Pancakes and Program

It's a nice day out today. My apartment smells like pancakes. Burnt pancakes. Pancakes aren't my forte. And that Wal-Mart syrup sucked. Absolutely took the joy out of eating pancakes. The butter didn't melt right either. How strange is this...expecting perfection out of pancakes. Wait...stranger still...having expectations of pancakes at all.

Ah, the insanity.

We started step five yesterday (that's where you read step four, your moral inventory).

Step Five: Admitted to ourselves, God, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Fun. Not. I had shared with MFD on Friday that I was going through a life-changing spiritual experience on Saturday. She asked what that experience was, exactly. So I shared with her that I'm in OA, and that I'm doing step five, where we share our moral inventory with another human being. We briefly talked about some of the other steps.

"Next up are character defects. Then we ask God to remove the character defects in step seven."

"Wow, talk about tearing a person down and then building them back up again." I guess that's exactly what it is. When you go through so many of the things that you did wrong, so many of the resentments you have, and you go through them one by one with someone who's sane, you get a pretty good idea of how you've messed yourself up.

I was a child of an abusive, neglectful home. I'm learning to stop wearing that like a badge. I'm learning to relate to that differently. I'm learning stop defining myself by my past, to stop thinking of myself as a perpetual victim.

And I learned during step five that many of the survival skills that I developed in order to get through day to day life in a place like that have now turned into liabilities as an adult. They've turned into arrogance, judging, and a few other things, but we weren't quite finished when I had to go meet the guy who was bringing Niece's bed.

When your parents' moods are pretty unpredictable, you learn how to work people so that you can avoid setting them off. You learn to manipulate in order to get your needs met, since your parents aren't doing their job willingly. You learn to lie in order to avoid confrontation.

That skillset might help you get through being a helpless kid whose world is out of control, but it doesn't promote a healthy, successful life as an adult. It pretty much promotes isolation. It promotes low self esteem and a personality that's difficult for others to stand.

I'm grateful that these things are being brought to my attention. I do want to be different. I want to change and be someone that can give and receive love. And I'm not talking about romance or any of that. I'm talking about friendships. Close, loving friendships. That's where one really has to start. I'm talking about being able to accept my family as they are and stop expecting them to magically transform into healthy people that will love me unconditionally. They are who they are, and trying to control that is not a job that I can or should do or try to do.

But for today, I only have to worry about one or two things. Actually, I needn't worry. God will take care of them.