It can be done

By JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer
The Providence Sunday Journal
Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004

Rose Quigley woke up one morning and found two drug addicts asleep in her living room. The family television set and VCR were gone. Rose's mother, an addict herself, had let in the strangers.

Rose threw them out of the apartment.

She was 12.

A year and a half later, a ringing telephone awoke Rose in the middle of the night.

"I'm in jail," her mother told her. "Don't tell anyone because I'll only be here a day or two."

Barbara Quigley's jail stay on arson charges, however, lasted two years. Rose and her younger brother, Billy, became wards of the state.

Somehow, Rose blossomed. She excelled at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence, making the honor roll, serving in student government and becoming captain of the softball team. She did this while juggling three after-school jobs and being a surrogate mother to Billy.

Now 21, Rose will graduate in May from the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor's degree in human development and family studies. She hopes to enter graduate school next fall.

"I look back now and say, 'How did I do it?' " Rose says. "But school was my way out. I had great teachers. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't have finished high school or gone to college."

Her teachers, however, credit Rose's own determination and will.

"Given her circumstance, there's no reason for her not to have been a teen mother or a drug addict or a million other things that could have gone wrong," says Nancy Mullen, Rose's former high school principal. "But Rose had a vision of herself as someone who was going to succeed. It came from within. She was not going to fail."

STARTING IN first grade, Rose brought home straight-A papers for her mother to display on the refrigerator. A slim girl with long hair and warm brown eyes, Rose excelled in everything she did.

Without prodding, Rose followed an ambitious schedule: school, library, softball practice, dinner and homework. Because Barbara usually worked double night shifts at Haven Brothers diner, she often missed Rose's after-school events. "She used to get mad at me, because I didn't get to all her games," Barbara says.

Barbara, whose own family had dissolved under the weight of poverty, abuse and mental illness, had resolved to do better by her own children, especially after she and their father broke up.

By age 2, Barbara was in state care. She lived in 32 different foster homes and at the Children's Center on Mount Pleasant Avenue, the now-defunct state orphanage. She never forgot the Christmases she spent in foster homes.

"Sometimes they wouldn't have any presents for me," she says.

Working hard and earning money were the only ways Barbara believed she could be a successful mother to Rose and Billy.

"It was very, very important for me to be able to give my kids anything possible," she says, her voice husky from years of smoking. "I showed my love differently, in a financial way. I bought them things."

Year after year, every present Rose and Billy asked for was under the tree. But they had to stay quiet and wait until 11 on Christmas morning to open them. Barbara needed her sleep. She worked the late shift and did not return home until 4 a.m.

THE FAMILY began to slide after a young cousin was killed in a car accident in Warwick in 1993. Her mother was devastated, Rose says.

Barbara started abusing drugs and alcohol, a life she had railed against. Someone gave her Valium to dull the pain; she started drinking peppermint schnapps after work. Soon she was snorting cocaine and getting drunk on orange juice and vodka during her shifts. Then she discovered crack. "When I started on drugs, I was a locomotive."

Barbara's descent was swift.

She started bringing drug addicts home; Rose found the crack pipes in the sofa cushions. Two years after Barbara got hooked on drugs and alcohol, she was sent to jail, charged with hiring someone to set fire to a coworker's house.

Rose, then 14, and Billy, 13, were placed under the protection of the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families. They moved in with family friends. Virtually all of their possessions went into storage, but they lost everything when Rose couldn't make the $100-a-month payment.

Rose started working, first waitressing under the table, then as a cashier and front-end supervisor at a Price Rite when she turned 15. Later, she became a certified nurse's assistant at Miriam Hospital, changing bed pans and often holding elderly patients' hands as they died. From sophomore year on, Rose made the honor roll. By her junior year, she was juggling three jobs, working 40 hours a week, and still finding time for softball practice, yearbook and her brother.

Billy had a more difficult time adjusting. He had never enjoyed school. When Barbara went to jail, Billy was inconsolable. Like his mother, he never finished seventh grade.

After two years in jail, Barbara was released on home confinement for nine months, awaiting her trial. She was convicted, serving three more years at the Adult Correctional Institutions before being released in June 2003.

While her mother was incarcerated, Rose bought all of Billy's clothes, including $110 sneakers, and sent her mother $35 a week for spending money. A favorite teacher at Mount Pleasant went with Rose to buy her first car, an old Chevy Cavalier, for $1,600. "He gave up his lunch hour to help me," Rose says.

Rose went to jail to see her mother receive her GED. But Barbara was not allowed to attend Rose's high school graduation. Rose wrote to a judge and the parole board, pleading with them to let her mother attend, even in handcuffs. The request was denied.

Rose was the first person in her family to earn a high school diploma, and her mother was not there to see it.

"I cried when I crossed the stage," Rose says.

ROSE REACHED out to teachers and mentors.

"She so desperately wanted to go to college and she made us want to help her," says her former principal, Nancy Mullen.

Mullen knew that Rose's mother was in jail, and that Rose worked and cared for her brother. Mullen was struck by Rose's "sunniness" and her involvement in sports and student government.

School provided a refuge for Rose.

"After school, I remember the sadness I felt when I had to leave," she says. "I felt so safe and normal there."

Mullen doesn't recall the exact words she said that helped Rose the most during high school, but Rose does.

"This is the hand you've been dealt and you've chosen to play it well," Mullen told her. "If this is what you have to do, Rose, just do it."

Frank Forleo runs the Talent Development program at URI, which is geared toward helping poor and at-risk teenagers succeed in college. Forleo met Rose about five years ago when he was recruiting at Mount Pleasant High School.

"Rose was in the front row, and she asked me about 30 questions. I think the intelligence of the questions is what struck me the most," Forleo says.

Forleo advises Rose on her college classes and helps her navigate financial aid. He has become a mentor, and is writing her recommendation for graduate school.

"So many things have happened to her," he says. "And she's bounced up to the surface like a cork in water."

ROSE EMBRACED college as she had high school. She wanted to become a nurse, but couldn't pass the required anatomy class, even though she took it four times. It was too hard, she says, especially with her work schedule. She ended up switching her major during her sophomore year and started making the dean's list.

Rose lived on the Kingston campus for only one semester; she still needed to work and her full-time job -- first at Miriam Hospital in Providence and later at a group home for mentally disabled adults in Woonsocket -- made the commute too hard. She began taking some classes at URI's Providence campus, to lessen her travel time. She also earned credits through an internship with the DCYF, working with troubled youth.

After she switched her major, Rose took extra classes to graduate within four years. Her jobs and her studies sharpened her focus, and helped her figure out what to do with the rest of her life: social work.

She is applying to Rhode Island College's master's program, and hopes to specialize in helping young people whose parents are incarcerated or who have been in trouble with the law themselves.

"If you get them young enough, you can catch up with their mistakes," Rose says.

Having been on both sides of the system - a child in state care and an adult working with young people and disabled adults -- Rose thinks her perspective matters.

On one hand, Rose says social workers are swamped, and she sympathizes with their workload. "But they never got to know my brother; they only got to know his problems," she says of her family's experience.

She also hopes to improve the system, and has already written a letter to Governor Carcieri about how the DCYF helped her apply to and attend college.

"At some point, I want to be a voice in the government," Rose says. "Half of the government, they don't live in reality. How can they when half of them, on their free time, go to country clubs that cost $800 a week?"

Rhode Island needs more support for children whose parents are in prison and for foster children, Rose says. "If you're in the system, you should automatically be in counseling, because you're not like other kids in school."

Rose believes she survived because she reached out to adults who could help her, and they responded.

"It doesn't mean every kid is able to do what I did," Rose says. "Half my life was lucky."

ROSE REMAINS close to her mother and is proud that Barbara is working again and staying sober.

"I have a lot of traits from my mom, like her persistence in life, her hard work and the way she doesn't feel sorry for herself," Rose says.

Barbara worked seven days a week for several months to save the money for her own place. Billy, who works at Taco Bell as a team manager, lives with her. The walls in Barbara's immaculate apartment are covered with photographs of Rose and Billy -- the only family possessions not lost when Barbara went to prison.

"My mother has the most guilt anyone could have," Rose says. "Now that she's out of jail, she's on fast forward, trying to make up for lost time."

Rose, too, carries scars. They rise to the surface when she sleeps, in the form of anxious, panicked dreams. In them, she cannot get out of bed; she is unable to handle the pressures of school and work; she runs out of money.

"Sometimes I do get stressed, I do get depressed," Rose says. "Money kills me. You could always use more. You want things and can't have them."

ROSE ALSO has good dreams.

They started coming when she watched Seventh Heaven, a hourlong, idealized drama about a California minister, his wife and their seven children.

"My whole growing up was fighting, but on Seventh Heaven, no one fought," Rose said. "They stuck together."

The show helped Rose conjure a vision of what she wanted; her aspirations were not reflected in her world.

Rose dreams of a three-bedroom Colonial with an in-law apartment for Barbara. It is painted yellow with a red door and blue shutters, maybe in North Providence or Smithfield. She hopes that she and her longtime boyfriend, Kelvin Brito, 23, a technician at a computer ink and dye company who lives with her in Woonsocket, will eventually get married and perhaps have a child -- in that order.

"Nobody in my family has been married. That's not reality to me," Rose says. "I want to bring it to reality. I want my child to be able to come to me about things. I want my kids to look up to me."

But first there is school to finish and a graduation to plan.

This time, her mother vows to be there.