"You don't expect me to go to these meetings for the rest of my life, do you?" It's a question I, myself, first asked more than twenty years ago. "You do realize I have a life, right?" I was arrogant, hostile and very frightened. I thought this all was terribly unfair. It was my parents whose drinking ruined my life. They should go to the meetings, certainly. And while I did admit that I seemed to have inherited the genetic predisposition to addiction, my drinking had never gotten that bad.

I was twenty-four when I came into recovery. I showed up at my first meeting with my dad, to support him in his noble, year-long effort to quit drinking. I was proud of him but ashamed that our family secret was being so publicly acknowledged in front of total strangers. Yet, I was also a journalist and curious about this not-quite-church, not-quite-therapy phenonomen. I went to that first meeting with a notebook tucked into my purse. It might make a good human interest story. I was horrified when the stories they told sounded so much like mine that I instantly became paranoid that these people had been watching my life and taking notes of their own.

One thing I never wanted to grow up to be was an alcoholic. Only in the last few months of college was I even willing to say that word when describing my parents or explaining their behavior to friends. I reassured myself that while I did like my margaritas and Dos Equis, I wasn't dependent upon alcohol and certainly my drinking had never hurt anyone. No DUIs, no lost jobs, high honors all the way through high school and college, a brilliant career started at a very young age. My relationships with men tended to be a bit intense and unstable, but what would you expect with a childhood like mine. I adored my parents, but I just couldn't fathom how they had allowed things to get so crazy.

In my shock following my first meeting, I read every piece of literature I could find, hoping to prove to myself that I was not an alcoholic. I finally concluded that I was a "potential alcoholic" and prescribed for myself a twelve-week course of meetings and the steps (one per week). I was certainly not powerless over alcohol (the whole powerlessness concept seemed to me psychologically flawed) but I saw my twelve-week program to be a good insurance policy against ever becoming "like them." I was willing to quit drinking, not because I had to, but because I was smart enough to see that alcohol and our family's gene pool was a bad combo.

I found the steps a bit more challenging than I expected: first there was that powerlessness thing. "If I had been powerless, I wouldn't have survived my life so far," I complained to the patient, smiling people in my meetings. The second step was a bugaboo, too, until some nice lady said I could have the ocean or the power of love be my higher power. I had always believed that my love for my parents (and later for a string of unreceptive boyfriends) could cure them and make them love me back. Despite the fact that it hadn't worked so far, I was desperate to believe it could.

The third step was the crushing blow to my entire belief system. "Turn my life and will over to the care of God? The same God who ignored all my prayers and pleadings as a child? The God who, in the last years, watched my Dad go to daily Mass already fortified by a shot of vodka? That God either doesn't exist, or worse, doesn't care. Turning my life over to Him is suicide!!"

I was eager to get on with the fourth step, since listing all my faults and telling the sad story of my life was something I was awfully good at. But all those nice, patient, smiling people at the meetings told me that, until I could really grab ahold of the third step, I wasn't ready for the fourth. My twelve-week plan was in shambles. I had been going to meetings for four months and I was stuck. "You don't expect me to go to these meetings for the rest of my life, do you?" I was directing the question to the woman whom I had reluctantly accepted as a sponsor. She smiled - how I hated that smile - and said, "You're going to have to go until you want to go."

Five years into my recovery, my dad died of a cancer related to his alcoholism. He was nearly seven years sober. "Aren't you angry?" I quizzed him one day just before the end. He looked puzzled and wrote "Angry at whom?" at the top of a legal pad. The cancer had taken his voice, but deepened his spirituality and serenity. "Aren't you angry at a God who finally gives you sobriety and then, just when you are starting to enjoy life, He gives you cancer, too?" I was furious and my tenuous hold on faith was slipping.

He sat with his pencil poised for a moment and then began to write with fervor. "God didn't `finally' give me sobriety. I finally accepted his grace that He had been offering me all along. I don't believe God gave me cancer _ or alcoholism. He doesn't interfere with nature or with my free will. He doesn't have anything to do with whether I got cancer. But He has everything to do with how I've handled having cancer."

It had taken five years and a thousand meetings of several different recovery fellowships, but it finally made sense. God is the light that has illuminated my path through the rocky tangles of divorce, illness, infertility and the mind-boggling losses I've experienced in recovery. Today, I have a life truly beyond my wildest dreams. Tomorrow I will fly off with my beloved husband and three children to the Colorado Mountains, where I'll give a retreat for others who are "trying to figure it out." But first I have a meeting I want to go to. Because I do, indeed, have a life, you know.

Cathleen Brooks, author and clinician, is a founder and former president of NACoA, an active member of its Board of Advisors, and the founder and Executive Director of Next Step Institute for Integrative Medicine, Palm Bay, FL. Cathleen Brooks is the name she chose when she authored her first book to respect the tradition of anonymity.