the Universal Good

Reading One Day at a Time in Al-Anon alongside Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties is a real trip into the deep. One day at a time asks me to "cancel out my thoughts of grievances against others" and Rilke says, "The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them." I am truly a beginner at love and getting rid of grievances.

But I fear Rilke has gotten to me a bit late. All the preparation of self he explains as necessary to be able to really love, well, let's just say I drank through that stage in my twenties. The whole decade when I could have been strengthening myself as an individual, instead I was drinking heavily and doing what Rilke says young people too often do: "that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion. . . . And then what?" Well, Rilke, my friend, I am at that very then what? My life leading up to marrying my husband and giving birth to my daughter was a roller coaster of travel and self-exploration that had the potential to be liberating and maturing except for that it took place in a fog of alcohol and was daunted by a loneliness I looked to fix by scattering myself amongst friends and lovers.

Writing that condemnation of my twenties makes me think that maybe the first grievances I should 'cancel out' are those I hold against my past self. I'm in this undesirable predicament of having a young child and being married to an alcoholic in denial of his alcoholism and I suppose I want to blame my past self. I want to blame the person who made the choices that brought me to where I am right now. Some good that will do! Right?! But it's the truth. I blame my husband for his actions, but more than that I blame myself for becoming attached to someone who could do these actions -- who could lie, and yell, and tear things from the wall.

I want to go back in time, about ten years, and read Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties then. I want to really learn from the first alcoholic/addict I dated. But last I checked, a time machine for the emotional and intellectual late-bloomers has not been invented. Knowing this, that I can not go back and make the past Miriam better than she actually was, leaves me with really only one option (in time and space) moving forward. I suppose that's why One Day talks about these grievances, because you can't really move into the future with them. Of course, you will wake up and tomorrow will calendar-wise be tomorrow no matter what you're still holding on to. But if you're still holding on to it - to whatever it is - then emotionally and intellectually you will be in the same damn place. And I've been in that damn place too long!

I am ready for the serious truth and difficult work Rilke talks about - I just wonder how possible it is to do this work while tangled in the mess of marriage with an alcoholic. Guess I'm destined to find out.