After years of drug abuse, Shelley Collins finally sober
BY ELLYN COUVILLION
Advocate staff writer
March 25, 2012
0 Comments “I was numbing the pain, is what set off the addiction. I didn’t have to feel nothing; I had this baby to care for. I had a salon to run.” shelley collins, former addict
PORT ALLEN — Shelley Moses Collins, 47, had an extraordinary childhood.
Gifted with a powerful singing voice that she used as her talent in childhood beauty pageants, she went on to become something of a little country music star in South Louisiana, opening for such acts as Barbara Mandrell, Hank Williams Jr. and Willie Nelson.
But Collins’ world began to change when she was in her 20s. For the next two decades, she would follow only one dream almost exclusively — where to find more cocaine.
“I was so consumed with the addiction, I lost my way,” Collins said.
She’s found it again, though.
On Feb. 29 of this year, speaking to a reporter, Collins knew precisely that she had been clean for two years, eight months and four days.
She marks the 25th of every month as the anniversary of her recovery, after time spent in rehabilitation at the nonprofit Hope Center in Marksville.
“People who are hopeless need to know there is life after addiction,” Collins said.
“I want people to know that the grace of God is the reason I’m here, and he saved me to help others, to give them hope. I was so hopeless at one time,” said Collins.
She’s back in business as a beauty salon owner — a career that cocaine had taken away from her — with her younger sister Sharmon Schexnaildre and has formed a 12-step support group in the Chenal community in Jarreau.
Alongside her at the support group meetings is her husband of five years, Carter Collins, who followed his wife’s example, went through rehab and walked away from alcohol and cocaine.
The two had known each other many years before they married and had been through some of their worst times together.
“We were on the streets so long together,” said Carter Collins, a commercial and residential carpenter.
He remembers what it was like when his wife left rehab more than two years ago.
“When I saw her, I saw the clean in her face, in her eyes. It was like night and day,” Carter Collins said.
“‘I can see the change in you. I can’t get over it,’” he told her.
Carter Collins, still using drugs at that time, said he knew, “She’s going to come back home and I’m going to pull her back down. I love her so much. You know what? I’m going to get what she got.”
And he went into rehab.
Shelley Collins knows she is fortunate to have many people who, like Carter, love her.
Her remarkably unflappable daughter, Shelbe Collins, 22, is one of them.
Shelbe Collins has been her mother’s strength but also her unflinching truth bearer over the years.
Shelbe Collins remembers the time when her mother came home with a bullet in her leg. Shelley Collins had gotten caught in the middle of a drug deal gone bad, and her mother, a nurse, had removed the bullet and nursed Shelley back to health.
Shelbe Collins remembers the time her mother’s parole officer came to the house and roused her mother from bed to return her to prison.
“I was there. I felt something was up and faked sick” to stay home from school that day, Shelbe Collins said.
Shelley Collins missed Shelbe’s high school graduation. Afterward, Shelbe Collins wore her cap and gown to visit her mom in prison.
Shelbe Collins remembers when she and her brother lived with their mom in Missouri, before returning to Louisiana.
Shelley Collins was using cocaine in Missouri, but was still managing things.
“In Missouri, she was an active mother. In Missouri, I remember her taking care of me ... it hadn’t consumed everything yet,” Shelbe Collins said.
That would happen after Shelbe Collins and her mom and brother, Sheldon, now 15, returned to Louisiana more than 10 years ago.
Coming home
Shelley Collins, who grew up in Jarreau, and lives there today, said she first used cocaine when she was 19, but she didn’t become addicted until her mid-20s when she was a single mother raising her infant daughter.
Shelley Collins had been eight months pregnant when Shelbe’s father left; she never saw him again, she said.
“When Shelbe was born, and I looked at her, and her daddy never came, I never cried. I had this baby to care for. I was numbing the pain, is what set off the addiction. I didn’t have to feel nothing; I had a baby to care for. I had a salon to run,” Shelley Collins said.
When her daughter was 2, Shelley Collins one day put her toddler in the car seat, left her business, and headed out of state to where her parents, Gene and Norma Moses, then were, in Beaumont, Texas, for her father’s work as a traveling electrician.
It began a pattern for Shelley Collins, who would follow her parents to new locations around the country for several years.
“I was running and taking myself where I went,” she said.
After Beaumont, Shelley and her daughter lived in Colorado — where Shelley managed to get her electrician’s license and work on construction of the Denver International Airport — and also Missouri, where Shelley had her son.
For both of her pregnancies, Shelley Collins entered rehab and stayed off cocaine until the babies were born, she said. She never used drugs in front of her children, she said.
In Missouri, Shelley Collins cooked crack for the local drug kingpins, who, to safeguard their dope, would lock the basement she worked in, she said.
Somehow, she managed to leave her parents mostly in the dark, she said.
“I would lie so much. They were clueless for so long,” Shelley Collins said.
Then Shelley Collins returned with her two children to Louisiana. Not long afterward, in West Baton Rouge Parish, she walked into a sting operation, looking to buy some crack, and was arrested on a felony, intent to possess cocaine.
It was the first in a series of stints in jail for Shelley Collins — sentences of 2 1/2 years, 12 months, nine months and six months — that followed after she’d fail mandated drug screening on parole, and go back to jail.
Before she entered the Hope Center, she was facing five years of prison if she violated parole again.
Shelley Collins went to five different treatment centers over those years. Her sisters, Sharmon Schexnaildre and her older sister, Stephanie Emrick, would ask the judge to extend her sentences, so at least she wouldn’t be using, she said.
“We knew she was such a good person ... we hoped one day she would get past this,” Schexnaildre said.
“I’m not supposed to be here. Jail saved my life,” Shelley Collins said.
“I’d pray to God, ‘Stop me!’” she said.
It seemed oftentimes that the jail sentences were an answer to that prayer, Shelley Collins said.
“In addictive addiction, people are selfish, dishonest, unkind to others, inconsiderate and self-centered,” she said.
“Today, I have a God-directed life,” she said.
Once when she was in jail, Shelley Collins learned that an old family friend, a cousin’s grandmother who Shelley loved very much, had died.
On her deathbed, the woman had said, “Help Shelley Moses.”
That stayed with Shelley over the years.
“It knocked me to my knees that someone dying had so much hope,” she said.
The woman’s granddaughter worked at Hope Center.
The turning point for Shelley Collins came when her daughter told her, “You’re not going to come to my wedding.”
“I was always there for her, but I always told her how it was,” said Shelbe Collins, who’s apprenticing these days in her mother’s hair salon in Port Allen, The Hair Place.
“I wasn’t enabling, by any means. I was serious about it,” said Shelbe Collins, who is married to Adam Collins (no relation to her stepfather), and is mother of 7-month-old Lila and stepmother of 9-year-old Emma.
It was Shelbe Collins who drove her mother to the Hope Center, after her mom had told her, “I can’t live like this,” Shelbe Collins said.
“It was the first time she ever wanted to ask for help. I could finally hear it in her voice,” Shelbe Collins said.
Shelley Collins stayed in the Hope Center for 28 days, then went to a transitional, “sober-living” house in Breaux Bridge for three months.
She was able to go on leave from Hope Center to attend her daughter’s wedding.
“She is a walking miracle. I feel like my prayers were answered,” Shelbe Collins said.
“My sobriety is always first, because without it, I’m not a mom,” Shelley Collins said.
People interested in learning more about the 12-step support group that Shelley Collins leads can call her at The Hair Place, (225) 382-2008.
Shelley Collins still sings, often as a soloist at her church, Sharon Baptist Church in Erwinville.
“I’m nothing on my own. Every day before I leave the house, I ask God to direct my way,” Shelley Collins said.
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