Mothers Who Made Mistakes

The people from the county took away Lynette’s kids in October, 1988.

She remembers that it all started when she snorted a line of methamphetamine for a jolt to get her going. She drank for about 24 hours, working her way through several cases of beer. Then she lay on the bed next to her 2-month-old son.

When Lynette woke up, the paramedics were trying to revive the baby, who was suffocating because Lynette had rolled over on top of him. Her estranged husband discovered them and called for help.

Lynette was so dazed that the paramedics thought she had overdosed on heroin. As they rushed the baby into an ambulance, a sheriff’s deputy said to her, “Why did you even bother having kids? Why don’t you give them to someone who cares?”

Lynette recounted the story to an audience at a hospital forum in Lancaster that included doctors, nurses, social workers and fellow patients. The forum was part of a Lancaster program for drug-addicted mothers--haunted women learning how to care again.

About 300,000 mothers a year nationwide give birth to babies affected by prenatal drug use, according to Jean Clemmer, a nurse at Antelope Valley Medical Center who runs the Road to Recovery rehabilitation program for low-income mothers. One of its main goals is to force mothers to confront what their addiction did to them and their families.

Clemmer has seen two babies die. She has seen children ravaged by problems with behavior, muscular coordination, emotional and mental development: One 5-year-old son of a heroin addict starts fires compulsively, burning his way from one foster home to another.

Lynette’s boy survived. Physically, he appears normal. Psychologically, the extent of the damage is still emerging. Lynette’s four children are hyperactive, emotionally volatile, violent, requiring frequent trips to the emergency room for injuries or illness.

Doctors are trying to determine how much the behavioral problems stem from alcoholism during pregnancy. Life in a family racked by addiction and turmoil also played a role, said Lynette, a blond, chubby 25-year-old who became a mother at 16.

A well-dressed woman in the audience asked the inevitable questions from across the room, from across an economic and cultural gulf: “How could you do it? Didn’t you know the danger?”

“Once you are addicted your mind plays games with you,” Lynette said. “You justify everything.”

Debbie had help becoming an addict. Her husband abandoned her in a trailer park in the desert buttes of Lake Los Angeles with their young son. Without a car. Pregnant.

Her next-door neighbor, a heroin addict, appeared at Debbie’s trailer each day like a generous demon.

“She would faithfully supply me every day,” Debbie said. “I didn’t have to pay. She would even inject me.”

Two days before her baby was born, Debbie used methamphetamine “to kick the heroin.” Her daughter was not born addicted.

“Whatever she went through, she went through in my womb,” said Debbie, who at 34 looks tired and grimly purposeful about putting her nightmares behind her.

Traces of methamphetamine showed up in the baby’s system. Debbie was found to be an unfit mother both for the infant and her older son, Danny. “I always promised Danny that nobody would ever take him away from me,” she said. “My worst fear came true.”

Rather than fear, the first sensation Marilyn felt upon losing her children was relief. Marilyn is 41 and black. She addressed her listeners with a speaking style that was clear and poised and retained a street edge.

Marilyn said she had been taking care of children, other people’s and then her own, since she was a 9-year-old in South Los Angeles. She began using drugs--pills, marijuana, cocaine--in her 20s.

The expression she and her friends used was “24-7”--smoking rock cocaine 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

“We would go to church high, we would leave church and get high,” she said. “I enjoyed ‘chasing the rock,’ as they say. I enjoyed lying and stealing for the high.”

Now Marilyn looks at her children and fears that she sees the consequences of that lifestyle, even in her eldest son, who is 21.

“When I had him I was taking a lot of Red Devils,” or barbiturates, Marilyn said. “Ever since he was little he was accident-prone. He was always running into walls, falling down. He once fell off a second-story balcony.”

Marilyn took refuge at a church shelter in Venice, but it was still too close to the action, too tempting. She remembers literally running from a drug dealer with an insistent sales pitch who followed her into the church parking lot.

She moved finally to the Lancaster shelter and entered Clemmer’s program.

Both Marilyn and Debbie are working to get their children back. Their hope is embodied in Lynette, who after intensive counseling regained custody of her three sons last year.

Lynette’s daughter remains with her ex-husband, however. Lynette cries every time she gets to the part of the story where she drops off the girl at her father’s house after visits.

“I told her, ‘There’s nothing I can do. I made a mistake. This is how things have to be right now.’ ”