Mikie Bobzin: From Fear to Empowerment in a Chaotic World

When I talked with Mikie Bobzin on the podcast, she told me something that’s stuck with me. “I could not wait to get older so that I could get drunk and smoke weed,” she said about being seven years old, watching the adults around her drink. “At a very early age.” That’s not normal kid thinking, but for Mikie growing up in Belleville, Illinois, it made perfect sense.

Growing Up in Chaos

Mikie was an only child dealing with a mom who was a severe alcoholic. Her parents divorced when she was two, and while her dad got sober when she was five, the damage from those early years ran deep. “My mom did the best she could,” Mikie explained. “She was in school for a while and she was bartending at night and we were in and out of different public housing.” Some of those places were infested with roaches.

Her grandmother begged to adopt her, but her mom wouldn’t allow it. Mikie spent most nights at her grandmother’s house while her mom was bartending, then coming home drunk. The fear was real for a kid that young. “I remember I hated when my mom would drink gin and I would beg her mama just drink beer today just drink beer because it was never quite as bad,” she told me. She was measuring her mom’s drinking patterns at seven years old, trying to predict how bad the night would get.

One night stands out in Mikie’s memory more than the rest. Her mom was crying in bed when Mikie went to check on her. “She said mama what’s wrong? And she said Mikey do you see him? And I said do I see what? And she said the demons Mikey they’re crawling up my curtains,” Mikie recalled. Her mom was bipolar and suicidal on top of the alcoholism. “I got next door in bed. I curled up by her. I held her and we both cried until we fell asleep.”

Finding Her Escape

At eleven, Mikie found her mom’s weed and smoked it. “I was the most popular kid in the neighborhood that summer,” she said. “But I felt good. I finally felt good. I felt like I was enough.” That’s the thing about addiction that people don’t always understand. For someone who never felt like they fit in anywhere, drugs gave her what she’d been missing.

By high school, she was actively seeking out the worst influences she could find. Her family’s racism against black and Latino people disgusted her, so she made it her mission to hang out with everyone they hated. “I was hanging out with like the baddest people I could find in like the poorest and worst parts of society because I did not want to be like my family,” she explained. But she wasn’t really as tough as she portrayed.

Her mom kicked her out at seventeen. Her dad, who was sober and working as a therapist, let her stay for three weeks before kicking her out too. She moved in with a boyfriend who beat her for a year. On her eighteenth birthday, she got her first tattoo, and when she came home, he accused another man of touching her leg and started beating her. A neighbor’s intervention saved her that night.

The Meth Years

After moving back with her mom briefly, Mikie started doing cocaine. Then she made a decision that seems crazy now but made sense to her addicted brain. She thought the problem was hanging out with the wrong people, so she decided to start hanging out with white people doing drugs instead. That’s when she met her ex-husband and got introduced to crystal meth.

“It was awful,” she said about that world. “I liked it a lot better than cocaine because you didn’t fiend out as much and it would last a lot longer. But I mean, it was just a completely different world, nothing that I had ever been exposed to before.” This was the anhydrous meth, before the shake-and-bake methods that came later. Cops were watching them, kicking in doors.

For the next several years, Mikie’s life became a cycle of getting pregnant, getting clean, having the baby, then relapsing. She had five kids total. Each pregnancy gave her hope that she could be the “super cool mom” who partied but still took care of her children. “I had the baby, breastfed for a couple months, stopped doing that, did that quarter gram of dope. And once again, my life spiraled out of control.”

Losing Everything

The worst came when Mikie’s ex-husband got an order of protection against her. She didn’t even know about it until she went to pick up her kids from the school bus and they never got off. Police had told him to get the order or they’d call DCFS because Mikie had been seen walking their baby daughter through town while clearly messed up.

“I truly had felt at that moment, like I lost everything,” she said about sitting in that motel room. Her oldest son was ten. She’d always been there with him, doing the best she could to be a mom. “And now I’m in this little motel room. And I didn’t know what to do.”

Her ex-husband told her to go to treatment, get off methadone, and she could come home to her family. She went to a women’s treatment center in Chicago. A month into treatment, he moved another woman into their home. When Mikie called to talk to her kids, her nine-year-old son answered and said, “We don’t want Becca for our mommy. We want you for our mommy.”

The Bottom

After leaving treatment and relapsing, Mikie entered what she calls “the land of I don’t care.” She started using needles for the first time. “I lived every single minute of my life to use. I did what girls did to get money, to get drugs. I turned tricks. I got drugs. I got high. Turn tricks got drugs got high. Eat, you know, wash, rinse, repeat. That’s what I did.”

The drug tactical unit that had been watching her since she was nineteen knew her well by now. They’d arrest her with dope, then let her go on condition that she’d set up other dealers for them. “They would call your cell phone and they would come pick you up and they would even give you the money to go make the undercover buy,” she explained. “They just knew you wanted out of jail and they would use you.”

Mikie’s absolute bottom came when she was pregnant again, with what she knew would be a healthy baby girl. She was sitting in her dad’s house, shooting up meth and vomiting after every shot because of the pregnancy. “I hated the person I had become,” she told me. “I had all these washed up ideas of this mother I was supposed to be this daughter I was supposed to be this child of God and I was none of those things. I felt like a waste of oxygen.”

She wanted to put a bullet in her brain but was too scared to do it. She couldn’t live one more minute the way she was living, but she couldn’t figure out how to stop either. Sometimes that’s what it takes. Sometimes you have to get to the place where continuing and stopping both seem impossible before you find a third option.