- Alcohol
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Jeanie starts out by sharing that at the age of nine months she was seen crawling on the floor towards her father’s beer that was beside his chair on the floor and taking a sip out of it. That was an early start for an alcoholic life to come. Later in life, she remembered that around age 13 she was given cocktails or small drinks on weddings, birthdays or similar occasions. Alcohol was given to her by adults that considered her old enough. She loved the feeling of “fitting in” when she was allowed to do so.
When she was around twelve years of age, she had “cocktail parties” at home with her younger sister and a friend every day before the parents returned home from work. She loved shows like “I love Lucy” on TV where you saw this behavior and she thought it was part of growing up and loved it. But then she didn’t drink through high school and started again after she got married at age 17.
When she was about 23 or 24 years old something happened and she developed a taste for alcohol again. She thought it was normal to go out with friends and get smashed. That’s all she knew and that’s what she saw on TV. She often had one-night-stands after a girl’s night out, while being married. She and her husband moved to Wisconsin and had three girls. They lived like ‘Little House on The Prairie’, cooked over an open fire and lived a life with drugs and alcohol.
She enjoyed her beer, while her husband was on speed and pot. He was also bipolar and things got bad after a while. She never liked drugs, because she hated to lose control. With the alcohol, she felt that knew what she would get into. She switched addictions and had a shopping issue for a while, an eating disorder and a sex addiction. She got divorced and married the man she was having an affair with. He was an alcoholic. At this time Jeanie felt young and great. She was about 40, kids were out of the home, her husband was drinking just like her.
At the age of 49, she reached a turning point and got the thought that something needed to change. She found herself having panic attacks that lasted for days. She stopped for two years and was put on medication for the mental problems she was experiencing. Her husband was still drinking and she finally saw the behavior in him, which she didn’t like anymore.
She even called a 12-step fellowship to ask how to make him stop drinking. Later, she divorced her husband and moved to a different city. She finally got honest with herself and knew then that she was an alcoholic and need the help herself. She started to go to 12-step meetings and now has eight years of sobriety. “‘Not mine, Thy will be done.’ Once I accepted that, my life changed in such a beautiful way,” Jeanie said.
She went on to study in beautiful places; she went to Australia and La Croix for vacations and she knows that all of these great memories would have never happened to her if she were still drinking. “I screwed up my life so bad. I’m a firm believer today that following God is for me the way to live,” says Jeanie. She is working today in customer service, and lives by herself in Kentucky. She goes to several meetings a week and enjoys her new life in sobriety.