Celebrating recovery

Brian Foard, a former addict, proposes to fellow former addict Donna Edmonds. DTH/Jessica Crabill

After a slow dance with his girlfriend, Brian Foard, a former speed, cocaine and alcohol addict, grabbed the microphone from the band.

“Ever since I laid eyes on you, I knew you were the one,” he said, dropping to his knee.

“Will you please marry me?”

Donna Edmonds, 34, a former cocaine and heroin addict, didn’t hesitate giving her answer.

“Hell, yes!”

Foard and Edmonds were among a group of about 70 people who gathered to celebrate overcoming drug and alcohol addictions at the Freedom House Recovery Center in Chapel Hill on Thursday.

The center is a halfway house with crisis and outpatient services for those struggling with mental illness and addiction.

“We need to celebrate those folks among us who are on the journey and succeeding,” said Judy Truitt, director of the Orange-Person-Chatham Area Program, which co-hosted the event.

About six months ago, Foard, 29, was addicted to crack, alcohol and speed. He spent time in the state penitentiary twice, was shot four times and stabbed twice.

Foard said after his friends kicked him out of the house they shared, he walked eight miles in the rain to Person Memorial Hospital emergency department, where he was cleared to go through a seven-day detox at Freedom House.

Foard then moved to an Oxford House, one of 130 drug-free group homes in North Carolina, where he first met Edmonds.

She came to the Oxford House to pick up a friend and saw Foard on the porch smoking.

“I asked my girlfriend, ‘Who is that?’” Edmonds said. “I thought, ‘That’s my husband standing there.’”

Edmonds herself has been clean from heroin for three years and is recovering from a cocaine relapse. She said the picture she had of her life as a drug addict was much different from what it is now.

“I literally though I was predestined to be a person to die from an overdose,” she said.

One night she prayed to God that she wanted to be a mother. But when she found out soon after that she was pregnant, she was angry at God, she said.

“I said to God, ‘I’m not ready,’” she said. “God said back to me, ‘When I say you’re ready, you’re ready.’”

After a year of treatment at the UNC Horizons Program, Edmonds was homeless with her son and struggled to find housing due to possession charges.

“(The Orange-Person-Chatham Area Program) is the only program that said, ‘We don’t care. You deserve a second chance.’”

She also tried to go back to school, but life stresses settled in. Edmonds said she forgot about recovery and relapsed.

She lost custody of her son and went to jail, she said. When she got out, she moved into Freedom House’s halfway house and has been staying there since Aug. 4.

“Nobody can ever tell me he does not belong to me,” she said. “I used to wonder if I’m good enough to be a mom. Now I know I am.”

Her son Billy will be two in October, she said. Foard said he is working with the Department of Social Services to adopt him.

“He is such a role model and father figure for my son,” Edmonds said.

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.