Therese's Story

Therese was married to an alcoholic and abusive husband for ten long years. After they finally divorced, she continued raising their two sons by herself.

“I was fine with being a single parent,” she says. “I had no desire to be with anybody again. I had my mom as my best friend, and wherever she moved, I basically followed her. When she got older, I moved into the apartment next to her so we could be there for each other.”

After Therese’s older son graduated from high school, he joined the Army, got married, and moved away. Therese wished they were closer but was able to draw strength from her relationships with her mom and her other son.

Then tragedy struck.

“My mom passed away suddenly eight years ago in September,” Therese says. “A month later, my younger son told me he was addicted to heroin. I held on for a couple of years, but then things just started to spiral down.”

Therese did whatever she could to keep her son alive as he went from jail to treatment to relapse and back to jail. But it was more than she could bear. She wasn’t able to focus at work and eventually lost her job. She and her son lived off her savings for a while, but when the money ran out, she lost her home.

“My son and I lived in my car for a year and a half,” she says. “Sometimes his friends stayed with us. They were all using heroin and I wanted to make sure they would be safe and things would be clean. I even went to the needle exchange for them.”

Her son’s addiction took a terrible emotional toll on Therese. “One day I walked into Covington, sat down on a curb and just started crying,” she says. “I had no idea what I was going to do. A woman came by and asked if she could sit with me, and it turned out she was a pastor at a church.”

That’s when Therese learned about the Mission.

“She cried with me, talked with me, and told me about KentHOPE. I stayed there for about three and a half months, and then I went to Hope Place.”

The Mission helped Therese grow stronger in more ways than she could have imagined.

“For the first time in years, I really felt loved. I knew that Christ was there. Just having an opportunity to take classes, work in the kitchen, or work in housekeeping, it made me feel like a real, whole person again.”

Therese received counseling for her depression and anxiety. She says, “It’s taken a long time, but I’ve learned it’s okay to put myself first. My son has been watching me get stronger, and now when I talk to him about the Men’s Program at the Mission, he says he’s thinking about it.”