Fragment -- #30
[1997] Each narrative we created in the Miami effort to assist the cocaine-abusing women developed around the same set of questions -- Who is this mother? What does she value? How does she make sense of her experiences? In what social context does she live? How does she view parenting? What aspirations does she have for herself? for her child/ren? How does she define key words (e.g., hope, joy, success, power, freedom, fear)? How does she view her involvement with drugs (e.g., a fact, a recreation, a coping mechanism, a threat to well-being)? Does she want to be drug-free? Does she want her child/ren to be drug-free? What barriers does she face? Why does she try or not try to benefit from available resources? Why do her attempts succeed or fail? How does she define success or failure?
Here is one mother’s story. She enrolled in the program in 1991. We completed her life narrative in 1996. A fictitious name was chosen to protect the mother’s confidentiality.
Lakesha was born in 1962 to what she remembers as ‘a loving family’. She was the fifth child in a family of eight daughters and one son. “We had a good family life. Both of my parents worked. We’d go to Orlando three or four times a year. We had family picnics. We were involved in the church.” Lakesha fondly remembers going to youth camps and being president of the youth choir. She did well in school. “I admired my history teacher. She always wanted to take me home for the weekend, but my parents never let me go. She cared. She listened to me.” Lakesha recalls her father being excessively proud of her accomplishments. But his discipline could be severe. “Now I catch my five-year-old boy hitting at me and I try to talk to him rather than beat him. A beating, it don’t do anything but make them more rebellious. I got four or five of them a day. It made me more rebellious than ever.” She remembers enduring numerous belt-whippings, in spite of her efforts to please him. “My mom was a homebody, afraid of society. She was fragile and easy to manipulate. But she never abandoned us.”
Lakesha and her family lived in Liberty City, a section northwest of downtown Miami. Since the mid-1980s, Liberty City (along with neighboring Overtown) has been a drug-burdened and dangerous place to live. As a street-living friend recently reminded Lakesha, “There is no hope for people in Liberty City”. But during her childhood, Liberty City had not yet so deteriorated. Neighbors watched out for each other. Unemployment had not yet become the norm. Teenage pregnancy had not yet become epidemic. Illicit drug dealing had not yet become the dominant ‘business’. Only the older generation now remembers how Liberty City used to be.
Lakesha rebelled before reaching her teens, often slipping away from home when her father was out of town. “I don’t think my family was very dysfunctional. I was the dysfunctional one. I wanted things, but was either too young to have what the older kids had or too old for what the younger kids had. Attention. All along I was looking for attention. I started cutting school in the first grade -- hanging out in the park, going to the house for a snack when school was out, and then taking off again on my bike. My parents never knew.”
Lakesha had the first of her six abortions -- a home abortion -- when she was just twelve years old. “I was five months along. My mom called in a midwife. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. The midwife inserted something she said would make the baby come out. The baby was fully developed. It looked good. They tried to pump it, but nothing happened. When it was all over, my mom went on to work at the dress factory.”
By age thirteen, Lakesha had permanently left home. “I moved in with an older girl who lived three blocks away. My father had warned me to avoid ‘project kids’ because ‘they turn out to be nobody’. I told him, ‘You can’t pick my friends for me. If I think you are going to try, then I’m getting out of here’. That’s really what pushed me down the wrong street. I wanted to prove I didn’t have to do what he said. I knew young women were dying out there, but I did not feel at risk. My older brother regularly checked on me. I continued to go to school. My parents would pick me up every Sunday morning to go to church. I was having the time of my life. A fake ID made it possible to hang out with the big girls. Older guys paid me special attention. I was going to be someone’s princess.” Lakesha was using beer by age twelve; marijuana by age thirteen; cocaine, by age fifteen; crack, by age seventeen. “I was transporting drugs for some older men, giving them to girlfriends, when I decided to try them.”
Lakesha dropped out of high school six months shy of graduation. “I was living two very different lives. I was frantic, scared. I think my drug use put me back a lot. I knew by that time that I was in danger, but I thought I could always get back to safety. I was smoking crack every day. I just marked time -- didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t care. Then the guy I was with was shot dead and I blamed myself. At first I thought about suicide. Then I tried to recover myself. An older physically handicapped man in Bay Point supported me.” She eventually joined the Job Corp, earned her high school equivalency diploma, and stayed clean for over two years. Then a cousin visiting from New York City wanted to try crack. Lakesha remembers warning herself, but decided to supply her cousin. Soon after, she was back on the street. She met at a party the man who would father her three children -- all cocaine-exposed. They have sustained a stormy relationship together since 1985. She enrolled in a RN program at Florida College of Business, but never completed the program.
Lakesha became pregnant with her first live-born child while living in Connecticut (1988). “We didn’t know anybody there, so we came back to Miami. I was really smoking big time. I realize now that I was trying to smoke myself to death.” She delivered a baby girl at twenty-eight weeks gestation. After six months in an outpatient treatment program, she remained clean for a while, attended follow-up meetings, and found a job. However, she had started using again (1991) just before becoming pregnant with her second child (the delivery after which she was enrolled in the intervention program the University of Miami neonatologist had just started). “DCF (Florida’s Department of Children and Families) kept my case open. I’m busting my ass to try and make sure I stay halfway right. I thought maybe this time I had really crossed the line. Then I learned about a woman with three crack-exposed kids who was using, but DCF closed her case. That was the excuse I used to get high. If she can get high, I can too. I lost my pride. I was still getting high thirty minutes before I went into labor.” She delivered a baby girl at thirty-five weeks gestation. "At first, I thought Baby Steps (the name of the University of Miami program) was just one more part of ‘the system’. I refused to sign any papers. I think I told the person she could sign it. After a nurse explained a bit more about the program, I enrolled.” Though Lakesha faithfully kept the appointments for her children, she was not yet receptive to efforts to engage her in intensive case management.
DCF had referred Lakesha to a short-term residential treatment program during this pregnancy. After another few clean months, she again relapsed. “I remember coming to a Christmas party at Baby Steps the day I started getting high again. My kids were dressed in red and green. Later that day, I went around my neighborhood, running my mouth about getting high.”
Now carrying a third cocaine-exposed baby, Lakesha arranged for intake at a different residential treatment program in order to strengthen her chance of retaining custody. She delivered a full-term baby boy (1993). When she was turned down from yet another residential treatment program because she had not ‘hit rock bottom’, Lakesha finally turned in desperation to her Baby Steps case manager who had remained diligent in her attempts to engage Lakesha in spite of repeated resistance. “If she had not been at my doorstep early that morning, I don’t know what would have happened. I begged her for help.” The Baby Steps case manager succeeded in getting Lakesha into a recently established nine-to-eighteen month residential treatment program (i.e., The Village) that was based on the therapeutic strategy of making the inside experience as stressful as possible in order to empower the women for being on the outside. The case manager remained in regular communication with Lakesha during these months and served as a resource person for the treatment staff. While at The Village, Lakesha began to make plans for entering Florida International University with the hope of getting a social work degree.
Since successful completion of The Village’s program (July 1994), Lakesha has been clean. However, avoiding relapse has not been easy. Housing, childcare, and employment have presented obstacles that she, with her Baby Steps case manager’s assistance, has had to overcome. “It was very difficult at first, after leaving the structure of The Village. My expectations were too high. I had to move in with my mother. I still live from paycheck to paycheck. I often feel stuck between dependence on the system’s financial aid and the independence I know I need. The scary part is relaxation. When I relax, I relapse. The pre-Village world is not necessarily inside you, but it’s all around you, closing in on you. Why can’t there be a half-way house for women who are really trying to change?”
While in the treatment program, Lakesha was diagnosed with a form of clinical depression (which is responding well to medications). Knowledge of this condition could have made her more dependent on ‘the system’. Instead, she has tried to stay employed -- which has meant losing food stamps, a subsidized apartment, AFDC, and Medicaid. She has battled through periods of suicidal ideation and debilitating depression with the assistance and occasional intervention of the Baby Steps staff. She knows that the realization of her aspirations necessitates long-term independence. She has earned certification as a child-care provider. She is dealing responsibly with past student loans from a training program that went bankrupt. She is now working as a recruiter in a program serving HIV+ drug-using women in Liberty City. The Village asked her to serve on its Advisory Board. Lakesha has become a model PTA mom. She was selected by her children’s school as “Mother of the Year”. She goes to all the meetings, volunteers at the school, goes on field trips, helps out in the classroom and the library. “When my daughter saw me one day in the school library, she shouted, ‘Mom! Mom!’ It was really nice. It made me feel like gold. I love my children and now I love me.”
When asked what she shares with mothers in life circumstances similar to her experience, Lakesha answered, “If I can change my life, anybody can change their lives. I want them to think, ‘Maybe I can do it. She did it and she’s got those kids. She was right there on the same street as me.’ You can fix yourself up and look OK on the outside, but be all messed-up on the inside.”
When asked what Baby Steps has meant to her, Lakesha explained, “Baby Steps has been the stepping stone for me. Without Baby Steps, I would still be high and running or even dead right now. I didn’t have nobody to care for me. Baby Steps is like somebody’s on my side. Baby Steps can make you change, make you a success.”
[1997] Each narrative we created in the Miami effort to assist the cocaine-abusing women developed around the same set of questions -- Who is this mother? What does she value? How does she make sense of her experiences? In what social context does she live? How does she view parenting? What aspirations does she have for herself? for her child/ren? How does she define key words (e.g., hope, joy, success, power, freedom, fear)? How does she view her involvement with drugs (e.g., a fact, a recreation, a coping mechanism, a threat to well-being)? Does she want to be drug-free? Does she want her child/ren to be drug-free? What barriers does she face? Why does she try or not try to benefit from available resources? Why do her attempts succeed or fail? How does she define success or failure?
Here is one mother’s story. She enrolled in the program in 1991. We completed her life narrative in 1996. A fictitious name was chosen to protect the mother’s confidentiality.
Lakesha was born in 1962 to what she remembers as ‘a loving family’. She was the fifth child in a family of eight daughters and one son. “We had a good family life. Both of my parents worked. We’d go to Orlando three or four times a year. We had family picnics. We were involved in the church.” Lakesha fondly remembers going to youth camps and being president of the youth choir. She did well in school. “I admired my history teacher. She always wanted to take me home for the weekend, but my parents never let me go. She cared. She listened to me.” Lakesha recalls her father being excessively proud of her accomplishments. But his discipline could be severe. “Now I catch my five-year-old boy hitting at me and I try to talk to him rather than beat him. A beating, it don’t do anything but make them more rebellious. I got four or five of them a day. It made me more rebellious than ever.” She remembers enduring numerous belt-whippings, in spite of her efforts to please him. “My mom was a homebody, afraid of society. She was fragile and easy to manipulate. But she never abandoned us.”
Lakesha and her family lived in Liberty City, a section northwest of downtown Miami. Since the mid-1980s, Liberty City (along with neighboring Overtown) has been a drug-burdened and dangerous place to live. As a street-living friend recently reminded Lakesha, “There is no hope for people in Liberty City”. But during her childhood, Liberty City had not yet so deteriorated. Neighbors watched out for each other. Unemployment had not yet become the norm. Teenage pregnancy had not yet become epidemic. Illicit drug dealing had not yet become the dominant ‘business’. Only the older generation now remembers how Liberty City used to be.
Lakesha rebelled before reaching her teens, often slipping away from home when her father was out of town. “I don’t think my family was very dysfunctional. I was the dysfunctional one. I wanted things, but was either too young to have what the older kids had or too old for what the younger kids had. Attention. All along I was looking for attention. I started cutting school in the first grade -- hanging out in the park, going to the house for a snack when school was out, and then taking off again on my bike. My parents never knew.”
Lakesha had the first of her six abortions -- a home abortion -- when she was just twelve years old. “I was five months along. My mom called in a midwife. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. The midwife inserted something she said would make the baby come out. The baby was fully developed. It looked good. They tried to pump it, but nothing happened. When it was all over, my mom went on to work at the dress factory.”
By age thirteen, Lakesha had permanently left home. “I moved in with an older girl who lived three blocks away. My father had warned me to avoid ‘project kids’ because ‘they turn out to be nobody’. I told him, ‘You can’t pick my friends for me. If I think you are going to try, then I’m getting out of here’. That’s really what pushed me down the wrong street. I wanted to prove I didn’t have to do what he said. I knew young women were dying out there, but I did not feel at risk. My older brother regularly checked on me. I continued to go to school. My parents would pick me up every Sunday morning to go to church. I was having the time of my life. A fake ID made it possible to hang out with the big girls. Older guys paid me special attention. I was going to be someone’s princess.” Lakesha was using beer by age twelve; marijuana by age thirteen; cocaine, by age fifteen; crack, by age seventeen. “I was transporting drugs for some older men, giving them to girlfriends, when I decided to try them.”
Lakesha dropped out of high school six months shy of graduation. “I was living two very different lives. I was frantic, scared. I think my drug use put me back a lot. I knew by that time that I was in danger, but I thought I could always get back to safety. I was smoking crack every day. I just marked time -- didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t care. Then the guy I was with was shot dead and I blamed myself. At first I thought about suicide. Then I tried to recover myself. An older physically handicapped man in Bay Point supported me.” She eventually joined the Job Corp, earned her high school equivalency diploma, and stayed clean for over two years. Then a cousin visiting from New York City wanted to try crack. Lakesha remembers warning herself, but decided to supply her cousin. Soon after, she was back on the street. She met at a party the man who would father her three children -- all cocaine-exposed. They have sustained a stormy relationship together since 1985. She enrolled in a RN program at Florida College of Business, but never completed the program.
Lakesha became pregnant with her first live-born child while living in Connecticut (1988). “We didn’t know anybody there, so we came back to Miami. I was really smoking big time. I realize now that I was trying to smoke myself to death.” She delivered a baby girl at twenty-eight weeks gestation. After six months in an outpatient treatment program, she remained clean for a while, attended follow-up meetings, and found a job. However, she had started using again (1991) just before becoming pregnant with her second child (the delivery after which she was enrolled in the intervention program the University of Miami neonatologist had just started). “DCF (Florida’s Department of Children and Families) kept my case open. I’m busting my ass to try and make sure I stay halfway right. I thought maybe this time I had really crossed the line. Then I learned about a woman with three crack-exposed kids who was using, but DCF closed her case. That was the excuse I used to get high. If she can get high, I can too. I lost my pride. I was still getting high thirty minutes before I went into labor.” She delivered a baby girl at thirty-five weeks gestation. "At first, I thought Baby Steps (the name of the University of Miami program) was just one more part of ‘the system’. I refused to sign any papers. I think I told the person she could sign it. After a nurse explained a bit more about the program, I enrolled.” Though Lakesha faithfully kept the appointments for her children, she was not yet receptive to efforts to engage her in intensive case management.
DCF had referred Lakesha to a short-term residential treatment program during this pregnancy. After another few clean months, she again relapsed. “I remember coming to a Christmas party at Baby Steps the day I started getting high again. My kids were dressed in red and green. Later that day, I went around my neighborhood, running my mouth about getting high.”
Now carrying a third cocaine-exposed baby, Lakesha arranged for intake at a different residential treatment program in order to strengthen her chance of retaining custody. She delivered a full-term baby boy (1993). When she was turned down from yet another residential treatment program because she had not ‘hit rock bottom’, Lakesha finally turned in desperation to her Baby Steps case manager who had remained diligent in her attempts to engage Lakesha in spite of repeated resistance. “If she had not been at my doorstep early that morning, I don’t know what would have happened. I begged her for help.” The Baby Steps case manager succeeded in getting Lakesha into a recently established nine-to-eighteen month residential treatment program (i.e., The Village) that was based on the therapeutic strategy of making the inside experience as stressful as possible in order to empower the women for being on the outside. The case manager remained in regular communication with Lakesha during these months and served as a resource person for the treatment staff. While at The Village, Lakesha began to make plans for entering Florida International University with the hope of getting a social work degree.
Since successful completion of The Village’s program (July 1994), Lakesha has been clean. However, avoiding relapse has not been easy. Housing, childcare, and employment have presented obstacles that she, with her Baby Steps case manager’s assistance, has had to overcome. “It was very difficult at first, after leaving the structure of The Village. My expectations were too high. I had to move in with my mother. I still live from paycheck to paycheck. I often feel stuck between dependence on the system’s financial aid and the independence I know I need. The scary part is relaxation. When I relax, I relapse. The pre-Village world is not necessarily inside you, but it’s all around you, closing in on you. Why can’t there be a half-way house for women who are really trying to change?”
While in the treatment program, Lakesha was diagnosed with a form of clinical depression (which is responding well to medications). Knowledge of this condition could have made her more dependent on ‘the system’. Instead, she has tried to stay employed -- which has meant losing food stamps, a subsidized apartment, AFDC, and Medicaid. She has battled through periods of suicidal ideation and debilitating depression with the assistance and occasional intervention of the Baby Steps staff. She knows that the realization of her aspirations necessitates long-term independence. She has earned certification as a child-care provider. She is dealing responsibly with past student loans from a training program that went bankrupt. She is now working as a recruiter in a program serving HIV+ drug-using women in Liberty City. The Village asked her to serve on its Advisory Board. Lakesha has become a model PTA mom. She was selected by her children’s school as “Mother of the Year”. She goes to all the meetings, volunteers at the school, goes on field trips, helps out in the classroom and the library. “When my daughter saw me one day in the school library, she shouted, ‘Mom! Mom!’ It was really nice. It made me feel like gold. I love my children and now I love me.”
When asked what she shares with mothers in life circumstances similar to her experience, Lakesha answered, “If I can change my life, anybody can change their lives. I want them to think, ‘Maybe I can do it. She did it and she’s got those kids. She was right there on the same street as me.’ You can fix yourself up and look OK on the outside, but be all messed-up on the inside.”
When asked what Baby Steps has meant to her, Lakesha explained, “Baby Steps has been the stepping stone for me. Without Baby Steps, I would still be high and running or even dead right now. I didn’t have nobody to care for me. Baby Steps is like somebody’s on my side. Baby Steps can make you change, make you a success.”
