Surviving me

CHAPTER ONE

BEGINNINGS

This is a true story, dedicated to truth and clarity. I am eternally grateful to have survived and be able to share it.

My journey began in a family of three children, one older boy and two younger girls. I am the middle girl. Our parents worked hard in the 1950’s and 1960’s, trying to provide us with a normal childhood in Southern California, with two exceptions – we had horses and our family disease was alcohol.

My folks learned early on of my love for horses. When I was 7 years old, Dad brought home a lovely, very tall, buckskin horse. She had been used around the race track and she ran very fast. We named her Buck. I was in heaven. She was too big for me to ride alone, but my father would lift me high into the saddle and I sat behind him as we road down the trail. In the city, horses didn’t usually have much room to be ridden but we found places here and there, not too far from where our horses were boarded. Soon after our first horse arrived, two more joined the herd. My first horse was a black Welsh pony, and of course, I named him Flicka.

My dad, older brother and I were usually the riders. After a year or two of feeding the horses on the way to and from school, we sold the horses, since I had become about the only person riding.

We found another horse for me, a beautiful brown and white paint horse, named, of course, Flicka. This time she was already named before she came to our family.

My father was a residential and commercial builder in Southern California but my folks wanted to remove my brother and sister and I from the ever-more present drug culture growing larger in the cities. In 1966, we moved to northern Idaho to live on a large ranch, raising horses, dairy cattle, beef cattle, chickens, thousands of pigs, goats, sheep, and pretty much anything else that lived on a ranch, including rattlesnakes. We worked very hard but it truly was ideal for young teens.

My spiritual path wasn’t conscious for me yet, but our family alcohol disease had taught us early how to dodge and weave our way through every day, or attempt to.

I didn’t know alcohol could be a disease then but I could tell our entire family was infected with the addiction, distortion and darkness that causes destruction of families, dreams and tender young hearts.

Our family was, at minimum, the fourth generation on my father’s side of alcohol addiction, but this disease wasn’t openly spoken about in those days. At least not in our family or anyone we knew. We thought we were growing up like everyone else, but this turned out not to be the case. In our family, alcohol was a daily mixed bag of insanity, emotional and physical violence, from 5am to late in the evening. My father always drank at home, rather than in bars. As children, we tried to lay low, do our homework and stay away from the upsets as much as possible. Dinner-time could be especially dangerous, and thousands of times, entire weekends became horror stories. If we went camping or boating, the adults would party plenty and we were spared the private agony until we were back at home and the work-week began. I remember lying in bed at night, praying hard to God for my parents to stop fighting and for crying and the screaming to end.

By my mid-teens, we had moved to the Spokane, Washington area and our family addiction to alcohol began to turn my way. Beer-keggers after school on Friday evenings, stealing booze from my folks’ bottles and of course, sneaking cigarettes to smoke with my girlfriends while we drank and knew we were in the cool kid’s gang.

My own alcohol addiction began to blossom, unbeknownst to my folks, or me. Amazingly, even though I had lived each day with the emotionally destructive and crippling, twisted, devastating results that occurred with my father’s drinking, I thought I had escaped the traps and the scars. I had no idea how deeply I had emotionally disconnected from life, other people or myself. My horses knew but I did not. What I didn’t see when I looked in the mirror at 17 years old was a deeply sad, angry, manipulating and lost young girl. I wish I had known God more as a much younger child. The soothing comfort of prayer, other than trying to stop the fighting, would have helped to ease the years of torture I felt with the upside-down, inside-out perceptions and distortions of a raging, violent, alcoholic environment.

On one of my darker days, I remember a time when I drove closer to the edge of a hill, thinking I would be better off going over the cliff than to keep living. I was lost, alone, with no answers and no one I could turn to. I wondered how was I going to survive and why I would want to. Amazingly, I felt the steering wheel veer sharply back to the right, placing me back into my downhill lane of traffic. I wondered what had stopped me from going over the cliff. I knew something happened but hadn’t realized at that time the significance of the protection I was under by angels and guides who were helping to keep me alive.