Key points:
- Haleign Baker and Wendy Noe crossed paths at the Dove Recovery House for Women — one in recovery and the other a leader.
- One of the major supporters of Dove House is St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis.
- Baker says she is on the mend after counseling at Dove House.
Her T-shirt declares “My Life’s in Ruins.” Once, it was true.
“If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” says Haleign Baker, 22, with a rueful smile. “Yeah, that’s how I feel.”
Substance use, violence and prison once dominated Baker’s life. On this day, safe and relaxed in an easy chair at Dove Recovery House for Women, she seems the picture of serenity.
But chaotic memories are never far away, dating back to when she was a toddler.
“I remember one time my mom was sitting in a rolly chair,” she said. “I was really young and I’m not really sure what my grandma was mad about. But my grandma just hauled off and hit her. She was probably just really fed up with my mom’s (stuff). My mom had four kids and my grandma was taking care of all of them.”
That was a normal day in Baker’s family.
“The police were always at my house,” she said. “In my (Greenfield) neighborhood, we were the white trash family.”
Dove Recovery House, a community of 50 or so women fighting addictions, is a much more joyful atmosphere. Among its major supporters is St. Luke’s United Methodist Church.
The day a reporter visited, a birthday party was happening, with singing, cake and presents. It felt like a carefree gathering of an extended family, which it kind of is.
Wendy
Wendy Noe, in her office near the room where the party is happening, runs Dove House with a potent combination of corporate smarts and empathy for women who want to turn their lives around. Instead of quoting quarterly earnings report results, she sings the praises of the women she calls her “doves.”
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But she is as tough as any hard-charging executive.
“I expect the best because our doves deserve the best,” said Noe, who a few years back replaced three-quarters of the staff because she was dissatisfied with their efforts.
“We’re a free program,” she pointed out. “They can stay with us for up to two years, and we provide individual therapy and group therapy. We provide classes in management life skills like financial literacy, job readiness, healthy relationships, faith-based programming, anything that we can to just throw at them to get them healthy and stable to leave the house with a 70% success rate.”
Noe graduated from Marion University, a small Catholic institution, with a degree in communications and the expectation she would go into public relations.
“I had to have an internship my senior year and so I started interning at a local domestic violence shelter,” she said. “That’s where I fell in love with nonprofit and women’s issues.
“I was raised by a single woman, a single mom and her twin sister, so I always just felt compelled to help other women.”
When she arrived, Dove House had an annual budget of $250,000, six staff members and was housing 23 women. Nine years later, a staff of 36 employees oversees the care of 55 women, with an annual budget of $3 million.
Haleign
Baker briefly attended Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (before the school split into two separate entities), and her dream was to become a nurse.
“School was always my dream,” Baker said. “I was always the very smart kid. A lot of my teachers I had a little bit of trouble with because I was always talking.
“They were like, ‘She talks too much, but she’s a joy to have in class.’”
Then she started drinking alcohol and getting into fights.
Despite that, with her grandmother’s help, she got into college.
“I started school in the fall of 2019, and I got pregnant with my daughter in November of 2019,” she said.
She quit school and moved back in with her grandmother, with whom she says she “doesn’t have the best relationship.”
“So I guess I was drinking one night, and I guess I pulled her off the couch by her hair,” Baker said. “I don’t remember this.”
The police arrived and arrested her and the Indiana Department of Child Services took custody of her daughter.
“They took me to jail,” she said. She was charged with domestic violence in the presence of a child.
She got out on pretrial release but couldn’t move back in with her grandmother.
“I was homeless… and I just lost it. I started drinking and doing more stuff, and that’s when I ended up on pills. I was living with people I shouldn’t be living with, and every time I would get so close to getting her (daughter) back, something would happen and I would have to move out.”
She did two stints in jail, and the father of her daughter was awarded custody.
When Baker was close to leaving prison, her probation officer asked her if she would like to live at Dove House. She agreed to do it.
“The ladies that I talked to who had previously been here really loved it,” she said. “They have lots of programs.
“I have a 3-year-old,” she added. “I just really wanted to be somewhere where (she) could come and be here with me. She comes every weekend.”
Wendy
For Baker and women like her who find their way to Dove House, the facility is the only feasible place to get help kicking their addictions.
“The number one reason people don’t receive treatment for substance use is cost, so there’s a benefit to them to be introduced to Dove House to get those services,” Noe said.
“Many of the women here come with nothing except for the clothing on their backs, and they are extremely distrustful,” she said.
The counselors try to counter the idea that Dove House is a place where they are just serving out their sentence.
“What we do here is so much different,” Noe said. “We love them until they can love themselves. That’s our motto here.”
One key point is getting the doves to stop looking at their addictions as “a moral failing, a personal choice,” Noe said. “The evidence shows that addiction affects the brain, its chemical makeup.”
According to Noe, the average age the residents of the Dove House pick up their addiction is 13.
“Now, if you have children, you know that most children don’t pick up and decide they’re going to be heroin addicts or methamphetamine addicts,” she said.
“There’s something that comes before that, and that’s trauma. … Addiction brings them to Dove House, but trauma brings them to addiction.”
Nearly all Dove House residents suffer from trauma, and 90% of them have experienced sexual abuse, Noe said.
“If you don’t identify that trauma and work through that trauma, then we’re going to see repeating behavior,” Noe said. “Science shows that at the age you start using drugs or alcohol, your brain stops maturing, so we have a house full of 13- or 14-year-olds,” and it usually takes about six months of treatment “for the lights to come back on.”
“Lack of time is our greatest enemy,” she said. “So if we can’t get through to them and help them here, we’re going to lose them back out there.”
If they fail, former residents are welcome to come back and try again.
“Our doors are open after a client leaves our program,” she said. “This is where our family will always be their family. Once a dove, always a dove. They’re always welcome to come back, even if they’ve relapsed.”
Haleign
Baker thinks the program has worked for her.
“I was never going to stop,” she said. “I would have never come here on my own. Just because of ignorance and stubbornness.”
Her dream of college is back on her to-do list.
“I just gave (school) up before, because nobody is going to want me or think I’m good enough,” Baker said. “I’m so grateful that (coming to Dove House) happened, even though I’m sad that I missed so much time.”
Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.
