A Second Motherhood : Family: As their own children fight addiction, grandmothers take a course on caring for babies prenatally exposed to drugs.

Robertean Young had brought five of her 25 grandchildren to her graduation. This wasn’t simply an outing with grandma; she is the children’s principal caretaker, having acquired them “one by one,” she says, as both a daughter and a son battled drug addiction.

Nor was this a traditional graduation ceremony. Young, 55, had just completed a 10-week, 30-hour parenting course for black grandmothers caring for babies prenatally exposed to chemical abuse.

This being 1990, these grandmothers have more to deal with than childhood scrapes and scratches. They are coping with youngsters who may have been physically damaged by prenatal exposure to cocaine or other drugs and psychologically wounded from being shunted between foster care and relatives.

And, as caretakers, they are dealing with a staggeringly complex social-services system. Ten of the 12 members of this first graduating class were on hand one recent afternoon at George Washington High School in South-Central Los Angeles as certificates were handed out during a ceremony punctuated by wails of babies in the audience.

The grandmothers were part of a pilot project under the auspices of the county Department of Health Services’ child-abuse prevention program and the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect (ICAN), a coalition of state, city, federal and county agencies.

ICAN director Deanne Tilton, who hopes the program will go statewide and, possibly, nationwide, explains its mission: “There’s considerable evidence now that the responsibility to care for children profoundly affected by substance abuse falls on grandmothers, yet there has been very little support or preparation or training.”

Such children are increasing in number. At Charles Drew-Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in South-Central Los Angeles alone, almost 10,000 babies are born each year, and, according to hospital statistics, 40% of their mothers test positive for drug use. The county Department of Children’s Services reports that between May, 1988, and April, 1989, the most recent period for which statistics are available, an average of 176 drug-exposed infants each month were referred to the agency.

Although the program graduates, together with their volunteer teachers, are members of the founding chapter of the Assn. of African-American Grandmothers, their class includes one grandfather and one biological father, Willie Smith, who attended classes with his own mother; together, he and his mother care for his daughter, whose mother is incarcerated.

Smith, who is disabled, may have summed up the feelings of all when he described the initial reaction of his mother, Icie, to the news that her granddaughter might be turned over to her: “I’m not taking care of no crying, howling baby.”

Lois Walters, the county health services specialist who designed the program, says many grandmothers in the same situation at first feel “very angry and frustrated” as well as “humiliated” by a legal and financial-support system they do not know how to negotiate.

During the 10 weeks, this group learned about custody-release procedures, how juvenile court works, about getting food stamps and a Medi-Cal card, as well as about services available to developmentally disabled children.

They learned about the importance of prenatal care, about the nutrition needs of these babies and about safeguarding their own health.

Networking is an important facet of the program; the grandparent caretakers learn their problems are not unusual.

Common threads run through their stories:

Lynda Brewer, 46, was jolted in the mid-’80s to learn that her two daughters were “users,” on cocaine. She says the older daughter, now the mother of a 6-year-old and pregnant, is still using. The younger daughter, Dana, 24, says she has “been clean” for almost five months and is pulling her life together.

Meanwhile, Lynda has been caring for Dana’s daughter, Rayna, a 4-year-old abandoned by her mother during a time when drug abuse led her to Skid Row and two months in jail for forging checks to support her habit--”That’s what made me come back to my senses,” she says.

Although both she and Rayna’s father used cocaine, even during her pregnancy, Dana says, Rayna is among the lucky ones. She is bright and alert.

Now, Dana is again pregnant; when drugs become paramount, she says, nothing else matters--”You think about abortion, but you’re just too lazy to go down there.”

She acknowledges that she used drugs early in this pregnancy and expresses “some concern” about whether the fetus has been affected. She still wonders if drug use was linked to the death in 1988 of her son from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

She says she is fighting her way back, trying to get into a program for women who are recovering drug users and pregnant, hoping to go back to school and train to be a drug counselor, hoping to “get my child back” and provide for her a stable environment.

Attractive, poised and well-groomed, she is a young woman who gives every appearance of being on her way.

Meanwhile, Lynda Brewer is, for all intents and purposes, Rayna’s mother. She is also founder and executive director of a nonprofit South-Central Los Angeles program, “Mothers and Daughters Against Drug Abuse.” She says she came into the grandmothers’ program to learn everything she could about drug babies so as to “pass on that information.”

Her older daughter, she says, walked out of a drug-rehabilitation program. A relative is the court-appointed caretaker of her 6-year-old. But with another child on the way, Lynda says, “Sooner or later they’re going to call me about taking care of that new grand-baby.”

Robertean Young’s charges range in age from 13 months to 11 years. “This one I got from the hospital,” she says, cuddling the youngest, Brittaney. A woman who looks comfortably grandmotherly--and, for graduation, festively costumed in a floral-print dress and a perky black hat--she does not seem rattled by the noise and confusion created by the five youngsters tailing her.

She is talking about baby Brittaney’s mother, Sheila, who she says has now been drug-free for almost a year and has a steady job. Having her mother to take care of the baby and three older children allows Sheila to go to work.

“I just thank the Lord,” Young says, that her daughter is now clean. Soon, she hopes, the two youngest grandchildren will be in their mother’s custody. Young, whose own seven children are grown, says she will be legal guardian of the two older children.

Their father is not in the picture. “We don’t know where he is,” Young says. “We haven’t heard from him in seven years.”

The future of 11-year-old LaCresha, daughter of Young’s son, Mark, is uncertain. She says, “Right now he’s in jail. La Cresha’s mother gave her to me, and I took her in.” That was in 1986.

“It’s hard now, I’m telling you,” Young says. “You’ve got to have plenty of patience. The children today are more hardheaded, and they’re kind of lazy, too. One of the things is the time we’re living in. If you don’t keep up with them and train them, you’re going to be in trouble.”

Kathleen Williams, 43, another graduate, tells a similar story. Her son is in prison, on a drug-related robbery conviction; her daughter, the mother of Williams’ only grandchild, Kathy, 4, is pregnant by the man with whom she lives. Williams hopes to get custody of Kathy, who is with her mother but spends weekends with her grandmother.

Williams believes that the child “is not in a good environment.” She worries about drug use in the house where the child lives and about violence. It is in gang territory, she says--”In that house, when they say ‘hit the floor,’ they mean ‘hit the floor.’ ”

Williams, a technician at the Veterans Administration Hospital in West Los Angeles, says she learned a great deal in the program about the behaviors of drug babies and, specifically, those of Kathy. A pretty, rather somber child, “she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just stand there and scream,” Williams says.

Growing up in Los Angeles was different when Williams was Kathy’s age. “My mother had us in church four or five days a week,” she says. “And when you woke up in the morning, you had something to do.” Although her mother had a job as a practical nurse, she adds, “She picked us up from school and then went back to work.”

And, unlike in many black families today, there was a father in the picture to help rear Williams and five siblings. Williams herself has never been married; if she gets custody of Kathy, she will rely on help from her mother, Helena Wilkins, now 73.

The graduation ceremony for the grandmothers was a blend of nostalgia and reality. Speaker Ophelia Long, administrator of the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in West Los Angeles, was first to mention the grandparent tradition among blacks--”The strongest part of the black family was the grandmothers.”

Actress Roxie Roker of “The Jeffersons,” herself a grandmother, noted that when she was growing up in segregated Miami, “one of the most precious possessions” of black people was community unity, “the self-help we gave each other.”

If a child were in trouble, perhaps because a parent was in trouble, Roker said, that child was taken in by another family. “We made room. . . . We’d add a little more water to that gravy.”

Actress Marla Gibbs of “227,” also a grandmother, said, “This is a crucial time in our society, when the grandmothers must step forward” to give love and support. She admonished those in the audience, “Dig for your heritage. . . . We’ll find we’re made of great stuff.”

Life does not stop, she told the grandmothers, “because your baby had a baby.”

Graduate Frances Hinton told of being rattled when she and her husband, looking forward to a leisurely retirement, learned they were to take care of two grandchildren. “I just did not know what I was going to do,” she said.

They worked it out. Now it is she who is reminding others in the black community, “These are our children. The social programs are not working. We’re going to have to go back to the drawing board,” stick together. She spoke of the need to re-instill values such as home and church.

This program was an experiment, with basically no funding save for Lois Walters’ time; indeed, she dug into her own purse to pay for refreshments and a newsletter. The instructors volunteered.

From here, Walters says, “I don’t know where we’re going to go, but it’s far.” Already, she is thinking about expanding the curriculum to include visits to court and to a corrections facility.

And she is aware of the need to resolve child-care and transportation problems so more caretaker grandmothers may attend sessions.

The need is apparent; Deanne Tilton points out that 90% of the dependency cases before juvenile court are related to substance abuse. Being a grandparent to a special-needs child coming out of a chaotic environment is not easy.

“These are kids who have two strikes, at least, against them,” Tilton says. A grandparent promises more stability than a non-relative, a stability that in many instances the foster-care system has been unable to provide.

Some grandmothers in this group have children who were ordered by courts into their care; others just had the youngsters dropped there. However it happened, the caretakers need help. That help may be something as basic as knowing whom to call when the AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) check doesn’t come.

Grandparent training for black women is an idea that came to Lois Walters when she was working for the Los Angeles schools, seeing grandmothers of junior high students “harried and distraught,” burdened with the problems of families torn apart by drugs or violence.

A program like this one will give them self-confidence and self-esteem, she believes, and they in turn can pass those qualities on to their grandchildren.

Walters tells of a family she recently ran across in Compton. The great-grandmother and the grandmother were on cocaine; the great-great-grandmother was left to take care of the kids.

“It’s just so tragic,” she says. “All this stuff touches all of us, I don’t care where you live.”

Deanne Tilton sums up the importance of the program: “All the agencies and all the money in the world can never take the place of grandma and grandpa.”