15 – The Gift Excerpt from The Seventh Crow, copyright © 2013 Bernie Schultz

 

When I fell in love with Nancy, I forgot to ask her if she had children. Well, she had told me she was married twice before and I recall her mentioning she had a few sons and a few daughters but I naturally assumed they were all grown up, moved out and married with children of their own. Buzz! Wrong answer!

Nancy had two sons and two daughters. One son and one daughter did fit my description, but the others were still teenagers and still living at home. Now, I had a son of my own so I had a rough idea how that was done. But, when it came to daughters, I didn't have a clue.

I suppose it would have been easier if she didn't hate me the way she did. She would not look at me or talk to me or speak to me when I spoke to her. She completely ignored me and if she hadn't burst into a temper tantrum the day she found out I was coming to live with them, I might have assumed she didn't acknowledge me at all. This affected me deeply.

I remember asking Nancy why she hated me and Nancy said oh don't worry she treats a lot of people that way. Really? Well I did some covert observing and I didn't see her treat anyone else the way she treated me.

I talked to my sponsor about it. He gave me one of his mysterious one-liner answers. "Don't go to them; let them come to you." It made perfect sense to him, and no sense to me. When I asked him to elaborate, he said, "Be patient. Work your steps, that's what they're for." Well, I know now what he was trying to say. He was talking about the principles that are embedded in the Twelve Steps, spiritual principles by which we try to live our lives, a day at a time.

So I was patient. I waited six months and she still wasn't talking to me, unless you count that time I was standing in front of the fridge when she was hungry and she said, "Could you move?" Oh, and there was that other time when she said, "If you think we're going to be one big happy family, you're sadly mistaken!" Then she made a comment about my IQ.

There was another wise old man I sometimes confided in when my sponsor wasn't readily available or when I just wanted a second opinion, so I talked to him about all this 

He was a spiritual man and he directed me to the Prayer of St. Francis, to the verse that states: "Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood, to love than to be loved, for it is by self-forgetting that we find, it is by forgiving others that we ourselves are forgiven, it is by dying that we awaken to life."

My friend went on to say something I have never forgotten. He said everyone ultimately wants, desires, needs only one thing - to be loved. And if we want to be loved, we must love first. What I came here looking for, I must come here looking with.

And that's exactly what I did. I gave Angel (that's her name by the way) unconditional love. That's not always an easy thing to do, because in order to give unconditional love, we must practice acceptance. I would need to accept Angel for who she was and how she felt about me. I would need to allow her to be where she was for as long as it took her to realize where she was. Sometimes that would mean accepting unacceptable behavior and sometimes it might mean redefining what was acceptable or unacceptable.

A wise man once said, in reference to alcoholics, honesty with ourselves and others is what gets us sober, but it is tolerance that keeps us sober. Tolerance is defined as the readiness to allow others to think and act as they see fit. So, I was tolerant.

I began to see from observing Angel that it was not me she disagreed with. In fact, it had little to do with me, it was the role I was in. The father. Without going into too much detail about the failings of another, her biological father had been unkind to her. Not in a physical way, but he had seldom, if ever, expressed the love of a father toward his daughter. I do not know why. I only know my own story. Like me, my father had been an alcoholic. I knew from my own experience as one that alcoholics are people who suffer from an inability to carry on a true partnership with the people around them. It may not have been that my father didn't love me, he just did not know how to say it or show it.

Suddenly, in that instant, I understood. I wanted to rush over to her and tell her it was okay. I wanted her to know that I possessed the one thing she had never known, the unconditional love of a father for his daughter, for despite everything, I saw her as my daughter.

Unbidden, the words of my sponsor echoed in my head, "Don't tell her, show her." I practised more patience, and I made every attempt I could think of to show her she was loved and needed. I did little things for her. I folded her laundry when she was too busy with her homework to do it herself. I bought grocery items that I knew she liked. I left little notes here and there, the kind that require an answer, like will you be home for supper? is there anything you want me to pick up tonight? do you need any money? And so in a small way, we began to communicate. I think the most important part was that I was listening, paying attention.

One evening, her and some friends went to a school dance and they got into some rum. Angel was escorted home by two chaperones. She was very drunk. Nancy and I put her to bed. I sat up all night, in case she needed anything. The next day, she had no recollection of the night before, and the last person she wanted to talk to about it was the only person home.

We had quite a chat that day, about alcohol and alcoholism, blackouts, about my drinking and my reasons for drinking. I told her I basically drank because I was afraid. Well, she couldn't imagine how anyone as big and strong as me could be afraid of something. I told her I was mostly afraid of rejection, of abandonment, of failure. I showed her that I had weaknesses and she was smart enough to know that I wouldn't tell just anybody that stuff. She told me that the main reason she didn't want us to become close is because she was afraid I would leave too. I didn't say I wouldn't. I just nodded and told her I understood how she felt. I think I made a friend that day. Some time passed and we began to talk a little more.

One day, I told her something about myself, about a secret I had been keeping from everyone and had only recently exposed to the light of day. Angel asked me why I was telling her. I said I was telling all the people who were important to me. She began to cry and said he had never told her she was important to him. We hugged that day and she cried on my shoulder. I cried too and I think she knows. She has never mentioned it, but I think she knows.

On another day, not long after, Angel told me she loved me. She did it in a way I will never forget. In my spiritual life, I have a tool called a God Box. Whenever I am wrestling with some thing I cannot seem to let go of, I put it in the box. It's a physical way of putting the situation into God's hands. Well, one of the men I sponsored needed a god box, so I gave him mine. Then I put a request in for a god box on my xmas wish list.

On xmas morning, I opened a gift that Angel had bought for me. Inside was a beautiful box, very expensive I could tell, with picture frames on all four sides and on the top. Inside each frame were pictures of sunsets and clouds and other scenes she hoped would be helpful to me in my morning meditation. On each one, she had handwritten a line of the Serenity Prayer and on the back she wrote I Love You and signed her name. I was speechless.

On father's day of the following year, Angel gave me a brooch made out of pewter. It was a native American symbol of the Wolf. She said she wanted to give me this gift because on the box it said the wolf was a symbol of family and togetherness and that I had taught her that these things were important. I asked Angel if she was familiar with the St. Francis Prayer. She had never heard of it. Well, the emblem of St. Francis, the gentleman who wrote the prayer that drew Angel and I together, is the Wolf. Imagine that.