It’s not a matter of whether life is going to get crazy; it’s a matter of when. And when that storm comes, you have to have a strong foundation if you’re going to weather it.
That’s the message that Melissa Tatman and Kira Hoskins shared with female inmates at the Brown County jail, and others in addiction recovery at a Battlefield for Freedom meeting.
That foundation includes having a strong support system. It means going to recovery meetings. It means “eliminating the nouns” — people, places and things from their addicted life.
Even at 16 years sober, Tatman, a grandmother of 13, has to check herself. “I don’t go places I know will be dangerous. I stay away from toxic situations,” she said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]At a March visit to the jail, Hoskins and Tatman wrote their phone numbers down for a woman who was about to be released. They encouraged her to reach out so they can help keep her on the path to sobriety.
“I walk around thinking about the things I’ve done,” the woman told them.
“Push through those thoughts,” Tatman responded. “You can’t hold on to those thoughts. The more we dwell on it, we’ll go back (to using).”
Hoskins is recovering from a methamphetamine addiction. She recently stepped up to help others recover, attending meetings with Tatman.
“There is recovery. It’s real,” Hoskins said.
The jail recovery ministry is way to help people start that journey while they are clean and their brains are starting to function normally again.
“No one sits in there (jail) and says, ‘Well, I can’t wait to get out of here and screw my life up again.’ They all really want something different because they are clean,” Tatman said.
Sometimes, it doesn’t work out that way.
“Here in Brown County, it’s a small town, so we know (when) they’ve already called their old boyfriend or gone back to an unhealthy relationship, which is a reason for changing your nouns,” Tatman said.
“You get really hopeful for people. … This could be their last stretch in jail, the last time they use. You’re always hanging on to that hope that this is the time.
“Sometimes, I pray them back in jail.”
‘My whole life changed’
Tatman’s story began at age 17, when she ran away from an abusive home and got married. She and her ex-husband became addicted to alcohol, “which opened the door to drug use,” she said.
“Cocaine, crack, just pretty much everything. I only had a chance to do heroin one time and I passed it up,” Tatman said, adding a fist pump and “Praise Jesus.”
“But it wasn’t so readily available then, because you’re talking late ’80s or early ’90s.”
When she quit drinking in 2002, all of her other drug use stopped because her circles changed.
“My whole life changed,” she said.
“That was the end of my 17-year-long marriage, so I had to part ways. He is still an addict and still in active use, so obviously it was the obvious right decision.”
When she quit drinking, she was living in Minnesota. “Drinking was the recreation up there. It’s just what you do. Within four miles of my house there were three bars. I was 20 minutes from a grocery store, (but) two-and-a-half minutes to three different bars,” she said.
“I had no real support, didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t have a driver’s license, so (recovery) meetings and those kinds of things weren’t an option. I just tapped into God and found my strength in Jesus. It just changed everything.”
Tatman and her current husband of 12 years, Gordon, moved to Indiana from Minnesota in 2006. Together, the couple has six children and 13 grandchildren, and they are raising three of those grandchildren now.
Tatman spent time twice in drug treatment centers: once when she admitted herself and the other when she attempted suicide.
In 2001, she did a 90-day stretch in the Decatur County jail.
“I didn’t want to live the life I was living,” she said.
She wrote a letter in jail about yearning to have a family that wasn’t hung over and going to bed as the sun rose on Sunday morning. Instead, she dreamed of a family who woke up to go to church on Sunday morning followed by dinner at her house.
“I wanted a real life. I was going to have that when I got out of jail. I was not going to go back,” she said.
About three weeks after writing that letter, Tatman was arrested with her husband again.
“The lady booking me into the jail the last time we were arrested together said, ‘You know he’s going to kill you, right?’ Then I sat there for five days and thought about it, which was the beginning of the end,” she said.
She quit drinking six months after leaving her husband. She went back to school and earned her GED, while raising three children on her own.
Two of those three children later struggled with addiction. Her youngest daughter, Samantha, has been in recovery for three years and is now attending nursing school. Samantha was one of the three speakers who shared their stories about addiction with Brown County High School students last fall.
Tatman is now raising her oldest daughter’s three children, including her 9-month-old son, who was born addicted to heroin. The Department of Child Services is working to reunite her daughter with the baby. The two other children, aged 12 and 10, will stay with Tatman until they turn 18, she said.
Within the last year, her oldest daughter had been administered Narcan, the drug that reverses an opioid overdose, eight times in about six months.
“That was a rough year,” she said.
That daughter is now over 90 days sober.
Using these life experiences, Tatman reaches out to those who need her through recovery meetings at the jail and at New Life church each week.
“I have had a lot of knowledge put into me that I didn’t use until I was ready to lay it all down,” she said.
‘Stay with it’
In the basement of New Life, 16 people from different walks of life gather in a circle. One man is wearing a “Sobriety is Sexy” T-shirt. His baby sleeps peacefully in a car seat next to him.
They’re there for the weekly Battlefield for Freedom meeting.
Tatman finishes making a pot of coffee to keep the group energized as the evening discussion starts. In a nearby room, children laugh through a game of tag while their parents talk about the struggle of addiction.
A friend of Tatman’s tells the group about his own battles with opioids.
“I don’t know where you’re at in your walk, but don’t give up,” he says.
“Stay with it. I went through withdrawals and it sucked.”
Pastor Tim Conboy enters the room. He, too, struggled with drug use in his past. “It’s a privilege to have you all here,” he tells the group. “I don’t know you all, but I love you. This is home.”
Battlefield for Freedom began after Tatman and her family stood up in church one Sunday to talk about their struggles with addiction. At the time, her oldest daughter had reunited with the father of one of her children, and they had gotten married. They also shared their stories.
Four years ago, Tatman and her husband took in that man who became their son-in-law. Tatman had just met him because he had been in prison most of his adult life. He lived with the family for two-and-a-half years.
Last June, he left the home when Tatman’s daughter gave birth to her son and Tatman was going to have the baby living with her full-time.
“It wasn’t his baby, and he had some pending court charges. He wasn’t going to pass background checks for DCS and all of that. I didn’t want the baby to be a trigger to him and put him back into a full-blown relapse,” she said.
“He died Aug. 15. He left at the end of June and was dead Aug. 15. He was shot and killed in Greensburg. It’s all drugs and alcohol. When he left, he relapsed, and then started doing what he had to do to survive and feed his habit.”
The video of his testimony to the New Life congregation was played at his funeral.
He wasn’t the first person Tatman has taken into her home. Living in Minnesota, she let the friends of her children stay with her when they were struggling. Two of them later died due to drugs or alcohol.
“It’s not good enough to just have these people in my life for a short time and not have more to give them, so I wanted to do more,” she said.
“There was a reason I feel like God’s sending these people into my life, and it wasn’t just so I could experience their death, so trying to help them experience life.”
This is why recovery ministry is important to her.
“I’ve always wanted a recovery house. I’ve always wanted to do it and I just didn’t know how. I finally felt like I had a platform. I could at least start a meeting. That’s how Battlefield came about,” she said.
“I had survived a lot of things, from sleeping with guns because we stole dope from the wrong people. It went from a very dangerous, scary life to this. Now I help addicts.
“We can hear each other’s stories and know we’re not an isolated case. We’re not crazy. We’re not so different from everybody else. … Our coping skill would be drug use, where (for) some people (it) might be eating or shopping or cussing,” she said.
“It just gives us a hope, hope of recovery.”
Within the Battlefield group, clean time varies from 16 years to weeks. Having people with years of clean time under their belt helps to inspire newcomers, Tatman said.
Meeting addicts in the middle of their journey allows Tatman to have a different perspective than their family or friends, especially if a relapse has occurred.
“They (addicts) come in and they are all, ‘My family is not recognizing my clean time. I’ve got three months clean time and nothing has really changed on the homefront with my parents,'” she said.
What family members might have a hard time seeing, the recovery group can, she said.
“That’s kind of what the meetings are for, because we haven’t invested into these people. We can just look at them and go, ‘So, you relapsed? Let’s get back up and try again,’ where the family goes, ‘Relapse? So, we’re going to do this again. This is where we’re going again. We’ve already been down this road and here we go again.’”
Meetings are a place of no judgment, she said.
“They’re looking for a place to fit in, and they aren’t getting the acceptance from their friends and family whose heart they have broken over and over again. … That’s what they get from the meetings: No judgment. It’s helped me keep it in perspective in dealing with my daughters and their addictions,” Tatman said.
The addictions that people are dealing with in the Battlefront group include mostly opiates, but also methamphetamine and alcohol. “Meth is not gone by any means,” Tatman said. “Alcohol is its own real struggle, because it’s socially acceptable and legal.”
The biggest challenge the members of her group face is returning to Brown County after getting clean, she said. She recently spoke with a woman in treatment in Florida who was wondering if she should return home to fight to get her 2-year-old child back.
“The baby hasn’t been with you since he was born, and he’s now 2. He is well taken care of and he’s somewhere where they are never going to exclude you from his life. Why risk being nothing to him and being dead if you can stay clean and stay there?” Tatman said.
“If you are already afraid to come back to Brown County, nothing good is going to come from it.”
At the end of the day, what keeps Tatman working in her recovery ministry? “Knowing I did it,” she said.
“If I can do it, anybody can.”
OTHER STORIES IN THIS SERIES:
Addicted and Dying: An introduction
‘Addiction works when it gets to hide’
‘#DoSomething movement uniting the community
OPINION: In the midst of addiction, there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’
Local churches reaching out as ‘spiritual hospitals’
Local task force aims to educate, prevent drug use
‘I judged so much. Then it happened to me.’
GUEST OPINION: The impact of opioid use on families
‘I want your mom, too’: Grandmother raising three grandchildren as daughter battles addiction
Hidden victims: Addiction’s effect on Brown County children
