In preparation for that, I needed to renew my Mexican passport. The closest Mexican embassy to me was in Chicago so I traveled there. On route to Chicago I met Anthony. I didn't know it at the time but he would become my daughter's father.
Unable to renew my passport I went back to Wisconsin and Anthony tagged along. We started and on/off relationship which lasted a couple of years. The thing u he was different than the rest of the guys I hung around. Mainly he didn't drink or did drugs. I attributed this to his belonging to a particular religion and since I was looking still for a change in my life, I started attending his church.
Anthony and I parted ways but I remained in church. I was baptized and became very religious. I stopped drinking and doing drugs. For the next 20 years or so I thought I was "cured" from alcoholism or more accurately I became convinced I was never an alcoholic in the first place.
In spite my religious involvement and in spite having an adorable daughter during those 20 years I continued feeling miserable inside. Eventually feeling as dissatisfied with life as when I was active I took the geographical cure I had planned when I met Anthony and my daughter and I moved to Mexico. She was only a year and half old. To this date she does not know the town where she was born.
My daughter does not think I am an alcoholic because she has never seen me drunk but I know better now. It's true she never saw me drunk but that doesn't mean I did not crave alcohol. Being around my family made it hard not to want to drink. But I was so self righteous then that my ego did not let me "succumb" to the low levels of my drinking relatives. That's why I didn't drink not because I didn't want to.
On the other hand it's not totally true I didn't tasted alcohol at all during those years. Once in a while, I did "succumb" to temptation but again my pride stopped me from going off the deep end.
AA's first step states: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable".Well for those many years I never really admitted anything but I knew my life was unmanageable. I was 29 when I had my daughter. When I moved to Mexico I left all responsibility for my daughter to my parents.
The "geographical cure" did not work. I was still miserable inside. Complained about my lot in life. (Still do). But with the help of a friend who knew about alcoholism and who belonged to the same church I did I started to see that if I wanted to change it had to come from within me.
I started to think of others ahead of myself and realized I had placed a great burden on my parents by leaving all responsibility of my daughter to them. My father showed signs that he was getting tired of the stress of working to support all of us and if I ever wanted to see my father retired I had to start taking the responsibility for my life and my daughter's.
So I did it again. I tried to fix by moving back to the U.S. and in 1997 I moved to Texas. My daughter remained with my parents so I could find a job and become stable. But six months after I moved I was still not stable and my parents had a car accident in which my daughter had a broken knee. As soon as the school year was over my mother flew to Texas to bring my daughter to live with me.
I was still in church and not having the pressure to drink from my family helped curve the obsession but the emotions were still out of control. I was depressive and irritable. I yelled to my daughter for any little thing and dumped my negative emotions on her.
When she turned 13 my daughter went to live with Anthony who had come back into her life. Again, it was easy to dump the responsibility for her on somebody else. My daughter was tired from the emotional abuse I inflicted on her.
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