Tommy Ribaudo – Chaplain Of The Month

Hello forever family. I’m a grateful believer and follower of Jesus Christ. I celebrate my recovery over drugs and alcohol. I struggle with no self-esteem, codependency, and mental health issues. My name is Tommy.

I was born on September 3, 1969 in Montréal Canada. My father is an Italian man from Brooklyn New York, and my mother was a German woman from Valley Stream New York. I also have a sister who is a year younger than me. We lived in Queens New York until I was six years old. We were very religious members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion. Most of my younger years were pretty normal. I can remember being very happy. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. They lived right across the street. I was told that I was pretty smart, but I was extremely shy. At least that’s what they called it back then. I was reading and writing by the time I was two years old. I’ve always felt older than my years. Being someone that’s always been shy, I’ve always had to pay really close attention to everything I did so that I didn’t draw attention to myself. That’s how I’ve always functioned. People bullying me started as soon as I began school and moved to Arkansas. It was the 70s, I was a Yankee, I looked Oriental, I had a lisp. Being a Jehovah’s Witness meant I didn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance or celebrate any holidays. Being shy didn’t help either. And did I mention that when we moved to Arkansas we moved to  Pearcy , Arkansas. I went to what at that time was an all-white school in the middle of nowhere. I was from Queens New York, and my accent was so strong you could barely understand anything I was saying. I was completely out of place.

I loved learning but was scared to death every day to go to school. I made straight A’s. I was in the gifted and talented program. I loved learning, but could not stand being in school. I would get ridiculed, picked on, pushed around. I was scared to even turn a corner because I might get knocked down. At home my parents began fighting a lot. My sister, when asked if I was her brother, would tell people she did not even know who I was and that we were not related. So, I started hanging out with the kids that didn’t get picked on – the kids and the older kids that the bullies were scared of. This is alsowhere my chameleon personality developed. I could fit into any situation. I played baseball and soccer. I was very good at both, but the bullying was still going on because I had to play with the kids that bullied me in school.

The year I turned 13, my parents decided to get divorced. This was very devastating for me, because this was also the year that my mother decided she did not want to be a mother anymore. You see, I was a mama’s boy. I loved my mother more than I loved anybody else. When she told me she was tired of being a mother, and that we needed to take care of ourselves, and that my being there made her completely miserable, it destroyed me. All I knew was that I didn’t want to make my mother unhappy. So I started running away. This is when my pot and alcohol use began. Back in the 80s there were a lot of us runaways. I would run away from and they would put me in a children’s home. By the time I was 15 years old, I had been in countless different children’s homes, and even went to a foster home at one point. I would run away, they would pick me up on the streets, my mother would say that I was unmanageable and they would put me in a home. I would get out and the same thing would happen over and over again until they wouldn’t let me back in any of the homes because I would run away from them along with everybody else that was there. Being a chameleon – along with learning how to manipulate people became my self-defense mechanisms. Eventually, when I would get picked up on the streets for being too young, they would call my mother, she would pick me up, and my friends would be waiting on the corner by the courthouse. They knew she was just going to drop me off. This was so confusing because she did not get in any trouble for allowing me to live on the streets. There was a whole group of us – a bunch of misfit kids on the streets trying to survive. Taking care of each other the best we could and doing whatever we had to do to survive.

One night, my best friend Donald and I were walking the streets. We were hungry, so we decided to break into a grocery store and stole a whole grocery cart full of food. This ended up with Donald and I getting caught and sent to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, reform school. I spent eight months inthere. My father was the only one that came and visited me. When I got out, I went to his house. I wasn’t there very long and I was back on the streets. Not too long after this, the Sentinel record, which is the newspaper in Hot Springs, decided to do a series on runaways. Guess who they picked to do the interview? In the article they called me a fictitious name – “Johnny” – because I was a minor. My mother, her new husband, and my sister were staying in a condo. I got to go stay with them while the newspaper was doing the interview. The day after the interview, I was downstairs hanging out with the kid that lived there in the same building. We took some pills, and I overdosed. I remember getting my stomach pumped. I remember being in shackles and being taken to the state hospital for trying to commit suicide. I wasn’t suicidal. I just didn’t want to be me. I can’t ever remember actually wanting to be me. This is why I loved the drugs and alcohol so much. They made me someone else. And anything else was better than me. Plus, being on the streets, it was easier to find a party with drugs and alcohol than it was to find a place to stay and food to eat. And not to mention, I hung out with the worst of the worst. I knew that as long as they were my friends no one would hurt me. Donald and I were the youngest of the group so they took care of us.

Before I turned 18, I met my first wife. She was older and had two kids. But, I was deep in my alcohol addiction, and the relationship did not last very long. Not long after I turned 18, I met another woman who turned me on to methamphetamines. I really liked the way they made me feel. I didn’t feel shy anymore, and I didn’t want to drink. I became an IV drug user immediately. I was hooked. It became my life very quickly. On February 15, 1989, I had finished some jail time for an offense. I was walking down the street and I heard somebody holler my name. It was a friend of mine, and he was with some woman looking to get some drugs. I immediately had a connection for her. She was crazy, she was fun, I could talk to her like I was never able to talk to anybody else before in my life. As far as I’m concerned this was the day I met my soul mate. February 15, 2019, will be 30 years that Sherrie and I have been together. I love you Sherry Ribaudo with all my heart! Always have and always will.

When she finally introduced me to her children, I fell in love with them also. We were together about four years when we finally got married, and I adopted her three children – Summer, Amber, and Brandon. I’m not going to go into too much detail about the last 30 years, but I will say that until August, 2009, I was high every day. And during all of this I learned how to make my own drugs. That way I didn’t have to mess with people at all. The last few years in my drug addiction no one even believed that I was still doing drugs because I was like that all the time. They thought it was just me. When I  wasn’t high was when people thought something was wrong with me. I did a lot of crazy stuff over the years – drugs, alcohol, cheating, swinging, lying, manipulating, stealing, and violence – putting my wife and me in situations that could’ve ended very badly. As far as God goes, to me there wasn’t one. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll was all there was. I don’t know how my children ended up so awesome. I know that we always took care of them no matter what. We never let them see any of the stuff we were doing. We would always send them to their grandparents or to their friends’ so that we could do whatever we wanted to do. Also during this time I found out I had another son named Cody. He was 12 years old. Yet I still did not have a relationship with him until his first son was born.

When the 9/11 attacks happened, Brandon, my oldest son, decided he wanted to fight for his country. So I signed the paperwork without his mother knowing so that he could take his GED, and his high school equivalency test so he could join the Marine Corps. He was 17 years old and became squad leader in boot camp. He joined the Marines. I went deeper into using and cooking meth. Sherry decided to get me out of Hot Springs and we moved to Arizona. We ended up opening a granite shop which I used mainly as a cover up for my addiction. It was all I did. I didn’t make it to sell it. I made it to do it. Before it was over with, I was more addicted to the making than I was the doing. Somehow we got a job offer to open a granite shop in New York. Right before that, my son – who was home for a visit – and I got in a big fight and he left Arizona. After we got to New York, I got to talk to my son on the phone and we made amends. He had planned on coming to New York when he got out of the Marine Corps to work with us in the business. But, on December 16, 2003, we got a phone call. My daughter asked to speak to me. She told me that my son and passed away. He was on leave in Hot Springs – staying at his grandmother’s house. He told them he wasn’t feeling well that morning and when they came home he had passed. I had to tell my wife that our son was gone. Needless to say, this completely tore us apart.

We moved back to Arkansas to be with our family. I just went deeper and deeper into my addiction. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to live anymore either. We completely destroyed each other. We took things out on the people we were closest to: us. We separated and divorced, but eventually got back together. We decided to get out of Hot Springs again and start over. We moved to Little Rock and I quit the meth thing, but started my research on cocaine. The couple of years on cocaine and crack cocaine were the worst in all of the rest of the years of everything else. I eventually put myself in a facility called Serenity Park. I stayed there until we got to the fourth step, the inventory, and I left. At the time I thought quitting the drugs was easier than doing all  that.  But, you guessed it, when I quit, I started heavy drinking again. Every time I would quit doing something destructive, I would replace it with something else destructive. I also found out when I was 40, that I was adopted. This is something I could have really went without knowing, but it also explained a lot. The next seven years were spent in a drunken stupor. Before it was over, I was drinking between a pint and a fifth of vodka every day. During this time my daughter, Amber, wanted us to go to church with her. I didn’t believe in God, but I just knew that this was something positive. I believe I didn’t want my grandchildren to end up like me. I wanted them to have something to believe in. Whether God existed or not – this was something positive. I wanted this for them so badly that I even got baptized with my grandson. But, this was just for him.

In 2013 our son, Cody, had his first child. He was sick and had to stay in the hospital. His mother, Kati, contacted us. This is when our relationship with Cody started.

A little over three years ago I went into the Quapaw Rehab in Hot Springs. When I got out, my wife told me about this program called Celebrate Recovery at the church we were attending called Rock Creek. I went reluctantly and decided quickly that it was not for me. Not long after that my wife told me that she had met someone from another Celebrate Recovery and wanted us to go and check that out. I went just so she would leave me alone about it. When I walked in, there was this crazy bearded guy that started talking to me and telling me about himself. I just chalked it up to another person telling me about themselves, like people usually did, and I never understood why. But this time it was different. This guy really cared. He was completely transparent. I didn’t want to be there, and he knew it, but for some reason he wasn’t letting me go anywhere. It didn’t matter what I said, what I did, or how I acted, the love in that place was unexplainable. Everyone there showed me love when I was unlovable and when I didn’t want to be loved. I was just waiting for the end of the night – hoping it would come soon.

But I kept going back. I started serving wherever I was needed. I would listen to the lessons, I would go to small group, and just listen. I wanted to believe that this was real. I had stopped believing in God a long time ago when I was a child. But, I joined a Step Study and I even went to a national Celebrate Recovery Summit. I got the same love at the Summit that I was getting back home at the Celebrate Recovery we were attending. I saw the miracles that were happening all around me. I started believing and becoming a follower of Jesus Christ. Now let me just say that when we got to the fourth step again, which says, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” I thought that was stupid and a waste of time. I had spent my whole life forgetting and drowning out all of those bad memories. I did not see the sense in bringing all of that back up. Needless to say, I relapsed. And relapsed, and relapsed, and relapsed. I had relapsed before I went in the doors of Celebrate Recovery. I relapsed in the parking lot of Celebrate Recovery. I relapsed at home. I relapsed everywhere to the point that I was actually told, jokingly of course, that I could possibly be the poster child for Celebrate Recovery! But it did not matter how many times I relapsed, I kept going back and I kept receiving all this love – this love that I now know is Jesus Christ!

On January 6, 2016, I was at home by myself and went on the Internet to see what I could drink to get drunk on as I had no money and I was alone. This would be the last time I would get drunk. In the middle of the night I got on my knees and asked Jesus into my life. I told him that I was tired of being this way. I asked him to please take this from me. And he did. On January 7, 2016, I checked myself into the Rivendell Treatment Center because I knew I had issues and I was tired of self-medicating. This is my sobriety date! While I was in there – remember that guy I met when I first attended Celebrate Recovery who wouldn’t let me leave? He agreed to be my sponsor. Thank you, Scott Waldo, for being so faithful. Soon after, I got baptized – for real this time – and announced to the world that I had give my life over to Jesus Christ. I got right back into a Step Study. I went to another Summit. I really started working my program and yes, this time I did my inventory!! I shared it with my sponsor and, then, threw it away. I actually started sharing in small group. And, this was a big deal for me. I was able to move forward in my recovery with the love of Jesus Christ, the 12 steps and eight principles. I graduated my Step Study and started leading small group. I’ve served in the kitchen, as a greater, as a bus driver – wherever and whenever needed. I serve with the teens, and I am a sponsor. I’ve learned that God turns my mess into his message.

In 2016 I joined Broken Chains – CR in the wind! We are a fellowship of bikers and bike enthusiasts who have found hope and healing through Jesus Christ and Celebrate Recovery – helping others to realize that change is possible. Instead of a drug lab in my saddlebags, I carry Bibles, information about Celebrate Recovery and Broken Chains, and Serenity Rags. You see, I share Celebrate Recovery and Jesus Christ everywhere I go…gas stations, bike rallies, grocery stores, etc. I want everyone to experience the love of Jesus like I have. I’m supposed to tell you my favorite step, but I don’t have one. All the steps are my favorites! I need every one of them! Jesus said so, LOL.

I’m going to tell you something that was said to me: “You don’t have to live this way anymore.” There is always hope. Hope uplifts us. Hope carries us when we are too tired to walk on our own. Hope inspires us, motivates us, and encourages us. Even as we stand in the shadows, hope reminds us that the warmth of the sun will return once the clouds drift away. Even as we mourn in sorrow, hope heals us with promises of the future filled with love, happiness, and laughter. Hope keeps us afloat when the weight of the world threatens to sink us. There is hope and healing in this place. Because there is Jesus in this place. He is the hope. And Jesus loves you no matter what, and there’s nothing that you can do about that. In the Bible, Isaiah 43:1-3 says, “Fear not for I have redeemed you, I have summoned you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you, when you walk through the fire you will not be burned, the flames will not set you ablaze, for I am the Lord your God, the holy one of Israel, your Savior.” God has always been with you, and always will be with you. For what it’s worth I am also here for you, and I love you, all of you.

Also in the Bible, in 1 Peter 1:3-6, Peter gives us this promise of hope. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” See, Jesus died on the cross so that we all may have hope and forgiveness through him. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall. If you’re not falling, you’re not moving forward. Failure is not getting back up. I believe that this is how God teaches us to trust in him. We fall, we trust he will make everything better, and we get back up. No matter what we’ve done, what we do, no matter how bad we think we may be, we arealready forgiven. Isaiah1:18 says, “Let’s talk this over, says the Lord. No matter how deep the stain of your sins, I can take it out and make you as clean as freshly fallen snow. Even if you are stained as red as crimson, I can make you white as wool.” We fall short daily. We are human, and this is life. But we don’t have to do it alone. As for me, Philippians 3:13-14, says, “No, dear brothers, I am still not all I should be, but I am bringing all my energies to bear on this one thing: forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God is calling us up to heaven because of what Christ Jesus did for us.”

I’m a redeemed addict and follower of Jesus Christ. A hope dealer and seed Slinger. I ride for Christ’s sake and I celebrate my recovery over drugs and alcohol. I struggle with codependency, no self-esteem, and mental health issues, and my name is Tommy – forgiven child of God.