She’s on top of the mountain right now.
But with Potter’s luck, and her history, her fate could change any second.
She recently was named winner of the Steel Magnolia Award, funded by the AK Steel Foundation, that recognizes women who have overcome adversity to have an impact on their communities.
“Overcome Adversity” is Vanessa Potter’s middle name.
After this year, they should retire the Steel Magnolia award or rename it after Potter.
Few have survived more than the Trenton resident and single mother of three children, between the ages of 7 to 12. After listening to the abridged story of her life, you don’t know whether to feel sorry for her, applaud her stubbornness, give her a hug or wipe away her tears.
Or yours.
June Cleaver, she ain’t. Her life isn’t shown on a 19-inch black-and-white TV every Sunday night. It’s more R-rated than Walt Disney.
She has made plenty of stupid mistakes — all of us have — but many of her errors were out of her control. Her mother was a drug addict and her father, who attempted to kill her as a child, was mentally ill and once set his home on fire when she was 5 years old, Potter said. She and her younger brother, Robert, were raised largely in the foster care system, sometimes in different homes.
Growing up, Potter said they were “dirt poor” because her mother sold all their possessions to fund her drug addiction. Potter said she remembers when her aunt gave her a Barbie doll. She was so happy. Then, her mother made her return it for cash at the local department store.
Now, Potter realizes why her mother wanted the money.
“She was constantly looking for that high,” Potter said. “We didn’t have beds to sleep on. We were constantly moving. We never had food. Never.”
Potter paid the ultimate price — her childhood innocence — because of her mother’s lifestyle. Her mother “sold” her daughter to men, she said. Those same men, in return, purchased winter coats and shoes for Potter.
“I would beg, cry and plea,” she said as tears filled her eyes. “It was a horrible situation.”
She fought back once. That’s when the attacker pointed a gun at her head.
When she was 11, Potter swallowed enough cough medicine to kill herself. She woke up in the hospital.
“I was hurting so much I wanted it to end right there,” she said.
This story also has some inspiration. Since the family didn’t have a TV, as a child, Potter spent hours at the local libraries, regardless of where they lived. She engrossed herself in books, the more fairy tale the better.
“That was my escape,” she said of her reading habit. “It took me to places I had never been. It was like watching TV and it was like painting a picture. That’s what gave me hope.”
Potter graduated from LifeSkills Center of Middletown in 2002, one year before she was scheduled to graduate from Fairfield High School, one of the numerous school districts she attended as she bounced from foster home to foster home. Last spring, six years after she enrolled at Miami University Middletown, she graduated with a degree in psychology and bio medical science.
For the past 11 years, she has worked at AK Steel, currently in quality control. It’s ironic that a woman whose life is loaded with blemishes and bruises is charged with detecting imperfect products.
Potter has been married twice, and each ended after the relationship became abusive, she said. She was married when she was 15, the same year she dropped out of Fairfield High School early in her sophomore year, and her second marriage — celebrated days after she found out she was pregnant — ended two months after she exchanged vows in Gatlinburg.
“I thought maybe we could be a family,” she said. The marriage license was barely dry before the divorce papers were filed.
Now Potter lives in a “shack” in Trenton. She and her three children, along with her adopted 16-year-old niece, live in an attic of a home and her boyfriend and his three sister live downstairs.
She has started an online support group for troubled teens and volunteers at Hope House, the city’s homeless shelter, and The Gathering. She helped with the Making Leadership Happen Event at Middletown High School and hopes to create an afterschool program to help keep students off of drugs and out of violence.
Every day, her goal is to silence the overpowering voice in her head. The voice belongs to one of those men, those demons from her past.
“He said I would never go anywhere,” Potter said. “He said, ‘Why waste your time going to school?’ That voice still haunts me. It was physically beat into me.”
Surprisingly, Potter isn’t bitter. She should hate every man. Instead, she judges everyone individually.
“You have to focus on the rainbow and not let all these storm clouds interfere with that,” she said. “We’re only given one life, one chance. But if we do it right, it should be enough.”
And now she’s a Steel Magnolia winner, what she called “like reaching a peak.”
Like climbing Mount Everest.
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