This year, Mother’s Day will be especially meaningful for a Springfield area woman recovering from drug addiction.
“I am actually in my kids’ life, this year, so that’s wonderful,” said Kayla Richardson, 31, of Rochester. She is pregnant with her fifth child. “My mother is three days clean from active addiction and is on the wait list at Gateway (Foundation). That’s huge this year, so hopefully I am going to have a clean mother for Mother’s Day.”
Richardson, herself a Gateway client, said addiction has been a family affair; her two sisters are also addicts. But Richardson wants to put drugs behind her. She is working to become a counselor to help others.
“Internal motivation, for sure,” is the secret says Mercedes Kent, clinical supervisor of Gateway’s outpatient programs in Springfield. “It’s a simple program for complicated people.”
Back to Richardson: she said before she got clean, she never noticed how blue the sky is.