In High Gear

So, I am now the fifth Coach Dew in my generation (I think). I’ve been snagged to coach cheerleading. First coaches’ meeting is tomorrow night. Go me! Practices will be Wednesday nights and games will be Saturdays.

reebar will be in town this week! Heee! He’ll be here from the 11th through the 18th. As it turns out, there is also another gun show in town during the visit. The younglings wanna go.

In recovery news, I found another meeting, or rather a pair of them, local to my home and possible to get to. That’s kind of a feat. The first is a “beginners meeting” which seems to be entirely informal and free-flowing. It’s immediately followed by a more typical meeting. This helps a lot, since the weekday meetings are either all very difficult to get to or at times that overlap work. Even the online meetings at stepchat.com occur at inconvenient hours.

My sponsor gave me three titles of daily reader to choose from. I expect to be doing this for a very long time, so I went ahead and ordered all three. Hope for Today was the first to arrive, so that’s what I’ve been working out of. It’s working pretty well so far.

Sergeant Batshit has been trying to make a big thing out of my younger son participating in cheerleading. He says my kid has a history of sexual harassment at his last school and shouldn’t be around girls. The people at the school haven’t returned my phone calls or email enquiries, so I’m suspecting something’s got blown out of proportion somewhere. The only information Batshit has given me is that my kid told a rude joke that fell flat, and that’s what the kid says, too. I’m not pulling him out of cheerleading in haste and out of hysteria. Instead I keep training him and his brother in the ways they should go, which include matters of honor, dignity, and respect.

Today was Blessing of the Animals at the local church. Father Paul was not entirely pleased to meet Stanley, but he was very kind and respectful and did a good job blessing him. Of course services were a bit disorderly, as the dogs tended to join in, but it was fun. It was also the first Sunday my younger kid got to be an acolyte. It went fairly well, though I forgot to bring my camera to get pictures of him. He had the fidgets something fierce, though.

Part of the reason I forgot my camera was that I was terribly sick. I think the lettuce in my salad night before last wasn’t quite with it anymore. Or maybe it was something else. My innards became irritated pretty painfully. They ache now.

I love little miracles, and they happen so often now, it’s constant amazement. Friday night I got off the train, greeted by a misting rain, as is not at all unusual. (There hasn’t been a rain-free day in the past three weeks, far as I can tell.) I was walking to where the van was parked, and the street had gotten flooded on one side. The rain must have been heavier earlier. Just as I was coming to the flooded part, a pickup truck came flying down the street, eschewing the dry lane, rolling right through the long lake there. I saw this perfect sheet of water spout up, arc high, and crash down upon the sidewalk …

… right in front of where I was walking. Not a drop on me. That never happens.

I had an unfortunate transit night the other night, due to my memorizing the wrong information about the departure time of the last northbound bus, and so I wound up in a cab from the train station. I was in a terrible mood, having wasted $15 in my efforts to save on $6 worth of gasoline. The taxi driver asked me about work, about which I replied noncommittally, and then I asked him how work was for him. He said, “Well, you bless whatever you get. Some days you drive and drive, and some days you hardly drive at all. My cab was in the shop, and then I didn’t get to drive, but you bless whatever you get and be thankful.”

I had a lesson. Seems like everything lately has a lesson for me in it.

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I have a sponsor! Yesterday I asked someone from my home Al-Anon group if she would be my sponsor. She said she didn’t know because of where she’s at in her own process, but that she would need to speak with her sponsor also and consider things, which I totally understand. Today she phoned me back with a yes!

I am so glad that she took time to consider, because my biggest fear in asking has been the fear of becoming someone’s burden. The second biggest fear has been rejection. So a) I was afraid they’d say no, and b) I was afraid they’d say yes easily and then find later that it’s a bigger pain in the ass than anticipated.

So, I finished my 4th step Thursday night. I celebrated Friday with a sumptuous lunch. It was a big process. I started with a third-person character sketch of myself as I understood myself at that point. Then I did a classic Big Book 4th step, with tables for resentments, fears, sexual matters, and harms done to others. I finished with a summary of bullet points of things I found out about myself during the charting.

Now, because I waited so long to find a sponsor, I may have to go back and cover some ground again. I’ll bring my written things about the first three steps from Paths to Recovery and Codependents’ Guide to the Twelve Steps, but likely I’ll need to do work on these from other books as well. We will have to see after we’ve sat down and talked and got a feel for where we’re at.

Now, of course, I am fretting because the first thing she wants to do is get my story. I have a complex life and I come from a complex background, so I’m kind of dreading this a little. When I did the 4th step charting, I drew a diagram of my family of origin and my current family, foreseeing what it’s going to be like for my 5th step person. Even so, there’s a lot of other stuff. Gah.

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Lately some of us have been discussing rules for conflict or rules for fighting fair. Do you belong to a relationship or group where there are conscious rules for conflict? If so, do you mind sharing them? Color me curious.

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