Tracey’s Triumph : Mother of 4 Overcomes Addiction, Abuse to Land Job, Move Out of Shelter

Tracey Florez cried the day she and her four children moved into a Camarillo homeless shelter, lugging plastic garbage bags stuffed with everything they owned--toys, dishes, clothes.

Life could hardly get worse. After a decade of drug use, bad choices and beatings delivered by a sorry string of boyfriends and husbands, she’d hit bottom.

Now she was intent on turning her life around, but from where she stood, it looked like a long way up.

“I’m sick of living like this,” Florez, 32, said after moving into the RAIN project facility, a county-operated transitional living center near Camarillo Airport. “I’m doing a fresh new start this very minute. This is going to work, I know it.”

She paused for emphasis, as if talking to herself. “It has to.”

As bad as things looked that day in July, Florez had actually begun her slow crawl back to a normal life 19 months earlier.

That’s when she decided to get clean and sober. And that’s when she entered a program for battered women in San Luis Obispo County after her latest boyfriend threw a knife at her through the car window as she drove away with her children. From there, she entered a drug rehabilitation program in Ventura and finally the RAIN shelter in Camarillo.

While the first two programs put her on the right path, she hoped the Camarillo shelter would permanently pluck her from the chaos of her past, providing a safe, stable place where she could build a new life for herself and her children.

This is the story of her journey, of a struggle to atone for mistakes and break free of the violence that swallowed her whole. It is also a story about a lot of other people who helped along the way.

And it demonstrates just how fragile a process recovery is, how it must be renewed on a daily basis, when your life has dangled by the thinnest of threads.

Memories of Abuse, Neglect

The long, slow slide to Camarillo is easy enough to trace.

Florez was born in Burbank and raised in North Hollywood until age 12, when her family moved to Lancaster.

The oldest of four children, her earliest memories include watching police haul her father to jail after he tried to strangle her mother. She remembers picking through garbage cans for food after being locked out of the house by her mother, who had a new boyfriend and didn’t want to be bothered. She remembers that her mother drank a lot and didn’t take care of her kids.

Florez said she looked for escape early on, numbing herself with alcohol and drugs in high school. At 17, she took her first hit of methamphetamine and never wanted to be without it.

It made everything that was a drag recede behind a crystalline buzz.

She managed to graduate in 1984 from Quartz Hill High School in Lancaster and married her high school sweetheart two years later. They had one child, Carolyn, now 12. They also had a stormy relationship. He would frequently choke her, sometimes until she passed out. To this day, her vision is blistered by black spots, a result of blood vessels that burst during strangulation.

Florez left him in 1989, moved up to Tehachapi in Kern County and fell in with a man who beat her even worse. She stayed with him six years and had two more children, James, 7, and Joshua, 5. Continually on the verge of running, she finally worked up the courage to gather up her three kids and leave. She sought refuge in a battered women’s shelter in Nova Scotia, Canada, where they had moved because her husband had family there.

Her first real stretch of sobriety came then, and lasted 18 months. During that time, she bounced from shelter to shelter and city to city, finally moving in with her relatives in San Luis Obispo County in mid-1996. By the end of the year, she was drinking again, using drugs and, as always, finding abusive men to torment her.

“I just had to go for it,” Florez said of that time. “My therapist would shake me by the shoulders, begging me not to do it. But it’s all I knew.”

It wasn’t until she got pregnant with her youngest child--until she got really scared that the drinking and drugs would hurt her baby--that she finally decided she’d had enough.

She checked into a battered women’s shelter in October 1997 and stayed four weeks before moving to the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Ventura. She was there eight months, giving birth to a blue-eyed boy named Joseph, before moving to the Camarillo shelter run by River-dwellers Aid Intercity Network, or RAIN, last July.

Of all her regrets, her deepest revolve around the damage she did to her children. There were times when she was so blinded by alcohol and drugs that she hit her kids or neglected them.

But the worst thing she did was hang on to violent men. Her kids saw it all: the screaming, the beatings. The oldest is in therapy trying to deal with it.

“I work every day of my life to be a better mom,” she said, her thick black hair hanging like a protective shroud over the baby, nestled deep in her arms. “I plan on fixing the damage I’ve done on my children from the past, that’s my main thing. Like they say in 12 steps, make amends. These are my amends.”

A Gradual Adjustment

During the early days at the shelter, Florez spent most of her time in the wood-paneled room she shared with her four children, a living space small and spare, dominated by three narrow beds with thin, hard mattresses.

She taped a tattered picture of Jesus to the wall above her bed so she could hit her knees in prayer. She did that a lot, even as the image slowly became surrounded by children’s artwork, including a paper lizard that appeared to be crawling up the wall.

She kept to herself. She spent her days watching her older kids play at the pool and her nights reading them bedtime stories until they fell asleep. She also spent hours rocking her baby and singing him lullabies, usually the old Carpenters song “Close to You.”

“She’s like a lot of battered women who come to us, in that it takes them a little bit longer to become adjusted,” said Diana Vogelbaum, manager of the shelter housed in an old Fire Department building in the shadow of the Camarillo Airport.

As she came out of her shell, she started taking advantage of all the services the RAIN shelter had to offer.

The shelter plugged her into counseling and continued her drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Shelter workers shuttled her to medical appointments and job interviews and took care of her older children after school when she was busy.

They tested her for drugs to make sure she was staying clean and forced her to save part of every paycheck after she got work. But perhaps the most significant step was landing a job.

About three months into her stay, she was cleaning her room when she heard a radio spot for a new program at Oxnard College that helped poor people find jobs.

She applied and went to work. Despite some early fumbling, she slipped easily into a new world of computer technology and secretarial tasks. She started dressing up, discarding her usual shorts and jeans for two-piece pant suits.

She even moved differently. She held her head a little higher as she became accustomed to this new world, where at first no one knew she was homeless, and they certainly didn’t know of her troubles with drugs and men with nasty tempers.

“It was like living two lives for a while,” she said. “They didn’t know me at all, but people treated me with respect. That’s what I learned. We do deserve respect.”

She didn’t stop there. She figured that since she was working at Oxnard College, she might as well sign up for classes, heaping a full load of course work--sociology, business and computer science--on top of everything else she had going.

Overnight, her life became more hectic than she ever imagined it could. Her days started before 6 a.m. She got the kids ready for school and out the door. She went to work and then attended school herself. Each night, while other students headed to houses and apartments, she returned to the shelter.

Her nights were filled with Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and counseling sessions for herself and her children. She put the kids to sleep, did her homework and finally collapsed into bed.

Sometimes she was so overwhelmed with all the responsibility that she cried herself to sleep. Then she woke up the next morning and did it all over again.

“There was no time to be tired,” she said. “There was just too much ground to make up.”

Ready to Move On

Eventually, she made up enough ground that she was ready to leave the shelter. She grew tired of being told what to do and when to do it. She yearned for freedom and financial independence and believed she was ready for both.

Two months ago, she plunked down nearly $1,000 in savings from her computer job for a two-bedroom apartment in midtown Ventura. She packed her belongings--in boxes this time instead of trash bags--and prepared to step out on her own.

As word spread that Florez had gotten her own apartment, friends at Oxnard College gathered things she would need for her new place. By moving day, they had collected truckloads of every household item imaginable. This time they wouldn’t fit in plastic trash bags.

They gave her a couch, a coffee table, a recliner, a rocking chair, a television and an entertainment center. She got tables, dressers, lamps and chairs. She got sheets and bedding, not to mention a couple of beds and more bath towels than she will ever need.

“She’s going to have to have a garage sale when this day is done, this place is going to be so packed,” said Linda Porter, a secretary at Oxnard College who helped organize the collection drive. “I’m so happy with what everybody has done. People are really pulling through.”

As more furniture was moved into the apartment, Florez’s boys promptly jumped up and down on the newly arrived mattresses and wore new stainless steel pots on their heads.

Their mother watched it all with an amazed smile, hardly believing her good fortune.

“It’s just that you want to help her because you know she doesn’t expect it,” said Diane Stephens, another Oxnard College secretary who mobilized the drive. “I really want her to know that for whatever reason, there are people out there who really care about her.”

Florez said she knows that now. While the shelter provided the backbone for her recovery, it was her friends at the college who made her feel that she was worth something.

She knows she has a long way to go. But she also knows she won’t go it alone, that people are ready and willing to help.

“This is hardly over; it’s only the beginning,” Florez said of her journey. She’s now thinking of a career in social work so that she can help others in similar situations.

Unlike in the past, she trusts her recovery this time. That’s easier to do when you have people to support you.

“This really feels like solid ground,” she said. “I won’t fall off; I can’t. The kids need it. I need it.”