Ep. - 1733 - SATURDAY SERIES: TOM BROSS

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1:01Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quinn's. Download the Quinn's app for app exclusive offers or go to Quinn's.com. Get free shipping on your orders and 365 day returns and now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quinn's asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was reality life with KKC. It's the best way to support the show. Welcome back for another episode of reality life with KKC and welcome back to the Saturday series episode. I first came across Tom Ross through his Instagram carousels. He was sharing stories about his unconventional childhood with the sense of humor that immediately drew me in. And as I kept reading, I began to understand how much instability that he and his siblings had lived through. I recognized that combination immediately, finding humor and things that weren't particularly funny when you were living through them. Tom's family began as this picture of conventional Midwestern life and then came divorces, a move

2:07to California, and a mother who embraced the hippie counterculture. She wanted freedom, adventure, and the opportunity to keep reinventing herself. But she also had five children and they were left figuring out how to fit into whatever life she wanted next. At one point, she decided Tom should be called Jupiter. He was a Sagittarius. Jupiter was his ruling planet and she thought he needed an identity separate from his father. Tom tolerated it at home until she called him in for tofu tacos and his friends heard her. And that was the end of Jupiter. It's a funny story, but it also tells you something about being a child in that house. Even your name could become part of your mother's next reinvention. While other people saw her as this cool mom, the one who was relaxed about drinking and drugs, Tom wanted roles. He wanted school. He wanted to know what was expected of him and what he could count on. And there's something very familiar about that for anyone who grew up with instability. The other things that kids complain about can be the very things you wish he had.

3:12Tom wrote about his life in his three-part memoir series, Don't Call Me Jupiter. And when we spoke, I wanted to understand how those early experiences shaped his relationships, his decisions, and the kind of adult that he became. Years later, after his sister died, he took in her two young sons. He had planned to remain a bachelor, but suddenly he was responsible for children who had lost their mother. He knew what it felt like to be left behind, and he wanted to give them something different. What followed was an incredibly difficult decision about their future and one that changed his relationship with his own mother. What I appreciate about Tom is his willingness to hold complicated feelings about her. He can tell you what she put him through, but he can also recognize the curiosity and enthusiasm that he inherited from her. He doesn't tidy up the story to make her easier to love or easier to condemn. We talk about abandonment, finding stability, becoming apparent, and the questions you may never get to ask the people who raised you. And there's a lot of humor because Tom is very funny, and sometimes the details of a family

4:15story are so outrageous that laughing is really the only reasonable response. Here's my interview with Tom Ross. Well, I'm delighted to meet you. I came across your Instagram. I'll tell everybody a little bit about the family of origin and the early years of growing up. So, we started in the Midwest. I like to kind of refer to us as the iconic Midwestern All-American family. We made the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer because we were the first family to sort of promote the oral vaccination for polio. And so there's a little picture of me reaching out for another sugar cube from Dr. Salk and my grandma's in it, my mom's in it, my dad's in it. And we were beautiful. I mean, I look at that picture and I'm like, what a gorgeous family. And then you fast forward through a couple divorces and we ended up in California and we turned

5:20into a band of California hippies. My mom was really drawn to an alternative lifestyle. I don't know if she knew exactly what she wanted, but she knew she didn't want to be raised the same way her sisters were and continued to live in the same town. They were extremely well off, but she chose a different adventure for her life. She too had five kids and she kind of dragged us around putting herself first, leaving us to adapt constantly to change in different situations. It's hard to sum up at three book memoir, but in a nutshell, that's it. We were the All-American family that became all hippied out. And there were some really interesting long-term repercussions as a result. So of the kids, where do you line up? I'm exactly in the middle. So I have two older siblings and two younger.

6:20And how does it go in terms of girl boy? Shelly is the oldest. She's the consummate artist in the family. Press is the sister sadly we lost in 1996. I'm in the middle. Now Molly is a couple years younger than me and we have a half brother. We never referred to him as a half brother or step brother or anything like that. He was just our brother. But my mom had another child with another man after her first husband. And what would you say is the best way that your teachers would have described you in those early years? As things got really chaotic at home, I gravitated towards the boundaries and the rules and requirements at school. I was a straight-a student and teachers pet often to the point of excessiveness. I really had two personalities, I think. At school, I represented myself one way.

7:23I wore different clothes when I got home. I changed into the hippie garb for my mother's approval. Really just like just robin and then almost taking on that new persona. I still wanted her to love me. I let my hair grow out not as long as my sisters because they thought we were twins. But down to my shoulders and she was a seamstress. I had hatch clothing and we were very well off and at home, I was their little hippie son. Now she changes her name too. Yeah, a couple times. Talk to me a little bit about that. So after her second divorce, she scattered the family. She needed to find herself. So she sent the kids away to stay with relatives. My sister and I, my little sister and I went to stay with our dad who lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts at the time. I really impressed the older girls stay with grandma and grandpa in Cincinnati. My little brother, Alex, went with his dad and his new mistress, his new woman in Sacramento.

8:28And while we were gone, it was only a couple months, but when we got back, I didn't recognize my mother at all because she had changed so much from that conservative housewife into a full blown hippie. And she had some help. She happened to have a hippie friend named Donna Rao that I had the pleasure of visiting last year. Accelerate, like kind of unleashed the beautiful butterfly within. And when we got back, even the flight attendants, they were caught sturdishes back then. We're like, are you sure this is the right family? Because you guys don't match. By then, she was in herk and stalks, meal tooth necklace, embroidery everywhere. And my little sister and I still look like we were dressed for a guest appearance on the Mike Douglas show, his grandma bought us new clothes. So the house had changed when we got home. There were plants everywhere. And eventually, my mother did what Donna did. Donna said, Donna is more than a mama. So you will call me Donna instead of mama.

9:30She told us to her kids. A couple months later, my mom said the same thing. You know, I'm more than just a mother. I'm a person. I'm a human being. I'm a free spirit. So call me Marilyn. And we were like, wow, we have to call our mom Marilyn. And because she was so loose and open to drinking and drug use at home, all our friends in junior high school thought we had the coolest mother in the world. You know, your mom party, she parties with us. She'll buy us alcohol. And she felt it was safer for us to party somewhere where we weren't getting in cars and driving and things like that. And another year went by. She went through many, many boyfriends and eventually settled on one that all of us kids really loved. And on a camping trip, she was looking at the sky, which opened up. It was very proud to be in Aries. She's very much in Aries personality. She's April 15th. And in the sky, the clouds kind of formed like Aries Ram horns. And so she announced on that day as a creature in this beautiful universe, I hear by declare

10:36that my name will be mayor. And I was like, well, that's just short for mayor. That's no big deal. And she goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not short for mayor. It means C in an Italian, Charlie was Italian. And she goes, that's the name he gave me. And you guys will call me mayor now. And of course, I dealt with everything with a sense of humor. And I'm like, what a frickin nightmare. And she goes, what? And I go, oh, what a beautiful nightmare. And my sister, Chris, is nudging me. Come along with that. Tom. But we all had to just constantly try to keep up with her. Yeah, what she brought into the house, her new philosophies. A lot of it was very interesting to be honest with you. I love having an open mind and learning about new possibilities. But some of it was also just roll your eyes crazy, especially to kids who are going to be like, oh, God, mom's at it again. Well, let's just go back for a second. What were her parents like? What was the kind of life she had before she got married and a children?

11:37The life I kind of wanted as a kid, because she was spoiled rotten. She got a brand new convertible under 16th birthday. My grandfather only had like a fifth grade education, but he was a people magnet. People loved him. In the book, I said he had more charisma than Jesus. I mean, everywhere he went, people wanted to hang out with them. He was a talker. He was smooth. He was always smoking a cigar. He taught us kids how you could take winnigring lifesavers and chomp on them in the closet and they spark. He was cool right off the bat to us. He started working at a car dealership when he was 15. By the time he was 25, he owned it. He also wasn't able to serve in World War II, and he knew there would be a big demand for used cars after the war. He sent trains as far as Texas and Southern California to bring back to Cincinnati.

12:37And they ended up buying a huge farm. They lived in bridal hills. My mother had baton lessons, tap dance lessons, equestrian lessons, singing lessons, same with her brothers and sisters. They were spoiled rotten. They had a driver. They had hired help. And for some reason, she wanted out. Very bad. Do you think there's possibility that there was an assault or something that happened to her? That is possible. Yeah, because it was such a break from what her brothers and her other two sisters did. But I don't know. All I heard from Grandma was that she really wanted to get out of the house and her father really wanted her out of the house. And I do know that there were a lot of guys' suitors because she was very attractive even as a teenager. And he might have just been tired of chasing guys away. I can't, I don't think there was any kind of abuse at home. Did he have a similar relationship with his other children or was it just?

13:40I think it was pretty even with all the kids. Although she was the oldest and it sounds weird to say, but I think in some ways her, the way she looked, how beautiful she was, was almost a liability because she attracted attention wherever she went. And I think she's sort of nurtured the idea that I can get whatever I want. For example, she stopped driving that brand new convertible at 16 because her boyfriend was killed by a drunk driver. She never drove a car again for the rest of her life, which created a lot of problems when you're a single mom and you have things to do with your kids or... Was this when her relationship with her father began to break down after the death of the boyfriend? She would have been still in high school then. Yeah, probably. The death of B-16 and your have your boyfriend die is in an enormously difficult. Does she meet your father and begin a family?

14:41She was still living at home and she got a job at Shalitos, which was a popular department store in Cincinnati at the time. And she worked in a slipper bar. I got this information from my grandma when I was sent away that summer because she needed to figure out who she was. And I go, what's a slipper bar? And she goes, oh, you know, try to explain it to me. And I go, I'll just tell people she met in a bar. They met in a bar. But he kept going into the slipper bar because he was entranced and found her very beautiful. He was a good looking guy. He was out of the military. He was working public relations for the Formica company. So he's gainfully employed six or seven years older. And they quickly got married and then boom, like you did back in the day, they had four kids pretty much in rapid fire succession. So at the age where she begins this process of like this identity change, what age is

15:44she? 22, 23. There's a place in Cincinnati called the Blind Lemon, which was sort of a pre-beat. It's actually still there where poets could perform and musicians and kind of an open situation. And he said she started going there and may have got ideas from that place. But what happened was she got into an affair with our next four neighbor who had five kids. And they ran off from San Francisco together. Pretty much well, she married them and she was married to them for the next six years. Teenagers don't want to live the same life as their parents. In this case, I think it was extreme. I think she saw that they had so much money and that it wasn't necessarily buying happiness that she was attracted to the counter culture. She didn't want to, by the time she had four kids, it was kind of too late. She was a midwestern housewife. She had responsibility. She was mom. But at the same time, she was longing for that independence freedom.

16:47I want to carve out my own type of life. I want to be a free spirit. Now I've got these kids. Is that going to hold me down? No, I'll do it anyway. So she runs off to San Francisco. He just abandoned his five kids. My poor dad is like, my kids are 2,000 miles away now. The first time he tried to visit us, she wouldn't let us see him or let him see us until 1966 on his own visit. I didn't know my dad. I didn't know him at all. I had no memory of him. Okay, make this back to school season. You're smooth to start yet. Get your family back to school ready with expert online tutoring. Why is the end tutors will review last year's material and then prepare them for what's ahead. So your child can start the school year with more confidence and fewer nerves. Isant is the nation's largest network of tutors trusted by parents nationwide with more than 65,000 expert tutors across 350 plus subjects. They make it easy to get personalized one-on-one online tutoring that fits your schedule and

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20:58its Buy a Pair Give a Pair program, and Warby Parker is covered by major eye insurance plans. Right now, buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com slash Kate Casey. That's 20% off any additional pairs when you purchase one pair at W-A-R-B-Y Parker.com slash Kate Casey. What about her parents and her siblings? What did they make of this strange life decision? I think they thought she was the weird one in the family. There's always one weird one. They remained a little bit more true to their values. They're still Catholic, practicing Catholics. My mother went through it pretty much every religious phase you can explore and try to add that. They lead more traditional lives. I think at the end, she'd still say, I'm proud that I did what I wanted to do.

22:04She never ever apologized for any of the things, the moves, the school changes that she put her kids through. It was all about her. And we were just going along for the ride. No, I think that the term narcissism is often overused, but it sounds like this may be like a textbook example of narcissism. There's a difference between being selfish. At any point, do any of you try to have a conversation with her about the aftermath of some of the decisions, the collateral damage that has been caused because of it? Here's just one of the saddest parts. Her final partner, a man she met when she went back to school at age 42 in Davis. His name was David Leiter and he's Creek Indian. He was studying to be a veterinarian. She loved that he was an Indian and she pulled him out of school.

23:10They quit both quit school. Went on a vision quest. He came back and had a name change to journey. Because she was paired up with journey, we never got to have a private conversation with our mother again. If we called, we were on speaker phone. If I went to visit and I tried to scoot my mom outside or away from journey, she wouldn't talk about the past. I go, why? And she goes, I live in the present. The past is gone. You can't do anything about it. It bothered journey that she had other partners. Just like, you know, he was just basically jealous. So it was a non-topic and I never got a chance to ask her some of those deep questions. I was estranged from her for 14 years. I can talk to you about that. And by the time she saw her nap a little bit, it was almost too late. Would you say that her personality is more like a cult follower or a cult leader? I've never been asked that question before.

24:11She saw herself as a leader, but she really, although she said, hey, a woman needs a bike like a fish needs a bicycle. You know, I'm independent. I don't need anybody. But the truth was, she was never without anybody. And remember, she can't drive a car. We have this yellow hippie bus. So she always needed a partner to drive the bus to get her where she wanted to go. So she saw herself as a leader, but I would see her more as a follower. Seeing something chasing something attracted to the allure of something better, deeper mystical, that's what she was all about. And also, when Journey is saying, you have to put, be put on speakerphone. I have to listen to all these conversations. That's the behavior of a follower. Were there times in your life where you felt like I'm never going to figure out who this person is?

25:11Like you think you get close to it and then it takes you down another street, another lane. I think because I started to lead a life more like my father's, even though he was 3,000 miles away. When she's what say things like, you don't need to go to college, you learn about life by living life through experience. I made a mental note, like I'm definitely going to college. And I think I look so much like my dad. Maybe. Sometimes I just pissed her off for being there because I reminded her of a different time, a different era. And yeah, she wanted to change my name to Jupiter because I'm a such a terious and that's my ruling planet. And it happened to smell on my birthday and there's always a storm on Jupiter. And why do you want the same name as your father? Don't you want your own identity? From now on, I'll call you Jupiter. Well, I rolled my eyes and I'm like, yeah, you can call me Jupiter at home.

26:15But the first time she went outside to call me in for toe-futacos, Jupiter and my friends heard it. I had a hissy fit. And I told her that is not my name. Never call me that again. And it sort of was this paradigm shift in our relationship. There wasn't anything obvious, but it was sort of starting to get clear that I wasn't going to be like my sister's and my little brother. I was going to take a different path. I looked at her and I'm like, I like the hippie movement. I like organic gardening. I like taking care of the planet. I love nature. But there's some things about the movement that are terrible. Exposure, premature exposure to drugs, no boundaries. I feared for my sisters. There were a lot of guys around and my sisters were attractive teenagers and I was worried about them. When you talk about her, her total disinterest in responsibility, and I think about your

27:20sisters, and then you're the middle child, that's an incredible responsibility put on to you as a child. But it probably still continued well after you grew up because the foundation of your life, your value system, sort of begins to be set up in your childhood home. And this happens to you at 12. For your other sisters, they're in a different foundational spot. Their friends had become a big part of their lives and they had more independence at that age. So, when she started going through a dating phase, I was the man to the house and I made sure all those men had a miserable time because I didn't want any of them in her life. She didn't need a man. I was going to take care of everything else. But there's no changing her. She just, that was the way she was. It was like the dating game at home.

28:22I read once that the age in which your parent abandoned you, whether it's physically or emotionally, that when you get to that age, there's a part of you that just let's go. Like the search for answers, the search for connection, it's not the same anymore because you have made it to the same age that they were. And it's so, so it was like a loss of respect because you can't imagine yourself at that same age doing something to you. The book opens with a chapter about how I was abandoned in one of her ex-boyfriends garage. And I chose to kind of begin the book with that traumatic experience because it's heavy and it's harsh and it's real. And pardon me at that time, I think I wanted to break away, but I was too young because once she did find an apartment a few months later and we were reunited, I was just so happy

29:26to be back with my family that I pretty much forgave her. At the end of high school, we were abandoned again in 1978. She went to live in the bus with journey and there wasn't room for any of the kids except Molly. So that one really hurt. I ended up moving in with my best friend's family in Sonora, California. And by the time I moved back in with her, I just felt like I was going through the motions. Like I'm just putting up with this until I can go off to college. I have two years to go. I'm going to count down the days. And so I was already mentally sort of divorced from my mother at that point. I was cordial at home, of course, and did my chores and cleaned up. They were also charging me rent and then two months before high school graduation, they moved out of the apartment and they sent my little brother to go live with his dad in Moral Bay, just kicked him out of the house. I couldn't afford the apartment by myself and I was like, two more months, come on mom.

30:26I'm so close to being done and they were like, no, no, we have to do this. We're leaving. So at that point, I was kind of done. I just couldn't wait to get on that plane. Flyback ease, my dad was living in Boston by then and go spend part of the summer before starting in college. But fast forward a couple years, I mean, she came up and visited me in college with journey. And to me, they were like an entertaining couple. I could show my friends like, you will not believe my mother. You will not believe her boyfriend. I mean her husband. And they would come up and share pot brownies and tell their stories. And again, my friends were like, she's so cool. You have such a cool mom. And I was like, yes and no, yes and no. How did it affect romantic relationships for you? Well, I don't know exactly. I do know that I think I might have been trying to compensate for a lack of my mother's

31:28love by having a lot of girlfriends. And there was a time where I felt like sort of selfish like she was like, oh, this is cool, you know, and it took me a couple of years to sort of mature past that and go, no, it's more about having deeper relationships with fewer women than having superficial relationships with several women. But I've always had more female friends than guys. Maybe it's because I had a lot of sisters. So, you know, can guys or girls have friends? Well, I always had lots of girlfriends that weren't my girlfriend. And of course they can. And in a lot of ways, you know, they're more emotional creatures. I just seem to get along better. I don't like the callous guy attitude. That's one of my best friends that I met in the same dysfunctional apartment complex we lived in in Davis. His parents were going through something very similar to recently divorced. And we met, we didn't have to BS around anything.

32:31There was no match, like, oh, I can do more pushups than you. It was all like, my mom's an alcoholic. My mom's a pothaholic. My mom had an affair with one of the ranch ants. Oh, my mom had an affair with a clown from the circus. My stepdad used to beat us with a twig. Oh, my stepdad used to belt. We just had so many things in common. It was just immediately like, okay, the curfew, we can be ourselves. There's a sense of community though when you cross paths with other people and you start breaking down this facade, you know, oh, look at our, we have the perfect house. We have the 2.5 cars. We have the dog. And then even the most picture perfect looking families, if you have the opportunity to get to know on a level, there's usually something. And often time, we didn't have a word for it. I grew up on the Brady Bunch and the Partridge family and an argument between two kids was considered chaos. That's not real life, but that for some reason we hung on to this, you know, image, this

33:32ideal that that's the way it's supposed to be. Well, it really never was that way, but that's what we were spoon fed. That's what we longed for. I never longed for a traditional life either, but I never longed to live on the outskirts, wound docking, off the grid, kind of like my mom's dream. I was more drawn to my father's lifestyle being independently successful, being able to travel, you know, continuing to learn about the world, where she just seemed to get stuck in this subculture of hippie tribe, you know, and yeah, there was Buddhism at one point and, you know, other mysticisms, but it was still seemed like, God, she's actually in a very small funnel, or as the world just has so much more to offer. My sisters and I, you know, they're smart. They could have gone to college. They could have done it, but I think that they had been told long enough by her that it doesn't matter, you know, as long as you're happy, just do whatever you want.

34:35Some things in life aren't required commitment, and they're not that easy, but you do them anyway because you believe that it's worth the investment. So I had to get to a point where I'd been through so much, I kind of knew I was going to write a book at a pretty early age, like it's really ironic that I started saving pictures when I was a kid. I happened to take care of my father when he had Alzheimer's and needed help. So as he moved in, all the pictures we sent him over the years as kids came out to me with them. All the letters we wrote. I mean, he had dored his kids. So suddenly I was left with this, not just, you know, a book, but also tons of content to support the story. So people could personally get to see, you know, Shelley, Chris, Molly, Tom, Alex, Mayor, Journey, Charlie, all these characters because it is real. And sometimes I'm like, no, he's going to believe this, but I put a lot of pictures on

35:37the cover of the book because I'm like, this was my life. This was real. Well, I think people would too wonder about your father. I mean, once she kind of disappears, why didn't he just get full custody? Why didn't so that really never happened back in the, never 60s? You know, you didn't the father, they're, they're special. They checked out. They didn't change their papers, right? The baby boy wasn't a hands-on position. Totally. No, they smoked cigars and have a drink and maybe go come home and go, I got another kid. There was also people go, where was CPS? I'm like, you can even know those initials growing up. I didn't know there was a place you could call. I don't know if they were funded in California or not. That wasn't an option. You know, I knew how to dial popcorn to get the time, but there was no number for CPS. Do you think your grandparents too were like, I just, this is so embarrassing. Let's just kind of keep this under the radar.

36:38No, I think they loved their children unconditionally. No matter what path they took, they came out and visited several times in California. And it was generally they were good visits. I didn't feel like they were judging my mom. Of course, you know, culture sneaks out. Great by that sideburns known to hear by then, you know, and he was wearing plaid suits and he was keeping up with the times. And so they just saw her as, you know, their daughter who doesn't live in the Midwest anymore, who's kind of doing her hippie trippy thing. And then the experience of parenting has been unique for you. Can you tell everybody about that? Yeah. So I was never going to have children. I was committed to being a lifelong bachelor. I love being single. I love the freedom. I just thought that's it. I'm never having kids. And then my sister passed away in 1996. And no one in the family was really in a position to take the kids.

37:41My mom suggested we time share them like a condo and cabo or something, you know, oh, they can spend the summers here. And then in the fall, they'll go stay with Molly and, you know, then they can visit Shelley. And I'm like, whoever they stay with first is going to be like their primary caregivers. Are you going to take them first? And she was on, no, we can't take them first. We don't want to take them first. So I'm like, well, they could become words of the state they could get into the foster care. They could get separated. So I said, I have to do it. I'll take the kids because I don't want that to happen to them. And they were all, oh, groovy, far out. And we're going to help you so much and we'll be there all the time. Well, I lived in Rancher Cordova, Sacramento, California. They were two and a half hours away. They never visited once. I had to take the kids there to visit. So I was kind of left with zero health, although my sisters sent clothes and stuff.

38:41And I mean, they did the best they could, but they just weren't there. So after a year and a half, I decided to put them in an open adoption. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make because I was so attached to them by then. And it took a few swings to the bat. I didn't really connect with the first couple and the lady at work wanted to adopt them with her new husband. And we tested the waters, but it wasn't right. And then I found the perfect couple. They were a little bit older. They wanted both kids. They lived nearby. They were financially stable. They were good people. And so I did that. And once I did that, that's when my mom said, well, you can adopt yourself a new mother because I will have nothing to do with you forever again. And she never got to see those grandkids again. She never got to meet my kids. So she really sheltered herself from out from a lot of stuff. But what I've learned from Shane and Skyler, my nephews, was that kids is a whole different kind of love.

39:47You know, I only really knew romantic love and family love. But when you have a child that's dependent on you, and you can provide comfort care, something else happens. And I was like, I'm going to have kids someday, but I want to be ready. You know, I don't want it to be dropped on me. And I want to make sure I'm mentally stable and I'm in a good place. I never lost anybody before. I was still dealing with losing my sister. And then thrown into the situation with kids and Shane needed our bereavement classes and counseling. There was a lot of stuff to pick up the pieces, but it did open my eyes. And it did change my mind about kids. That's why giving them up was so hard. But I'm still in touch with the family today. I'm going to go see him this summer. Turns out Shane lives in Tacoma. He's on the west side of the state. I'm in Spokane. So he still have relationships and it really did.

40:49It really was the right choice. So how are your relationships with your family today? Well, my mother passed in 2022. I got to see her a couple of times over the holidays in, I think, 20 and 21. It was a COVID year. There was some healing. There was some closure, but there was still journey in the picture. And I knew she was getting close to the end of her life because she had been battling Parkinson's. She had a bookshelf full of journals. She kept, she inspired me to journal as a kid. And I drew on some of that content and writing the books. I wanted those journals because I wanted to know my mother better and catch up with what I had missed and see what her plan was. She told me she always wanted to write a book. And I go, I'm writing a book right now. And you can read a draft of it. But at that point, she couldn't focus long enough to read it. And I didn't have an audio book out yet. So I never got any feedback from her on my attempt.

41:50The book came out in 2021 and she passed in 2022. So that's unfortunate. And journey took all the journals and probably burned them. We went back to visit them and see if I could reclaim anything, but the journals were gone. So that sucked. Isn't it frustrating when someone passes away and the romantic partner makes all these decisions and just cuts off? I mean, you, you're obviously the relationship preceded journeys, but somehow they have all the power. And that's what I didn't like about my mom. She caved in and did whatever her man wanted. Well, where's your independence right now? What's best for you and your kids? Why is he always right? You know, why don't you question him like you question other things? So that's extremely frustrating. And do you think the decision to cut you off was dominated by journey? Not necessarily, but possibly.

42:52I mean, he too was another one of those deadbeat dads who left or kids behind an Oklahoma never paid child support the entire time. One of them took him back though. A grifter will never stop grifting after all the tears. Someone opened up their heart to him. So I think that's pretty cool. I don't think it was necessarily journey. I think she was just like, you're my son. I'm your mother by law. You have to listen to me. Those are my grandchildren, not your nephews. You know, I have rank. And I think by saying, I would never put those kids through half of what we went through. Plus you're 60 years old now. Are you living the boom docks? Your main interest is growing your weed. You're not available. I don't want those kids to have the kind of lifestyle I had. No. And the kind of lifestyle they did have was not this picture perfect dream, of course.

43:54But yes, there was softball and baseball and, you know, football and sports and church and things that were a little bit more grounding. Which I felt would be really good for those kids. Well, this is kind of a complicated question. But and then you as you kind of age and you kind of change your perspective on things as you have more life experience. Do you look at back at your father and see parts of yourself in her? And what do you see that's the same? Almost definitely. Yeah. I don't know if she taught it or if it was just inside of me and then she solidified it or brought it forth. But I'm like her in a lot of ways in that I really, really. She was like a little kid sometimes. She was just diving to new thoughts, adventures, bring home books, records and want to share them.

44:56That kind of enthusiasm for new things in life is something I like to think I've got from her. I don't know if it was already in me, but I love finding out new things and sharing it with people and going to places I haven't been and seeing things I haven't seen. I'm very open-minded. I still like, you know, I have a lot of like I have a lot of trace hobbies. You know, I love photography and I love mountain biking. But I don't do any of them all the time. I just seem to like float around much like she did. She was just kind of this, you know, what's going to come next? And I have a very open and willingness, you know, to allow things to come to me that are like that. I never want to stop learning. So I think in a lot of ways she taught me a lot of really good things. And as I got older, even to this day, I'm, I feel sort of this is to solve readers. Because a lot of them walk away from the books really not liking my mother at all.

45:57But I feel like I was very lucky to have her as my mother because she shaped me into causing me to survive and putting me through hardships, taught me, you know, and shaped me into the man I am today. And I don't think, you know, I look back and I'm like, well, if you had that perfect life and there was money in the family, what would you have done? I don't know. I know I would have had a totally different life than what I've had. And I like my life. And I like the path that's gone. And to some degree, I attribute that to running away from my mother, but also running back to some of the things that she felt were important that I agree with. I think too that if someone's reading a story and there's still a deep in pain, their reaction makes sense to me. Like, why would you appreciate the pain that comes with an experience of being raised by a parent like that? But I also think with time, like I said, I think, you know, perspective shift. But I do think it's important that when you look back at her in reflection, that you do see things about her that you liked and that you see yourself in those things.

47:07I think that's a really important. Yeah, I'm not saying I would want anybody to go through any of the hardships I went through. That's not the point. I don't want that for anybody. But I also do feel like if you experience a range of challenges, if you experience the full depth of emotion that can be experienced in life, you're living a deeper human existence than the people. God bless them. Some people have no trauma in their lives and they just skate through. And I'm like, must be nice. You know, it's just this, I don't want to say superficial, but it's a less traumatic existence. And I'm not really drawn to that. So in some ways, I'm like my mother, I would rather have had some of the hardships because I understand and it makes me more compassionate and empathetic to other people that have had those kinds of experiences. If you never experience anything brutally rough and somebody comes to you and needs your assistance because they're experiencing something that bad, there's always so much you can do.

48:15But if you come from a space where you can really still feel what that was like, everybody needs people like that person that will allow them to sit in their pain and to talk through it. And if you know that someone has been through something really painful and you see them on the other side of it, it gives you hope. Yeah, we'll tell everybody where they can follow you, but also where they can get your books. Well, have you heard of social media? So I'm on the gram. Recently, we've been unlocking TikTok. Actually, producing TikTok content that took off on the gram and gram content that took off on TikTok. I have about 99,000 followers on Facebook. I think that's really where my core audiences, the books are available at Amazon, Audible. I recorded the books and we touched on this right before we started.

49:18There's just something about being open raw and honest about your own experiences that allows people to open the window on theirs. And these aren't like flighty comments like, oh, so cool. It's like, here's what happened to me. And I get some really compelling and sad sometimes, but enriching comments of other people that could relate to the content. And there's just this huge group of people out there that are still, I mean, here we are. I'm pretty sure I'm close to retirement. These days, here's a still part of our lives. So there's a community out there that kind of feels a sense of warmth and safeness and being able to share our experiences with other people. Well, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. I'm so grateful for your time. I want to thank my great guest and remind you to make sure that you click subscribe to this podcast and leave a five star review.

50:21I would love for you to join the Facebook group reality life with K K C. You can get bonus episodes on Apple podcasts and on Patreon. And my weekly what to watch list. I'm going to give you a list of what to watch in unscripted TV every week. You can get that at Kate Casey dot sub stack dot com. And follow me on social media on my Instagram at K K C C A TikTok. It's Kate Casey and Twitter Threads and Blue Sky at at Kate Casey.