I’m grateful for waking up early. I’m grateful for some pretty stirring music in the background. I’m grateful for the way things make sense now. I’m grateful what it took to get me here. I’m grateful for letting things come to me. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I hope you enjoyed the Three Days of Father’s Day as much as I did.1 There has been a fair amount of confusion over the “three days” part.2 I’ll try to lay this out, but I need to be a little vague so as not to provoke the waiting counter-strike from the Mother’s Day crew.3 Not that there would even be such a thing. But let me lay out the new, subtle but bold:
The Three Days of Father’s Day
Father’s Day Eve:
Celebrated on the day before Father’s Day. It can include something like dinner (as was the case for me), there can be an exchange of gifts, or not. To be honest, all it takes to celebrate this day properly is sending one simple text message. Hint—it’s not this:
Dad to all children: Happy Father’s Day Eve! One of said children: That’s not a thing.
Father’s Day.
We’ve talked about this enough. You know what should happen.
Father’s Day II (in-law edition)
There was some discussion about how best to celebrate the Monday holiday that is apparently now attached to Father’s Day4 Some “children” and others continued to insist that yesterday’s holiday had “nothing” to do with Father’s Day, despite the very coincidental timing. My son-in-law immediately suggested that it should be designated “Father’s In-Law Day.” 5 I can definitely get behind that idea.
I hope this was helpful. It’s June 16, 2024 next year.
You may have noticed that we are about four parts into the 239-part series that I modestly call “How it Works.” Here are the four parts, so far:
I have compiled a list of concepts that were important for me to understand as part of my own sobriety. I share them here, not as exact recipes to follow (read them, that’s impossible), but as illustrations of how I took the principles of the Big Book and AA and applied them to myself. The theme I see emerging is that the Big Book is about changing my own perspective more than anything else.
Gratitude, Empathy, Self-Honesty and Humility are like the four horse-people of sobriety.6 It’s worth pointing out that none of them involve any other person changing their views, doing something different or saying supportive things. The other thing is, this Gang of Four has a common target: The alcoholic ego will soon be disappearing from those photos of National Day in October.7
I didn’t need to create an alcohol-free bubble around me to stay sober. I needed to recognize that the problem in the world at-large, the one that required all of that drinking, was the impossible situation I had put myself in. That is not meant as self-blame, it is meant to suggest that the answer to my dilemma was in my pocket the whole time. The problem was the way I looked at the world and how I saw my place in it.
For me, as long as my view of the world had me at the center, there weren’t enough AA meetings in that world to keep my sober. The life-changing part didn’t happen for me talking out loud. A lot of it happened on really early mornings, when it was still really dark and there wasn’t really anyone else up. Those relentless, horrible mornings, waiting for things to get brighter (or for the Commissary to open at 8am), were some of the hardest times in my life. The problem was being with the me I had created, without the thing that made him possible. Being alone with that version of me was unbearable. Doing it sober was impossible.
That didn’t change, couldn’t change, when I just stopped drinking. That changed when I worked the steps and found the me that had gotten left behind a long time ago. It took being quiet and looking at things honestly, without fear and with love. But sure enough, the more I was willing to look, shapes started to appear out of the darkness. The me I recovered always loved the early, early mornings. There was never any grumbling about delivering the Des Moines Register at 5:30am, even during the coldest parts of January. I walked through the world in solitude on those early mornings, filled with awe and wonder and possibility, even though it was just down at the corner of Koser Avenue and Highland Drive. That’s how I feel again.
Gratitude, Empathy, Self-Honesty and Humility, and the other 235 parts still to come, that’s what brung me here. The Steps aren’t magical incantations, they’re tools for re-evaluating my life and my place in the world, and they work better the more they’re used. Like they say, “it works if you work it.”
Now that I write this, I sure wish I had made watching Three Days of the Condor part of the Father’s Day festivities over here.
Why is it always three days?
I hope none of us sees it as a zero-sum game between these two very lovely holidays. Three days of “Father’s Day,” and one really lovely day of “Mother’s Day,” adds up to four happy days celebrating parents, so why is everyone so focused on keeping exact count?
I understand that this has far more meaning than my own silly efforts to apply the Westward Expansion model to Father’s Day, two very Dad-driven enterprises.
You can see why he is my favorite son-in-law.
That does not sound great. But did you notice who got listed last?
I like this much better.