November 19

November 19 – AM          Page 114-115, To Wives, Chapter 8

If your husband is a drinker, you probably worry over what other people are thinking and you hate to meet your friends.  You draw more and more into yourself and you think everyone is talking about conditions at your home.  You avoid the subject of drinking, even with your own parents.  You do not know what to tell the children.  When your husband is bad, you become a trembling recluse, wishing the telephone had never been invented.
We find that most of this embarrassment is unnecessary.  While you need not discuss your husband at length, you can quietly let your friends know the nature of his illness.  But you must be on guard no to embarrass or harm your husband.
When you have carefully explained to such people that he is a sick person, you will have created a new atmosphere.  Barriers which have sprung up between you and your friends will disappear with the growth of sympathetic understanding.  You will no longer be self-conscious or feel that you must apologize as though your husband were a weak character.  He may be anything but that.  Your new courage, good nature and lack of self-consciousness will do wonders for you socially.

November 19 – PM          Page 161, A Vision For You, Chapter 11

But life among Alcoholics Anonymous is more than attending gatherings and visiting hospitals.  Cleaning up old scrapes, helping to settle family differences, explaining the disinherited son to his irate parents, lending money and securing jobs for each other, when justified—these are everyday occurrences.  No one is too discredited or has sunk too low to be welcomed cordially—if he means business.  Social distinctions, petty rivalries and jealousies—these are laughed out of countenance.  Being wrecked in the same vessel, being restored and united under one God, with hearts and minds attuned to the welfare of others, the things which matter so much to some people no longer signify much to them.  How could they?