[ad_1]
LOS ANGELES — There was always the chance that Tee Higgins would be gifted enough to play in the NFL, and maybe even in a Super Bowl if he were lucky enough.
And if he were lucky enough, lucky enough to land with a quarterback like Joe Burrow, there was always be the chance that Camilla Stewart wouldn’t be there to watch him.
But this Sunday, Tee Higgins’ mother, clean for 14 years, free from the life-threatening grip of crack cocaine and survivor of a bullet to her head, will be at SoFi Stadium to watch her son on the biggest football day of his 23-year-old life.
A Super Bowl Miracle.
“I’m so excited to go see him play,” Camilla Stewart told The Post, “and on the stage that he’s playing on. I’ve always watched it growing up, wishing that I could go to one of those games, and to know that my son is playing in a game like this? It’s surreal.”
Tee, seated on a UCLA podium sheltered on Friday from the warm California sun, broke into a big smile as he flashed back to Thursday.
“Got to see her yesterday,” he said of his mother. “She had nothing but a big-ass smile on her face. She’s like, ‘Son, we’re in L.A., we’re in the Super Bowl!’ Like ‘Yeah, mom, we’re here! We gotta get it done!’ ”
A mother-and-son dream at the end of a nightmare they both survived.
“This is something we dreamed of,” Tee said, “just having her here, especially after everything that she’s been through, everything I went through with her.”
Camilla, who is known as Lady in Oak Ridge, Tenn., started using and dealing when she was 19. She will turn 50 on April. 9.
“It was just something that I chose to do,” she said. “It was just something for me to do.”
Tee’s aunts would often care for him. His father, Eric, would look after him.
“It affected me a lot, just seeing her go through things that she did,” Tee said, “but now I look at it nothing can get worse than those times.”
By the time Camilla was 20, she found herself in Johnson City, Tenn., city jail. “The first time I went I did 14 months,” she said. “And I came home. And I was home for five months, and I failed my drug test and I went back.”
When she got out, after another year-and-change, she began turning her life around. “I had known Tee’s dad all my life, and that’s around the time me and him got together and I was clean,” she said. “We were together for four years, and then that time, that’s when I got pregnant with Tee.”
But everything soon changed for the worse. “Me and Tee’s dad had broken up, and I relapsed,” Camilla said.
Tee was no more than 6 when his mother was shot in the right side of her skull.
“By the drug dealer slash boyfriend slash the monster,” she said, “whatever you want to call him.” She survived — with 160 screws in her head.
The memory remains vivid in her son’s mind. “I remember it like yesterday,” Tee said. He had been living with his aunts. His sister KeKe, who is 10 years older, took him out of school.
“She was crying,” Tee said. “Got in the car and drove to mom’s house, there’s caution tape everywhere: ‘I want to see my mom.’ Helicopter taking off with her. ‘Where’s my mom, where’s my mom?’ ”
She was taken to the hospital. “You can’t see her right now, she’s hurt real bad,” KeKe told him. “And I just started busting out crying,” Tee said.
Unfortunately, the drugs kept stalking her. “I recovered from the gunshot wound and went right back,” Camilla said.
During her six or seven months in Anderson County Detention Facility, she decided that she was sick and tired of being sick and tired. “I knew I needed help, I just wasn’t trying to get help. I had to go when I was ready,” she said.
Another vivid Tee memory: a visit to a halfway house once when Camilla was in rehab. He thinks he was around 9.
“I cried, and I wanted to go see my mom,” Tee recalled. “And my aunts finally took me to go see her, and I wanted to stay the night with her. And my mom was just like, ‘This is not the place for you to stay, you wouldn’t like it here.’ ”
Tee told her he didn’t care. “So I stayed,” he said. “But the food there was not so good. So we ended up eating the noodles packs. We ended up eating the noodles but we didn’t cook ’em, they were just dry …
“Now,” he said with a big smile, “We eatin’ good! It’s been a wild ride for us for sure.”
Cynthia Russell and the Knoxville Area Rescue Ministries’ Serenity recovery program marked a turning point. “Serenity helped me learn how to love myself, become a woman, a mother, a daughter,” Camilla said. “It helped me realize a lot of things that I was missing in my life.”
She has been together for two years now with Eric Higgins, Tee’s father, and the two flew into Los Angeles on Thursday for Super Bowl 2022.
Tee has sported a Greatness tattoo on his right thigh since last year. “Everything I’ve been through, me and my mom been through, my tattoo Greatness is … I have no other choice but to be great,” he said.
Tee inherited his father’s laid-back personality. But Camilla knows this much: “He’s a mama’s boy, still to this day he’s a mama’s boy.”
Camilla has no regrets about the way her life has unfolded.
“Because that’s how my life was supposed to go,” she said, “and if I would have had any regrets, nothing will be going the way that it’s going now. So no I don’t regret anything that happened in my life.”
Tee is proud of the woman she has become.
“She didn’t have to come clean,” he said, “she could have stayed on the wrong route. But she chose God, and God led her to the right path.”
To a Super Bowl. With her son playing in it.
[ad_2]