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Resident Spotlight

 

Hello, my name is Clara and I’m a resident here at the Elizabeth Stone House. I have a son named Christian. He’s 5 years old. Having Christian in my life has changed my life. He gives me hope and strength to keep my recovery up front. I can’t imagine my life without him. 

I came to the Elizabeth Stone House from a one year residential treatment program. Before I was accepted to ESH, I got accepted to a transitional housing program in Springfield. I know that if I had gone there, I would have ended up using drugs, because that’s where I used to get high. That’s where I grew up. During that time, my life was hell. I was into drugs, and drugs took the best of me. Due to my drug abuse, I lost my other 5 kids. Due to my drug abuse I became homeless, with nowhere to stay. I don’t have any family other than Christian. I’m a single parent, and I know it’s hard raising my son by myself but I have to pat myself on the back because I’m doing a pretty good job. 

My turning point was when I relapsed and they took Christian away from me. After they removed my son, I tried to hurt myself and ended up in the hospital. They told me that if I wanted to get him back, I needed to do a program and otherwise he would go up for adoption. So I decided to do the program and get my son back in my life because I lost my other kids and I didn’t want to lose Christian. He’s my miracle baby, and he’s the one who made me change my life around. If it weren’t for him, I don’t think that I would be clean today. 

I decided that I wanted to stay in Boston, so I applied for the Elizabeth Stone House. I was so interested to come here that I called every week! When I got accepted to come here, I was grateful because it was hard getting here, and now that I’m here I appreciate it. I’m grateful for being here and I feel blessed. Since I’ve been here, I’ve accomplished getting DCF out of my life. I have accomplished going back to school to further my education. I graduated from the Strive Program, which is a job readiness program. I graduated from the MORE program, which is a recovery program. I graduated from the SOAP program, another intense recovery program. I also graduated from the Anger Management Group here at ESH several times. I still attend the other groups here and my outside meetings (such as NA). 

Recently, I attended the Personal Economic Planning group here and one of the things we did in that class was pull our credit reports. With the support of my advocate, I was able to clear up old debts that I had ignored due to my addiction. Thanks to the help of my advocate and Nancy, those debts will no longer be in my credit report.