Becoming Ms. Burton by Susan Burton

Author:Susan Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972137
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

“I kept on, kept on, kept on,” Dana said when she phoned A New Way of Life from the street. “I’m tired, and I don’t want to wind up back in jail. I need a place to go, but I don’t have any money.”

I told her to come over.

“Thank you, Jesus,” she exhaled.

Dana thrived at the house. She was able to reunite with her children and received permission to spend weekends together at A New Way of Life. I took Dana with me to the Cocaine Anonymous Convention in Palm Springs. “I’ve never been anywhere,” Dana said when we arrived at the hotel. She even mustered the courage to stand before a large group and speak about her experiences. Because of Dana, I started taking all the women to the annual Cocaine Anonymous Convention to meet people and see a world of recovery. Often, this was the first time the women had gone on a trip, and I instructed them to pack for a formal dinner, a swimming pool, and a nice hotel—though they kept calling it a motel.

When Dana began experiencing health symptoms, her skin itched horribly and she always felt like she needed to use the bathroom, I pestered her. “You going to get to the doctor?” For weeks I bothered her. “You going to get out of here tomorrow and go to the doctor? You going to get up in the morning and make an appointment with the doctor?” Finally, she went and was diagnosed as severely diabetic. “I don’t want to think, Ms. Burton, if you hadn’t seen me out there to the doctor,” Dana said, her head shaking with gratitude.

By the time Dana had been in the house for six months, her health had improved and she was in the process of gaining full custody of her children. But her subsidized housing—which was so difficult to get when you had a criminal record—hadn’t yet come through. She came to me, asking if she could stay longer.

Initially, Beverly, Mitzi, and I had intended A New Way of Life to be active, with each woman staying up to six months, at which point she’d ideally have enough elements in place to transition out on her own. But Dana risked losing her children if she didn’t have a permanent address, and she’d worked too hard to have everything jeopardized, so, of course, I told her she could stay.

Beverly saw things differently. She insisted that Dana leave, that a maximum of six months was what we’d decided at the beginning. But, in the beginning, we didn’t know what we were doing, and we thought we needed to impose some type of structure. Now, things were real. These were real people, real lives. Enforcing arbitrary rules that disregarded an individual’s needs would make us no better than the senseless system we’d all been trapped in and were still trying to escape. But Beverly held firm against me.

Though she tried to hide it, I knew Beverly had become addicted to Vicodin. I was deeply sad and concerned about her.

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