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No Turning Back
It wasn’t the bullets that got Combs to change her ways. Over the years, she was beaten, stabbed, burned with cigarettes and raped. She survived multiple overdoses and a pipeful of crack laced with rat poison. Then, one morning in 1995, she awoke beneath a highway overpass to find that her shoes had been stolen.The ground that day was hot enough to raise blisters. Combs was literally stuck. But the thief had stolen more than her shoes—he took the last scrap of her dignity. “It all just hit me,” she recalls. “I thought, This cannot be the life that God intended for me.”
After a friend rustled up a pair of sneakers, Combs walked to the police station and turned herself in. Her probation officer handed her a catalog of rehab programs and ordered her to find one she could stick with. Combs chose a halfway house and set about healing herself. The year she spent there, she says, was the hardest she had ever known. The slightest emotional upset, the flare of a cigarette lighter, even certain songs on the radio, would set off ferocious cravings. Most of the other residents eventually relapsed. But for Combs, this time, there was no turning back.
After getting clean, Combs surrounded herself with supportive mentors but didn’t always heed their counsel. Her most serious misstep was marrying an addict who was trying to stay sober, with far less success. While Combs worked to pay the rent, José would disappear on binges; he sometimes beat her when he returned. The abuse continued even after she discovered she was pregnant. She was 37 and hadn’t used illegal drugs for five years. No one could explain why, hours after Mycole’s birth in January 2000, the infant suffered a near-fatal stroke. He was left with brain damage, and doctors warned that he might never learn to walk, talk or feed himself.
Combs filed for divorce when her son was three months old, after José, in a rage, trashed their house and took a swipe at Mycole. At the time, she was working days at a collection agency and nights at a restaurant. That fall, her day boss told her to decide between keeping her job or rushing to the hospital every time her son had a seizure. Combs quit on the spot.
Beth Brantley, who ran the day care center where Mycole spent much of his time, saw an opportunity. Having just started a charter school for older kids, she made an offer: If Combs would come work for her, Mycole could stay for free.
“I’d never thought about teaching before,” Combs says. But after a week, she knew she’d found her calling. To enhance her skills and credentials, she began taking education courses at a community college. By 2005 she had earned her bachelor’s degree at the online University of Phoenix and enrolled in the master’s program at Grand Canyon University. After Brantley closed her school, Combs applied for a position at StarShine.
During the job interview, Patricia McCarty asked her why she wanted to work in a hardscrabble neighborhood when she could earn far more in a comfortable suburb. “She said, ‘These kids are me,’ ” McCarty recalls. “ ‘And we’re here to change the world.’ ”
Today Combs and her son live in a two-bedroom bungalow she helped build with a small army of Habitat for Humanity volunteers. She has reconciled with her parents, who love to take Mycole on fishing trips. He is in second grade now, and after years of intensive therapy, he’s an avid basketball player, an eager student and a voracious reader.
Combs’s own horizons continue to expand. McCarty is grooming her to become principal of a new StarShine school. Organizations are asking her to give speeches. Publishers want her to write an autobiography, and producers want to turn it into a movie.
All the attention is a little dizzying, but she has weathered tougher challenges. “Many doors are opening to me,” she marvels. Then she laughs. “I guess I’m ready.”
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