January 25, 2006 11:07 PM
For moms who need a fresh start - Part 3
Those of you who've hung around MommyLife for a while know that I went through a 12 Step program before becoming a Christian. I've always been grateful for that - and have often thought every new Christian should have the opportunity to work the 12 Steps because they are so good at teaching you to take responsibility and to become accountable, to repent specifically to those you have harmed, to accept forgiveness, and to move forward.
So tonight, in light of the question about Desperate Motherhood - where you just feel at the end of your rope (alcoholics would say you've hit bottom) with your motherhood, thinking you just can't ever make it work - I thought it might be helpful to rework the 12 Steps as a program for mommies who need to make a fresh start:
[Note: I initially caused a lot of confusion with this post because in reworking AA's 12 steps to meet the need of Desperate Mommies, I left in their words "God as you understand him." In my own personal history, this was my first introduction to God - and though AA was begun by Christians, they used this language in order to help as many alcoholics as they could - in other words, they didn't want someone to be denied the opportunity of getting sober because they hadn't yet come to belief in Jesus Christ. I think that was good, because it saved people from dying of alcoholism and cleared their brains enough so they could consider pursuing a spiritual life. This is what happened for me: Once I had worked the steps, I decided I wanted to know more about God. Those of you who know my testimony know I was one of those people like Saul who hated Christians, so I never would have looked there for help. I was looking for God in all the wrong places, but God saw my sincerity and confusion and in the end I found the truth of Jesus. So for readers who were startled by my leaving "God as you understand him" in the steps as I printed them last night, I was thinking that not all of my readers are Christians but many are Desperate Mommies and need help right away. But to clear the confusion, I have edited the 12 steps to more accurately reflect my faith!]
1. We admitted we were powerless - that our lives as mothers had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that God could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives completely over to Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of where we stood as mothers - including our strongholds of selfishness.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our failings.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character which kept us from fulfilling our calling and reaching our potential as mothers.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all the ways we had harmed our husbands and our children, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to our husbands and children, except when to do so would injure them.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought daily to improve our awaeness of God working in our lives, praying for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other mothers, and to practice these principles in our daily lives.
Posted in Mothering | Permalink
Comments
Thank you so much for posting this. I am going to print it and keep it on file.
Posted by: paigeu | January 25, 2006 11:38 PM
Can someone explain to me whether or not "God as we understood Him" means that we can believe in any god, the One True God or not?
As a believer in the One True God I have trouble with this wording. I believe that I have seen it as "God as I understand him to be" and to me it reads more like any god will do. If you understand god to be the sun, good for you, submit to that god and you've accomplished the purpose of the step. Somehow this just doesn't ring of true faith in the One True God, the only way. The reference to Power also smacks of this to me. Maybe these steps have evolved over time to reach more people in our post modern days, I don't know. The one thing I do know is that I cannot accept this without some type of explanation.
Posted by: mrs.s. | January 26, 2006 12:12 PM
Mrs. S - I can definitely understand your concern! Thanks for bringing that up so I could take care of it. I actually changed the steps to reflect my own faith more than the AA position, and added this note within the entry;
[Note: I initially caused a lot of confusion with this post because in reworking AA's 12 steps to meet the need of Desperate Mommies, I left in their words "God as you understand him." In my own personal history, this was my first introduction to God - and though AA was begun by Christians, they used this language in order to help as many alcoholics as they could - in other words, they didn't want someone to be denied the opportunity of getting sober because they hadn't yet come to belief in Jesus Christ. I think that was good, because it saved people from dying of alcoholism and cleared their brains enough so they could consider pursuing a spiritual life. This is what happened for me: Once I had worked the steps, I decided I wanted to know more about God. Those of you who know my testimony know I was one of those people like Saul who hated Christians, so I never would have looked there for help. I was looking for God in all the wrong places, but God saw my sincerity and confusion and in the end I found the truth of Jesus. So for readers who were startled by my leaving "God as you understand him" in the steps as I printed them last night, I was thinking that not all of my readers are Christians but many are Desperate Mommies and need help right away. But to clear the confusion, I have edited the 12 steps to more accurately reflect my faith!]
Posted by: barbaracurtis | January 26, 2006 1:09 PM
