter's home and in a special area of the cemetery called the Holy Family section (it's overseen by a large statute of the Holy Family, Joseph, Mary and the child Jesus) and in a even more special area of that which is called the "baby area".  It's an area reserved for babies and infants to be buried: you can see it from a distance, lots of balloons, plastic Easter eggs, toys, other keepsakes unique to each child buried there.  While that's a major hurdle for Rachel (my daughter) and her husband to go through, it's only one more door of grief for each of us to pass through.  I have no doubt there will be many more.  But the healing has begun.

At yesterday's service, I gave a talk as Oliver's grandfather and Rachel's father.  Before the talk, I welcomed everyone and introduced myself as one of Oliver's grandfathers -- but I informed them all that my three children were teaching their children, my grandchildren, to call me "Ho Ho" because of my slightly oversized belly, white beard, white hair and my laugh.  I then shared with them what Oliver's "purpose in life" had been for me.  My wife and daugher had just passed out little cards to everyone in the chapel for them to complete the following sentence: Oliver's purpose in life was....

While this might not seem at all related to my "recovery" from alcoholism, trust me, it has everything to do with my recovery.  Without question, were it not for my getting sober over ten years ago and were it not for all the things I've done over the last three years to stay sober (I now realize I've been doing far more than to just "stay sober" -- I've really been learning how to live!!) -- well, I would not have been able to get through the challenges encountered over the last six days.  And I have gotten through them, and far more than that.  More about that later.  Here's my talk which I wrote on my iPhone from 3 to 5:30am the morning of Oliver's funeral service....

Oliver's purpose in my life...was to teach me about Grief

 I think I've always seen grief to be a bottomless dark hole into which I would fall were I ever to give it permission to come up out of me and into the light. This explains why, until now, I've always said No to Grief.

 No! Not now! Some other time! Don't you dare cry! Control!

 After years of practice, these negative words all faded into silence. Nothingness. Grief became emptiness. A lack of feeling. A lack of emotion. An absence of love. A hole of no color or depth or width or time.

 When I learned of Oliver's death on Tuesday morning, I felt nothing. No feeling. I simply followed directions and began doing what I thought I was supposed to do. And I did that for five minutes.

 And then I felt a sound welling up from deep within me and I knew it was asking, pleading to be heard. And then, for some inexplicable miraculous reason I said Yes to this sound not knowing who or what it was.

It was Grief and I said Yes! 

The sounds of grief started as a slow wailing guttural groan of deepest sadness and pain. The sounds were followed immediately by tears, lots of tears! I said Yes to them too! And then came the words! Lots of words! Angry vulgar loud words not normally spoken in Churches or Classrooms or at dinner tables or living rooms...and certainly not funeral homes! Or in front of children!  The two biggest words were No! and Why?

 Thank God these vulgar words were spoken and washed clean by the tears! And the even more meaningfull non-word sounds of Grief. This lasted for thirty minutes.  By that time, I had arrived at the hospital where my baby girl Rachel was dealing with a grief I'd never prepared her for -- because I was never taught about grief as an adult subject, as a part of life, as a natural and essential part and parcel of love. I didn't feel guilty about this, I only felt the longing to hold and comfort my baby girl Rachel, my protector, my advocate, my fan. Rachel. The name Rachel means Gentle in Suffering.

 For the first time in my life, I have really been there for Rachel. I've held her, cried with her, kissed her forehead and cheeks, grieved with her. And encouraged her grief.

And then, what has been most difficult for me as parent, as dad, As pops, I had to let her go.

 What she is walking through is something I can not go through at this time in my life: the death of one's child in their womb, the birth of a son, the holding and caressing of his body for the first, and then the last time. I cannot do any of these things. Yet.

All I can do is be there for her as she continues to walk through a series of massive looking doors, all of which appear to have loud frightening sounds coming from behind them.  And I know that she will walk through each one of them with courage, determination, laughter and wit. And oh, with beautiful and powerful and grace filled written words! I know this because I have seen her do this repeatedly for the last five days. A Woman Warrior!

So it appears I was blindsided this week not by Death but by Life. I've learned the painful lesson that Death is an essential critical part of life. Over the last 58 years, I'd fallen asleep to this wonder-filled fact: all life has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Oliver Martin Gs life's beginning, middle and end lasted a day short of forty weeks. In that all too short time, he was wonderfully loved and nurtured by a mother and father and a large group of extended holy family and friends. In that short life he touched and transformed me in ways I could have never imagined or even hoped.

Oliver, Rachel and Daniel are my heroes.

Life has a beginning, a middle, an end and an after.

We are Oliver's after.

"For all that has been, I say Thanks!
For all that will be, I say Yes!"

(I forget who said this, it certainly wasn't me!)

New MikeLRecovery Twitter account...

My life continues to be overfull, but I am enjoying most every moment.  And the moments I don't particularly like, seem to be full of wisdom somewhere down the path.

Because of my time constraints, I've been playing with a Twitter version of my blog and I've branded it in the same MikeLRecovery fashion:

https://twitter.com/#!/MikeLRecovery

What I'm finding most challenging is the restriction within Twitterdom that allows only 164 characters to a post.  I'm not a short story kinda guy, but it's been fun trying.

Mike L.

Checking Back in...

Do you ever get so disconnected from something or someone that it's hard to get reconnected?  I feel that's what happened with me and blogging.  Life got so full that something had to give and blogging was it.  Now I know I need to get back in touch with this important part of my recovery.  And it's hard getting started again. 

Turns out the key ingredient to a solution is pain.  I'm away from home for a three day business conference in Orlando, Florida.  I am in a fancy resort for three days, don't know anyone, very uncomfortable, lonely. 

Heard the other day that alcoholics treat loneliness with isolation.  It struck me true then.  And even more now.

Thus, this blog.

So what have I been doing to stay sober?

• Going to lots of meetings (1-2 per day)
• Listening (95%) and talking (5%) in meetings
• Chairing (telling my experience/strength/hope) in meetings (avg 2/month)
• Getting together regularly with sponsees (10 active sponsees, meet for an hour once every two weeks or a month depending on their needs and my availability)
• Reading spiritual books (Pema Chodrin's my recent favorite)
• Meditation (mostly reciting things memorized over last ten years while I commute to/from work each day); listing to CDs by Jack Kornfield (Insight Meditation) and Pema Chodrin (The Fearless Heart))
• Started a Recovery Twitter account: @MikeLRecovery (short stories have never been my strong suit -- but I thought I'd give this a shot just to try something different -- committing to tweet 4-5 times a week)

My family is growing:  wife and I are growing older (celebrated 30th wedding anniversary this year); my granddaughter turns a year old soon and we are expecting two more grandchildren shortly: my son (still clean/sober after 10 1/2 years even though he's on some sort of meeting hiatus) and his girlfriend are expecting a girl in December and my youngest daughter and her husband are expecting a boy in April.  My children are all living their own lives, yet have remained connected with us and each other.  I'm truly blessed.  I think that this area of my life is what has been getting more of my energy in the last six months and that's a good thing.  I have a tendency to overdo things (to put it mildly!) and I have to constantly be on guard that my recovery work does not overshadow my family life. 

Balance: defined as that moment in time that I pass by when swinging back and forth between one extreme and the other!

OK, that's enough from me.  It's close to six a.m. and I need a quick nap before going out into that scary world!

Take care!

Mike L.

Our Part

Last night I got to get away to a meeting, my first once since beginning my vacation almost a week ago. It was a small group in a small Oregon coast town. They each seemed to know each other as the back of their own hands and welcomed me as a visitor without any hesitation. Very informal format which came from the fact that they all knew each other so well. When no one stepped up with a topic, they grabbed one of the daily meditation/reading books and made that the topic: I heard the reading to talk about relationships and the sickening role resentments can play in relationships if we let them. Others heard anything from the 4th, 5th and 6th steps, or an opportunity to share their story of recovery with a fresh face (me) in the meeting.

I shared with them my own most recent experience with deep hurt morphing into resentment and how AA had taught me the importance of focusing on "our part" if we are to find any sense of peace and serenity in our recovery. This experience came during my youngest daughter's wedding reception about a month ago now.

Rachel had asked me about a week before the wedding to give a talk at the reception. This meant a lot to me and for the entire week between then and the wedding, I spent numerous hours crafting the perfect talk for my daughter and her soon to be husband. I never wrote a thing down on paper. I just started drafting my talk out loud in the car as I drove to a from work that week. The centerpiece of the talk was a quote that I had memorized years ago (even before I was sober) from a book called "The Magical Child" by Jonathan Chilton Pierce. I began reading that book shortly after our first child was born and something at the beginning of the second chapter gave me a great sense of peace and comfort at the overwhelming panic I began to experience at the thought of what this newborn child was going to need from me and how little prepared I felt to provide what she so needed from me. The quote was:

Matrix is Latin for the word womb. From that word, we get the words matter, material, mater, mother and so on. These all refer to the basic stuff, the physical substance from which all life derives.

The womb offers three gifts to the newly forming life: a sense of possibility, a sense of energy with which to explore those possibilities and a safe place from which those explorations can take place.

Whenever these three needs are met, we have a matrix. And the growth of intelligence takes place by utilizing the energy given to explore the possibilities given while standing in the safe place given by the matrix.

By the time the day of the wedding arrived, my talk was ready for primetime. It was perfect. I had every word right, the tones and inflections just right. At the end of each practice recitation, I cried. And I knew that my words would strike my daughter the same way. I was ready.

Just before it came time for me to give my talk, my son (who was Rachel's Maid of Honor) and my oldest daughter Katie (who served as Rachel's Matron of Honor) gave their talk to their sister and her new husband. It was wonderful. My son came "this" close to being inappropriate about three or four times, but always stayed this side of the line he's spent years crossing. During their talk, my wife leaned over to me and asked me to walk down to them and take the microphone from them and ask them to "hurry it up". I looked at her aghast and she said, "No, if you do it, it will be funny! If I do it, it will look controlling." I responded that "It wouldn't be funny even if I did it--because it WAS controlling!" Shortly after that, their talk came to a funny and heartfelt end and the microphone was turned over to me to say a few short words to Rachel and Daniel.

I walked down and took the microphone and began my talk. I shared that when I was their age, I discovered what was most important to me to accomplish in life and that was to become a father, a parent. That shortly thereafter, I met Nancy and fell in love. We were married and began having children. And I got scared. Then someone gave me a book called The Magical Child by Jonathan Chilton Pierce.

At that point, I realized that someone, my wife, was now standing beside me. Nancy reached out and took the mic and said, "Mike, can you hurry it up? We only have this place until 10 o'clock!" Everyone laughed, I suppose all of them know I don't have a short story in me. I didn't laugh though because it threw me off balance as I was trying to recite the perfect talk to my daughter and I realized there was no way to finish this talk as I had planned it in my head ahead of time. As Nancy walked away, I knew that my perfect talk had been destroyed but that I couldn't do anything but try to move forward without making a complete disaster out of it. So, I went on to quote most of Pierce's magical words, left off the last sentence and also some other parts of the remaining part of my perfect talk. No one but me knew that their was anything left out. All of them, including Rachel, thought it was a beautiful talk -- very much from my heart, very much Mike. Everyone but me.

Me? I was deeply hurt. I was angry that Nancy had attempted to control the situation -- for whatever reason that might have been for her. I blamed her for ruining my perfect talk, my perfect moment, my perfect gift to my daughter. Ruining something that simply could not be recreated or repaired. That moment was over and done with. There was no way to rewind or
"do over". But I knew that I could not share my hurt with my wife -- it would destroy her. She had put so much into creating the perfect wedding for our daughter: collecting 200 dinner plates from garage sales and antique shops over the last year that would make this a unique event for our guests, finding the perfect venue for this wedding, the perfect flowers, the table gifts for our guests (small Heinz catsup bottles with Rachel and Daniel's names and wedding date--Rachel is a catsup addict), etc. If she knew that her funny interruption of my talk, meant only to keep things "light" when I had a tendency to be serious and philosophical and longwinded, had actually hurt my feelings at such a deep level, it would kill her and destroy her memory of this wonderful wedding day.

So I kept my hurt inside and tried to rationalize it away. I thought of ways that I could get around this unfortunate situation without talking it out with my wife: i.e., I could formalize my talk "in full" onto a plaque and give it to them on their 30 day anniversary, I could "let it go" and move on, etc. But the hurt remained and within two days it had morphed into a full blown resentment. Resentment is a decision to hold on to a feeling beyond its normal lifetime. And that's what I did: I held on and more, I nursed it and fed it. And it grew. By Monday, all it took was some little annoying comment made by my wife before I snapped at her with far more feeling than her comment deserved. And she snapped back with deeply held hurts/resentments of her own. Because we were in the company of other family members, we covered over our anger "until later".

When "later" arrived that evening after all family and friends had left to return home, Nancy look over at me and asked, "Well, are you going to apologize for what happened today?" I looked at her and kept all my vicious responses inside my head where they belonged and said nothing. Silence is my favorite weapon in battles like this--although at the time, I really don't realize I'm using this as a weapon -- I am just trying not to hurt someone I love and the only way I know how to do this when I'm feeling such strong and powerful emotions is to be silent. Of course, that silence is the one thing that hurts Nancy the most.

So, she then asked, "Is this apology going to be something that comes in a day or so, or after a week?" I keep my silence as long as I could and ended it by saying the kindest thing I could, "I'm leaning more toward a week...." Amazingly, she didn't reply with anything other than her own silence.

The next day, I got up early and went to an early meeting before heading to work. It was a step meeting and they were reading Step 4 from the 12x12. For some reason, this morning, the whole chapter spoke directly to me and what I had been going through in the last four days and unfortunately, it was all about looking for my part in this whole ordeal. I didn't want to hear anything but "her part" but I realized that focusing on her part was what I had been doing for all of the last four days and all that had gotten me was more and more suffering and more and more pain. As I surrendered to the idea that I could get relief from this suffering and pain only by taking a serious and careful look at "my part" did things start to change for me. I briefly shared my discovery of my part with the group: my part was all the expectations I had placed in coming up with the perfect talk, giving that perfect talk at this one point in time and history "no matter what", my thinking I had some control over the outcome of all my preparations and planning and efforts, and, most of all, my decision after my wife's interruption not to go ahead by reciting exactly what I had planned without any edits or rushing things! True, she interrupted my perfect talk, but I'm the one who changed the talk from that point forward. Not her. Me. God, I hate it when I'm wrong!

I drove to work as usual, but I spent the time again reviewing my part in all of this and seeing that I needed to make an amends to her rather than holding on to the falsehood that she owed me a huge amends... That night, as I was leaving work (trying to avoid the inevitable I suppose...) I texted her and told her that "I was going to be home around 7, with humble pie and an apology." She replied quickly that "Blackberry would be sufficient...". I knew it was going to be alright then. That night, I started off my apology by telling her that I needed her to understand that what I was going to tell her that night had NOTHING to do with her or anything that she had done. I had discovered earlier that day what had been bothering me for the last five days was something that I had done, even though I had been mistakenly thinking it was something she had done to hurt me the day of Rachel's wedding. I told her that earlier that day, it dawned on me that it wasn't anything she had done that had really hurt me, but rather, what I had done myself that was the true cause of my hurt. That said, I told her the story of what I saw happening the night of my "perfect talk" and how hurt I was by what happened that night after her interruption.

As expected, my sharing this information with her hurt her deeply and profoundly. She stood up crying, saying that I had ruined the memory of this wedding for her... All feelings that she had a perfect right to have and to feel and to share with me, but none of which really had anything to do with me (thank God I'd learned something in these years of recovery!). After a few minutes of some painful sharing, all things between us came back together and we were reconnected again in no more than 10 minutes. My irrational fear of her feelings and reactions has always been a self-constructed roadblock to me being myself and expressing my feelings to this woman who I love and adore more than anyone on the planet. You'd think after more than 30 years of marriage I would get over this.... But then, if you were thinking that, I suspect that you don't have 30 years of marriage!

By the time the next night came around, she was able to share with me that earlier at work, one of the nuns at her school walked up to her and said that her favorite part of the whole wedding was when Nancy interrupted Mike's talk (this nun was my former Department Chair when I taught religion at this same school where my wife is now principal...) --- sure, Mike's talk was great and touching and "pure Mike!" it was Nancy's lighthearted interruption that brought a lightness to the whole event that made this one of the perfect Mike/Nancy gatherings. And we laughed. And then I began rubbing her feet --- a self-imposed penance that I've lived now for nine and a half years of recovery and expect to be doing for the remainder of that recovery and for the remainder of this life/marriage.

The freedom gained by focusing on my part has been great to be sure.

Take care!

Mike L.