Another day unpacking

I spent a few hours today unpacking. I've collected pottery for years, Frankoma, Hull, and a few other styles, and each piece I took out of the box had a bit of memory attached to it.

I unpacked my mother's dishes yesterday, washed them and put them in her old maple hutch. I couldn't help but recall how many family dinners we ate on those plates; how many Thanksgivings we ate as Bolero blared in the background; how many times she and I stood in the kitchen drying that china after all the hustle of the meal was over and my brothers and Dad sat in the family room watching football or baseball or arguing about something.

Sometimes, not often because I try not to allow myself regrets, I wonder how, despite how hard my parents tried to raise me well, I got so screwed up. I am so grateful that I got clean while they were alive so that they could see how much I'd changed. I'd finally, my mother said to me, become the daughter she'd wanted all along. I wonder why I couldn't see her love for me when I was young?

I guess I'm in the mood to reminisce because tonight at my home group I talked a lot about how I got clean in Phoenix. I don't know that I would have gotten clean anywhere else. People took me under their wing and loved me when I felt completely unlovable. They saw something in me that I couldn't even fathom in myself: That I was a worthwhile human being who had so terribly lost her way. Thank God for the Fellowship we had at the time.

We were at church today and sang Amazing Grace. Every time I hear that song I cry, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because that's exactly what I was, a wretch, a pitiful, self-hating wretch. Yet God chose me to get clean.

Tonight at my home group there were three of us there with over twenty years. When I spoke about watching, as Red in Phoenix used to call it, the "passing parade," I saw them nodding, because we can't figure out why some people make it and some people don't. I often wonder why I am so lucky to have found the rooms and stuck.

Yes, I did the footwork, but it's grace, pure and simple, that brought me to the Fellowship and it is grace that has kept me there. And grace will lead me home.