Job, reliable car would help Macon mom, daughter turn lives around

Editor’s note: The Reindeer Gang is an annual holiday feature about people and families in need. Donations to Melanie Haslinger and her daughter can be made through the Rescue Mission of Middle Georgia, 774 Hazel St., Macon, 31201. For information, call 743-5445, ext. 307, or email dawn@rescuemissionga.com.

The car was a piece of junk, but it got Melanie Haslinger where she was going.

One day last year when her ex-fiance was at the wheel, the 2001 Kia Rio conked out for good.

They sold the car at a scrap yard for $210 and agreed to use the money to pay their electric bill. Haslinger’s ex, though, blew much  of it on meth.

They were living west of Atlanta then, over toward the Alabama border north of Carrollton. Their relationship, she says, was “volatile.”

“He thought he was God,” Haslinger says.

She told him he wasn’t and left him.

In August 2014, penniless and reeling from her own drug abuse, Haslinger was taken in by the Rescue Mission of Middle Georgia.

At 36, she is now in recovery — sober for a year and a half — and living in a west Macon apartment with her 13-year-old daughter, Haley.

They get by on $194 in food stamps.

That’s it, she says. “Somebody asked me, ‘How are you making it with no income?’ I said, ‘By the grace of God.’”

Occasionally she gets meals at the mission.

She often hitches rides to the supermarket, but mostly takes the bus to buy groceries.

“Sometimes I’ve got enough (money) for vegetables and sometimes I don’t,” Haslinger says.

They eat a lot of six-for-$1 packs of noodles.

“My daughter’s so sick of eating noodles,” Haslinger says. “I tell her, ‘Get used to it.’”

One time at the grocery store Haslinger, only half kidding, told Haley, “We can get the peanut butter and jelly, but I don’t know about the bread.”

Haslinger, raised mostly by her grandparents, grew up around Atlanta. Her grandpa ran a wrecker service. She says that even though they lived at a junk yard, she wishes her daughter had it so good.

“I want better for her,” she says.

Haslinger, a 10th-grade dropout who now has her G.E.D. and attends Miller-Motte Technical College in north Macon, wants to become a medical assistant.

“It’s always been my calling to help people,” she says.

Meanwhile, she’s looking for a job to make ends meet. She needs a car to get around. She recently spent a five-hour round trip ferrying her daughter to a doctor’s appointment by bus.

Adjusting to the sober life hasn’t been easy. When she first arrived at the mission, Haslinger kept to herself. Sometimes she clashed with others.

“I’m not really good with showing emotions,” she says. “I’m a lot more humble now. I still have my hurdles.”

Becky Hataway, who works at the mission, says, “What’s amazing is she still wears a smile.”

“I’m proud of her,” Hataway adds. “She has had so much adversity and she still perseveres.”

This story was originally published December 2, 2015 at 5:17 PM with the headline "Job, reliable car would help Macon mom, daughter turn lives around."