Getting Mum back is the best present
*stock image
“This Christmas will be the best, the best ….” says Mandy and maybe because it’s too painful to say “ever” she leaves the word unsaid but hanging in the air.
She’s 51 and sits nervously, yet determinedly, in one of the many counselling rooms tucked away in the rabbit warren of the City Mission’s headquarters in Hereford Street.
This Christmas will be the first in decades she is sober. She is going to celebrate it with her daughters in Australia who she loves more than anything.
“I want them to see me sober, I want to be around them and just experience being with them,” she says. She has sent photos and one daughter said ‘oh you look so healthy and good and happier - you are smiling. This is the mum we’ve always wanted’,” Mandy says proudly.
“They have always loved me but now they confide in me, they send me photos… because they are going to get a sensible answer. I’m like a mother should be with her kids” Mandy says.
Her drinking started young and continued through marriage and children but problems escalated with depression and anxiety and she found herself isolated, homeless, and spent time in our women’s emergency night shelter. All the time she was losing touch with family and friends, lost in her shrinking world of misery.
About three years ago she broke down realising she couldn’t live like this anymore. That was rock bottom and the start of her recovery.
Here in our counselling room she is surrounded by City Mission staff that opened their hearts and doors to help her. A few metres away is Thorpe House where she stayed to detox. Over the road is our foodbank where staff gave her emergency food and our new transitional housing building where she stayed for months supported by our staff while she re-learned how to live again with confidence. And today she is in the Wahine Whai Ora women’s recovery management day programme which wraps her in support from other women and our counsellors.
She has a new home, she is sober and she is happy.
“I sit in my house at night and pinch my leg, like how did I get here? After all that time, all those years and years of living the way I was and you know I love everybody at the Mission, I can’t speak highly enough, they have all contributed to me changing my life.”
“I’m like a mother should be with her kids.”
This is a happy Christmas story but it has come after a long journey of recovery where the Mission, and the supporters who fund us, have walked alongside Mandy the whole way.
Sadly, there are thousands of other Canterbury people who will need our help if they are also going to find some relief and hopefully some joy this Christmas.
Christmas should be a celebration, but for many people it is the most stressful, lonely, unhappy time of the year because with life already very hard the extra demands and expectations push them into crisis.
Christchurch needs us all year round, but we are needed most of all at Christmas when we step up to help people to get through the Christmas season - especially families with children – children who don’t understand why their home is so empty and life is so different to the others they see all around them in the media.
This beautiful handwritten letter of thanks from a young girl of 9 years, whose family got food from us, shows how much it means when the Mission (through our supporters’ generosity) helps a family in need. She wrote:
“Dear City Mission, thank you for everything you’ve done for me and my family. Thank you for helping out with other families and trying your best to help them. I want to thank you personally too.”
And how touching that she thanked us on behalf of other families too.
We will be making a huge effort over the week before Christmas, to give families who we know are in the greatest need of a special Christmas food parcel. Our foodbank will provide 1,800 Christmas hampers and they are an enhanced food parcel to see clients through three days with extra treats like chicken, ham, sausages, pavlovas, biscuits, Christmas chocolates, jelly, custard, gravy and then whatever fresh produce we have to make Christmas Day special.
This will help feed at least 6,000 people - many of them young children like the lovely writer of that letter.
All our other services – our addiction counsellors, emergency shelter staff, social workers, budget advisors, community development workers, day programme staff, social enterprise staff – will be working hard to give struggling people in Christchurch the best Christmas they can have as they face the season of the greatest stress. Those who are overwhelmed and only just surviving find Christmas a tough time of the year.
*Name and image changed to protect privacy