I went to dinner with a friend who quit drinking a few weeks ago. He warned me he thought it would be weird to go out without a drink. He has avoided being sociable. We ordered ice tea with dinner. I did not notice if he was aching for a beer and he never said anything.

I tried to give him advice without sounding pushy. I asked if he wanted me to go with him to an AA meeting. He said he doesn’t want to do the AA thing.  I wasn’t really sure what to tell him.  I am not really active in AA. I felt suggesting it was sort of a cop-out to actually helping him.  Then again,  I think everyone should at least try it.  Go to a meeting.  For me,  there is always at least one thing I hear in that whole hour that helps me. Maybe I just don’t want to feel the responsibility of being the only person with whom he can share his sobriety feelings.

My sister has been battling a lot emotional problems the last few years.  We stopped speaking three years ago because she had some mental breakdowns. She started leaving me nasty voicemails and texting me a lot of mean things while she was drunk. A lot has happened since then. But that is her story.

She is now trying to get help and go sober. Yet because of all the problems she has caused and the horrible things she has done,  no one in our family is talking to her. Her kids do not even want to talk to her.

She has started to message me recently. This has caused some strife in my family in a sort of “with her/against us” mentality.  But I know how important it is to have support when trying to get sober. I have sent her a few links to try to help.  She is getting professional help. I plan to check in and try to support her from afar. I am also worried about getting too involved in her problems and it hindering my recovery.

Mistake 178- When she started her nasty messages to me,  they started with accusations of an incident from the early 1990s.

I was drunk and ran into her old, high school boyfriend. We were in a military bar in another country. It was his birthday. A bunch of us were drinking pitchers of beer. With straws. We had long straws stuck in the large pitchers! Everyone was drinking and getting drunk like young military people tend to do. And somewhere in the night, he and I started to kiss. We left the bar and went somewhere else. We started to kiss heavily. He dropped to his knees and started some oral pleasantries.  Then when he tried to go to the next step, I stopped him. I said I couldn’t do this. He dated my sister. This was wrong. He seemed disappointed but was fine. We returned to the bar and acted like nothing happened.

I wrote about it in my journal. My sister later read my whole journal. Since in the journal it said he and I “hooked up”, she thought it meant intercourse. When she confronted me, I told her it meant just making out. I am not sure if I ever told her about the oral. But to this day, she swears I fucked him.  I am not sure if “only oral” is any less worse. What is actually worse is that I stopped from going further because of his past relationship with my sister but the fact that I was married at the time was not a reason to stop.