The Prodigal Daughter's Return

After a long detour, 12 steps led me home

Photo by Nick Holmes

“The prodigal daughter got together all she had, set off for a distant country and there squandered her wealth in wild living.” - Apologies to Luke 15:13

Virtually everyone in Montreat, this tiny North Carolina mountain town that happens to be a Presbyterian conference center as well as the home of Billy Graham, went to church last Sunday — except me. Despite, or perhaps because of, being a minister’s daughter, I unshackled myself from the strictures of organized religion at age 15 when I announced to my crestfallen mother that I didn’t believe in God. My arms crossed in steely defiance, I also informed her that I was not going to fidget through another meaningless hour on a hard wooden pew straining to latch onto anything any minister said, ever again!

Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, NJ, where I turned a deaf ear to many a sermon

Like any prodigal child, I’m sure I came across as sullen, uncaring, and ungrateful. And like most parents of prodigal children, my mother compulsively lectured me, while I compulsively ignored her. Mom kept trying to bring me closer, but I couldn’t get far enough away. Being with my family reminded me of the ways I was different from them, and the deepening belief that I had no true home.

I sought a geographical cure for my rootlessness by relocating at age 23 to Los Angeles. Fighting back tears as she said goodbye to me at the airport, my mother lamented that she was losing me to “the land of sex, sin, and sun.”

“Exactly!” I thought to myself. For decades, I over-indulged in all three but still wasn’t cured.

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I had some legitimate reasons for feeling disconnected and if you want to know more about them you can find out here. But the most wrenching severance was to myself. I possessed no solid identity, no ability to distinguish my feelings from those of other people, and no concept of healthy boundaries. Trying to steady my psychic wobbliness left me exhausted, terrified, and jonesing for something that would make the world stop spinning.

From the age of 15, I used compulsive romantic relationships as my drug of choice. Chasing the dopamine high of fantasy was a distraction from the chasm within, and I organized my life around the pursuit of perfect love. I had a knack for forming toxic attachments to men who weren’t good for me. Of course, being the lost soul that I was, I wasn’t much good for them either. After two marriages and a dizzying carousel of short-term relationships, I hit bottom when an ex-boyfriend that my friend Lisa dubbed The Grifter divested me of the last of my inheritance. To quote the great sober writer Anne Lamott, “I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.”

It was at this point that I crawled into an Alanon meeting, ready to turn my will and my life over to a Higher Power. I did this while cringing at all the “God stuff,” especially when we had to stand in a circle holding hands like a bunch of Whos down in Whoville and chirp, “Keep coming back! It works if you work it!”

“Religion is for people who are going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.” - Anonymous A.A. member

For those of you who have never been broken enough to seek shelter in a 12-step meeting, they often take place in a musty church basement and bear an uncanny resemblance to those other “meetings” on the ground floor. Our Bible is The Big Book, our Bible Study is the study of the 12 steps, and our sermon is the speaker’s testimony: one of our brethren explains what they were like before the program, what they did to get better, and what life is like now. And, like Christians who follow the teachings of Jesus, we in the program try to practice the 12-step principles in all our affairs.

I was an active program member for three years. During much of that time, I struggled with the concept of a Higher Power, so I used my phenomenal sponsor as a placeholder. Whenever I called her from the vat of fear and self-pity in which I was marinating, she listened patiently, urged me to take the next indicated action, and drink more water while I was at it. Since I did whatever she told me, I became emotionally sober as well as properly hydrated.

What I loved about being among members of my “congregation” was that I didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than how I was. I could admit, for example, that after first stepping foot in The Grifter’s squalid apartment to find dusty mounds of unopened mail, crusted-over dishes piled high in the sink, and a stinky, drooling, disorderly dog the size of a small pony, I convinced myself that I could fix him (the guy, not the dog, although it was hard to distinguish the two by the end). I could admit this because everyone in those rooms had a different version of that very same story. They nodded and laughed in recognition as I laid my truth bare.

Of course, if you’re serious about working a program, you don’t just talk about your character defects; you do something about them. You develop a spiritual practice (in my case, mindfulness and right action), you take inventory of your resentments, you make amends for your wrongdoings, and you try to help those who are still suffering. The 12 steps will kick your ass, but that’s because they’re a blueprint for how to be a sane grown-up. It was the doing, not my lifelong habit of compulsive rumination, that became my salvation.

In his book Breathing Under Water: Spirituality And The Twelve Steps, the rather heretical Catholic priest Richard Rohr weaves together Bible passages, Jungian psychology, and 12-step readings to demonstrate how each of these “faiths” has the same goal. The Christian, the neurotic, and the addict all must travel through the valley of darkness towards “a real transformation of the self.”

Becoming emotionally sober saved my life. My career flourished. My finances improved — immensely. And my craving for intensity-fueled relationships evaporated. Now, whenever I catch a whiff of a man who means me no good, I recoil instead of run towards him. There is no greater freedom than having my feet planted solidly on the ground.

Being restored to sanity meant I could listen to myself. The more I listened, the more mind, body, and spirit told me I needed to leave Los Angeles — not for a geographical cure, but to return to the only place that had ever felt like home: the Blue Ridge Mountains.

If the God of your understanding isn’t in these hills, and on these back roads, then I don’t know where

After my cousins Mary Jo and Perrin got back from church, my cousin Sandy and her family and I joined them around the dining table for Sunday dinner (fyi, dinner is “lunch” to you Yankees). Sandy blessed the meal with a prayer from my father’s book, Amazing Graces.

We all said “Amen!” before biting into the delicious sandwiches Mary Jo got at Veranda in Black Mountain. Then we talked a lot about my mom: the towering floral and fur hats she wore, the unsuspecting cashiers whose grammar she corrected, how she was at once larger than life and also fragile.

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My mother died in Asheville in 1995, long before I got into recovery, and before I had the chance to make an amends. If she were here, I would apologize for the pain I caused her because I didn’t know how to talk about what ailed me.

I would also thank her for giving me the best gift any parent could give a child: unconditional love. No matter how much distance I put between us, she never got angry in return. She continued to offer love, even when I pushed it away. Other parents might have held a grudge, or made me grovel to get back in their good graces. But my mother wouldn’t have done either of those things because she was Jesus’s star student. Instead, she would have welcomed me home with open arms. Then she would have suggested we go out for lunch and a little shopping.

“Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this daughter of mine was dead and is alive again; she was lost and is found.” - Apologies to Luke 15:22