Who we can help — and who we can't.

Who we can take

Mercy Manor is a home for adult women — eighteen and over — who want to begin again and are willing to give a year to doing it properly.

That is the entire threshold. You do not need a diagnosis. You do not need to have hit some particular bottom. You do not need to arrive with your reasons organized, or be able to explain yourself well, or have any of the paperwork.

Yes, you can bring your children

This is the question women ask first, usually in a careful voice, because they have been told no before.

The house is being built for children too. Not as an afterthought — the plans include a secure perimeter fence, cameras, and rooms meant for a mother and the children who came with her. A mother stays solely responsible for her own children throughout the program; a child up to age 11 may live with her, attending licensed daycare or school in the community during the day.

We want to be clear about why this matters so much to us. In the whole state of Texas there are roughly ten residential treatment centers that can take a mother together with her children (Texas HHSC, via the Hogg Foundation). Ten, in a state of thirty million people. Which means a mother who decides today that she cannot do this any more is, in practice, told to choose between getting well and keeping her children.

That choice, put to a woman at the worst moment of her life, is the reason a great many of them never call anybody. We would rather remove the choice than judge how she makes it.

Detox comes first, and it happens elsewhere

If you are still physically dependent, detox has to happen before you come to us — at another facility in the community, not here.

This is not us being difficult. Detox is medical care, and withdrawal from alcohol and from benzodiazepines can genuinely kill you without supervision. Mercy Manor is a home, not a hospital, and pretending otherwise would put you in danger.

So call us anyway. We will help you find the door for that first step, and we will still be here when you come out the other side of it. Locally we refer to Hood County Hospital in Granbury, and to Recovery Resource in Fort Worth when space allows. Detox first, then a year. That is the sequence, and it is the right one.

If you are on medication

Most prescribed medication is no barrier at all. Medication for your mental health, your blood pressure, your thyroid — anything a doctor has prescribed for a health condition — is welcome, and it is administered by trained staff.

There is one exception right now. Mercy Manor is not currently able to accept a woman who is in medication-assisted treatment for opioid use — methadone, Suboxone (buprenorphine), or a similar maintenance medication. Our board is looking into this carefully, and the policy may change. If that is your situation, please still call us. We will talk it through honestly and, where we can, help point you toward a program that supports medication-assisted treatment — which is a real and effective path to recovery.

What it costs you

Your first four months cost you nothing. They are carried entirely by scholarships, grants, and donations — because in those first months the work is getting well, not earning. From month five, once you are working again, you contribute $500 a month toward your room and the program. That is the whole of it: four months carried for you, then a shared cost once you are back on your feet.

Seeing your people

For your first month, the focus is entirely on you settling in, so there is no visitation. Once you have completed that first month, visitation opens in stages that we work out with you during intake. It is not a punishment; it is how the fragile early weeks of a woman's recovery are protected.

If you are coming straight out of prison

We are not your release address, and we will not pretend we might be.

Serving as a TDCJ-approved release address means meeting their standards, and the way in starts with an intensive three-part application filed while you are still serving your time. Mercy Manor is not set up for that, and starting that process with a home that has not opened would cost you time you do not have.

Call Sanctified Hope. Thirty minutes from us, and set up specifically for taking women directly out of prison. Our founder Sharon King led that home — so this is not a brush-off to a name on a list. It is a referral to work she built, at a place with a bed.

If you were incarcerated at some point in the past, and what has happened since is addiction, or an abusive house, or nowhere to live — that is a completely different question, and the answer may well be yes. More here.

The two things we cannot accept

Every woman who applies will go through a background check. We will tell you that at the start rather than spring it on you.

There are two histories we cannot take:

If we're not the right door

We would rather tell you the truth than take you. A home that admits a woman it cannot serve has not helped her — it has spent a year of her life.

How you actually get in

It starts with a phone call, and a real person. 817-881-6613. Here is exactly what happens next, so none of it is a surprise:

Mercy Manor holds up to twelve women, with a designated family room for mothers with children, and is targeting an opening date of November 1. You can reach out now — we will talk with you and keep you connected as opening approaches.

You do not have to be ready. You do not have to have the words for it. You just have to call.