2025 advocacy piece

2 Untold Stories E ileen grew up with an uninvolved mother who had a drug addiction and introduced Eileen to opiates when she was 12 years old. A year later, after Eileen found her mother’s boyfriend dead from an overdose, she was taken away from her mother and brought to live with her father. “My father and his relatives introduced me to selling drugs. When I graduated, I was kicked out. So, I became homeless, lived in abandonment and ate out of dumpsters. I tried crack and heroin, and I was selling drugs,” she shared. After being in a physically abusive relationship, Eileen overdosed on heroin. Some time after the hospitalization, she was rescued from a suicide attempt by a police officer and moved into a sober living home. “That was when, for the first time that I can remember, I woke up without the desire to get high,” she said. Then, she became pregnant and the father of her child “could not handle it, so he disappeared.” “I felt like a failure. I didn’t know what to do. The last thing I wanted was to be in a shelter with my baby. I thought I had no way out. I was afraid I would revert to my old ways, taking drugs to escape. I was lost, afraid, alone, hopeless,” Eileen shared. A friend referred Eileen to the For My Baby and Me program, which is operated by Rescue Mission of Trenton, Catholic Charities, Diocese of Trenton, HomeFront and Trenton Health Team. She received housing, substance use treatment, and mental and medical health care. Today, Eileen is employed as the Ambassador for the For My Baby and Me program, and her one-year-old daughter Ellyanda is thriving. “I like who I am today. Before, I just wanted to run away from myself. I now see a whole different future,” Eileen said. “It is a blessing to be on the other side of all that turmoil. I get to be a woman of honor, dignity and grace, which I was not before. And my daughter gets to see that there is another way to live. While my daughter is truly a motivation, I didn’t get sober for her. I had to get sober for myself, so we could have the life that we now have together. And together, I know we will create new possibilities.”