Dicking Around With The Program

So here comes the big Thanksgiving holiday.  Please hit me with a shovel.  

A very nice woman that SuperK and I know from a couple of different meetings asked us to join her family for the big holiday meal.  This very nice woman kind of disappeared for a number of months - she stayed sober but I can't imagine that she was doing too much in the Working a Program department.  She mentioned that she and her husband did some entertaining when she was drinking and that she wanted to start doing this again.

Here's the thing: SuperK and I are very nice people - well, we're nice-ish, anyway - so it has not been unusual for us to be invited to do things by other couples.  The problem is that often these are not the healthiest couples on the couple farm.  I think people see our very nice relationship and think: "Hey, let's practice on these people.  We're nice, too!"  They don't see the years of effort and work we've put into our relationship.  So SuperK and I have had a lot of pretty crappy evenings with people who aren't really doing too much in the spiritual growth department, if you know what I mean.  Just because we're nice and fun to be with doesn't mean you're nice and fun to be with.

I realize this may sound a little arrogant.  I don't mean it to be that way.  Trust me - we've had plenty of stops and starts on our couple road to recovery.  But we can see past the flush of the nice invitation to what may lie ahead.  We've got a woman dicking around with The Program; her husband who we've never met, who probably has a whole attic of codependent baggage; a few teen-aged children; that we've never met;  all sitting around a dinner table on a holiday that can be loaded with booby-traps for the healthiest of families.

Uh, no thanks.  We're not holiday test-dummies.

We politely declined, suggesting that perhaps a cup of coffee and a muffin or a lunch might be a more appropriate place to start.

This, of course, pissed off the apparently somewhat less nice woman, not a surprising response by someone dicking around with recovery.  This made our decision easier.  We're not trying to be rude - we do things as a couple all the time - but we don't want to be held hostage by someone trying to regain a semblance of a normal life without being bothered by the work part of the reconstruction.

We're going to go to a meeting and take a hike instead.  I'm going to pack a picnic lunch of turkey sandwiched (turkey), Craisins (cranberries), potato chips (mashed potatoes), sweet potato potato chips (sweet potatoes), and pumpkin cookies (you can figure this one out).  I don't know what to do about the stuffing yet.