The woman's voice was mostly a plea. She wanted to talk about her children but she could have been talking about yours or mine.
A couple of them have taken her to hell and back. I emphasize back. What else would you expect with a mother whose first name is Faith? When it came to her kids, Faith Drake, a single mom most of her life, wasn't going to stand for any other outcome.
This Pinellas Park woman wanted to tell me about her girls, grown up now, and how sweet they were once, when their cheeks were smooth and rosy and they found wonder in the smallest things, like a bird's egg, a backyard squirrel.
She wanted me to know how she had warned her girls not to get pregnant when they were kids, like she had. She told them to pick friends who had values and respect, and to stay clear of the rest - and how they got mixed up with the rest anyway.
Drugs and boys dragged them down. It still makes Faith, 38, cry to say the girls dropped out of high school. Her voice turns tough when she describes how she had to pull one of the girls out of a crack house.
Then the exasperation rises. She was talking about the cops, the social workers, the judges, who tried to put her daughters back on the right path. Help was available, but hard to get. She had to fight at every turn. "I heard it so many times," she recalled this week, " "I'm sorry, Mrs. Drake, but there is nothing more that we can do.' "
I hear a story like Faith Drake's and a chill goes down my back. I am reminded that there are no guarantees in child-rearing, especially now. You do your absolute best, but what your children are like at 5 is no predictor about what they'll be at 15.
You read to them every night, teach them about giving love and telling the truth every day, and pray these lessons in life's homework sink in. Then they become teenagers and it can seem as though the worst of the culture snatches them from you and transforms them into people you don't recognize and, worst of all, can't control.
Faith Drake doesn't blame anybody for her children's bad choices. But she does wish the juvenile justice system stopped letting kids get off with probation for small offenses until they worked their way up to the felonious big time and adult court. Until they land there, they've had no real punishment, she said. They conclude the system is a joke.
Faith's girls, one 18, the other 21, learned the hard way. Both have arrest records, mostly for minor offenses. But she believes they have changed. They have jobs waiting tables. They have passed high school equivalency tests. They date men she approves of. And they've apologized to her for the years of torment she endured.
When I asked her how they turned the corner, Faith Drake credits the power of a mother's love. At the same time, she said, she knew she could not force them to do a thing. All she could do was guide them.
"They kept doing wrong, and I just kept saying, "It's not right,' " she said. But she also told them she would be there when they were ready to get serious and straighten out.
Today, Thanksgiving, Faith Drake has a lot to be thankful for. Her girls will be with her, as she cooks up a meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean salad, fruit salad, pumpkin bread and pies, for them and her three other children.
Together they'll watch the parades and football games on TV. They'll celebrate the ties that bind a family together, the ties that were restored when Faith Drake's girls stopped breaking her heart.
I tell you this story because there are many Faith Drakes among us. There are many fractured families, many mothers, and sometimes fathers, trying against terrible pressures to manage a household. There are many children slipping away, even as their parents try to hang on to them.
Children rarely appreciate their parents' gifts and accomplishments until it's too late. May Faith Drake's daughters be different. For she has beaten the odds. Her refusal to give up on them has been enough to bring them back from the edge, and back into the light of a family's love.
