SECOND CHANCES –

June 10, 2021 – In prison, Celeste has thrown herself into helping other women live lives deserving of a second chance. Now 50, she won’t be free until she is 71 – unless she gets a second chance herself.”he told me she was going shopping and never came back. I remember finding presents in a hall closet that she’d wrapped for Christmas, but it was summer. Daddy was so sad and emotional, then he got really sick. I think he had hepatitis. Aunt Cindy came and brought stews for me to feed him and I rolled joints for him so he could get better.”  About a year later, she explains now, Celeste’s mother sent her sister’s husband to kidnap her and bring her to Texas. “I was traumatized by the fact that Daddy didn’t know where I was and that he would be worried about me. It was so bizarre. I felt like a squatter living with my mother and her new husband and child. Sometimes Mother would sleep late and forget to pick me up from school.”

She found solace with her grandparents. “Their house became my safe space. My grandmother and I would stay up on Saturday nights, sneaking into the kitchen and having a bowl of vanilla ice cream with a pinwheel. We would lay in bed and she would tell me all about her childhood and her life in the 1930s.” But in her teen years, that comfort slipped away as Celeste began to feel more insecure and fragile, culminating in a terrible event. At age 15, she was raped by the brother of a boy she knew.

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