Last night I was sitting on my daughter’s couch. It’s an interesting piece of furniture. She got it for free because it was defective and the original owner got something different. The main problem with it was that the “leather” covering was not well made so small bits of it began to pucker and peel off. That was 7 years ago…

Now, she still has it but it stays covered in big cloth sofa cover thing. It still sheds. If you find a piece of anything on the ground in the living room my 9 year old grandson will tell you “It’s probably part of the couch.” He’s lived with it virtually his entire life. All that is just for back ground, it’s not even what my point is…

The thing that made the sofa cool in the first place was that it had reclining seats on the ends. If you sat in the middle you got nothing, but the people at the ends could lean back and put their feet up. Last night Grammy had the feet up and our younger grandson was trying to climb up the footrest and onto the couch.

Dude loves to climb!

He got amused when the foot rest began to collapse under his weight. He’s two and a half and for him it became Disneyland. When he made his first attempt he slid to the ground and smiled. I helped by putting my foot underneath the footrest to hold it up. We did this a few times, then he changed the game. Now my job was to hold it up for his ascent. He would face plop on the seat to finish the climb, then walk to the edge, at which point he would wait for me to let it drop. We did this several times. (I wasn’t counting, but I could be convinced that it was about one million…)

Each time I tried to stop, he would instruct me on how the game worked. We kept going and going, all Energizer Bunny style. He had found something that worked and he wanted to stick with it. When I tried to take a break, he encouraged me to continue, because he knew it was working.

We were support for each other.

In recovery I am nowhere without my support group. There are people who are keeping me on track. I’ve found out what works and I keep striving for success. And those people keep me moving forward. Even when they have scratches and bruises on their feet from holding up the footrest on a janky sofa with peeling pleather. Just like Camden last night, I need their help in order to…

–Rise Up!!