RRP 122 — Jen L / When the Light Found Her, Part 1: From Bucking Hay to Finding Her People

A Parking Spot, a 150-Foot Cross, and the House She Hadn't Used In

Jen L. was sixty days sober and absolutely furious. She was on the fence — one direction led to a drink, the other to a meeting. The parking spot decided it. She walked in, heard everything she needed, and picked up her sixty-day chip. That was nearly three decades ago, and she hasn't stopped coming back since.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation on the Real Recovery Podcast, and if you've ever wondered what keeps someone in the rooms for twenty-nine years, Jen's story holds some answers. She's been Julie's friend since 1997, when she walked into Lunch Bunch as the second woman in a room full of men. Julie was the first. They've been walking this road together ever since.

But long before any of that, Jen was a ranch kid in Roseburg, Oregon — bucking hay, worming cows, hiding from a bull named Caesar in a crabapple tree. By fifteen, she was buying liquor in small-town stores and blacking out at discotheques in Costa Rica. By seventeen, she came out to her mom, left home in the middle of the night, and found the one family member who said: "We love your friend, and she's welcome here any time." Auntie Bev was her ally.

The years that followed took her through the Chemeketa paramedic program, a stretch in Philadelphia shooting pool until dawn with five guys and a lot of cocaine, and a relationship with a woman named Kathy who finally came down to the basement one night and said it plain: "I'm not gonna sit around and watch you kill yourself." That ultimatum sent Jen to treatment — first to a room full of men who looked like loggers, then to ASAP, a gay-specific program where she could finally stop hiding who she was.

And then came the cross.

Jen and Kathy had just moved into a house off Sandy and 88th. She'd never used there. "That's just what I wanted," she tells us, "a house I hadn't used in." One night the sun went down and a 150-foot cross from the Grotto sanctuary started shining through her kitchen window. Gregorian chants drifted into the yard. She'd found her first sober house, and she hadn't even been looking for it.

Her first AA meeting was in a tiny shack at the Grotto — a smoking meeting where she didn't believe a word anyone said. But she kept going. She found the gay meeting, where a man named James asked five words that changed everything: "Will I see you tomorrow?" He asked Julie the same question, on a different night. Both of them kept coming back.

What follows is a story about showing up. About the sponsor named Tammy who walked beside Jen for twenty-six years — a woman whose presence Julie still describes as something you could feel in a room. Tammy died two years ago, and Jen is only now ready to talk about it. You'll hear about driving Fred to Yreka for his amends, finding a meeting through the Yellow Pages on a payphone, and the father who waved whiskey in Jen's face as he was dying of cancer — while she never once told him she'd stopped drinking.

That last part sets up Part 2. But for now, we'll leave you with the image that opens this episode: a broken leg propped on a pillow, crutches to the right, and a woman who refused to cancel. If she can make it, we all can.

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