It's no secret that Mary J. Blige has survived hardships, managed to come out on top despite her past, and even helps other women do the same through her Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now. On the music front, the award-winning singer just released her new album My Life II…The Journey Continues as a nod to her 1994 triple-platinum record My Life. Blige recently sat down with CNN's Piers Morgan to talk about how far her she has come, her drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and how her husband helped her save herself.
"I was done, I was dying, it was over. I was gonna die, it didn't matter," she says on Piers Morgan Tonight. "But I didn't wanna die. So when it finally happened, I was like 'Wait a minute, this is not what I want.' But subliminally, I was drinking myself to death."
She says her husband, Kendu Isaacs, whom she married nearly eight years ago, was her source of love and support through the hard phase and was the one who motivated her to turn her life around.
"I've never had anybody approach me with that kind of love before," she said. "And that's what I needed, and that's what triggered in me the love that I have for myself today."
Blige is an iconic artist in her own right, one that's inspired others who've come after her, but in the interview she says she admires Beyoncé's childhood and wishes she had been that close with her own parents.
“You gotta look at a life like that (Beyoncé’s), with a mother and a father and a child and they’re raising and they’re in the music business with her where there is just so many vultures and people who don’t ever tell you the truth ... and to look at her life, and to look at how graceful and beautiful and what a lady she is, it just inspired me," she says.
“It made me a little sad because I wish I had that growing up, I wish my mom and dad had been together and I wish that they could have saw me through the music business and managed me and who knows how much further I would be and how much hell I wouldn’t have gone through."
Blige's own family life was a strained one as her mom was forced to raise four children alone in the Yonkers, NY, projects after her father walked out on the family.
"My mom's a beautiful woman and she's had a lot of hard times," she says. "She was a single-parent mom and she was pretty damaged herself. But she raised us, she had two jobs, and she did whatever she could do to raise us the best that she could raise us. My mom is very proud of me."
As for the man who left when she was four years old, Blige says she now has a great relationship with her father, too.
"I love my dad. We've reconciled. I was hurt earlier in my life over what he'd done, leaving us like that with no male figure. I was pissed for a long time, but I got over it because I didn't want to walk through my life angry at him, killing myself. I mean he didn't know any better, either. Our relationship right now is really good. I love him."
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