Last Christmas Eve, Deborah Wade, 58, was left broken-hearted by her husband. She was also left with rent and bills she could not pay. By January 12, the new life she had worked so hard to build had crumbled away.
Evicted from her apartment, she found herself homeless.
It was then that she came to Carpenter’s Shelter.
Wade arrived in Alexandria three years before with a dream and a plan to start over. She had years of prison behind her and decades of addiction. She had lived on the streets of Roanoke,
VA. It was a cycle of misery that she said had begun for her at 13, when she sought out drugs to try to cope with the trauma of childhood abuse.
When she moved to Alexandria she had made dramatic changes. She had a job and an apartment.
Wade said things started to fall apart when she learned her husband was using drugs.
“I tried to pay the bills, tried to help him out, but he just was not ready to change his life,” Wade said.
Wade said that her time in prison offered her a chance to break her own addiction and learn to love herself. She gave special credit to a program called Women of Empowerment.
The teacher started the program with words that struck her heart:
“Let me ask you a question: Don’t you know you are the most important person in your own life?”
“Every day she would come in and say that,” Wade remembered. “And then I began saying that to myself.”
When Wade left prison in 2009 she promised herself, that she would never go back.
She found a transitional housing program, she got a job in the Salvation Army’s thrift store. Everything was going according to her plans. Finding love threatened to derail her life.
“Living in the streets I never experienced love… and when I fell in love with this man, and he then left me, I was devastated,” Wade said. Through all the pain, she has managed to stay
sober, and hang onto her job.
“I don’t want to go backwards – I want to continue this patch, but believe me, I have done the pros and cons to make the right decision, and I have chosen me,” Wade said. “Cause I am the most important person in my life.”
Wade said Carpenter’s Shelter has helped her stay true to herself. Here she has found support and friendship, and she has the tranquility to keep on working and saving her money.
Though grateful for everything she has found at Carpenter’s Shelter, Wade dreams of someday finding a new apartment. She misses the feeling of having a place of her own.
“I miss the privacy, to be able to put a key in the door and walk in and shut out whatever is out there, open my refrigerator, eat whatever I want, take off my clothes and sit in my own chair and watch TV or listening to my mellow music,” she said.
For now, Wade has a bed at Carpenter’s Shelter and just as importantly, a place where she is able to keep evolving in a positive way.
As she said, “What better place to do it, than here?”
