Yvonne Walker

Federal Government Employee 2001 Mellwood Graduate, 2003 Mellwood House Manager

At the end I was 41; I had been using for a long time. I am grateful that in spite of my ego, arrogance, and age, I could allow someone to help me re-identify my idea of help.
Before Second Genesis, I was using everything; smoking crack, living in public housing, while receiving food stamps from welfare, running from my two children. My youngest son’s father was killed violently, my (then) husband was just as sick I was. Desperate, I was reduced to surviving.

I remember barricading myself in the bedroom to get away from his abuse. We were living a fantasy, each with our own obsessions and compulsions. As painful as it was, someone else had to treat me worse than I was treating myself for me to be tired. I didn’t know what recovery was about, but knew I felt hope. It had to be better than where I was. I picked up the phone and called; my first surrender.
I had absolutely nothing left – nothing in my hands to carry. I walked away from my entire life, my apartment, relationships, and family to enter Second Genesis. When they arranged my pick up, it was my 15 year old son’s father who brought me his daughter’s clothes to wear. This was the start of realizing that I don’t where or who my help will come from.

I still use the tools that those nine months at Second Genesis gave me – structure and responsibility; making my bed in the morning, ironing on the weekends, and all the home training that I had forgotten that my parents taught me. I went back to work there as the House Manager for a short time before getting back in federal service. I continue to try to give back what was so freely given to me.
Today, I am completing a Maryland University certificate program, sponsored through a scholarship program that I found out about through Second Genesis with DORS & PG County Workforce Development (including tuition, books, and a computer). My criminal record has been erased, and thanks to my higher power, I am working towards owning my first home! After all of the shelters and institutions I dragged my children through, I am finally going to have a home that I can’t be put out of.

Second Genesis helped me to live in hope – that if it could happen for the countless women who lived before me at Mellwood House, then it could happen to anyone else, including me. I am amazed every day that I am all those women that I always wanted to be. I am showing up for me. I couldn’t do any of it without the help of my higher power Second Genesis, and NA. They loved me until I could begin to love myself. I have a sponsor and I sponsor other women, I attend meetings regularly, I pray, I am in service, and I help people with no strings attached. “…just when the caterpillar thought the world was coming to an end, it turned into a butterfly…”
Anon