Do Starrs Dream

By Lisa Baker

This story has everything. It chronicles the life of a meth addict from childhood to post-addiction. There is physical and sexual abuse, drug addiction, adoption, a criminal enterprise, and incarceration. More importantly, there is joy, hope, sobriety, how I regained custody of my children, fell in love with myself and my soulmate. This is the story of how one woman hung on when the entire world told her to give up and came back from a suicide attempt to the happiness she never dreamed of. This is the story of how one woman lived knowing that her story was meant to encourage other women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781794821361

Book preview

This book is dedicated to every single woman who has ever struggled with feeling less than, the women who fall down but refuse to stay there. To the women who don’t know how they will make it through to tomorrow but always manage to do it. This is dedicated to you, in my bed, in Unit 1 right now. This is dedicated to the addict who thinks they can’t go on. YOU CAN! Life is not determined by the mistakes we have made; it is measured by the way we pick ourselves up and move forward. Never give up. Happiness you haven’t even imagined is waiting for you.

I cannot forget to thank my extraordinary mother. The most amazing, selfless, loving, hard-working and beautiful woman I have ever known. Without your love, encouraging and support, I would not have made it to this day. I tied a knot in the end of my rope, and we hung in there together. Thank you for never giving up on me. Starrs do dream mom and today ours came true!!

To my wife,

There are no words that I can write, no poem I can recite, no song I could sing that would express the amount of love and respect I have for you. You saw the me I always wanted to be and you made me believe in her. You are and will always be, my safe place.

To my children,

You are the loves of my life. You are the reason I never gave up and I pray that one day I can make each of you and as proud as you have made me.

And to my hero, my anchor, my first safe place. Grandpa, I pray that you are looking down from heaven and that you see me trying. I pray that one day I can make you as proud of me as I have always been of you. Aunt Annie was crazy enough to give me the convertible, I promise to take care of it!

Chapter One

Integrity is doing the right thing when no one else is looking. 

What is the price tag on your integrity?

What is the biggest lie you’ve ever told? What is the darkest secret you keep hidden? The truths that you must keep so locked away that not even you can see them. Where does that pain in your eyes come from? Pain that cuts so deep; from wounds that still have not healed. How do you stop the bleeding when it comes from your soul? Someone once told me that the only way to get past the storm is to travel through it. I have spent over forty years putting band-aids on wounds that would have killed others; so afraid of what other people would think if they knew the real story. I don’t know about each of you, but I am tired of living in fear, tired of being ashamed, and over feeling less than. So today, on this day, I am going to travel through my story... the pain, the struggles, the overwhelming joy, the humiliation of my own downfall, but more important than any of those things, I want to share my comeback story. I pray as I write these words that my truth helps at least one person reading these pages. If just one of you hears my story and feels like they are not alone; then my entire journey has been worth it.

I found myself mentally stalling at the start of this journey even though I have thought it through a million times in my head. Memories to mention or to leave for another time, things I haven’t thought of in years. Encouraging messages that I hope are conveyed in the truth of my story. I believe that each one of us is connected to something bigger than ourselves and part of our individual journey is to connect our piece. Some are called to do this on a small, more intimate platform. Women who are called to be mothers connect the pieces by pouring into their children and offering them a strong foundation to grow from, so that they can connect their pieces when the time comes. Others are called to share to a larger audience; some in song, pen to paper, some are called to teach, some to preach, and some to entertain. The struggle comes in steps. The first step; what is your message? What is your piece? What part of the puzzle are you? How do you connect to the bigger picture? The second piece is determining how you are meant to share. Are you meant to mentor, teach, or support with guided wisdom? I have always been drawn to writing. It’s the way I process things happening and the way I plan for things to come. When I write, the world grows quiet, and I feel at ease. I have loved it since I was a little child. The next step is getting your piece out to your audience with sincerity and honesty. Your audience may contain one person or many. My struggle with this…. Has always been telling the truth. The facts and nothing else. The truth is something I have struggled with my entire life. Literally for as long as I can remember. Whether it was an intentional lie, a little white lie, omitting part of a story or just plain old survival lying. I’ll introduce you to survival lying later. There is something significant to be said to each of you who instinctively know what survival lying is. We are a kindred spirit connected by pain. Knowing you are reading the words on this page gives me courage to continue with my truth. The entire truth. I say it that way because; well, truth is subjective. Telling the truth now is hard though. A lifetime of half- truths, hidden secrets, and an overwhelming need not to hurt others. The word lie is something I’ve heard many times. My dad could always see right through any story I told. Funny that the person you want to love you most is sometimes the one you can’t get to notice you at all. But I’ll get to that part soon enough.

As women, we are taught to be something to everyone. We are taught to be good daughters, sisters, friends. Later in life we are taught to be good partners, and then mothers. We are asked to be good home makers, good at our professions and often good role models. We are expected to look a certain way while we do all these things. The amount of pressure we put on ourselves is often ten times that of the world. I add more weight to my own shoulders that anyone could ever ask me to carry. Something I have struggled with my entire life, and I still struggle with carrying the burdens of others. I’m working diligently at learning the word no, but it does not come easily for me. I have been with, and I have been without. I have been someone and I have known what it is to be no one. Literally nothing. So, it feels natural to me to try and shelter others from feeling that way. The problem is that they are on their journey and by always doing for them, I rob them of their choices and their story. Had I never gone through those situations, I would not have the experience or perspective to sit here and type these words. I have hidden from the truth in my pretty house syndrome. That is what I’ve always called it. If everything looks pretty and in its place on the outside, it does not matter what is happening behind closed doors. Same is true for me. If my outside was pretty, my smile was big, it did not matter that I was dying on the inside.

These words did not pour onto pages overnight. I spent a lifetime being too afraid to tell my story at all. I was so busy hiding all the bad stuff that I ended up keeping the good stuff in the dark too. But this book has become a journey for me. I started with the hope of helping others. Have you ever started something with one intention and end up somewhere completely different? If my words are never read by another person, I will know that I came out of this whole. It has not been safety or even love that I have been searching for my entire life, all I needed was to find a way to make my beautiful broken pieces whole. It’s hard looking back now at all the time I could have been or felt something else. But our journey is just that. A journey that we are meant to take. We do it in our own time, for our own reasons. There are so many times in my story where I doubted so many things. I doubted myself, my surroundings, I even doubted that God loved me but not because of God. I mean, c’mon how could he possibly love me? I could never be good enough for Him. I know millions of other Christians have struggled with the same thought. But that’s the point though. None of us are good enough without Him. When I was little things would happen that I could never comprehend. How could a loving God let little girls be touched, or children be beaten, how does God leave you in the dark? Why does His silence seem so final during the seasons of growth? I did not see the magnitude of the evil around me. But evil is always around. Evil sets out to distract and detours us from where we are going. It must break us to keep us from reaching this place, right here, right now. This conversation with you. But he didn’t because here we are. I feel like Satan knew that if you can see that even my broken pieces can create an extraordinary tapestry of hope and love then when you walk away from this conversation, you will know that your pieces are meant to do something just as extraordinary. I had to add these words toward the end of the process, but I am carefully placing them at the beginning of the story. I want each of you to know that God loved me throughout this journey. I choose those words intentionally because there are times in the story that I forgot. There are times that I was on a fight with God and dug my feet in deep so that He would know how serious I was. I am thankful however, that my parents started me with a foundation built on rock and not on sand. Raise them in the way of the word and they shall not stray. I’m paraphrasing of course but these words hold truth. Even if you do not grow up to worship the same way, the same idea, having a foundation to worship is something hard to replace. Yes, there are times I did not make Him proud. There are choices that broke His heart but that can be said of each one of us. It took me so long to see that I am no longer afraid of your opinion. I am no longer here for the opinion of the world. The world cannot make me anything less than exquisite because I was created by God himself. I cannot hate myself and love Him because we are a part of each other. No situation, no choice, no mistake could ever make me less than exquisite because that is exactly what He created me to be. I may have lost my way. I may have made choices that you never could. For the first time though, I am not ashamed of that. I am honored that God chose me, that he allowed my story to grow big enough to fill pages and hopefully, encourage others.

That God took time out to create me, just right, to put my pieces together in a way that nothing could ever tear them apart. More important than that, if you take absolutely nothing else away from these words, I want you to know that He created you, exactly the way you are put together today. He lovingly put every single piece of you together. The addiction piece, the divorced piece, the confused, the hateful, the angry, and even the scared. He allowed those pieces in there. He does not just put the happy, the smart, and the content pieces because we are each meant for so much more. He did not create you to be scared but He has allowed it so that you too can be a light in a very, very dark world. You and I, we were never less than anyone or anything else. Listen to those words again, we, me, you, we have never been less beautiful, less worthy, less loved than anyone else. Even if you are at your lowest point. If this is the part of your story when the darkness seems to swallow you whole. Where the loneliness eats at your thoughts and the doubts engulf you. This is just a chapter in a huge story that you are meant to share. We may have lost our way for a little while, but we are not lost forever.

Don’t worry this book is not a how to be a Christian. I almost didn’t mention God at all out of fear that the world would see my mistakes and not my Savior. I feared being not enough, not good enough to write His name. I am terrified that His grace will be lost in my story, but His grace is what made my story possible. Oh, I’ve been mad at him. I’ve gone years without talking to Him, but He was always there. Waiting patiently with open arms. No, I am not telling you that God makes everything better. We live in the world; we do not live in heaven. What I am telling you is that you have everything inside of you that you need to write your own story. You are equipped you with all the tools you need to build your future. Where you are is temporary. Yes, it can feel like forever. There are times that the days seem like months and months feel like years. Days that you don’t know if you will ever make it through. Tomorrow, the sun will rise, and you will have another opportunity to be everything you were created to be. No mistake, no choice, no other person can ever take that from you.

This isn’t a how to book. I can’t tell you how to be a better parent or better person. I can’t tell you how to find your calling or love yourself. My words cannot make your addiction quiet or the chaos in your head go away. This is simply a story. My story. There are blessings, physical and mental abuse, secrets and lies, there’s hope and betrayal, drug use and incarceration, sobriety, and hope. There are love affairs, and extramarital ones. There are beautiful happy children and broken hearts. More important than any of that, there is an amazing love story not only between myself and my soul mate but deeper still, a love story that came from deep inside me. I fell in love with me as I typed the words on these pages. I stepped out of myself and stopped hating all my mistakes and started celebrating all those times that I held on when everything inside of me told me to give up. This is my tale of how I refused to die. How something inside of me held on during all the darkness and all the pain and came out the other side happier, healthier, more loved and with a freedom that I had ever even known was possible.

Before you judge, know that I look like the next mom at the PTA