Born Free
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By LIZ MAPLES
lizm@amnews.com
In 14 months, Natalie Resendiz went from struggling single mother to crack-addicted prostitute. Near the end of her wild ride, she was living in Ohio with other addicts and was pregnant with her fourth child.
One Saturday she had stayed up all night using drugs and having sex to score more. She decided to go to church. She took a dress from the closet of a girl she was staying with, grabbed a dusty Bible off the shelf and caught a church bus.
She sat in a pew, with a hole in her dress, wondering if the man next to her could smell her unbathed body.
"I said, 'I'm trying Lord,'" she recalls.
When the preacher made the altar call, Resendiz didn't go because she knew she was going back to the crack house.
A few days later, she decided she would call the one true friend she had in the world, Gerardo, an old boyfriend.
Before she got to the corner pay phone, though, a man stopped her.
"What are you doing? ... What's going on tonight?" he asked.
He told Resendiz he was a dealer and could hook her up, if she hooked him up with sex first. She got in the car.
When they got to his apartment, she said it felt weird, like it was a set-up. He left the room. There were no pictures. The furnishings were bare.
When he came back, he offered her a handful of cleaning powder and told her it was crack. She refused it, and he began to rape and strangle her.
Resendiz had flashes before her eyes of her sons reading a newspaper clipping with the headline, "Pregnant prostitute found dead."
She started repeating, "In the name of Jesus."
He didn't relent. Then she told him her water had just broken. He got up, and she walked out alive.
She came upon a man in a white pickup truck. He offered to bring her home but first made her wait at the hospital for 90 minutes while he watched for his wife, whom he thought was cheating on him.
"I was in disbelief that some loony had just picked me up. ... I was in disbelief that I just wanted to get high."
When the man finished his stakeout, he raped her, too.
Another man picked her up and dropped her off at the crack house. She told the people there what had happened, and they refused to give her a fix.
She realized that this was hell.
"There is no caring in crack. There is no love in crack."
A few days later, there was a knock at the door. It was the police coming to take her away. She was already on probation, and her sister had turned her in for using again.
The first day, she rambled, yelled and accused police of abusing her. On the second day, she felt peace. "I embraced prison like salvation."
Long journey to recovery
Resendiz had turned to crack to numb the pain of giving up her third son to adoption. The decision, she said, was the best one she ever made because she knew she couldn't take care of him. Still, the adoption tore her apart.
In her crack-induced haze, she lost everything - her car, a good job, the best coat and pair of shoes she had ever owned, and her pet fish, Herman. More precious than any of this, she had to give her other two sons to their grandparents.
A year and two months later, she found herself in prison, in withdrawal and seven months pregnant. She would have to give up another son. She didn't have family who would take him, and her only choice, she thought, was to give him to the state.
God kept her going.
"I knew God was with me. I knew he had something worked out."
A social worker in prison told her about the Galilean Home, a ministry founded by Jerry and Sandy Tucker that keeps babies for incarcerated women. She would get to see her baby once a week and when she got out they would bring him to her.
"Praise the Lord for the Galilean Home," she said.
Giving up her newborn son in the hospital brought back all the memories of giving up her other son for adoption. She would walk in the prison yard and mistake the quacking of ducks for her baby crying. She would wake up in her cell in the middle of the night thinking she heard him.
She wanted to name her newborn Isaiah, but she said God told her to name him Jacob. When she looked up the name Jacob, she discovered it means "He who supplants," or takes the place of another.
Resendiz feels the baby is God's way of giving her another chance to be a mother.
She enrolled in a drug-treatment program in prison and lived for the once-a-week visit when the Galilean Home brought the babies.
She said the feeling of watching her baby arrive at the prison was indescribable. She got letters about him from the volunteers, and once they brought Jacob to sit for a portrait.
"It was like the best thing that had happened in the world."
Making a new life
When she got out of prison, she went to a halfway house run by the Salvation Army.
She said her recovery was not miraculous. She went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings religiously and started going to church. She learned the hard way how to look for addiction's red flags, to not fall into the trap of one more hit. She said she had to learn how to totally give herself over to God.
Now she has a new job, an apartment of her own and Jacob. She leads Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at the Salvation Army.
When she was back on her feet, she made that call to her old boyfriend, Gerardo. They began to visit, and after a few months he told her he wanted a DNA test to see if Jacob was his son.
Resendiz said there was a million-to-one chance the baby was his because when they were dating, she sometimes turned 10 tricks a night.
The results shocked her. Jacob is undoubtedly Gerardo's son.
In September she and Gerardo married in Mexico, and she is expecting a honeymoon baby. Faith Esparanza will be her first girl.
If it weren't for the Galilean Home, Resendiz said, she probably would still be discouraged, hopeless and in pain.
"I bet I would not have changed too much."
Thinking about the mission, the volunteers, she said, "I could almost draw myself to tears thinking about it ... it was such a blessing."