Hatteras House Sober Living

05/23/2022

Owner & Founder Rachel Ziegler did a segment for Bakersfield Behavioral Healthcare Hospital

06/21/2021

06/09/2021

Today is a tough day for me, but I still feel it shouldn’t go unrecognized.
This is my biological mother Georgia.
Today is her birthday.
Our relationship is very complicated and strained to say the least.
I was taken away from her at 3 years old with my little brother and sister. I began visitation with her for the first time around age 11.
My mom had a hard childhood, difficult life and suffered a lot of trauma.
She turned to drugs at a very young age which triggered her mental illness. She was in and out of jail most of my life and prior to it.
I resented her for years and even to this day it takes a lot of work for me not to feel immediate anger towards her.
She didn’t have the support or resources that she needed. She turned to all that she knew and all she had ever been around, just as the generations before her. She is an addict with an underlying mental illness which has truly taken over the woman who I never really got to know.
I mean, I didn’t get to know her before all of this like my older siblings. Causing my relationship with her to be different from theirs.
Though it’s difficult to explain, I know she loves me. I know she always loved me, but I know she had addiction, untreated mental illness and unresolved trauma that didn’t allow her to care for me the way I needed.
Today, she is in an assisted living and I’m working on getting guardianship of her so that my sister and I can see to it that she continues to receive the help she needs.
People ask me “Why Sober Living” or “why treatment” and though I suffered my own battles, Georgia is truly my “why”.
I am grateful to know her.
I am grateful she is alive.
I am grateful to end the cycle.
Happy birthday mom ♥️