The Land of the Misfit Toys

 

“Land of the Misfit Toys”

 

            Recently I hosted a recovery meeting at my house.  A couple of my male friends from my home group and I were taking another couple of men through some step work and we gathered around my dining room table to read from the “Big Book” and have them underline passages and look words up etc…

           

            These step meetings center around the first three steps of the twelve steps of recovery and they can take about four hours.  If I am involved in these third step meetings, as we call them, I will generally feed people, and though it is serious business, it is always an intimate and enjoyable process that brings everyone involved closer together.

 

            This particular meeting struck me, because as I sat my table surrounded by these men, I was momentarily overwhelmed.  All four of them are first responders.  They are either law enforcement or veterans and at least two of them have some form of post-traumatic-stress-disorder and so do I, though for a very different reason.

 

            I was overcome as I looked around my dining room table at these somewhat gruff, but lovely men and felt an odd sense of belonging.  Here I was, this mainline soccer mom, sitting dwarfed alongside all this masculine pain and I was utterly at ease.  It struck me then that we were all God’s broken people and we were all so beautiful in our imperfection.

 

            In recovery, I have had the opportunity to meet myself for the first time and have begun to break out of all the molds I and society had tried to cram myself into.  I feel like I have had and have allowed myself to have so many labels over the course of my lifetime.  I care now to be as label-less as possible.  I want to be simply “Fiona” because that one label encompasses so much all on its own and continues to grow in its own scope daily.

 

            I don’t fit in anywhere anymore except among the misfits and it is rather glorious.  To be free of the molds means I see myself differently now and therefore I see others differently also.  For the most part, I try to suspend judgment and not place people in boxes or label them until I have actually talked to them.  Until I have connected with them on some level, I want to keep my mind open as much as I can to meet them spirit-to-spirit and not place them where society tells me they should be placed.

 

            Once I was able to start doing that I began to meet a range of people I had never given the time of day to before.  It was like discovering new colors and sounds I’d never seen or heard.  The scope of my vision and hearing expanded and people looked and sounded more attractive to me.  They became works of art in all their flawed humanity.

 

            I think often now about how many years my senses were shut down.  I think of how many lovely people I walked by in my life, never bothering to give them the time of day because of some pre-conceived notion, label or mold I had already placed them in.  I won’t waste my time on the “what ifs”, but concentrate instead on honing my senses to being as open as they can be so that I can welcome others to the kind shores of the land of the misfit toys.

 

           

Somnambulance

“Somnambulance”

 

            I’ve mentioned before that I go once a month to speak at a rehab in New Jersey with my sponsor.  I’ve been doing this now for three-and-a-half years.  I meet him there and he speaks to the men and I speak the women.  We go after to eat a diner and it is one of those staples in my month that I truly look forward to.  I recognize that it isn’t the norm for a woman to have a male sponsor, but this happened somewhat organically and he is a bit like a father to me and it works so take that for what it is worth.

 

            I was talking to a friend on the phone the other week on my way to New Jersey and she asked me what I was up to.  I explained where I was going and that after I got home later that night I had to finish a paper for school so I did not anticipate getting a lot of sleep.  She commented that she was impressed I was still going to speak given that I still had to finish a paper.  She stated that she sometimes worries I take too much too much.  I understand her concern, but I think I am so busy because I feel as though I lived my life before recovery in a partial state of somnambulance and I don’t want to waste any more time.  I smiled to myself because there are so many reasons why I would put speaking before writing that paper and so many reasons why getting a little less sleep would so be worth the sacrifice. 

 

            I look forward to this second Tuesday of the month even though it means I have to jump in the car right after work and battle through Philadelphia traffic to get across the bridge and it normally takes me about an hour-and-a-half to get there.  I look forward to invariably seeing my sponsor pacing back-and-forth helping yet another person on the phone when I pull up.  We hug, trade quick hellos and catch up briefly before checking in and getting badges and going to different meetings.  I walk across the beautiful campus to the women’s facility and walk in to greet the CAs who know me well by now.

 

            The meeting is held in a large, open room and the women are usually waiting for me in a circle of chairs and I sit at the top of the circle and look out over about an average of twenty to twenty-five broken faces.  I see myself in those broken faces.  I remember what they are going through.  Those feelings of hopeless desperation are all too familiar and I do my best to offer hope.   

 

I tell them about my history with sexual abuse and mental illness and alcohol and all about the bad choices my reliance on alcohol resulted in.  I tell them about my two stints in rehab and my periods of suicidal ideation.  I tell them about living in the recovery house and feeling like I would never make it out of the hole I had dug.  I tell them about marriage counseling and the fragility of my marriage to Frank during my climb back out of that same hole I had dug. 

 

I am sure then to start telling them about the journey out.  I tell them about the meeting I found that changed it all.  I tell them about the steps and how they re-introduced me to myself and how I learned to love myself for the first time in my life.  I tell them about getting an apartment and getting a job and deciding to get a divorce and buy a house.  I tell them about the kids and how well they are doing.  I tell them how Frank and I are friends and how we co-parent.  I tell them how I am now in grad school and about the book and I tell them there is promise and life is good but that it takes work and that you can’t do it alone.

 

I do all these things like I do every month and then there is time for the women to ask me questions if they like and they always do.  We talk for a few minutes and I tell them where my home group is and give them my phone number and e-mail address in case they want my help when they leave.  Then we close the meeting with the serenity prayer and I hug as many of them as will let me.  And with each hug, my heart swells just a little more because that room darkened by hopelessness and desperation has been lit by a tiny spark of hope and I got to be a part of it.

 

I walk out and back across the campus to find my sponsor and we ask each other how our meetings went and head off to the same diner we eat at each month.  We sit and grapple with the same menu and say grace over the meal when it comes and eat and catch up and something about the whole process feels like coming home. 

 

It was worth staying up late to finish that paper.  For one thing, it was my fault for procrastinating in the first place, but then I just proved to myself for the umpteenth time that I am undisciplined.  For another, I went to speak at that rehab so that I could write the paper.  I would not be in grad school in the first place if I wasn’t in recovery and I wouldn’t be in recovery if I did not give away what I have so freely been given by others who have gone before me.