For those not in the know, the title of this post is the name of a Frank Sinatra song. One of the many songs that were played at my wedding last month. The marriage and the celebration were a wonderful affair. I am still bowled over by so many things that were a part of this weekend. The gathering, ceremony, and celebration provided me with a lot of opportunity to reflect on my life and my current circumstances. The bottom line is am tremendously blessed.
There are so many things I want to write about that this will need to be a post of many parts.
Lets start with my bride and how getting married to her makes me reflect on relationships, attraction, and having good people in my life.
I am, quite frankly, pretty amazed at my wife’s personality and what I think of as her soul. She is a genuinely sweet and good person. I rarely see her get angry and I believe this emotional reaction is just not something she has ever cared to resort to. Her experiences in her family life and with her friends is quite unlike my own. In her immediate family there is is not any alcoholism or addiction and her parents are decent folks that have worked hard to do the best they can for their children. Most of her friends, many of which she has known for many years, are good, interesting, and bright people.
My brides life has not been sheltered and all sweetness though – she has seen others in her extended family and some of her friends go through all kinds of struggles that we in recovery find par for the course of life – mental illness, addiction, etc. My wife also had brain surgery a few years before I met her. My perception is that her experiencing some unpleasant parts of life have given her a good dose of humility and perhaps a greater appreciation for life itself.
There is more to this picture I am painting but the outlines provide an image I am trying to present – my wife has not become who she is in a way that resembles my own path. I have spent twenty years aspiring to be healthier, happier, more positive, more caring, and more of the person I should be. The change in my life has been dramatic. She, on the other hand, has had a lot of good qualities in spades and as far as I can tell is still improving in many areas that I think she already does pretty well with.
The point of all this is that for me I am just floored that my working at my sobriety has allowed me to attract such a wonderful person into my life. I have been very conscious of and learned a lot about where I am at and how I am doing by paying attention to the people I have around me. As an active drunk I neither really cared for nor seemed to seek out these kinds of people. It used to be stressful to be around decent people, for me and for them.
My first sober relationship was very interesting. I grew and learned a lot from that experience. I was also very fortunate that all the insanity it supported and fostered drove me deeper into my program rather than justifying going back to drinking. I did a lot of wrong things in that relationship. I also know enough today to see that similar situations I have seen others gone through have gone either way – many end up drinking again but a few get back into working the AA program. Anyway that first sober relationship was crazy but it simply was what it was. In part it reflected who I was and where I was at. Just as the drunken relationships I had had before were with other insane people and were a similar mirror.
Another aspect of all this is that I have become a decent person that my wife and her parents want to have in their lives. They are in fact pleased to have me become a part of their family. I have self-worth, respect, and dignity today. Years ago I would have thought this was amazing and that I was somehow reaching beyond who I was – almost as if I was just lucky to have landed where I have. This is just not true for me today.
When I was getting sober and working the steps that allowed me to “clean house,” I was led to see that my morals and actions were incongruent. There were some beliefs I had that were good ideas but they were not really guiding my behavior. I also held conflicting ideas that made no sense when placed side by side with one another. So I was taught, and practiced, and learned from experience what being decent is all about. It is really gratifying to know I do not need to act like a nut and that I really don’t want to anyway. I usually have a pretty good idea of what the right thing to do is whenever life challenges me (“we will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us”) and I can even act accordingly a lot of the time. While I had no conception of this twenty years ago, this way of living is great and can create the very situation where I can get married to a wonderful woman with a nice family.