A place that gave women a chance closes shop

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Celeste House is quiet these days. The old convent, converted four years ago into a home for recovering homeless substance-abusing women and their children, is closing shop.

Most of the beds on the second floor have been stripped clean. Photographs that once covered the walls are gone. In the playroom there is just one child, for only one mother remains here. All the others have been transferred to other homes for substance-abusing women throughout the state.

Celeste House was the model for these homes. Located in Plainville, just north of the Rhode Island border, it has known unparalleled success. Of the 68 women who have completed its nine-month program, 60 remain substance free. The cost is lower than any of the nine programs it spawned: $84 per woman per day compared with a high of $200.

Still, Celeste House will close its doors on June 30, because the Department of Public Welfare has decided not to fund this particular home.

This doesn't make sense, economically or morally. If drug-addicted women who are looking for help don't get it, they end up on the street and eventually in jail or in a hospital where it costs the state far more money to care for them. Their children end up in foster care, in therapy, and in court, eventually so messed up themselves that they wind up in trouble, too.

And all this trouble costs big bucks - far more than $84 a day. Celeste House isn't simply a lifeline for women in trouble; it's a lifeboat. It takes them away from their environment into the America of picture books: Wide, open spaces, sprawling lawns, big houses.

There are no tenements near Celeste House, no drug dealers on the next block, no crack houses, no constant temptation.

Blaise Flynn, the home's director, spent two years talking to women who lived on the streets, visiting every recovery program in the state, reading and researching and listening to what those addicted to and controlled by drugs said they needed and wanted, before she began to put this program together. It's been hard work, but a labor of love. You can tell by the way Flynn interacts with the people she has helped. You can tell by the comfortable feel of the place.

A message posted by the back door is the essence of what has been happening here: "Make something good grow from the bad times."

The women who've come here have all had bad times.

"If even one of the things that happened to them had happened to me, I'd be in therapy for 10 years," Flynn said.

Two graduates, now living with their children in apartments in Plainville, both drug free, plus the sole woman remaining at Celeste House talked a little about their bad times.

Each had a different story to tell; but the endings were the same. They began using drugs to fit in or to mask some pain or just to get high. When the high didn't happen with one drug, they went on to another, then to more of another, then to a combination of drugs. Drugs took over their lives. They would do anything to get them. They spent their food money on them. They fed their habit before their children. The drugs became their first love.

And yet it was their children who ultimately saved them, the fear that they would permanently lose these people who are theirs.

Dorese found herself on Christmas Day, 1992 on the streets with her kids. "It was below zero and we were all crying."

Christine's small daughter wandered out of a friend's apartment onto the street in the middle of the night looking for her mother, while Christine was out somewhere getting high.

Betty got to the point where she was feeding her son drugs so he'd go to sleep so she could get high.

The realization of what they were doing to their children was the impetus that gave each of these women a reason for trying to stop using. Celeste House gave them the opportunity.

Structure and a safe environment are the keys to Celeste House's success. The women live there with their children. They learn how to parent, budget, grocery shop, play, think, share, grow. They attend support meetings. They have responsibilities. They learn to interact with the community. Their children get counseling. Their babies get love.

On June 30 Celeste House will lock its doors.

"After 13 years of using I came here," Betty says. "Now I'm in college. I even made the Dean's List."

You have to wonder how many women like now Betty will never get a chance.