Step Three: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God."
My mom was excited to visit the "butt hut," the weathered gazebo in the back of the women's dorm where smoking was allowed. We sat on the picnic table, grooved with a thousand hieroglyphics, as holy as an ark. She bummed a cigarette from one of the other patients. She smoked occasionally my whole life, never finishing a pack in anything shorter than a week. Usually, she only smoked when she drank, but today, she was coherent, solid, dry. Instinctively, I'd inhaled deeply when we hugged: no sharpness of vodka, no tang of wine. Just Elizabeth Arden's Red Door.
"Aren't the men here good-looking?" she asked me, eying their dorm on the other side of the campus. "They were when I was here."
I thought of the heroin addict I had a crush on. "Some of them, sure."
"Do you think the alcohol preserves them? Or are addicts and alcoholics just better looking?"
"I don't know. I haven't made a study of it yet."
She looked great, though. Her jaw was sharper, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. Her hair was blown out and tucked behind her ears. She laughed. Just 18 months before, I'd seen her sallow-skinned and barely talking. She tried to spoon cereal into her mouth and partially missed.
She'd gotten sober, then relapsed, then sober, then relapsed, and, finally, she'd gotten to treatment. This same rehab, actually. I'd visited her, going back to my hotel room to drink myself to sleep after the day together. Now, she was visiting me. "If they can get your mom sober, I guess maybe it'll work for you," my soon-to-be-ex husband had said when we were deciding.
The other patients had drifted away.
"How are you doing with the 'God thing?'" She asked me, taking a drag on her cigarette.
"I hadn't really thought much about it," I told her truthfully.
On Sunday mornings, we were offered the option of doing "alternative chapel" rather than going to the main service, and a lot of other women in my dorm stayed back to take up the questions of "bad things happening to good people" and free will. I thought we'd make little more progress than anyone else in the last couple of millennia, and I liked the singing at the main chapel. The main chapel was also where rehab alumni would come back and get their year coins. I liked hearing their stories even more than the singing.
"Do you 'hit your knees' at night?" She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Blew smoke out. It smelled sour in comparison to the green scent coming off the grass.
Again, why not? The truth: "Sometimes."
I had told my counselor I wasn't sure I believed in God. Not God-god, at least. She'd told me — like everyone had — that was fine. Did I think I was the most powerful thing in the universe? I told her I did not. Could I conceive of anything — gravity, fate, or some General Spirit of the Universe — that was more powerful? I told her I could go with "General Spirit of the Universe." Then you're good, she assured me.
But, prayer, I'd said. Why should I pray if I don't believe in a God that's listening to me? "You're not praying so God can hear you," she told me. "You're praying so you can hear you."
I didn't share any of that with my mom, though.
"So you don't feel silly? Talking to some bearded guy in the sky?"
"Mom." I laughed. "You have no idea the things I've done drunk that are so much more embarrassing than praying on my knees. At least no one can see me praying on my knees."
My counselor hadn't actually specified kneeling. I did it because of superstition, maybe. People used the phrase "hit your knees," and I thought it was probably just a way of saying "prayer" generally, but I really wanted it — whatever "it" was — to work. I wanted to be sober. I didn't want to drink again, and I was terrified I would. I didn't know if the Twelve Steps were a magic spell or a recipe; I knew that all those alumni at Sunday Chapel said they had worked their way through them. I figured faking it was a start.
It felt insincere to pray without knowing who I was praying to or if they/she/it/he was listening; it felt ridiculous to turn "my will and my life over" to something that might be as inhuman as gravity, as unknowable as the universe. What did that even mean? My prayers were repetitive: "God" -- shorter than "Spirit of the Universe" -- "just help me. Just help me. Help me trust that I'm going to get better. Help me figure out what to do. Just help me. Keep me from fucking this up. Help."
Sometimes, I cried. Silly. But I had fucked my life up too much to be very picky about who was in charge, as long as it wasn't me.
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