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I was given the gift of Friday on April 6th of 1996, and I'm forever grateful. That's 18 years.

I guess I'll start at the beginning.

I am the fifth generation of alcoholics, and I'm the first one to get sober.

My name growing up was Christi Go Give Me a Beer.

And being the good little budding, alcoholic waitress that I was, I would bring their beers to them opened and I would take a little sip.

And pretty soon they started getting their beers half empty.

And they would say, go get your own.

I was raising in alcoholism, as you can imagine.

And so, you know, I, there was never really a time in my life that it wasn't okay for me to just go get a beer and drink it.

But I knew that that wasn't something that I was supposed to do whenever people were over at the house, when your grandparents were there,

is one of those unspoken secrets that we had you know growing up in alcoholism um so my parents my mom and my dad

they actually um were you know they grew up in pampa Texas and they dated almost their whole

lives and uh they all through junior High School College, they got married.

They were married for 13 months, just fairly long enough to have me and got divorced.

My mom, they both got remarried pretty quickly.

My mom married my stepdad, and that was the alcoholics, and my dad married my stepmom,

and they were like Ward and Jim Cleaver.

So I had these two really opposite lives going on.

You know, I was raised in alcoholism, and then every other weekend I would go and I would visit Ward and Jim Cleaver.

...