Spiritual Fitness

Kelley’s Incredible Journey To Happiness: By William J. Koshelnyk | Photography by Todd Lancaster

Kelley had known a lot of pain and too little happiness. She had a father she never met, was sexually abused as a child, married at 15, and was a high school dropout with four children by the time she finished her teenage years. It’s no surprise that the primary comforts in her life were alcohol and drugs, which she saw as “a pain reliever, a happy time, and a cool way to die.”
But the pain kept coming back as the happy times became shorter and further apart. And she didn’t die. One autumn night in 1993, she found herself parked outside a convenience store, waiting to drive a person she loved away from an armed robbery he was committing inside.
Suddenly everything was worse. Far worse. She faced five to 15 years in prison as an accomplice in the robbery. But her real sentence was longer – and for a young mother, much more harsh. Her children were taken from her, and she could have no contact with them until each was 18 years old.
“I was out in the prison yard,” Kelley recalls, “and it was a beautiful spring day, when I got news that my kids were adopted. I felt my life come to an end, and I wanted to just lay down and die. I dropped to my knees, and I said, ‘God, please help me.’” Help came in the form of Mike Nunez, Permanent Deacon at her local parish, where Kelley had grown up. Mike made regular visits to the women’s correctional facility in Coldwater, and he met with her often.
“Deacon Michael is very talented at working with people,” Kelley observes. “We would have talks, and I’d ask him all these questions about my life and what I should do. He just turned the questions around on me. He made me think and find my own answers.”
Kelley had always believed in God, but aside from a few services at a local Baptist church, she’d had no real exposure to religion. In prison she attended Mass, invited by a Catholic inmate she’d watched reciting the rosary. She also became involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, started taking part in Bible study, and began to examine the circumstances that had brought her to her current situation.
Part of Kelly’s journey was exploring a new faith. Mike Nunez had put Kelley in touch with Barb Wilcox, director of the parish’s religious education programs, and they had corresponded. When she was out of prison, she met with Barb to discuss the Catholic Church and its conversion procedures. Barb explained the process of preparing for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), and Kelley, determined to give it a try, signed on as an enquirer during the 1997-98 cycle.
Kelley had many difficult personal issues to address during her conversion year, including some memory loss from her days of drug abuse, fear of driving a car (instilled by the traumatic experience of the robbery), and a deep self-consciousness that made it uncomfortable to share with others in the RCIA group. She took classes offered at the facility, earning a high school equivalency diploma. She also obtained certification in the food technology program and began working on the prison kitchen staff. “I descovered I had a real talent for cooking and I never knew it.
After a long and tumultuous relationship riddled with drugs and conflict, Kelley still describes her partner in crime as “my soulmate.” And she believes her conversion will not be fully accomplished until she has completely forgiven him. “I didn’t know he was going to rob that store until the last minute,” she insists, “but if God has forgiven me, I have to forgive him.”
She is encouraged by some signs that he has made progress in his own rehabilitation. For instance, she was surprised and delighted to learn that he has been participating in the same Bible study program she had pursued during her incarceration. She has visited him once at the prison where he’s being held and plans other visits to encourage him in his journey toward his own new life.
The one obstacle remaining for Kelley is the loss of her children. Barb Wilcox has explored whether there might be some way for Kelley to have contact with the kids, but that isn’t possible. The children have undergone extensive
therapy in an attempt to reverse the effects of living in a household dominated by drugs and the constant threat of chaos and violence. It will be up to the children to contact her, if they so decide when they come of age. Kelley faces at least two years before she can hope to see even her oldest daughter, who is currently 16.
The reality poses its own challenge to Kelley’s ability to forgive. Originally, she had been promised that her mother could have custody of the children during her prison sentence. But the case was reassigned to a different social worker without Kelley being advised, and the decision was rescinded. “It’s like a mother whose children have been kidnapped,” she reflects painfully. “She just sits in the window wondering where they are and how they’re doing.”
But Kelley accepts responsibility for the part she played in that situation. And her newfound Catholic faith gives her hope that she can make amends.
“You have to break the cycle,” she says adamantly. “Some people are beaten as children, and then they grow up and beat their own kids.” Sexual abuse ran in Kelley’s family. “But at some point you’ve got to say, ‘This isn’t going to happen anymore.’ That’s what I’m doing. I’m forgiving, and I’m trying to break the cycle. I’ve been clean and sober for seven years, and now I’ve got God to help me stay that way.”

For more information on addiction, call Bob LaPrad, Ph.D., Bishop’s Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs, at (517) 342-2513.
Or, for more information on joining the Catholic Church or on Bible study, call your local parish or log onto www.DioceseofLansing.org

By: William J. Koshelnyk
Originally Published: May/June 2000