Refresh & Restart Transcript

What's up, everyone? Welcome to the first episode of The Horth House. I am your host, Aly, and I'm very excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Like I said, this is the very first episode. This is very exciting. A little nerve wracking, but very exciting nonetheless. For those of you that do not know me, my name is Aly Like I said, I am basically a nobody. Like, I am pretty much like everyone else. I am a relationship coach and I focus primarily on the relationship that you have within yourself and how that can impact the relationships you have outside of your own self. So platonic relationships, family relationships, relationships with partners, things like that, because this is primarily a podcast for those of you that have grown up without maybe one or both of your parents. I grew up without my dad, and I never really had a place for females or those that identify as female to go and talk about growing up without a father. There were a lot of places for men without moms or men without dads, women without moms, but nothing about women without fathers. And there's this whole concept of daddy issues, right? And we'll break that down in a little bit. It's kind of this inherent idea that women who grow up without their fathers are broken internally. And that's not true. I mean, to a degree its kind of is just because we're missing out, but that's not our fault. So, I wanted to really break that down and kind of start in there. But yeah. So, this is a podcast pretty much for anyone that has grown up without one or both of your parents and how that relationship or the lack of that relationship can impact your other relationships. And how do we repair that part of ourselves, right? Because we're never going to get to meet our parent or fulfill that one part of ourselves. So how do we kind of heal that?

So, we kind of dive into that and yeah, so I think one of the hardest parts about this situation and the subject matter is trying to find a way to make this lighthearted and fun and enjoyable without it having to be so heavy and so intense and emotional and yes, it will be all of those things at one point or another. We're definitely going to try to balance between having a podcast that's a little bit heavier and one that's a little bit lighter. Okay. And I like to think of the metaphor of diving. Okay. Fun fact, I've thought about this so much lately, I do not know how to dive. Okay? I have been swimming for probably about 28 years of my life now, and I do not know how to dive. Whether it's just diving off the side of a pool, off a high dive, off the side of a boat. I've got nothing I can do. A pencil dive where your legs are straight, your arms are by your side, and you just whoop. There you go. That's all I know how to do. I do not know how to physically dive and do, like, a nice, beautiful, looking, like, kind of dive. Don't know how to do it, okay? But when I think about diving in my life, okay, like I said, I know how to swim. I'm a good swimmer. I'm a strong swimmer. I've got this, right? When I think about diving, I think it is terrifying. I don't know why. Whatever the situation, I could be diving into, like, a six-foot pool, and I'm almost six foot. I could dive into a six-foot pool and be like, you know what? No, this is terrifying. And I will find some reason to be incredibly anxious about it and not want to deal with the subject or handle it or just run away from the entire situation if I can. Right? I'll just skip swimming that day. I will just not swim anymore. I'll go to the ocean or a lake or a pond instead of going to a pool right when you're standing on the edge of the pool, and it might be terrifying, you're going to learn over time. Sure, you're going to belly flop a few times. You're going to want a cannonball. You're just going to want to say, fuck it, and just do whatever you want. But then there are times where you find an instructor or you find a friend or you find someone that knows how to dive into that deep into the pool, and they help you learn how to dive into the 13-foot pool, the 20-foot pool. They teach you how to go on, like, the small high dive, and then they teach you how to go on that Olympic size high dive, and then you win gold medal because you're kicking ass. That is what this journey is going to be about, okay?

 It is going to be hard to talk about these topics. It's going to be hard for me to be so vulnerable. It's going to be difficult, and it's not always easy to heal, and it's not easy to have to admit that, like, you're a little bit you know, I hate to say it, but we're a little bit broken inside, okay? If you're listening to this podcast, you probably feel alone. You feel sad. You feel broken. You feel different. You feel like an outsider. You probably feel one of those things. If you don't, congratulations. You probably had a better childhood than I did. And if you didn't, then you are a much stronger person than I probably am sometimes, and I'm very proud of you for that. If you do feel those things, then you're not alone, because guess what? I felt those things for the majority of my life, okay? I've been feeling those things for years and years and years. I don't even know what it's like to not feel those things. So, I know what it's like to have the scariest thing about you and the most vulnerable part of you have to be shown and have some light be shed on it and really work and grow through that situation. And that's what we're going to do on this podcast. We're going to try to grow through our situations, but we're going to do it in a lighthearted way. We're not going to cry about it all the time. We're not going to be always angry. We're not always going to be sad. We're not going to play the victim. We're definitely not going to play the victim. Okay? That's one thing I've learned. I have done a lot in my life, and we are not going to be doing that anymore, okay?

I'm going to try to remain as lighthearted as I possibly can because it's not fun. But sometimes the only way to get through these situations or to just feel our way through these emotions and whatnot is literally just to laugh through them. I have had numerous of my friends and family friends, close people in my life that have lost their parents and they make dead parent jokes all the time. Would some people see that as cruel and mean and hateful and disrespectful? Absolutely. People could totally see it that way. Do I? No. Do my friends that make those jokes? No. Why is that? Because sometimes you just have to laugh about it. Is it fun if someone walks up to you and it's like, haha, your parent doesn't love you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all these negative things? No, but if like, it's Father's Day and I walk up to myself, or I walk up to my brother who doesn't have a great relationship with his dad, and I'm like, hey, guess what? Hey. What? Our dads aren't here. Happy Father's Day, I love you. Just things like that. Some people might think that's sad or like, oh my gosh, that's so, like, depressing. That's so, like, sadistic. Almost. Maybe I might need to talk to my therapist about it a little bit more. But that's how I cope. Okay? I cry every year on Father's Day. I spend some time to myself. I just grieve the loss that I've had my whole life that like, hey, I just wish I had this at one point. And yes, I have had father figures, and we're going to get into my story in a little bit. I definitely have had moments in my life where I grieve and I have my sadness, but I also have my funny moments. And so, we're going to try to find, like, a nice balance, a nice blend of all of those emotions. Okay? Again, take what you need, leave what you don't. This message is for everyone and also for no one at the same time. Okay? Bye.

Okay, everyone. So, my story, my story is very long and a little bit complicated, so I'm going to try to take it as slow and do this as efficiently as possible. My story basically is that I have never met my dad. I have grown up my entire life without one. I've never met him. I don't know him. I know what his name is, and thanks to Google, I know a few things about him. But I do not really know much about my biological father. I have grown up with quite a number of people and men that have raised me and whether they've been related to me or not. Some of them are family members. Some of them were married into my family. Some of them were just really close family friends. Some of them are my actual best friends and are my age. And they are basically parents to me in a mental sense. They teach me so much, it's insane. So, I've definitely had a village of people raise me, but I've never had my dad. And that was very difficult for me. The story of my dad, from what I know, and this is all alleged, I don't know that this is 100% true. I've never had it confirmed by him. I have no proof. I've just heard the story from one perspective and one person that was there, which is my mom. And that's all I know. So, this is kind of what I know. But basically, him and my mom were dating and they were very young. My mom was about 19. My mom was about 19-20 years old when she had me. And so, she was very young. I believe my dad was about 22 or 23 somewhere around there. And they were dating, whatever. They had hooked up quite a number of times. And this one specific time they got pregnant and I believe they were engaged at a point. And then my dad decided to break up with my mom, did not want to move where she had moved, where she was eventually going to have me. He ended up dumping her, got back with his ex-girlfriend, who he also had had previous children with. And they are married still to this day and happily married and have their children and are living their best lives ironically. Actually, my parents, both my mom and her husband and my dad and his wife, they all have the same anniversary. It is all the exact same day, just years apart. Kind of funny. I've never once talked to my dad. I have never heard his voice. I don't know what he's like. I've never reached out to him or try to talk to him. That was true up until this last Father's Day, Father’s Day of 2022. I finally got my dad's number. So, I found my dad's number, and I believe it was his, actually. And I texted it and said, hey, happy Father's Day. I hope you have a great day. Like, this is your daughter, whatever. I never got a response. I've never talked to him. So, I have no idea if he was the person that got the message or not. But, you know, it had his name in it, and I believe if it wasn't his number, it was one of his family members. So, if he didn't feel like shit that day, one of his kids or his family members is holding onto a very large secret. So that's beside the point. I will say I don't know if my message was necessarily the nicest message I could have sent, but I was definitely proud of myself for reaching out and for saying something. And I remember I talked to a friend about this on Father's Day. I met up with them, and they said, wow, I'm really proud of you, because I know what a huge move that was for you. I know how intense and how terrified you were to ever talk to him or ever reach out. So, the fact that you did, like, I'm just so proud of you for finally, like, taking a stance and just letting your presence be known, right? Like, you're standing in the room and you're taking out space, and I'm proud of you for that. And honestly, I was proud of myself, so that was great. Like I said, I did have a village, basically, of men that raised me, just people in general, even, that raised me. And I did have one of my family members that had been married into my family, and he essentially was my dad growing up. I still call him dad even till this day. And great guy, really nice fella. But unfortunately, he did face quite a number of mental health issues that he never wanted to address. And unfortunately, that soured our relationship, and I don't really have a relationship with him anymore, which is very unfortunate and very sad. I'm not really going to get into what mental health issues were going on or the details of that part of my life, but I do just want to say, like, it was definitely mental health issues. There were a lot of different things going on, a lot of ways that I wasn't allowed to express myself or, you know, say certain things. And I actually I've never really put this out in public, so I guess I kind of will now. But I moved out when I was 19. I just had enough, and I was like, I can't do this anymore. And, you know, it was a very difficult thing. It really broke my family. It really broke me, even as a person. And it took a lot of courage, it took a lot of strength for me to move out. And it had been I had lived there for about 19 years of my life, and it was probably about 15 years of buildup. So, it wasn't exactly a non thoughtout plan I had had years to think of how the fuck I was going to move out of this house. And it was difficult. I'm not going to lie. It was very difficult. And like I said, it really broke my family and broke us all kind of apart. Yes, I think I could have handled the situation better. Maybe one day I'll kind of dive into it a little bit more. But people have asked me for years and years and years, why did you move out? Why did you do this? Because you had a great life there, and you were well off. You were very privileged. Like, why did you move away? Why did you do this? And like I said, there's, like, 15 years of build up right here, right? So, there were obviously a lot of reasons that I moved out. Like I said, mental health issues were definitely one of them. Another reason was because I had gone on a family vacation with my mom and my stepdad and my brother. And my brother and I kind of share our issues about parents. We both don't have great relationships with our fathers. We kind of joke about it. I was telling my parents about it when I came home. I was talking to my grandma, and I said, you know, hey, this is what we were saying, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is what my brother was saying about his dad. And this is what I was joking about, about my dad. And because my grandfather was in a very similar situation, but on the other side, he ended up coming up to me and telling me that I was not allowed to talk about my father in that way. I was not allowed to be saying these types of things about my biological father or anything like that. And I want to point out, my grandfather and my actual father never met. Never, not once. Like, my grandfather knew just as much, actually less than I know about my dad. And so, to have a grown man told me at 19 years old, when I'm legally an adult in America, and him to look at me in my eyes and say, you cannot think this way. You cannot say this about your own biological father. I'm in my mind, and I still remember this years later. I heard him. I heard what he said. It went in one ear, filtered in my brain, and went out the other. And all I remember thinking is that my middle finger was up, and all I was saying was, go fuck yourself, because I could not believe the audacity of this man to tell me what I was and was not allowed to think about my own father. Okay? So, if you ever want to know why, do not live in my hometown. And, you know, me and you are from my hometown, along with a plethora of other reasons, physical, emotional abuse, all the things. This was one of the key reasons. Okay. Anyway, I digress. But growing up, I had a great life. Like, I really did. I'm not complaining in any way, shape or form that I didn't have a good life. I did. I had a really great life. And when I had positive moments with my parents, they were very positive, but they were very seldom OK. They were very unlikely to happen on a regular basis. We had a lot of negativity in our house and a lot in our family and everything like that between just the three of us, my grandma and grandpa, myself, because it was such an unhealthy household. And so that was really difficult. And I wasn't allowed to talk about my dad growing up. I wasn't allowed to discuss that I missed my dad. My parents would always kind of give me this opportunity and say, like my grandparents at least would say, you can talk about it. You can talk about it with us, bring it up to us, whatever. But every time I would, it was met with resistance and anger and judgment and it was you need to be grateful for the life you have. You need to be grateful for the people that are in your life and be kind and respectful to those people. And being respectful and kind to those people about the situation means not talking about how you miss your dad. You need to be grateful for the people that are in your life or in your life raising you because your dad is not. And I see where people are coming from with that, right? Like, as I've gotten older, I'm like, you're, right. I'm really blessed that I had so many people willing to make sure that I end up on a good part of life, that I didn't end up becoming all these different stereotypes that, unfortunately, statistically, there are things that are true, unfortunately, and there's a lot that isn't, but there are things that, you know, unfortunately, can be true about people without parents. There are a lot of studies done about people like us. I think it was beautiful to see how many people did care about me and did want to raise me and help me and help my parents. But at the same time, it never really gave me a place to able to talk about the fact that I did really miss my dad and I really did want him around. And, you know, I did cry myself to sleep most of my childhood. I do not remember having an entire year where I didn't cry just when I was going to sleep, because either I miss my dad or something was happening in my life where I felt alone. And all I kept saying was, I just want to be normal. Like, I just wanted to be a normal kid with a normal family and normal parents, and that was it. And I never meant it to be disrespectful to anyone else, but I know how it can come across like that 100% now. Yeah, but as a kid, you just want to be like everyone else because you don't want to be made fun of. You don't want people to talk shit about you. You don't want people to know that you're different, and it's hard, and people, especially kids, do not understand why your parent is not around. Right? And then parents will just say whatever they want to their kids about it, and then it just you feel judged. So that was not very fun. But as I said, I did have a great life, and I don't want to take that for granted. I don't want to pretend that that didn't happen or play the victim and be like, no, I had a terrible life now. I had a great life, and I had a lot of people that really did care, and I was really, really blessed with that. But it never made it any easier. Like, I never stopped missing my dad. I never stopped you know, that void never filled. Like, that hole in my heart never got better. People just put a bandaid over it and said, you know, oh, look, it's camouflaged. You can't see it. You might not be able to see the band-aid, but I could feel, like, the breeze going through my chest because there's a hole in it. I think the times that I definitely did try to talk about my dad to people, my mom was a little bit more understanding because it was kind of our situation together. But for the most part, when I would try to discuss and express this emotion or this full capacity of emotions or feelings that I was having at that moment, I was really just told to cover them up with, like, false positivity, in a sense. Like, oh, I'm really hurting because my dad isn't here. I really wish my dad were here. Oh, well, your uncle is here. Your grandpa is here. Your mom is here. Your nana's here. Your grandma's here. Like, your aunt's here. I'm like, with all respect, I don't care. I want my dad. And that was normal. That's okay, right? Like, I was grieving over a person that I should have had. You know, everyone else in my school got to have two parents. Why didn't I? And I felt so alone from that. And I appreciate my grandparents at least being there, because it gave me the opportunity to have that life where I did kind of have two parents, and I did have, like, a mom figure and a dad figure raised me in a home and all these things. But one, I didn't have any of my siblings grow up with me, so that was really difficult. I didn't have any siblings that were, like, 100% related to me all the time. They grew up with me. No. And then I grew up with my grandparents and that's already like a generational gap. Nothing felt normal in my life. Like, nothing at all felt normal. Okay? It was awful. And again, I'm not playing the victim. It just sucked. And I think with this false positivity that my parents would give me, it really went from a place of I wish people would just understand that I was hurting rather than I needed to be grateful for my life and everything. I never wanted to express that I was unhappy and I never did express that I was unhappy. I was just sad because of what I wanted in my life and I wasn't able to get that. And it wasn't like, oh, I'm going to cry about it until I get it. It was like, no, I'm just sad because I know at like six years old that I want something and I'm never going to get it. You know, I never expressed that I was unhappy or that I wasn't grateful for my life when I was a kid. I did when I was a teenager, 100%. Like, I was definitely that teenager that I would yell and I would scream and I was like, I want to get the hell out of this effing town as quickly as I can. I was definitely that person. And yes, I do love my hometown now. I still stand by what I said. I'll be honest, I still stand by what I said because I lived in a small town where everyone knew everything about you. But at the same time, it's a beautiful town. It's gorgeous. It's so much fun. I love it. It's home. OK, it's home. I wasn't ever unhappy. I just wanted my dad there. Like, I just felt this really intense void in my heart and in my body that I wanted something and I knew I was never going to be able to get it. As I said, I did have a father figure growing up, but I always felt like something was kind of missing. And it's sad because I think this is the hardest part about growing up without one of your parents or both your parents, is that or even if you've lost your parent, right? Like, there is a hole in your heart and your body, in your spirit and your soul that is gone and you never get it back. Like, you're never going to get it back. You're never going to get it. Like, me, I had to come up with, like I said, at six or seven years old, I had to grasp that I was never going to get this certain thing in my life no matter how bad I wanted it. I think about it all the time, you know, god, we're about to get a little deeper, but I think about it all the time. It's like, you know, one day I'm going to want to have my own children, right? How am I going to cope with that? How am I going to handle the fact that my kids get two parents and I only got one and not be a little bit bitter about it? That's why I go to therapy because I want to make sure that I'm not like that. But how do you go through life knowing that I never got to have a dad, I never got to have that perfect family that I always wanted, but my kids are going to get that because I'm going to make damn well sure of it? And then what happens one day when they say, oh, I hate you, or like I wish I didn't have you as a parent? How do I not flip my lid and make sure that they are grateful without me being disrespectful about it? And that's why we go to therapy because I don't ever want to be disrespectful about that. But I need people to know, look, if you have one parent that loves the hell out of you, you're lucky if you have two like if you grew up in a house where you live with your biological parents, both of them and your biological brother and your sister and or sibling, do you know how lucky you are? Because I would give everything in my life to have one day with my mom, my dad, and a sibling that was 100% related to me. I would give everything in my life for that. Okay, I just want to point that out so that's where I am. And yes, we will cover the daddy issue aspect of how I would look for qualities of a dad in different men and how I would look for them to be a good dad or a good husband when even I was really young at like 16 years old. OK, we're going to talk about it probably in the next episode. But I would definitely search for a father figure in my partner. Not even necessarily for me. I didn't need them to be a daddy for me or a dad for me or whatever, but I wanted them to be a good dad for my future kids. Like I want to know that the person I end up with or that I marry or that I decide to have children with will never leave my children. They could pass away. Sure. That one I can handle because I would never want that for my kids. I don't think anyone ever does but me especially I'm like I would never want that because it's so difficult. Yes. Could I probably handle it if it happened? Yes. Why? Because I've been through this. I know what it's like to grow up with your parent. I at least could relate to them. But I'm not trying to have some like trauma bond with my kids where we're like bonding over like being broken. OK, that's not exactly a fun thing to cover. I always look for these dad qualities and partners that I date, like, wondering if they could be potentially good father figures to my future kids. And like I said, I've been doing this since I was like 15 or 16 years old. Like completely an unrealistic age to be looking at it. But I was just so desperate for love. That's all I ever did. So yeah, that's kind of my dad. And then my mom did end up getting remarried years ago. And to a man who is my stepdad and oh my God, he is like my favorite person in the entire world. We did not get along when I was younger. For like the first 1015 years that he was in my life, we did not get along at all. I could not stand my stepdad. I wanted every bad thing to happen to my stepdad. I could not give less of a fuck about him nowadays. You guys, I think I love my stepdad more than I love my own mother. I love my stepdad. Everyone that went to college with me knows my dad. They love him. I literally call my dad sometimes because he's just he's such a great dad. So, you know, while I did grow up with my grandparents and all these people that did help me in my life and step in as a role as a father, my stepdad has done a great job of helping me as an adult learn things that an adult need to learn or things that I didn't necessarily learn before. And, you know, he was great. And like I said, he was the only person that came to visit me at college. Shout out to my Arizona State sun devils whoop forks up. Love you guys. And living away from my family was really hard at that time. And he came to visit me all the time. And, you know, it was great. God, I love my stepdad. I don't even want to keep going because I love my stepdad so much. He's so great. And my mom will probably never hear this, but if she does, she's going to play this for me and be like, look how much she does love you. Oh, my goodness. But I do. I love my stepdad. I joke about it all the time too. I'm like, you know when my mom goes away, this is the fucked-up part. It's like when I was a kid, I started bracing myself for the day that my mom dies. Real dark here. But like, I've braced myself for that moment. I'm ready for it. OK. You're never really ready, but I know it's going to happen one day. OK? I'm fine with it. I'm like, mom, I love you. We've had a great relationship. We've made a lot of good memories. But when the time comes, the time comes, and that's okay. I spent about 10-15 years not really liking him or even enjoying his company in any way, shape or form now that I have, and he's in his later years and he doesn't have another 50 years on the planet, 60 years on the planet, he probably has about 40 to 30. It is terrifying for me. I am not ready and I am trying to soak up every memory and every moment I can with my stepdad like a freaking sponge. I love him so much. I do not know what I will do without him. I can handle my mom. It'll be fine. But my stepdad is like my stepdad handles my mother in a way that I could never, okay? And he just knows how to keep her calm, cool, stable, and collected. I don't know how. So, the fact that I'm going to have to learn how to do that without my stepdad around and I'm going to have to grieve when he goes, it's not going to be fun, okay? It's going to be a lot that's a whole podcast episode one day that will happen, and when it does, you all know I'm going to be losing it. But anyway, so this goes off a little bit of the track of, like, my family story and kind of about my dad, but it's kind of how we ended up here. And there are a lot of topics I'm about to just briefly touch on that will be episodes in the future. Just give me some time. As I said, slow and steady wins the race. But how exactly did we get here? So, I always knew that I had daddy issues that have never been lost on me. I know that I do things that most people don't because I don't have a dad. And that's completely fine. I recognize that. I'm noticing it more. We're talking to our therapists. We're doing all the dang things, okay? But I did not realize how deeply rooted they were, how intense they were, and how much they affected my life until I went through a breakup with someone that I really, really loved. They meant so much to me. They are the person that I felt really in love with, this person. Like, they were my best friend. We dated and they completely broke my heart. And it was very brutal. They didn't hurt me physically or anything. It was just a purely emotional, hard breakup for me and it broke me from the inside out. And the silver lining is it taught me a lot about myself and shed a lot of light on issues I had with my dad, or rather the lack of him and growing up without him and just the abandonment wound. Like, having someone be there for you every day and be your best friend for like, three years and then just up and ditch you one day and basically ghost you for the rest of your life. Is it's like borderline traumatizing? Honestly, I'll be honest, it is borderline traumatizing. It is so intense. It's so terrifying. It's so painful. I wouldn't wish this feeling on anyone. And I was actually talking to my partner about it today and I am still so closed off. You know what? Six, or seven years after this event happened, I am still very guarded because of this situation. Like, we all have that one breakup that really messed us up. And usually, it's our first breakup. Mine was like my second or third breakup. It really messed with me a lot. Like, a lot. And it was rough. So, we're going to get into that in another episode. But, you know, I've had where I faced my own daddy issues and things like that and had to really understand and focus on like, OK, where am I at? Where exactly am I falling short on this? Right? I've also had a boyfriend who I had met his dad, and then his dad, unfortunately, passed away. He got very sick with cancer and a number of health issues. He was a little bit older and he passed away right when we started dating. And it was one of the hardest moments of my life to ever go through. And I got to see the pain of that loss and I got to feel it in my own capacity. I got to feel it as someone that knew his parent or had met his parent. But then I also got to feel it as someone that was watching my partner has their heart broken and I couldn't do anything about it. This was also the same exact person that I dated for about ten years. And one of those years that we dated, we had 13 people between the two of us, and we had 13 people die. It was not fun and was not something that really brought us together. It actually kind of pushed us apart more than we realized until the end. That's basically one person a month for the entire year. And that was friends, family, friends, close family, distant family. It was so much shit. It was so intense. Still to this day. Do not know how I made it through. Do not know how he made it through and do not know how we even made it through. Even as a couple. Do not know how we made it through. And guess what? We didn't like that. Short and sweet to the point we didn't make it. And again, that will be told in a different episode. But I do want to say if your parent has passed away, I do not know what it feels like, okay? I do not know. And I have not dealt with that situation. I have only dealt with it as a girlfriend and as a partner and as a friend. But I will never understand what it's like until it happens to me. Okay? So, I do want to just point that out and I don't want to put on this facade that I know what you're. Feeling? Because I don't. But I know the void that hurts because I felt that my whole life. So, I know that painful part of you that's just like, damn it, I wish they were here. I wish I could talk to them. I wish I could hear them laugh. I wish I could smell them. I have all those same wishes too. OK? So, I just want to point out, like, even when your situations are so vastly different, we're still very much the same. I have a page that's like all these things I want to know about my dad, and it's literally like, what's his favorite kind of gum? Spearmint or, you know, Frosty Mint? Does he like Gatorade? What flavor? What's his favorite food? Does he like spicy stuff? What does he do in his free time? What's his favorite TV show? What does he think about the office? Like, what's his favorite music? What music does he hate? What's his favorite Taylor Swift song? Like, I want to know all of these different things, and I don't know that I'll ever get to know them or that I'll ever get to hear them or see them or feel them or smell them. I don't know, though. You are in a different situation. You're a little bit lucky just because you've had that, but at the same time, you're also at a loss between the two of us because you have gotten teased a little bit. You've had it and then you've got it taken away from you. And so, my heart goes out to you. Just know that I don't necessarily understand, but I am here to try to understand, OK? I want you to feel like it's okay to grieve. Even if it's been years and you find yourself crying in a grocery store because they're playing your parents ‘favorite song. You're okay. You're allowed to grieve. You're allowed to just put your basket to the side, walk out of the store, go to your car, cry for five minutes and come back. Okay? You're allowed to do that. You're allowed to grieve in any way, shape, or form that you need to. Try to be healthy, try not to hurt yourself or do too much with substances and whatnot become codependent on those, and find yourself in a deeper rabbit hole. Try to do positive things to help you, but grieve as long as you need to. And that will probably be the majority of your life, let's be honest, because there will always be parts of you that wish that you had two parents or you wish that you even had one. You wish you had that one back. But what I'm trying to do is just find the silver lining in the situation. Like I said earlier, I would not be as confident as I am and as strong as I am. If I had two parents, I would not be as outspoken as I am. I wouldn't have my stepdad I wouldn't have the village of people that helped raise me. I probably wouldn't have any of my siblings or my brother. I have always said that I don't have a dad. And every year that's a struggle because it's one of the days that reminds me of how empty I feel in that part of my heart, in that part of my body. And I've learned to accept it and move on and things like that. But it's always going to be hard and it's days like that that are going to be difficult, but there are always going to be days in between the hurt and you're just going to find yourself grieving over that and grieving over your parent or the loss of your parent, the lack of your parent, the lack of the happiness that you got to have as a kid. Those experiences like father-daughter dances when you get married, do you know who's walking you down the aisle? Because I don't. Are you going to have a father-daughter dance at your wedding? Because I'm not like, why? Because I don't have that. Why do I need to have something else that rubs salt into the wound? I'd rather have some tequila and take a shot. Okay? That's where I'm at. I have done a lot of work over the last 15 years or so to try and figure out how to cope and be okay with not having a parent in my life and see what it did to me psychologically. And I've ended up A, OK, sure, I have my flaws and I've got my issues, but I'm okay. I ended up on the good side of the situation. And anyone that is struggling or just mentally, you don't know how to deal with the situation. You don't know how to deal with where you're at in life. Even if you have both your parents or if you lost your parent when you were like five years old or even like me when you were born without one. We're all affected by this differently. But what I'm here to do is unite us all and remind us that none of you are alone, okay? We all feel a different sense of pain. We all feel rejected in our own way. Even if your parents passed away, you feel rejected in a way because you feel like, why the hell did this happen to me? Why did that what the hell? Oh, it's supposed to teach you something. What the fuck is growing up without a parent supposed to teach you? Actually, quite a bit. But you have to be willing to look into that. You have to be willing to look into the positive, to see it, to try to just find it. Because if you focus on all the negative, you're only going to see the negative. But if you try to focus on the positive, you're going to see it a little bit by a little bit and then all of a sudden, you're going to realize that the positive has always been here. You were just primarily focusing on the negative.

Alright everyone, thank you so much for joining me. That is going to be our episode for today. I am just very happy to have you all here. So, thank you again so much for joining me. Another episode will be out in a couple of weeks. Excited about that. In the meantime, if you want to do a few things and come hang out with me, feel free. We have our website up www.horthhouse.com  spelled just like a podcast. Also, you can follow me on Instagram @Aly.Horth or you can go on The Horth House page, which is just @HorthHouse. If you can go write and review the podcast and like it subscribe, share it with a friend, and do all the things that are going to really help me out! I really appreciate it. Otherwise, I will talk to you beautiful humans in two weeks. Have a good time, make your choices and I'll see you then. Bye.