Crazy Bitch

Being a member of a 12-Step Program gives me ample opportunity to confront all my serious issues, one of which is my aversion to and fear of crazy bitches.

I was raised by crazy Irish bitches who drank, and fought, a lot.

My earliest memories are not happy ones. They more often than not involve hiding under covers and living in morbid fear of being killed by people who were supposed to love me.

All that fear took a tremendous toll on me and left me untrusting and unloving of people. I struggle daily to overcome my fear of others and of my own feelings.

Every once in awhile, in a 12-Step meeting, I will hear some woman telling the other side of my story, from the drinking woman's point of view. Yesterday was an example.

I will not tell you who or where, but I will tell you what happened. A woman with some "time" in the program (several years), who is divorced with two pre-teen male children who live with her did a five minute rant on her ex-husband and her two sons. And as she was going on (and off) about these men (adult and children) who were making her life MISERABLE, that they mocked her, that they "didn't do things" her way, that THEY (they, they, they) were ruining her life.... all I could think of was my own, late, alcoholic mother, and how from my earliest childhood all she ever did was blame my father, her FIRST ex husband (of several), for all of her woes in life and then would, more or less, tell me how I was only making matters worse by constantly reminding her of him.

As though the mere fact of my existence was some sort of divine punishment on her.

So I grew up not only fearing for my life, but also feeling guilt and remorse for being responsible for all the misery in the lives of the crazy bitches around me.

When that meeting ended yesterday, I fled. My sponsor tried to talk to me, but I didn't want to talk. I couldn't talk to anyone. I felt fear and nausea and full of murderous rage. I jumped into the Element and skidded off into the afternoon sun.

I wanted to kill that woman, whom I scarcely know. I wanted to hide under the covers again. I knew she was doing to her children what my mother had done to me. Venemously poisoning their minds against their father, and taking her vindictivness towards him out on them, for the heinous crime of being his offspring.

And once again, I was five years old and powerless over alcohol. Somebody else's alcohol, but alcohol nevertheless. God I hate this disease.