March 30, 2011 – Lois Wilson was happy and so much in love with Bill. Her happiness was short-lived soon after they got married though, but the love stuck.
See, Bill started as a small time social drinker and after coming back from the war, he didn’t have a job. Lois got her good friend to put in a good word with her husband to get Bill a job and after the deal was sealed, they moved to a lovely home…and then along came the bottle full force.
Bill would come home every night drunk like a fish. His stupidly drunk friends would carry him home and dump him in his living room. Sure enough, the drinking got out of hand and of course people started talking but Lois defended her husband, even to her family who had started losing faith in him.
Along the way Lois had two miscarriages and finally had a tubal ligation done on her when the second miscarriage ruptured her fallopian tubes. As any normal woman would, she took it hard on herself and sort of blamed her inability to have children as the root of Bill’s drinking problem (which in essence wasn’t the case). Bill just enjoyed his drink…too much.
Slowly, things went from bad to worse and a couple of rehabs later alcohol still controlled Bill’s life. He had tried to get sober for the sake of their unborn child, then tried for the sake of his relationship, then for the sake of his life, then his health – but all the time he’d lose the battle.
Inevitably, he lost his job and naturally you’d assume he’d stop drinking because he didn’t have money to support his drinking habit right? Wrong! He would drink and drink and when the stress of being out of a job worsened he started stealing the little money Lois brought home from the odd jobs she did to sustain them. Lois sacrificed everything she had but she refused to sacrifice her love for Bill. In her heart of hearts she knew he’d get better.
The thing is, Bill loved her right back, but that wasn’t enough, because he was unable to kick the bottle to the curb even as Lois prayed and stood by him. So after sticking by him for 17 years and several rock bottoms later, Bill got himself together and through the help of another alcoholic, co-founded the Alcoholic Anonymous movement also known as Al. Anon. (twentieth century’s most important social movements).
My couple of questions:
How much do you value the woman in your life?
Do you care to find out what she goes through on a daily?
And do you ever tell her how much you appreciate her for standing by you?
This is the story line from the movie “When love is not enough: the Lois Wilson story” which is a true story. As a woman of course I identified with Lois, who believed that good can come out of the most evil monster if you love them enough to believe in them. She understood that alcoholism is an illness that needs a lot of willpower to quit.
This movie was made for the alcoholics. Maybe watching it could make you turn your life around if you are one of them. But at the same time it should get you thinking about the people who you hurt in turn because you cannot get yourself together. Remember, that in life, you always have a choice. You can always try and make the right ones.
Well, this is what Bill and co. came up with as the 12 steps of Al. Anon
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Try and see if these can help someone who is suffering from alcoholism to enable them get their life back on track.
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