A life of trauma, turned around

-Divorce, sexual abuse, suicide, a parent's stroke and domestic violence: By the time Bonnie Laabs was in fifth grade, she had seen or endured it all.

A childhood pockmarked with family crises led Laabs down a path of theft, drug use and destructive behavior that nearly wrecked her life as a teenager. Laabs, now 27, turned the corner in high school, but it's only in the last year that she has started speaking publicly about her mistakes in an effort to help other young people. On Sunday, she'll take another step: Laabs, who is publishing a memoir this month, will tell her story in church, to the 700-member Burnsville congregation she serves as a youth mentor.

In Grove City, Minn., where she grew up, "Everyone knew me as the bad kid," said Laabs, a college graduate who works as the director of youth ministries at River Hills United Methodist Church.

The art supplies, photos and comfy couch in Laabs' office reflect nothing of the overturned furniture and shredded pictures she saw as a child after fights between her mother and her mother's boyfriend. Nor do the young woman's smile or the small crucifix she wears on a necklace conjure up images of the sunken, sore-marred face she saw in the mirror at the lowest points of her drug addiction.

But the traumas that Laabs recounts in her books are shocking in their variety and number. By the time she entered third grade, she wrote, her parents had divorced, she had been molested by a baby-sitter and her mother had started dating an alcoholic who physically abused Laabs and her younger brother. Social workers pulled her out of class to take pictures of her bruises that year -- the same year that, walking to school one day, she saw police take down the body of a young neighbor who had hung himself off his back porch.

In fourth grade, her mother had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of her body. In fifth grade, Laabs tried to hang herself three times, got expelled from school and spent time in a foster home. In seventh grade, her family sent her to a group home after she was caught stealing money from her father. In eighth grade, she started drinking and smoking pot. By tenth grade, she was using cocaine and crystal meth.

In the end, the promise of college, a future outside her hometown and God helped her pull through. Laabs, whose good grades had earned her a chance to take college classes while still a teenager, had sunk so far into drug use that her grades slipped and her academic counselor threatened to send her back to high school. Laabs shut herself in her room for a week and came out ready to start fresh. She spent the next year with her nose to the grindstone, avoiding the friends she'd gotten high with and fighting loneliness at home with television and ice cream.

These days, Laabs uses her experience to help others. After training with Toastmasters, she became a professional speaker and began telling her story to troubled teens and foster parents and even at the group home where she once lived. When kids pressed her for details about her recovery, she decided to write her book, "Becoming Beautiful."

And that meant making herself even more vulnerable to family and people who knew nothing of her childhood, lest teenagers in her congregation pick up the book and say, "Oh my goodness, this is my youth pastor."

"I'm very embarrassed about the things I did in my past," Laabs said. But her church has been supportive, she said, and she's working on a second book with her mother. And if her story helps other young people like her, she said, it's worth it.