HEALING TIME
Paula St. Germaine knows recovery takes more than 28 days
Paula St. Germaine can’t recall getting on a bus to British Columbia seven years ago with nothing but $20 and a bag of dirty clothes, but she remembers flashing images of a mountain range passing before her eyes.
After a year of what she refers to as a drug-induced psychosis, St. Germaine traded her welfare cheque for a ticket west — to a place where she knew one of her cousins had successfully obtained help.
What she found in Vancouver was a recovery facility where she was welcome to stay for a full year — a stark contrast to the 90-day maximum, 28- to 42-day average stay allotted in Saskatchewan residential drug rehab programs. She credits the length of her experience with finally giving her the time to regroup and find sobriety.
“I got off in Vancouver and I was dope sick. I thought, I can go to Main and Hastings and probably score a fix … or I could call my cousin who was in recovery,” St. Germaine said. “I surrendered. I asked for help.”
Flash forward to today, and St. Germaine is seven years into sobriety. She is a new graduate of an addictions counselling program, and is speaking on the marginalization, victimization and imprisonment of women for the Sallows Fry Conference at the University of Saskatchewan.
As one of four people who took part in the panel discussion, St. Germaine talked about her intent to open a long-term recovery centre in Saskatoon for women.
Although it’s only in the beginning stages of planning, St. Germaine’s proposed recovery centre would afford women — particularly women who have lost their children to protective services — the same opportunity she had to find security and sober up over a minimum length of six months to a year.
“It’s not an overnight fix. I drank and used for years, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to recover in 28 days,” St. Germaine said. “It’s a lifelong process.”
Her struggle with addiction and crime was rooted in her childhood. She describes herself as an intergenerational product of residential schools, a woman raised by parents who were too burdened by their own alcoholism to keep their daughter out of the cycle substance abuse that held them.
“Everyone was just a bunch of wounded souls trying to figure out what to do and fill a hole in their soul, and drinking and drugs were an anesthetic. Any type of feeling was just too painful,” St. Germaine said.
By the time she had her first court date at age 13, she had been placed in the foster care system and separated from her siblings in the process. When she was arrested for vehicle theft, she found herself oddly comforted by that first six-month stint in Kilburn Hall.
“I had people around me, it was safe, doors were locked. No one was coming in my room in a drunken state in the middle of the night,” St. Germaine said through tears, reflecting on the sexual abuse she faced as a child.
“Sometimes when I think about that, it’s a harsh reality that I had to be locked up to be safe, or to feel safe. But I know that it’s like that for a lot of people.”
St. Germaine entered a pattern of re-committing crimes to maintain that feeling of safety, and spent much of her time between the ages of 13 and 18 behind bars.
She was 37 years old when she got on that bus toward Vancouver. By then, she had three children but had grown apart from them due to her substance abuse. Although things still aren’t perfect now that she’s sober, St. Germaine is particularly proud that she has begun to mend her relationship with her son and younger daughter, who are both now well on their way to adulthood.
Her eldest daughter, Destiny, 26, has been going through her own issues with addiction for over a decade. Destiny’s story mirrors her mother’s in many ways — parents struggling with addiction, foster care, falling into drugs and alcohol abuse. St. Germaine said she isn’t chasing a recovery centre as a way of fixing her daughter’s problems. Instead, she offers herself as a model anyone — her daughter included — can follow, she said.
“I’ve tried to help her in every way possible. I know she has to help herself. I can only be an example of what’s possible — that suffering is optional and that there is a solution.”