In my early days in AA, seasoned members painted pictures of a life of hopeful sobriety. It was not at all like the hell I had created for myself in the last days of drinking.

Early in my sobriety in Alameda, California, I learned that a solid foundation is a critical element to having continuous, useful and rich sobriety.

The moment I knew the COVID pandemic was going to be a major disaster was when my kids were sent home from school.

“Once I get sober, life will be great!”

There are struggles we will face in sobriety. Getting sober is not a guarantee that life will be void of trouble. On the contrary, life will have its ups and downs, life will be life.

This pandemic has been hard on us all. It’s been like one giant roller coaster ride from hell. Every day we’ve been bombarded with what feels like nothing but negativity and bad news.

It’s 1:30 Friday afternoon, and I have just returned home from my fourth AA meeting this week. I usually go to four each week. My delightful wife takes me. I last drove a car on Feb.

My sponsor Sandy always told me that no matter what happens in sobriety, never to pick up a drink. That was something I kept very close to heart.

It took several years in sobriety for me to fully appreciate how much my first sponsor helped me.

Like most of us, I knew I was in trouble with alcohol long before I I came to AA. During the last two years of my drinking, I went back to church to pray my drinking away.

Tradition Two asks us to make use of a loving God to guide our group conscience and act as our ultimate authority.

When I was 13, I went to work on a farm where I soon became friends with my boss, who was 21. He’d occasionally offer beers after we finished bringing in the hay in the hot sun.

I’m told that my grandfather was an alcoholic. The disease appears to have skipped a generation, as my father, an only child, did not drink. But alcoholism found me.

I was the invisible alcoholic. I was a housewife and a mother who was sometimes employable. My husband traveled for work, and I drank at home.

Tonight I’m sitting in a prison dayroom in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I’m 13 months away from completing a 12-year sentence.

I have met with her many early mornings because, like her, I’m an early riser. We both have our busy schedules, with life inviting us to encounter everything around us.

It started out as just another August workday. A downtown noon meeting might be good, I thought, to help keep my fairly new sobriety going.

A friend in my morning home group asked me one day if I would be interested in starting a new evening meeting, saying, “Wouldn’t it nice to bracket our day with a ‘harmony meeting’?”

It is a long drive to my first AA meeting. The first step through the door is hard. I walk into a crowd and I feel alone and intensely uncomfortable.