Mornin Bitches
A cursing, foul mouth old ladies take on the present world!!! Filled with her opinions, views on current events, and special guest appearances!
Mornin Bitches
Heartwarming Tales of Adoption and Unexpected TikTok Stardom
Ever been curious about the journey of adoption? Join us, as we walk alongside Chazz, "The Chazzinator," and his husband, Marek, through their heartwarming narrative of love, marriage, and adopting two children via the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). Be prepared to embark on an emotional rollercoaster ride, as Chaz candidly discusses their trials and triumphs - from their meeting in the distant past, standing against societal norms to build a family, to their current life as parents.
But that's not all! Prepare yourself for a surprising twist, as we trail Chazz's unexpected rise to fame on TikTok, with a staggering count of over half a million followers. Even more astonishing is his noble endeavor of using this platform to aid others. This episode promises a unique blend of raw emotion, heartening stories, and engaging chatter that will keep you hooked till the very end.
MORNIN BITCHES PODCAST
Morning to Ches and now we're told you they love you today, then I love you because you are you. Who else are you going to be? And I am honored and privileged to have one of my favorite people from TikTok Chazz, or the Chazzinator, all right, how'd that name come about, honey?
Speaker 2:It was a name that was given to me when I was doing FM radio back in 2008. There was somebody who used to call me and harass me at the studio, and he kept saying I'm the president of the Chazzinator fan club, and so I started making a running joke about it, and then it ended up becoming my name as a host on the show.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's great. I can imagine closing my eyes listening to your voice. That you could be like an FM radio host. Did you play music or you just got people calling you?
Speaker 2:I did mostly music. I did a like a weather report, weekly news updates, like a news interview. It was a two hour show and my son was my co-host. He was about 13 at the time.
Speaker 1:Oh, that must be fun. So let's talk about your married person. Right, you're married, right? How? Long are you married Chazz.
Speaker 2:Well, I've been with my husband for almost 31 years and we got married in 2013 legally, and so yeah, but for those 31 years together, we would have gotten married from day one if we could have back in 1992. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:So tell me the story of. I love hearing the story I think I saw on our take of how you met and so forth and so on. I love that story Really. Yeah, tell our audience all about that, because it's just important for me to interview people on my morning bitches podcast that I admire, respect. People go oh, I want to be on your show and I went, okay, what are you all about? What's your story? And sometimes they go well, I don't know. I'm honest with you. Well, I want to be the one that strikes me, that I feel like they're, they strike an emotion in me and so forth. So you emotionally struck me. First of all, you're gay. That makes you 110% in my book, my story with gay people.
Speaker 2:So you're very loving and accepting.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that you know I am, and God, because, first of all, gay men are the only people who ever loved me back in the day and still do, thank goodness so all right, thank you. So tell the listening audience how you met your husband, what's his name?
Speaker 2:His name is Merrick. In Polish it's Maudic. He came from Poland in the 80s.
Speaker 2:Back when Poland was still the communist country. He struggled a lot to try to acclimate to American culture and on October 6, 1992, I actually ended up going to jail. That's the day that I met him. So it has a happy ending, but I was.
Speaker 2:I went to jail for a good reason. I was actually defending an elderly gentleman who had been attacked by a tenant of one of his apartments. When we were giving the tenant notice that he had to remove some items from that apartment or else they were going to be thrown away, he spat on the older man and then I stood between them and then he punched me and then he hit me a second time, and that's when I tore up his comic book store with him and broke his nose and went to jail Because I was on his property when this occurred. Loser didn't want to hear any excuses. He just said you came here, you started trouble, you're going to jail, right, right. Fortunately, the older man that I worked for had a good connection with an older lady in our district and she got me out of jail very quickly and I went to a friend's thrift store to change clothes and get cleaned up and I went out to a bar called Lucky Horse Shoe Lounge and where I was not supposed to be because I had been kicked out of this bar before. I was not a troublemaker as much as it seems like. I just had a disagreement with the owner of that bar and when I stopped working there, so I wasn't allowed to be in there. But the owner wasn't there that night, so I went on in and I ordered myself a cocktail and then a couple of minutes later I turned around and there was this young or this like Polish man, this little short Polish man, standing near me, smiling at me, and he introduced himself as Marek or Merrick, and Mark was hard for me to say. Even my kids will call him Daddy Merrick. I'm getting ahead of myself.
Speaker 2:Meeting him that night changed my life. I was struggling financially, emotionally, I was alone, I was very lonely and he was suffering from the loss of a partner that he had before me, who he was with for seven years, who had passed away over a year before we met. And so the two of us were just two lonely people who met at the right time and the right place, and we ended up going back to his condo and then the next morning he put a ring on my finger and by that next afternoon he was telling me he wanted me to move in with him, and I did on the same day, and I have been with him ever since. So, yeah, that's truly our anniversary. The day we met is the day we got together, and we have been with each other ever since, so it turned out to be happy. We ended up adopting two children together through DCFS, and raising them.
Speaker 1:What's DCFS? What is that?
Speaker 2:Department of Children, family Services.
Speaker 2:Also known as dysfunctional children and family services Because sadly there's so many children trapped in this foster care system. But we couldn't adopt as a couple because gay marriage was not legal back then. So he adopted as a single parent, but I was on all the paperwork. It was known by DCFS that I was living there, that I would be the caregiver of these children and that I had to have a background check the same way that he did. And we were scrutinized but we were never asked are you a gay couple? It was not relevant to them because we weren't able to get married and because he qualified just fine as a single parent to adopt. So we got really, really lucky and we've been very blessed with our children.
Speaker 1:And how old were they when you adopted them?
Speaker 2:Well, when our son Anthony first came to us as a foster child, he was only seven and a half months old, so he was still an infant, and by the time that he was three years old we were able to adopt. So my husband actually adopted and I never officially co-adopted the kids. I put all of my trust in my husband, legally, that he would be able to handle this entire process, and he did. He did well and of course I was his advocate. And then, by the time Anthony was three years old, his mother, his birth mother, had another baby and we were able to get him in foster care and I knew he was coming.
Speaker 2:It's really weird. I actually had a prediction. I was in the bathtub upstairs soaking and this feeling just came over me that there was a child that was going to come and live with us, that we were going to get another child. And there was no reason to think that this was going to happen because we had moved to a different county and DCFS had not caught up and there were a lot of issues with getting the foster care license transferred over to that county in Illinois. But we got him placed with us. A week later he was premature and his name is Patrick. He only weighed four pounds when we got him, so we had to go through some health issues Initially. He ended up having double pneumonia. A couple of weeks after we got him he was hospitalized for 17 days. He was just a tiny little baby, the tiniest baby I've ever held, but they're doing great now. These boys are all grown up and they love us very much.
Speaker 1:What's not to love, and you're a grandparent.
Speaker 2:I am, and just in 2021, in April, my son, anthony, and his wife had their first baby boy and they named him Genesis, and he is the apple of my eye and he brings me something Joy. I love him so dearly. And then, just last year, about, oh, 10 months ago, they had another baby and it's another baby boy. And they look so much like each other. It's amazing they're just. These two are two peas in a pod. I'm so happy.
Speaker 1:I'm happy that you're happy. Are you a working person? You work.
Speaker 2:I have been Throughout the course of my relationship with my husband. I have worked 30 jobs. I counted about 30 jobs that I had. He was always a real breadwinner. I just supplemented our income just so that I wasn't just bumming off of him financially. But there was a period of time for 10 years where I did not work. I was mentally and physically just exhausted. I had gone through a lot of stress. It was not happy ever. After I met my husband. Our relationship was fine but I suffered some losses in my life. My younger brother was found in his partner's backyard.
Speaker 2:My brother was also gay and he had a very abusive partner and he was found passed away in his partner's backyard and it was very graphic and brutal and it appeared to me as though my brother's life had been taken by his partner or by someone else, but the police did not investigate it and the coroner refused an autopsy, and I ended up struggling mentally over this lack of closure and that started a snowball effect of depression in which I later lost my little sister, I lost my nephew, I lost my mother, and all these things combined to just bring me down and I got so thin, thin as a rail, and I'm about six foot two and I was 150 pounds, so I was just skin and bone. My husband and my sons did not want me to lift anything. They didn't want me carrying milk, they didn't want me carrying water bottles up and down the stairs because they didn't want me to expend any calories. And it was about 2019 when I finally snapped out of it.
Speaker 2:I actually tried an experimental process for myself. I tried mushrooms and it actually changed my life. I had an experience on this psychedelic substance that gave me hope and made me see things differently, and I went out and got myself a job. So I started working at a gas station because it was close to home.
Speaker 2:And I enjoy that kind of work I always have. I love working around people and in a gas station. People are so real and so raw and they'll tell you exactly what's on their mind, and I enjoy that kind of honest encounter with people. So I did that for about 40 years and then my last year working there I had gotten onto TikTok and it started in August of last year. August the third was the day that I uploaded my very first TikTok video and it got about 600 views. And I was surprised because I've been on YouTube another app for a while. I never had any kind of success. So I started uploading more and more and it became an obsession with me, to the point where within a month I had 10,000 followers. And then I decided well, I'm going to go live and I'm going to meet some of these followers and talk to them. And now it's almost a year later and I have achieved a following of over 500,000, like almost 550,000 followers.
Speaker 2:Right, right and yeah, and now that is my job. It's not a big income. I do ads for some sponsors and things like that occasionally, but I enjoy it. I really do. It's been a good opportunity for me and I noticed you're really big on TikTok and you've got even more followers than I have.
Speaker 1:Well, I love TikTok. I mean, it's just been a place for me to talk about what is important to me in life in my platform. So I never did it for the money, because I really haven't made money from it, and that's OK. I do it for fun and for free, and right now it's the teacher's thing for me. I'm really making sure that if a teacher needs whatever it is, a pencil, whatever that I get that out, because I didn't know that teachers don't get this. They just apply and they have to buy them. It's a shock. That was shocking for me, definitely. Yeah, so, and then I started, you know this thing, this podcast, just because I wanted to be able to express myself. My beliefs were Nobody was, you know, hindering me or saying I couldn't say this or I couldn't talk to people about that or couldn't interview this person.
Speaker 1:I you know as I said, screw it, I'm just going to create something where I could just be myself and ask questions and all sorts of things like that.
Speaker 2:So I mean I what Tic-tac-tac censor us Like? There are words that we cannot say there, that we can say outside, on other.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know about that. For me it's more like when I've worked for different companies like I, you, if you were. You know some of the things in the not recently. But One just has to be careful of the things that you say people are always Wanting to send to me, especially. You know, if I say something or I believe something, don't, you can't say that. You can't do this. I hate that.
Speaker 2:Yes, I get that a lot. I've been getting it a lot this this last week. It's been it's been rough. I try to avoid politics on my channel, but the moment that I step into a political realm, on any issue whatsoever, I do get people from both sides trying to tell me what to say and what not to say. Right, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't. I try not to get into politics right now because, um, I've been fortunate enough to be Hired as the flaming hot Cheetos you know, grandma, so that's been amazing for me.
Speaker 1:I put a couple of videos on and doing more stuff, and that that was a gift. That is a gift that came out of nowhere, and those people were amazing. I love it. So you know. But but still so, I don't talk about politics right now. I just I watch the news all the time. I kind of like, you know, I sometimes stitch or do it or whatever, but I just, you know, I just try and like Go on tiktok. I love you know, I love astrology. So what sign are you?
Speaker 2:I'm a Sagittarius.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, and you're husband.
Speaker 2:He's a capricorn.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, very close. So one's earth, one's fire. That's interesting. Okay, right, and what are the boys?
Speaker 2:My son Anthony. Our first son was actually born on my 25th birthday, so he is also a Sagittarius. My son, patrick, was born on September 2nd.
Speaker 1:It's a Virgo.
Speaker 2:Virgo, that's right. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think I am a typical Sagittarian, though in many ways I love adventure. I love just getting up at the last minute and running off to do something. I'm a very short attention span, but I love very, very deeply. But I also am very hurt by betrayal. So you know, there's so many things about that sign and those qualities that I think I can relate to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, you know I love to do it. The first year I was doing it like a lot about people. Oh, tell me what I am. When was I born? What is it it's like? Okay, you know that's, you know that I do. When I go live, I usually like to read the you know the horoscopes from the paper for people and you know, and that's that's one of the things I love to do and and I love doing that. So before, is there anything that you want anybody to know in the world that's important for you and like your mission statement, what you believe, anything like that? What do you want people to know?
Speaker 2:Sure, thank you. I feel that we my the purpose of my channel has mostly grown to become a as an ally to people who have been sexually abused as a child or as an adult, because I have experienced sexual abuse in my life as a child and an adult and it is something that I feel very passionate about. I feel that I have survived a lot. I used to be in a victim mentality for a very long time as I was processing this whole. You know all the abuse that I experienced and then, when I overcame the worst effects of that, I felt like it was my responsibility to speak out on behalf of people who are still struggling with the victimization of these atrocious acts against us and especially children.
Speaker 2:I was essayed sexually abused at age 12 by a 40 year old man and then I again at age 15 by a 32 year old woman who I ended up marrying legally because in most states in the United States, child marriage is still legal. So those are that's really the big issue for me, that I want to get the word out that you know we can heal, that we are not responsible for what happened to us as children. There's so many people carrying so much guilt around that they don't need to carry. It was never theirs to carry, and the messages I get from people who are in similar situations to my own are very loving and kind, but also sometimes triggering, because people will tell me the details about their abuse that they've experienced.
Speaker 2:And it could be painful to you know, brings up my own memories. But then I remember. I remind myself I've dealt with that, I handled that, and I'm stronger now and I'm okay. I can handle anything that comes my way at this point. I've never been stronger, and so. I feel it's important for those of us who have overcome to be able to help other people who are still processing that trauma.
Speaker 1:Right Now I get it totally. I've experienced a number of things that have happened to me and I won't go into them. But okay, now here's my. That is an important question. I want to what do you think happened to that cally girl for real? What's your belief? I know you were like, oh my god, she's been kidnapped. She says what's happening. What is that? All of you?
Speaker 2:I joined the whole bandwagon for looking for her.
Speaker 1:I actually did. I know you did. I didn't. I shared Mama Todd's video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, from the beginning I thought it's better to reach out to try to get people to what happened.
Speaker 1:I just lost you.
Speaker 2:I always feel like as a former victim myself of you know leaves the victim, but when there's evidence that comes forward that that victim is not honest or that this was done for any other reason besides justice, then it's clear that there has to be some repercussions, and I'm assuming that she's going to be charged, because a lot of resources were spent trying to find her and then it was a hoax. At this point it's very clear that it was a hoax and that she did not go missing, and then none of her story makes any sense. So I feel like she wasted a lot of people's time, including mine. I think she took away from a lot of victims who needed advocacy and she received more than she deserved because she did not go missing.
Speaker 1:I'm always skeptical of those kind of things Like and then everybody's yelling to her on TikTok and I'm going wait, let's just see. I'm not going to say anything. I don't know what really happened.
Speaker 2:I remain silent on it. For the most part, I've reposted her video from Mamata, but she stands by. Mamata and I have become really good friends and we text each other like every other day.
Speaker 2:And she stands behind her video and she stands by. She says she will always believe a person who claims that they've been victimized until further evidence shows itself, especially if that person is in a marginalized group. Because the black women, black women in this country, are far greater victimized by violence than the rest of the population in general, and so I feel it's important that we have to listen to black women when they say that they are experiencing abuse or trauma or are the victims of crimes. But it's sad, it's so sad to me that this woman, that this Carly was, she just I don't know. I hope it doesn't cause damage for other victims.
Speaker 2:I hope it doesn't make people less likely to share things like that in the future, because these are really important issues. I mean, we're talking about potential trafficking victims, somebody who claims they were kidnapped and, for good note, who knows what reason such a kidnapping could have occurred. But she certainly had a lot of people alarmed and it was all over TikTok. But I noticed that a lot of things that are trending on TikTok are not trending in life in general. Outside of TikTok these things don't get nearly as much coverage or interest, but we have our own little realm there in TikTok.
Speaker 1:We do have our own little realm, honey. That's how we met. Now we can be friends. So, I just want to thank you, Chas Chas and Ada, for coming on my channel today, my morning pictures and if nobody told you they love you today, I love you because for you.
Speaker 2:I love you too, for the same reason. Thank you so much. Who else?
Speaker 1:are you going to be doll? All right, this will be on later. You can all listen to it. I have to work my magic now, Now that Chas has done his magic. Love you.
Speaker 2:I love you too. Thank you Bye.