"My life should be more stable, given how much time I'm spending with recovery."

Actually, tavalon, your life should be exactly where it is, because you are doing exactly what you are supposed to do. Just keep doing it and it will all come together, precisely the way it is supposed to.

My Dad had been sober in AA nine years when I called him to tell him I had a drinking problem. You know what he told me, of course, and I called him two days later to tell him I had joined AA. The following week he called to tell me they were going to operate on him for cancer and asked if I could come see him. I went with him to his home group before the surgery. One of his guys took me aside and told me about him telling them I had "found the way home." He had been praying for years that I would come to my senses. "I've never seen that old man so happy," he told me.

I stayed in Arizona with him most of the next three months until he died. of the cancer. Went to meetings with him until he was no longer able, and a couple of the people I still talk with today, thirty years later, are people I met in those meetings. I can assure you my life did not feel stable those three months when I was with my father, watching him die of cancer and trying to learn myself what sobriety was all about. But I did what I was supposed to do and it came together the way it was supposed to come together.

And the last time my father looked at his oldest son he saw a sober man. My sobriety is my life, and it is a gift to my Dad.

Hang in there tavalon. Stay close.

Your sobriety may be a gift to your father but you know it's a gift to you as well. You are a better person as a recovering, than as a drunk. I feel safe saying this because drunks at rock bottom are rarely the life of anyone's party. Good on ya, Jayhawk.

In another reply you are where you need to be, you are working your program and sharing your thoughts and feelings in an open honest way. Doing what is needed for yourself. This program of ours sometimes requires a certain amount of selfishness, we cannot "be there" for anyone else if we are not there for ourselves first.

Hang in there and stay in touch.