This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. I'm here with the naked life story with Cheryl. Hi Cheryl. Welcome. Hi, Annie. Thank you for having me. Oh, thank you for being here. It's so great. So I love your story. I know a little bit about it, and I can't wait for for people to hear it. So why don't you kind of go right back to the beginning for us. Why don't you back it all the way up and start start where it starts. We'll do. I just want to thank you first though for all the work that you did. I mean, I'm sure you know how much

good you have done and how many people you've impacted, but really it truly. Thank you. So I definitely had an interesting childhood. I grew up in a house, alcoholic father, my mother never drank then, but he had mental issues as well. So the drinking definitely

helped with it. Well, I say helped was his therapy for the mental issues. He had OCD and phobias. So like, I don't know if people have ever seen the movie like as good as it gets. I think that's the closest I've seen to like, wow, I can really relate to that.

So weird things like we couldn't wear black in the house because it represented death. We couldn't bring money in the house because it had germs on it. Like I think all his phobias were centered around death. So

and it's weird because like we all had to live by these rules and growing up, I kind of didn't know like what was normal and what wasn't, you know, what was just because of him.

I can't anybody wear black in their house. Like, you know, it would be funny. I'd walk in a friend's house and be like, I don't have any money in my purse. They're like, we don't care.

So it was interesting. So and it made, you know, teenage years interesting too. As I, you know, spent more time at friends houses and kind of learned what, how other people lived.

So when I was 13 because, you know, he was his, his drinking went into Rage's, you know, I know a lot of people who drink and they can just be happy drunks.

He was always raging and it was just a very tumultuous upbringing.

But when we were 13, when I was 13, my sister had gotten married at that point and moved out and my mom and I did leave. My father got laid off for other reasons.

And the drinking got real bad. So we left. We actually lived with a friend of mine. I went into school one morning and said to her, you know, my parents split up last night. We spent last night in a hotel room and she's like, come live with me and my mom.

So I'm looking back and that's so weird. But we did my mom and I moved in with her and her mother for a good month or so. They helped us get on our feet and get an apartment. And I mean, this was like everything I ever asked for. I like, I just wanted my parents split up. And I know that's not normal for most kids to want. But my childhood was so weird. I was starting to really know it was weird.

I hated my dad because of the drinking and, you know, this was like amazing that we were out.

Well, a couple months into that, my sister called my mom one morning and said, you know, I think we need to go over to the house. So they did and, you know, my dad had just been laying like in his own excrement, you know, no clothes, who knows how long he'd have been there.

And he asked them to go get him a bottle. So they said, you know, we're going to get coffee. We're going to come back. You let us know hospital or you're laying here to die. So he picked the hospital. He went and, you know, we were still like, okay, like he's not going to make it. He had to roast us a little liver. He had had heart attacks that he didn't know he had because he was drunk so many things were wrong. And what's that?

Remember how old he was at this time.

I was 13. So the math, I'm 35 now. So he's 77. He was probably in his mid 50s.

Okay, so young.

You in the math, right?

Yeah, he was fairly, fairly young.

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