My name is Shelia Santiago. I'm 51 years old. I've been a licensed practical nurse at a nursing home in Norwich, Connecticut, for twenty-two years. I've been married to Roger for thirty-one years. We have two grown children, Andrea and Stephen, who are the lights of my life. I go to Mass on Sundays and I make the best arroz con gandules on our street, and I will fight you about that.

And I'm a compulsive gambler. I haven't gambled since the morning of Monday, March 17, 1997, the morning I sat down at my kitchen table and told my husband everything.

I'm putting my story here because when I was in the middle of it I thought I was the only one. A nurse, a mother, a woman who says the rosary, doing this? I thought gamblers were men in movies. I wasn't. Maybe you aren't either. Maybe you're reading this at two in the morning with a stack of mail you haven't opened. If so, keep reading. And then make a phone call. I'll tell you which one at the bottom.

My Story · What I Told Myself · The Morning · What Helped · The Monday Night Group · Getting Help · For Families

My Story

It started as a girls' day out. In 1994 some of us from work started taking the casino bus on payday. You know the kind. You get on in a parking lot with a coffee, you get a coupon book and a buffet ticket, and you ride up the road laughing the whole way like it's a field trip. It was fun. I'll say that plainly, because if I told you it wasn't fun, you'd know I was lying. It was fun, and I was tired, and I had been taking care of everybody else's mothers and everybody else's dying for a long time, and for six hours nobody needed anything from me.

On my third trip I won six hundred dollars on a slot machine. Everybody screamed. I bought a round of drinks at the buffet. My counselor says now that it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and she's right.

By 1995 I wasn't waiting for payday, and I wasn't waiting for the girls. I'd ride the bus alone on my days off. Then on my nights off. I stopped going to the buffet because it was time away from the machine. I'd sit at one machine for five, six hours. I wouldn't get up to use the ladies' room, because what if somebody else took my machine and it paid off? I'm a nurse. I know better than that about my own body. I didn't care.

I didn't win much after that first time. Nobody does. But you don't play to win, not after a while. You play to keep playing. When I had money, I played until it was gone. When it was gone, I went and got more.

Where did I get more? Our grocery money. My paycheck, before Roger saw it. I told him I was picking up overtime, and some weeks I was, and some weeks I wasn't, and I was gone the same number of hours either way. Two credit cards he didn't know about. Cash advances. Twenty dollars borrowed from a coworker, then fifty from another one. And then the big one: we had a home equity line of credit on our house that we'd opened to put on a new roof and help Andrea with her last year of college. I drew on it a little at a time. Then not a little.

And I hid the mail. I switched my shifts so I'd be home when it came. I put statements in my purse, in my locker at work, once in a box of frozen peas in the back of the freezer. Roger never ate peas. That's how I chose the box. When I tell that story at our group, people laugh, and I laugh too, but I want you to hear what's under it: I was a woman who would plan, carefully, how to lie to the man she loved, and then go to Mass on Sunday. I'm not proud of it. I'm not going to hide it either, not anymore. I did enough hiding.

What I Told Myself

I've thought a lot about the signs I ignored. These are mine, in my own words. If you see yourself here, please don't look away.

The Morning

On Sunday night, March 16, 1997, I came home from the casino with nothing. Not a dollar. I'd drawn the last of what we could draw on the house. I'd known for weeks that a letter was coming, and on Saturday it had come, and it was in the frozen peas.

I sat in the car in the driveway until the sky got light. I prayed, and I didn't know what I was praying for. Then I went inside, and Roger was up making coffee for his shift, and I said, "Sit down. I have to tell you something, and you have to let me get all the way to the end."

I told him everything. The bus. The cards. The coworkers. The house. I got the peas out of the freezer and put the letter on the table. I gave him the number, the whole number. I didn't make it smaller.

He didn't say anything for a very long time. What he said after that, he wrote himself, on the family page. I'll only tell you that he didn't leave, and he didn't go to work that day either.

That afternoon I called my doctor. That was my first phone call. He didn't laugh and he didn't lecture. He gave me the name of a counselor who knew about gambling. That was my second phone call.

It was St. Patrick's Day. I'm Puerto Rican, so it never meant much to me before. Now I wear a little green every March 17th. Roger thinks it's funny.

What Helped

There was no one thing. There were a lot of small, hard, boring things, every single day. Here they are.

Telling the truth. All of it. Not the half that sounded better. The secrets were feeding it. Every one I let out took away some of its air.

A counselor who understood gambling. Bernadette. I saw her every week for the first year and every other week after. Not every counselor knows about this, so ask. She helped me see what I was running from, which was a lot of grief I'd never let myself feel, and she helped me make a plan for every bad moment before it came. She never once made me feel like garbage, which I was very good at doing on my own.

Handing Roger the checkbook. He pays the bills now. My paycheck goes straight into the bank. I carry twenty dollars, and I bring home receipts. The first months that was humiliating. Now it's a relief. I don't have to fight myself over money because there's no money to fight over.

Cutting up the cards. At the kitchen table, that first week, with my good sewing scissors. The bank card too. Roger watched. Then he got out the tape and taped all the pieces to a piece of cardboard and put it in the drawer, so I'd remember. It's still there.

A credit counselor. A nonprofit one, not the kind that advertises on TV at midnight. She helped us call every company we owed, set up a payment plan we could actually live on, and stop the phone ringing. It's taken two and a half years. We're almost there. When the last card is paid off I am going to make a pernil big enough for the whole street.

Staying off the bus routes. Literally. I drive a different way to work so I don't go past the lot where the casino buses pick up. I don't go to that shopping plaza at all. When the girls at work plan a trip, they don't ask me, and they don't talk about it in front of me, and I love them for it. No lottery tickets, no office pools, no scratch tickets in my Christmas stocking. Not even bingo at church, which hurts, because Esther runs a mean bingo.

My faith. I went to confession for the first time in eleven years. I'd stopped going because I knew what I would have to say. I said it. The priest was very kind. I'm not telling you to do that. I'm telling you it helped me.

Other people who knew. Which brings me to Monday nights.

The Monday Night Group

In the fall of 1997, Bernadette had a few of us in her waiting room on the same afternoons, and we got to talking in the parking lot. Five of us. We all said the same thing: the hardest night of the week was Monday, when the weekend was over and the bills were on the table and you'd made it through Saturday and Sunday and you were worn out from it. So we asked our parish if we could use the church hall on Monday nights. Father said yes before I finished the question.

We meet every Monday at seven. Folding chairs, a coffee urn and whatever cookies somebody brings. There are about twelve of us most weeks now. Here's how we do it, and we made this up ourselves:

• Everybody who wants to talks about their week. Nobody has to.
• We say the numbers out loud. What we owe, what we paid, what we spent. Secrets about money are how all of us got here.
• No advice unless somebody asks for it. We are not each other's counselors. Most of us have real ones and we keep going to them.
• What gets said in the hall stays in the hall.
• Everybody has the phone list. If it's a bad night, you call. If somebody calls you, you pick up.
• No one is better than anyone else here, no matter how many days are on their calendar.

The five of us who started it said I could tell a little about them, first names only:

Judy is the youngest of us, a bank teller, and her trouble was scratch tickets. "Just a couple dollars," she says, "a couple hundred times." She's the one who taught the rest of us that small bets add up exactly like big ones.

Glenna was on the same bus I was, a few seats back, for a year. We never spoke. We found out in Bernadette's waiting room. We laughed until we cried and then we just cried.

James bet on football. He's a truck driver and he says the radio in his cab was the worst thing in his life, all those games. He listens to books on tape now. He's on his fourth Louis L'Amour.

Esther is sixty. She was a widow who went to the casino because the house was too quiet. She runs the coffee, the phone list and, as I said, a mean bingo for the parish, though she doesn't play. She's the reason all of us keep showing up.

Anyone is welcome. If you live in eastern Connecticut and want to know where we are, write to me.

Getting Help