It may interest you to know that some older programming languages didn't originally support recursion, although they did support function calls (early FORTRAN being one example). The return address for a function call was typically stored in a fixed location associated with the target. So if you called that function once, you wouldn't be able to call it a second time until the first call had returned, otherwise you'd end up overwriting the first return address.

Not that I think that is the OP's problem - just a bit of interesting history. Support for recursion may seem obvious in hindsight, but there was a time where that wasn't the case.