By Christ Rickert – Wisconsin State Journal –
Becky Mack had a rough start to life. Raised along with her four siblings by a drug-addicted, “nomad” father, she suffered abuse and was intermittently removed from his care by child welfare workers until she went into foster care for good at the age 8 when the family moved to Madison.
But 28 years later, Mack is proof that a rough start doesn’t have to define the finish. With some help from sources both earthly and divine, Mack got her high school diploma, then her certified nursing assistant license, then her nursing license and then her bachelor’s degree.
She currently works as a “float nurse” — meaning she floats among different departments — at UnityPoint Meriter Hospital and says she’s “happier than I’ve ever been.”
“I do feel like in a lot of ways that this was God’s will and it was the path that he put me on a long time ago because my entire life I’ve cared for people,” she said.
Among those people are her adoptive mother, a son, 10, a daughter, 17, a nephew, 21, and a 2½-year-old rescue dog named Nala — all of whom live with her on Madison’s Far East Side.
How did you find your way to being a nurse?
I got pregnant with my daughter and ended up getting my (high school equivalency diploma) from a program called Omega on the South Side of Madison, because I had fallen so far behind in high school that it was either that or I would stay in high school until I was 21. I reached out to a program called Care Net and they help with pregnant women, and they provided me with a social worker. She really helped me kind of figure out resources in Madison. So I applied for low-income housing and I got into low-income housing and within months had my daughter and I had a stable household, which was really nice. It was just really by the grace of God that things happened that way.