My Daughter’s Schizophrenia Led to Opening a Business

00:00:11
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. And up next, we’re going to hear from Donna Howard, tell the story of her daughter Cassie, who was a teenager was met with a diagnosis that changed her life. You’ll find out where that diagnosis has led Donna to today, to a place where she can help not only her daughter Cassie, but others under similar circumstances, and all while shedding light on an illness that had kept them in the dark for so many years.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: I was director of ideology at a hospital here in Mississippi for many, many years. I moved to Arkansas, got married, had three children, and in 1990, Cassie became ill. On her fourteenth birthday, it was a Sunday afternoon. I remember it very well. She came in the kitchen that day and said, “The new kids on the blocker a singing happy birthday to me through the air conditioner.” And that was AHA moment. I began to think back, and she had been telling me things, and I had not paid attention. I say this, and I don’t think people really understand when I say she didn’t sleep till she was five years old. And I think now, was she hearing the voices? And that was normal to her. But there were many, many nights we didn’t sleep. So I called the pediatrician and I said, “We need to talk to you.” And so we met him at the emergency room, and after about an hour of him and her talking, he came out and he said, “She’s got some serious, serious issues.” She was in and out of hospitals. Then it took a long time to get a diagnosis because a lot of doctors didn’t know a lot about schizophrenia. It took us a year. We went out to UCLA to the Neuropsychiatric Institute, and that’s where we got our diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia at age 15. She was having such a hard time that year that I don’t think it really resonated with her what chronic paranoid schizophrenia was. She just knew she was hearing these voices that were very real to her. It was very scary for her. It was hard to find anybody to treat her. It was just a nightmare because I couldn’t get any help, and I couldn’t find any peace for, and I also had two other children at home. She went to school until she was in the tenth grade, and I finally took her out because here she was a quiet, shy little girl sitting over the corner, crying. So after six months of them calling me every day, “You know, we don’t know what to do with her,” I finally took her out of school. So I had to stay home and take care of her and educate myself on what to expect and how to handle what we were going through. It was extremely difficult time because you didn’t talk about. My family wouldn’t talk to me about it. They didn’t really understand it. And that’s when we decided she needed to get a job that that might help. And we tried many jobs, and I even paid one place to let her work there. I paid them just to let her come in and clean their equipment, just so she’d have something to do. Then she got a job and worked at this grocery store, but the people were not kind to her. They didn’t understand her. She was 20 years old. She looked like she should be able to act like a girl woman and make decisions, and she couldn’t. And every day she would come home, “I hate my job! I hate my job! You know, I don’t want to do this.” So I was in Nashville shopping with my sister-in-law, and we went into a thrift store, and we got to talking to the owner. And he had opened it to give his daughter a job because she had autism. And we walked out the door, and my sister-in-law looked at me and said, “You’re going to do that, aren’t you?” It took me four years. I retired. Then I put what retirement money I had into it, and I opened the store here in Oxford to employ persons living with mental illness in a safe work environment in hopes of helping them achieve independence and self-respect. Cassie was thrilled. She was very excited that she wasn’t going to have to work at the grocery store anymore. We started out with two employees. I had started getting donations before I opened the store, and so we had a few things—not a lot. But the first day we opened, a lady stole from me the very first day, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I hadn’t thought about that!” Everything we sell is donated. We don’t buy anything. We have to depend on the people in the community to donate. There were lots of paydays. On Thursday night, I’d say, “Lord, please put the money in the bank, because payday’s tomorrow; I don’t have it.” And we always managed to make payroll. I always didn’t get paid, but we always managed to pay of the employees. It was a real learning process. We really just struggle financially just to get by and keep our doors open. But when the pandemic hit, people were home cleaning out their closets, their attics, and their garages. Cassie and I and my niece worked at the store every day just to keep the donations out of the parking lot because people were bringing them in like crazy. Not only did we get all the donations, people learned about us that didn’t know about us before, and since then, we are—we’re doing really well. Today, we have about 15 employees. It’s very rewarding. Most of my employees have been there a long time. I have one young man that’s worked with them ever since we opened. He and Cassie were friends when we opened, and they love working there. They do a good job. But it’s like a new day every day because just because you told somebody that those go in the floral section one day, the next day you have to tell them again. Sometimes my customers will mistake my employees for being rude, and I’ll pull them aside. I don’t know. I’ll explain the situation. You know, “Here’s our brochure, this is what we’re about.” And most of the time they’re very understanding, and then they’re apologetic. But we do have people that are just downright rude, and I just say, “We are here to give these people a safe work environment where they can feel comfortable, and it’s not tolerated because all we want is to be loved and to be treated with kindness.” That’s it. They work very hard, several of them. I have to say, “Okay, you need to sit down and take a break,” because they work hard. The joke around the store is some days when we would be overwhelmed, my niece, who has helped me from the beginning, she would say, “Would you please quit praying for furniture because God always supplies?” I knew when I walked out that door in Nashville, if that’s what he wanted me to do, I didn’t have any idea how I was going to do it. I had been through so much with Cassie being sick and not being able to work at times, but we never went hungry, and we never did without. So I have a pretty strong fate, and I knew that through this he would provide, and he has. It’s pretty awesome. A dream is open more stores and more cities to help more people, because, I mean, I don’t know what Cassie would do, and I don’t know what the other kids… And I call them kids—they’re not kids, they’re young adults—but I don’t know what they would do if they didn’t have a place to go to. I have a young man that came to me at the time he couldn’t count change, and his confidence just grew and grew as he worked for me. And now he has moved out of his mother’s home, has moved to Nashville, and is working at a store, and he’s assistant manager. And it just thrills me because look what he’s done! And had he set at home and not done anything, it would be in such a waste, and it’s great to be a part of that. I take no credit for this at all. It’s a God thing. He’s just using me, and I just—I tell Cassie, I said, “Some good has come from all the heartache and paining the Cassies had to go through.”

00:08:08
Speaker 1: And a great job on that piece by Madison. And a special thanks to Donna Howard, the founder of Holding Hands Resale Shop. Oxford is a beautiful small town about an hour south of Memphis, Tennessee. And my goodness, finding out that your daughter at the age of 14 is diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, that’s a tough one. And what do you do about it? Well, Donna, well, she taught us all what to do about it. And she learned about it from someone else in Nashville who taught her what to do about it. A beautiful mother-daughter story, Donna Howard’s story, her daughter Cassie’s story too. Here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell story of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story, small or large, to our email: oas@ouramericanstories.com. That’s oas@ouramericanstories.com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too.