Wake Me Early Mother. . .For I'm to Be Queen of the May

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online May 1950
May. . .The Merry Month of! Season of Poets! For me it used to be an in-between time of indecision on how I wanted my gin! Should it be in the winter's Martini--or switch to Tom Collinses?

Also, for me personally, the calendar makers should have called it May-hem! For it was a month of arguments, of the skull-cracking variety! I got crowned all right--often and with force! In my personal campaign against commercialized holidays, the second Saturday night in May was always a critical time. It was Mother's Day eve!

Mother's Day, in my book, remains the most cowardly of all the trumped up holidays. In Mother's Day the high pressure publicity genius has fashioned, with diabolical cunning, a little gem, foolproof! Raise your voice against it -- and you're blaspheming motherhood itself! In my desire to protect the masses against itself, I'd open my yap and wha' happened? Some monkey down at the end of the bar immediately decided I was reviling his mother -- and wham! Crowned again! And not Queen of the May either!

Philip Wylie it was who said this nation is degenerating under a self inflicted disease more subtle and devastating even than alcoholism. He calls it 'Momism', the unbridled worship of woman for performing perfectly normal physical functions.

My own mother would buy Wylie's theory. She ran our household with an iron hand just as surely as my pop thought he ran it! Surrounding my mother with a lot of sentimental, gooey, and useless trappings on a certain day would seem to me like helping Joe Louis cross a street.

If there was one member of our family who was thoroughly capable of taking care of herself, it was my mother. And I have a notion that this is pretty generally true in all families.

Yet tradespeople have put the arm on us and nobody, except misguided individualists like me dares say them nay! To them, Mother is a quaint old Whistler-type dame in a knitted shawl, helpless unless we ply her with flowers, candy, nylons -- and mink coats!

All this is pretty terrific material for a saloon soliloquy. I remember one M.D. eve in my favorite bar. I thought 'Let's have some excitement!' I put my views in re M.D. on the air. Even Gus the bartender who shared my views on the Brooklyn Dodgers, the 4th dimension, Einstein's theory and the sanctity or vice versa of marriage -- even Gus turned on me like a wounded stag. Ma started celebrating 'her day' by bailing me out of the hoosegow!

Where others may have had a 'mother fixation' I seem to have acquired a 'Mother's Day fixation'. It was the one commercial holiday I could never do anything with. Valentine's day was as easy for me as 'Prevent Foot Callous Day.' But Mother's Day, Ha!

In fact, one of the biggest drawing powers of AA was when I was told that it was on Mother's Day 1935 that Bill first met Dr. Bob; that the good Doctor, nicely plastered, arrived home with a gift, an outsize rubber plant suitably potted. His entry into history and posterity was accompanied by a fall which busted the rubber plant -- craaash!!!

"There," I said, "is a man who knows what to buy for Mother's Day. Something durable. Something that will bounce! There's a man who knows how to combine a good drunk with a proper gift. This must be the outfit for me, this AA!" And it is, too -- up until now!

How an "Oldtimer" greets a "Newcomer"

His name is Bill. He has wild hair, wears a T-shirt with holes in it, jeans, and no shoes. This was literally his wardrobe for the past four years of life. He is brilliant. Kind of profound and very, very bright. He became a alcoholic while attending college.
Things have only gone down hill since.

Across the street from the campus is a well-dressed, very conservative A.A. club. They want to develop a meeting for the students but are not sure how to go about it.

One day Bill decides to go there. He walks in with no shoes, jeans, his T-shirt, and wild hair. The meeting has already started and so Bill starts looking around the room for a seat.

The room is completely packed and he can't find a seat.
By now, the well dressed people are really looking a bit uncomfortable, but no one says anything.
Bill gets closer and closer and closer to the front of th e room, and when he realizes there are no seats, he just squats down right on the carpet.

By now the people are really uptight, and the tension in the air is thick. About this time, the evening's speaker realizes that from way at the back of the meeting, an "old timer" is slowly making his way toward Bill.

Now the "old timer" is in his eighties, and has silver-gray hair, and a three-piece suit. A spiritual man, very elegant, very dignified, very courtly. He walks with a cane and, as he starts walking toward this boy. Everyone is saying to themselves that you can't blame him for what he's going to do.

How can you expect a man of his age and of his background to understand some college kid on the floor?

It takes a long time for the man to reach the boy.
The meeting is utterly silent except for the clicking of the old man's cane. All eyes are focused on him.

You can't even hear anyone breathing. The speaker can't even continue the meeting until the "old timer" does what he has to do.
And now they see this elderly man drop his cane on the floor.
With great difficulty, he lowers himself and sits down next to Bill and welcomes him so he doesn't feel outcast and alone.
Everyone chokes up with emotion.
When the speaker gains control, he says,

"What I'm about to say, you will never remember.
What you have just seen, you will never forget."
"Be careful how you live. You may be the only Big Book some people will ever read".

I asked the Lord to bless you as I prayed for you today.
To guide you and protect you as you go along your way....
His love is always with you, His promises are true, and when we give Him all our cares, You know He will see us through.
Pass this to People you want God to Bless with sobriety.
I DID
Submitted By Colleen M.
*

Slips and Human Nature

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online Volume 20 Issue 5 October 1963
This article is reprinted from the January, 1947, issue of The Grapevine, because it seems as timely and useful now as it was then. The late Dr. Silkworth was for many years medical chief at Towns Hospital and Knickerbocker Hospital in New York City, where he treated more than 40,000 alcoholics, including Bill W. in the last stages of the co-founder's active alcoholism. Some of the great contributions to AA made by "the little doctor who loved drunks" are described in the books "Alcoholics Anonymous" and "AA Comes of Age."

THE mystery of slips is not so deep as may appear. While it does seem odd that an alcoholic, who has restored himself to a dignified place among his fellowmen and continued dry for years, should suddenly throw all his happiness overboard and find himself again in mortal peril of drowning in liquor, often the reason is simple.

People are inclined to say: "There is something peculiar about alcoholics. They seem to be well, yet at any moment they may turn back to their old ways. You can never be sure."

This is largely twaddle. The alcoholic is a sick person. Under the techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous he gets well--that is to say, his disease is arrested. There is nothing unpredictable about him any more than there is anything weird about a person who has arrested diabetes.

Let's get it clear, once and for all, that alcoholics are human beings, then we can safeguard ourselves intelligently against most "slips."

Both in professional and lay circles, there is a tendency to label everything that an alcoholic may do as "alcoholic behavior." The truth is, it is simply human nature.

It is very wrong to consider many of the personality traits observed in liquor addicts as peculiar to the alcoholic. Emotional and mental quirks are classified as symptoms of alcoholism merely because alcoholics have them, yet those same quirks can be found among nonalcoholics, too. Actually they are symptoms of mankind!

Of course, the alcoholic himself tends to think of himself as different, somebody special, with unique tendencies and reactions. Many psychiatrists, doctors and therapists carry the same idea to extremes in their analyses and treatment of alcoholics. Sometimes they make a complicated mystery of a condition which is found in all human beings, whether they drink whiskey or buttermilk.

To be sure, alcoholism, like every other disease, does manifest itself in some unique ways. It does have a number of baffling peculiarities which differ from all other diseases.

At the same time, many of the symptoms and much of the behavior of alcoholism are closely paralleled and even duplicated in other diseases.

The "slip" is a relapse! It is a relapse that occurs after the alcoholic has stopped drinking and started on the AA program of recovery. "Slips" usually occur in the early stages of the alcoholic's AA indoctrination, before he has had time to learn enough of the AA technique and AA philosophy to give him a solid footing. But "slips" may also occur after an alcoholic has been a member of AA for many months or even several years and it is in this kind, above all, that one finds a marked similarity between the alcoholic's behavior and "normal" victims of other diseases.

No one is startled by the fact that relapses are not uncommon among arrested tubercular patients. But here is a startling fact--the cause is often the same as the cause which leads to "slips" for the alcoholic.

It happens this way: When a tubercular patient recovers sufficiently to be released from the sanitarium, the doctor gives him careful instructions for the way he is to live when he gets home. He must drink plenty of milk. He must refrain from smoking. He must obey other stringent rules.

For the first several months, perhaps for several years, the patient follows directions. But as his strength increases and he feels fully recovered, he becomes slack. There may come the night when he decides he can stay up until ten o'clock. When he does this, nothing untoward happens. Soon he is disregarding the directions given him when he left the sanitarium. Eventually he has a relapse.

The same tragedy can be found in cardiac cases. After the heart attack, the patient is put on a strict rest schedule. Frightened, he naturally follows directions obediently for a long time. He, too, goes to bed early, avoids exercise such as walking upstairs, quits smoking and leads a Spartan life. Eventually, though, there comes a day, after he has been feeling good for months or several years, when he feels he has regained his strength and has also recovered from his fright. If the elevator is out of repair one day, he walks up the three flights of stairs. Or, he decides to go to a party--or do just a little smoking--or take a cocktail or two. If no serious aftereffects follow the first departure from the rigorous schedule prescribed he may try it again, until he suffers a relapse.

In both cardiac and tubercular cases, the acts which led to the relapses were preceded by wrong thinking. The patient in each case rationalized himself out of a sense of his own perilous reality. He deliberately turned away from his knowledge of the fact that he had been the victim of a serious disease. He grew over-confident. He decided he didn't have to follow directions.

Now that is precisely what happens with the alcoholic--the arrested alcoholic, or the alcoholic in AA who has a "slip." Obviously, he decides again to take a drink sometime before he actually takes it. He starts thinking wrong before he actually embarks on the course that leads to a "slip."

There is no reason to charge the "slip" to alcoholic behavior or a second heart attack to cardiac behavior. The alcoholic "slip" is not a symptom of a psychotic condition. There's nothing "screwy" about it at all. The patient simply didn't follow directions.

For the alcoholic, AA offers the directions. A vital factor, or ingredient of the preventive, especially for the alcoholic, is sustained emotion. The alcoholic who learns some of the techniques or the mechanics of AA but misses the philosophy or the spirit may get tired of following directions--not because he is alcoholic but because he is human. Rules and regulations irk almost anyone, because they are restraining, prohibitive, negative. The philosophy of AA, however, is positive and provides ample sustained emotion--a sustained desire to follow directions voluntarily.

In any event, the psychology of the alcoholic is not as different as some people try to make it. The disease has certain physical differences, yes, and the alcoholic has problems peculiar to him, perhaps, in that he has been put on the defensive and consequently has developed frustrations. But in many instances, there is no more reason to be talking about "the alcoholic mind" than there is to try to describe something called "the cardiac mind" or the "T. B. mind."

I think we'll help the alcoholic more if we can first recognize that he is primarily a human being--afflicted with human nature.

William Duncan Silkworth, M.D.