Alcoholics Anonymous can convey unimaginable courage and the ability to cope with unimaginable tragedy.

Roberta W. knows that. She was an alcoholic who drank heavily all through her three pregnancies, unaware of the deadly dangers of fetal alcohol syndrome. Her oldest and youngest, both girls, escaped this curse, but her son was a troubled child from his earliest days. When he was 17, he drew a one-year detention, and it was about this time that Roberta became aware of fetal alcohol syndrome.

"This was about 1989. I´d been sober four years by then. When I researched it, everything fit my son except the facial features. He didn´t have that. I got very involved in a support group, and he did well in detention. That´s typical. Fetal alcohol kids need structure."

Her son went to a group home in central Washington after his release, but refused to go back when he came home on a visit. He tried school again with no success and moved into a luxury apartment in downtown Seattle, where he began hanging out with other young people as they shoplifted and abused credit cards.

And then a girl was found dead, murdered, near Roberta´s home in Shoreline. Her son was tried and convicted, though Roberta does not believe he is guilty. "My son had no history of the kind of violence the girl suffered," she said. The appeals continue, so far without success, and the young man still has 24 more years to serve.

He went to prison in 1993. Four years later, tragedy struck again. Her 20-year-old daughter died of a rare heart ailment. "She was a great kid," Roberta said. "No drugs, no booze, she didn´t smoke. And she was doing so well in college. This came on very suddenly. There was an abnormal heart rhythm that could have been treated had we known."

Alcoholics Anonymous was Robert´s refuge and her support through these crises. "The night my daughter died, I was so tempted to drink. I figured everybody would understand when I told ´em in a meeting. But I also knew I would be no help to my family if I started drinking again."

Regarding fetal alcohol syndrome and her son, Roberta said she was overwhelmed with guilt even though this problem was unknown during her drinking days. "It helped when someone in the program pointed out such things as German measles," which can cause retardation through no fault of the mother if she acquires the disease during pregnancy.

After the death of her daughter, a psychic healer told Roberta that her daughter´s soul was with her son, trying to help him understand his limitations. "That idea worked right in with my idea of God as I understand him," Roberta said.

"I love this program. It seems impossible that I get more grateful the longer I´m around, but I do. I really believe that if we work through our alcoholism, we will come into the next life clean. I did not come here to make changes in my life, but you can´t avoid it. Over and over, people in this program have shown me more depth, more tolerance and more love than normal people ever did. The friends I have made-just unbelievable. When my son was arraigned, it was all over the papers and the TV. After that, non-A.A. friends avoided me and wouldn´t talk about what was happening. But when I walked into my meeting that night, everybody clapped. A.A. people are truly different. They knew that night that what was important was support for me. I needed care and love, and they gave it to me."

Roberta was 17, the child of an alcoholic family, when she discovered liquor in her senior year at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. Her boyfriend, a University of Washington fraternity member, was her mentor, and she was soon drinking every weekend. Up to that point, Roberta had prided herself on her scholarship, but her grades began to suffer. When she entered the university the next year, she went downhill academically and ended the year on probation. No problem. She´d get a fulltime job and save her money so that she didn´t have to work and go to school at the same time.

It didn´t work out that way. She went to work as a secretary until she married in 1969. Her husband was captain of a freighter, so she lived aboard ship while she sampled the varied beers and wines of the world. "It was hog heaven for an alcoholic," she recalled. She continued to live aboard ship after her first child was born, but after her second child, she settled into life in Shoreline.

"I thought of myself as the perfect suburban housewife," Roberta said. "PTA, Blue Birds, Sunday School-obviously, if you succeeded in all these activities, you couldn´t be an alcoholic. Just look at what I was doing for my family! When my husband was home, I´d bake bread for him. After I got sober, he asked me when I was going to bake again.´You know,´ I told him, ´I baked bread to get you off my back [about drinking], but I don´t drink anymore.´ I´ve baked bread twice since I sobered up on March 23, 1985."

During those years, her drinking progressed apace with growing concern by her husband and steady denial by Roberta. "When I started drinking in the morning, word got around. A friend of my daughter´s told her I was an alcoholic, so I had to tell the child that everybody has a glass of wine at 5 o´clock. "

She juggled her volunteer work at two schools, and only volunteered Tuesday through Thursday. That left five full drinking days open. When she couldn´t make it to a commitment, she played one school off against the other: "Sorry, my child in the other school is sick today and I have to stay home."

Her husband never wanted her to stop drinking, just to control it and stop embarrassing him. So that led to various creative techniques to disguise her consumption. "I´d hide my wine in the sewing room. Remember when you could get gallon Baskin-Robbins ice cream containers? A gallon of wine fit inside them very well. Then when he went to bed, I´d refill the burgundy bottles that I´d hidden in the refrigerator from the jugs in the ice cream buckets. It didn´t work too well, though. He was amazed at my consumption when he started lining up the empties. It was wonderful when he was gone at sea. I could relax and drink all I wanted." Eventually, they divorced.

"Recycling started around that time, and like a good citizen, I stored my empties in the station wagon. That car was absolutely full of empty beer cases. At the recycling station, a man thought I was a bottle collector and traded pickup location information with me."

In 1983, two years before she joined the program, Roberta had a 12 Step visitor who was referred by her minister. Roberta thanked him for telling her alcoholism is a disease, not a moral failing. She also found out that neighbors were talking about doing an intervention for her. With those pushes, she briefly attended A.A. before the beer and wine took over her life again.

"That last year was bad," she said. "One morning, I just could not stop drinking. I tried to go to a meeting after drinking all the beer in the house, but instead I bought more beer and drove home. I told a friend, ´I just can´t stop drinking.´ She called Marge, a 12th Stepper who´d been helping me. Marge came right over and took me to the Ed-Lynn Fellowship. When we got home, she called Group Health´s treatment program, and I decided that was it. But I had to have one more celebration, so I got drunk that night, and had a final beer to prep for my child´s school conference

." After that, it was Group Health treatment and 90 meetings in 90 days. I thought a year in A.A. would teach me to drink like a normal person. But after six months, the desire for sobriety set in." Her sobriety date is March 23, 1985.

Once she got sober, Roberta decided to go back to school, first at Shoreline Community College and then to U.W. for her degree. That led to a job that lasted 11 years working with hard core, pregnant women who were substance abusers. Before the federal funding ran out, she says the program scored some outstanding successes: 25 per cent clean and sober after one year, 50 per cent showing "good changes" in their lives.

Now retired, Roberta is focussing on a new grandson, "the love of my life. I´ll go any time, any place to babysit him. It´s such a joy to be part of his life, and I wouldn´t be if I were still drinking."

She´s modest about her work for A.A.: "the usual: coffee making, GSR at one point, and I´ve started answering phones at Intergroup.

"I love this program. It seems impossible, but I get more grateful the longer I´m around. I did not come here to make changes in my life, but you can´t avoid it. Over and over, people in this program have showed me more depth, more tolerance and more love than any normal people. I am a happy person. "

Interviewed and written by Dick S.