2 Generations 1 Mic
Explore the journey of an intergenerational and intercultural couple navigating life, love, and the unique challenges of a 25-year age gap. At 36 and 61, they bring together two different generations, cultures, perspectives, and life experiences, while making it work.
2 Generations 1 Mic
Growing with an alcoholic parent
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A candid exploration of the complexities of childhood shapes our character and future pathways. Our discussion showcases the interplay of love, addiction, and healing, revealing thought-provoking insights into coping with difficult family dynamics.
• Acknowledgment of the complexities surrounding childhood experiences
• Exploration of memories—both the joyful and the painful
• Discussion on the impacts of addiction on both individuals and families
• Insights on resilience and transformation through adversity
• Importance of seeking help and recognizing addiction as a challenge
• Encouragement for listeners to embrace their experiences for healing
If you need someone to talk to about your struggles, don't hesitate—there are help lines available and people who care.
Introduction to our childhood stories
Speaker 1Welcome to another episode of Two Generations One Mic . Please , guys , if you haven't done it , follow us on every single social media platform YouTube , tiktok , instagram , facebook . The handle is at Two Generations One Mic , just like our logo , and also follow us along to keep interacting with us , and we really appreciate all the support .
Speaker 2Yeah , it's actually totally free . So that's good , and we want the ideas , because people always hit us up privately and say you should do an episode about this , you should do an episode about that . If there's something you want to hear us do an episode about , we're more than happy to look into that and enjoy and engage with you in the conversation .
Speaker 1Yeah , absolutely . Today's episode is not such a fun one , but I think we thought about talking about this . I think the other day we were talking about rough childhoods and I got to say I am lucky . And I got to say I am lucky , I'm one of those lucky kids that I think I had a pretty normal childhood per se . I mean , I was the only child , so I really never had to deal with siblings or anything else .
Speaker 1My dad was a great dad , my mom a little bit of a rough mom , like Latin crazy mom , but still nothing , nothing too crazy , and at least she's consistent . Yeah , at least she's still .
Speaker 2she's still a crazy Latin mom , so I can vouch that she still treats you like you're 10 years old .
Speaker 1I mean she , I don't have kids , so she says that when you have kids they're always your babies until the end . I guess I don't know . But yeah , like I think I had a pretty normal childhood . I mean I was bullied in school , but that's a whole other story , and we were talking about that and after all these years we've been together , it came up . You don't talk a lot about it , but you talk enough about it that I'm always wondering how was your childhood growing up the way you did ?
Speaker 2well , you know I don't talk about it a lot . I don't even really talk about it with friends , or you know probably a lot of friends that listen or watch , that wouldn't even know this about my childhood growing up , but it was not , especially my earlier childhood . It was not pleasant . So I was adopted when my adopted parents were in their late 40s , early 50s , you know , and they adopted me as a baby . Um , and they adopted me as a baby and you know I've heard all kinds of stories about you know , like I , I searched forever to find out . You know my real parents are biological parents and all that stuff and , um , you know , all that entailed and that wasn't a lovely thing either .
Speaker 2You know that I that I ended up finding out kind of what , uh , the biological mother was all about . But the adopted parents , you know they were older and so you know and I'm old now . So it's like you know , when they had me or when they got me adopted as a baby and I don't even know how legal that was at the time it's like they just paid for the ladies to have the baby and they did some thing and they paid the bills and this and that and the other .
Speaker 2They had some lawyer drafted the thing and I don't know if it was just like a thing she sold me . I have no idea how it went down and at that time you're talking about the early 60s that things were different , people didn't keep track of things and it was just a different time . But I'm not saying that my adoptive parents didn't love me , of course my father I always was very much closer to my father . My mother and I were not really close when I was younger , growing up , and there was a lot of reason for that . You know they she was . Uh , when I was young , she was a raging alcoholic . I mean a raging alcoholic and it was bad . So I remember , cause I grew up in Texas and you know they didn't sell um , they didn't sell whiskey . They still don't , I think they still don't they . They still don't sell alcohol on Sundays . It's like Jesus .
Speaker 1Christ , what year is it ? Oh , they don't . Yeah , no , no , they don't . I just remember that I was like what year are we in ? Only beer and wine ?
Speaker 2Yeah , only beer and wine in Texas and the stupid liquor laws they have here . But anyway so— .
Speaker 1Hey , you have to praise the Jesus to do that .
Speaker 2So anyway , so we—on Sundays they would literally—my mother would—I . I remember she drank Old Grandad , which is a whiskey .
Speaker 1That was the name of the whiskey . That's the whiskey Old Grandad .
Speaker 2I think . I think they still sell it , I don't know , but anyway , we used to go on Sundays to the bootlegger is what it was called . He would sell her whiskey on a Sunday , and so she would go there to get her what was that it's called a bootlegger .
Speaker 1Like a hidden . It's called a bootlegger . Like a hidden .
Speaker 2Yeah , it was like a hidden thing . We had to go there and they would sell , but was it like a store ? No , it wasn't like a speakeasy . It wasn't like the cool speakeasies of now . No , it wasn't a store , it was just a guy's house . He would just pull up to his house .
Speaker 1It was like a dealer right .
Speaker 2Like a drug dealer . Yeah , he on Sundays .
Speaker 2That was way back then . God , you know that was crazy , but that was just one of the things there . But she would get so drunk and my dad would drink too , but not to the point . He was trying to always stop her from going too far , to slow down and she would just get crazy . And I remember , I have these horrible memories of being I was probably five , six years old , but I still remember it Five , six , seven years old where she would get into fights and like , oh , you're not going to go get me , and she would literally pull giant cleavers or knives out of the thing and go after him and she tried to stab him one night . I mean , I'm a little kid just watching this all go on in front of me . He's trying to calm her down , she's swinging a cleaver at him .
Speaker 1So she was not the alcoholic that just fell asleep .
Speaker 2No , she was the violent . Let's fight alcoholic . That's what she was .
Speaker 1And so she would .
Speaker 2She tried to like attack my father and he was trying to like fend her off and she fell down , broke her arm that night . There were times where she had alcohol poisoning twice . She almost died . We had to go to the hospital . She was in the hospital for a week because she had alcohol poisoning . It was so bad .
Speaker 2When I was still in junior high I had made the Honor Society and it was the ceremony of being inducted into the Honor Society , and I remember I didn't get to go to that ceremony because she was so drunk on the couch that I thought she was going to overdose and I was taken care of . She was throwing up on the couch all day so I couldn't even go to school . I had to just stay home and take care of her . So I missed my ceremony because I was taking care of her . Also , when I was about seven to eight years old , I remember going to the beach with her in Galveston and a bunch of her friends . My dad wasn't there with us and we went to a camp on the beach in Galveston . She got so drunk at the thing she just walked into the ocean in the pitch black oh my gosh and I'm walking down the beach just crying and screaming .
Speaker 2I think she's dead oh god , and I couldn't find anybody to help me because I didn't know . She just walked into the ocean in the dark and and came back later . But it was like I mean that's a lot for a six-year-old to have to process and uh and that was rough . There were a lot of those type incidences that happened . You want to know why I'm so claustrophobic to this day .
Speaker 2Because when I was seven years old . I didn't want to take a nap or something , and she was trying to make me take a nap and I started crying . But she was so drunk in the middle of the afternoon that she literally held me down with a pillow over my head and my arms and I couldn't breathe . I thought I was going to die .
Speaker 1But she had me trapped underneath the pillow to make me shut up from crying . Yeah , Now , until sometimes , until this day .
Speaker 2sometimes I lean on top of you and you're like no , no no , no , no , Like , if I'm underneath the covers and I've how many times I've told you that you come and jump on me while I'm under the covers I'll throw you off the bed because , I have this fear that that's going to happen to me again , and so you know it's .
Speaker 2You know I was never a . You know woe is me . You know . You know I had this horrible thing . You know she that's , that's a lot of the way she was growing up when I was a kid and so she wouldn't go to the baseball games and things like . My dad was at every one of my baseball games as a kid and all that stuff always there and always . You know , my dad was always around and even though he worked and everything else , he never hit me . My mother loved to get drunk and , you know , beat me with a belt and things like that .
Speaker 1Well , my mother beat me too .
Speaker 2Yeah , but this was I don't know .
Speaker 1And she wasn't even drunk , so I don't know what's worse .
Speaker 2I don't know it was a rough time , but you know , I have to give her this is that she realized that she was what she was doing . It took her almost dying several times and what was going on , but she realized that when I was a mid-teenager probably 15 , 16 , something like that , Anyway , she went to AA and she went to get help .
Speaker 1Or , as I call it , aa .
Speaker 2Yeah , anyway , she went to AA and she went to get help , or as I call it , aa , yeah , aa , she went to AA , but she went to AA yeah . And she ended up . You know I have to give it to her for having such a horrible younger childhood . That still affects me today . You know some of those memories to by the time I was about 15 , for the rest of her life she was an AA and she was sober for 30-something years and she ended up helping thousands of women get off alcohol .
Speaker 2And ended up speaking at conventions for thousands of women and that she helped and got them sober and got them to help their lives and changed their life . And she was a completely different person when she was sober drunk , sober two different people .
Speaker 1Well , most people are like that .
Speaker 2She continued to . Basically , that was her penance to not only get better , but to help other people get away from what she was trapped , and so I was very familiar with AA and all that .
Speaker 2And I think maybe it was like when I was 14 , 13 , 14 , maybe I'm trying to think back because she made us all jump in back , because she made us all jump in . So when you do that , there's AA , which for the alcoholic , there's the Al-Anon , which is for the spouse . You go to meetings , the spouse goes to meetings . My dad went to some of those meetings to learn how to deal with that and then there's Alateen . So as teenagers we had our own meetings . But remember , this is the 70s .
Speaker 2This is the early 1970s early to mid-1970s . So we were in meetings with teenagers in a small little room , smaller than this , and everybody's smoking . I'm like , oh , you've got to be kidding me . You're all teenagers and you're smoking in this tiny little room with no windows . Are you trying to kill me ? And it was like I would my mother's like why don't you go into those meetings ? I don't know . Because they're killing me with cancer . I don't want to sit in there and breathe their stupid cigarette smoke .
Speaker 1Well , that's something that that's why you hate . But you know what ? Sorry to interrupt you . So I it's very interesting because you grew up in a household where both of your parents smoked yeah .
Speaker 2With the windows closed . Oh my God .
Speaker 1And you hate smoking with a passion .
Speaker 2I do .
Speaker 1Yet you grew up with an alcoholic mother , but you still like to drink . I do , Most people .
Speaker 2Because I'm not an alcoholic . You're an alcoholic or you're not an alcoholic .
Speaker 1No , but a lot of people that grow up with alcoholic parents . I've met people that they don't drink because they say , oh , I grew up like looking at my parents or like my mother or like a sibling or something , like an alcoholic like next to them and they saw how that was destroying them , that they really don't care about the alcohol . But I mean also , she was not your birth mom , so you could have another trait from your mom's side , which also had other kind of addictions , I'm guessing . Or we don't know that , because you were adopted . So is there like did they ever say , or was that a reason why she was drinking ? Like you know , a lot of alcoholics do it to get out of reality , because at some point that's how they start and then they just start building that up . Was that something that she said I'm going to become an alcoholic to escape something ? Or she was just all you remember is she's always been drinking .
Speaker 2Well , first of all , if you're in that , they don't say that AA doesn't teach you that you don't just become an alcoholic , it's a disease . They say it's a disease and that it was always hidden inside her that she had this trait . And again , remember , I said they were old , they were older , so they met . They had a great story . Meeting . I mean my parents met literally like something you'd see in a movie . My dad was in . This is my adopted parents . But my dad was living in New York City at a high school with five friends and Pearl Harbor happened and him and all his friends went down and joined the Army . So he went to war , he fought in World War II and he met my mother in the USO show .
Speaker 2She was a singer in the USO and so they were recording out . Her and her brother recorded albums . There was all kinds of albums . She was in the 1940s and 50s . She was a big singer and artist and did all that stuff . But I mean at that time they were drinking a lot . Back then in the 40s , 50s , 60s they were pounding alcohol . They were drinking a lot back then in the 40s , 50s , 60s they were pounding alcohol . I remember everybody coming over and just everybody's , all the adults just like watch Mad Men . They were just pounding that alcohol so there wasn't a lot of like governor on that . So you know she had that and she couldn't control it . You know she I drink , yeah , I do .
Speaker 2I don't have the thing where I need to drink like that , Like will she wake up and need to drink as soon as she woke up ? Not necessarily no , but you know she'd go from that to , you know , just passed out drunk by midday on the couch . I mean , it was when I was little , yeah , but you know again , the fights and the big fights and everything were all at night , like late night .
Speaker 1I perceived as late night .
Speaker 2I was like six or seven , so to me it was late night , I have no idea .
Reflections on lucky childhood experiences
Speaker 2But the again it's not all bad . She did turn herself around and and and and got the help and and changed her life . She lived , ended up living . She passed away . Both of my parents passed away in the same year . My mother died when she was 85 . 81 or 80 , 81 , I think .
Speaker 2And my uh , my father , he'd uh , not not to anyone . She was 81 years old and so , um , she died and my father , uh , passed away . I moved my father in to live with me and he passed away seven months later . But , uh , he was three years older , so he was 83 . And this man again smoked most of his life , had four heart attacks , smoked from the time he was a teenager all the way up until the doctor was like quit smoking , and he was still . He already had four heart attacks . He's still sneaking cigarettes here and there , but he made it through life like that . And she actually had to stop smoking because she had a brain aneurysm in the 80s and so she had to have brain surgery . She made it through that . So I mean , this woman physically made it through a lot of stuff .
Speaker 1You would think that she would have died from cirrhosis or something . Right yeah , the liver .
Speaker 2You would think so , but yeah , no , she didn't . But you know , she physically made it through a lot of different things . But you know , I think if you have an addiction it's an important thing to seek help . You know , I see a lot Identify yeah identify the problem . Yeah , that's what the other thing is . The first thing is identify . You have a problem . You have to realize that you can't get help until you realize you have a problem .
Speaker 1And this is , I think , for everything right , like if you feel like you're depressed . I mean we're humans , right , like we have emotions , but sometimes you have to identify , like , how depressed you are , like seek help . It's OK to seek help , like I tell you that all the time I have we have our psychiatrists in Europe , right , that it's not . It's not that you're crazy , but sometimes it makes a whole difference between you got it after COVID , you started having panic attacks , right , and I told you please , let's go see the psychiatrist and you were like no , no , I don't want to be on pills , I'm like babe , but it's not normal that you're just walking down the street and suddenly you have a panic attack and you're on some medication that helps you your anxiety and panic attacks Like mine . I also have anxiety with other kind of depression-related issues and I take medication for that and it's okay .
Speaker 1I think it's important , like you say , identify that you have a problem and seek help because I could be coping Instead of taking my pills , I could be coping with alcohol . That's what I was asking about , your mom . A lot of people actually do not seek professional help and try to cope with their issues , their problems or their depression with alcohol or drugs or everything else , and then you become addicted to that Right , which is horrible . I mean alcohol . I can't , when you have a hangover like what would you want to just keep going over and over and over with that ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I , I don't . I don't't know if she was drinking because of issues . I do know that she had . Before she adopted me , she had had six miscarriages , but I don't know . Was she drinking to cope with the fact that she was trying to be a biological mother and could not get pregnant . Or while she was pregnant . All those times was she still drinking and smoking ?
Speaker 1And that triggered all that .
Speaker 2I don't know . I never ask about any of that . I was way too young at the time . I didn't ask any of those questions , but I mean , you look back and you try to analyze it . I don't know which one was which , but I certainly can understand . Like I said , I've never had panic attacks in my life and after COVID Unless you were in a closed space .
Speaker 2Yeah , unless I was in a closed space . You know , COVID rewired a lot of people's brains and bodies and everything else , and so after having COVID twice , that was weird . I remember like when it started happening to me we were living in New York .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2And it happened once in our kitchen , in our apartment . But it also happened and I thought , okay , well , maybe it's in the apartment I just felt closed in or whatever . But then it happened in Central Park .
Speaker 1Well , to be fair , that's a scary place with a lot of scary people .
Speaker 2No , but we were walking . We loved the park . We used to walk the park every day with the puppies .
Speaker 1That was in the middle of the day , the middle of the day and we were just walking .
Speaker 2It was a beautiful day and we were walking under some like terrace , portico , kind of thing .
Speaker 1Kind of like a tunnel . Yeah , yeah , it wasn't even a tunnel .
Speaker 2No , it was like the wooden structure right , yeah , like a structure by the lake , Right by the lake , and all of a sudden it felt like the structure was closing in on me . It was freaking me out and I was like I'm not a person that gets freaked out , I don't get scared with things and I don't get freaked out over things and that really I started . It was like this weird feeling where it was closing in on me and I'm like , oh my God , we're having this panic attack here again and again . That never happened before COVID .
Speaker 1Never happened to me ever before COVID .
Speaker 2So , and again , that never happened before COVID , never happened to me ever before COVID . So you know , that was the thing that was so freaked out to me and you got me on the medication and I was like , okay , well , yeah , I made you go through it because I saw you Every day .
Speaker 1You were waking up and I could see the anxiety filling you up and I was like this is babe . I love you with all my heart heart , but you're acting like a lunatic . I can't , I can't , I can't take this . You're not just not you and , and , and . We took you to a psychiatrist and , yeah , he said , yeah , like you're having this pattern , and and again you could be fine today and suffer from depression next year . Like it's just chemical imbalances in your brain . That happens to everybody . Right , it's a lot of studies that have to be done again about our brain and chemicals in our brain , but I really I appreciate that you listen to me and we're on the medication now .
Speaker 2Yeah , I think if you have any kind of addiction or any kind of problems or you're feeling alone , suicidal , whatever , please seek help .
Speaker 1There are a lot of things that there's a lot of help lines , a lot of help lines and stuff that you can call , that don't even cost any money .
Speaker 2Just call and talk to someone . Or , if you're call a friend , someone that's a true friend , that will talk to you and help you and maybe help you get the help that you need to get . And I have a lot of people friends of mine on Facebook and people I know that have had to deal with alcohol issues and have sought ways to , through AA or whatever their way is . They've gotten sober and are doing fine , doing fantastic , they feel much better , having a great life , and they didn't need that . So if that's you , then please get the help you need . But people have problems . People can overcome those problems and hopefully have a better life , and that's what my mom ended up doing .
Speaker 1And God bless your dad , babe . Oh my gosh , I never met that guy and I wish I would have met Andrew . But wow , like , pulled through that till the end and still loved that woman after she tried to kill him several times when she was drunk , and the fact that she died because she was gone . Yeah , Like that's .
Speaker 2Well , he knew her since , like I said , since , World War II , since World .
Speaker 2War II and you know , his last few months of his life where he would just . I had a house in Dallas at the time and he would just sit out on my back porch and look at the pool and stare at the waterfalls and just sit there and just I could see it . He was miserable , you know . He'd spent 50-something years with this woman and like she was gone and so he didn't know what to do at that point and he passed away , like I said , seven months later . But it was like it was an interesting story , an interesting time and , like I said , it's a great lucky for me that they adopted me , because God knows what would have happened to me if they didn't . But so everything is a gamble .
Speaker 1It didn't turn me into a serial killer , it didn't turn me into a lunatic A little bit of a lunatic sometimes Shit happens in this world , and if it happens , it happens .
Speaker 2So , anyway , speak of happening . This is happening every Tuesday morning , 6 am , central Standard Time a brand-new episode . They're not all depressing Hopefully this wasn't that depressing , and it's on YouTube . Subscribe for free . Also every other podcast platform we are there .
