Starting Over : Counselors Help Mothers Kick Drugs and Keep Children

Valerie Garcia is looking forward to Christmas, when she will bring her children home for the first time in two years.

Last year she was alone. The county had taken custody of her two little girls because Garcia, who was then a heroin addict, was unable to care for them. The Christmas before that, she was in jail serving time on a drug charge.

Garcia is again in jail, this time serving the last two weeks of a 60-day sentence for prostitution. She now has three daughters, including a month-old baby, who are in the care of her mother and grandmother until she is released.

“It was hard to come in this time and leave my daughters,” the 28-year-old Santa Ana woman said during an interview at the Orange County Women’s Central Jail. “But I did it because this was the last thing I had to do to put my past behind me and build a life for my kids.

“And I couldn’t have done it without Laura.”

Laura is Laura Najera, a counselor with the Child Guidance Center in Santa Ana. The center was hired by the county a year ago to provide the therapeutic counseling element of a federally funded program designed to keep drug-addicted mothers from abandoning their infants.

“We take care of the head stuff, the emotional stuff,” Najera said. “We try to help the mother create an emotional bond with the child she is carrying.” Creating that bond is an important part of preventing the baby’s abandonment at the hospital when the mother discovers she has passed on her addiction, she said.

For Garcia, the Abandoned Infants Assistance Program meant the difference between staying strung out and risking the loss of her newborn daughter, or kicking her heroin addiction in order to reunite her family.

Garcia said she was first contacted in February by one of two social workers in the program. After an initial meeting with the social worker and Najera, she canceled subsequent appointments.

“I wanted out of my life so bad. I was tired of being sick all the time, but I was scared,” Garcia said.

In April, Garcia, then four months pregnant, was sentenced to two months in jail for prostitution. But the judge allowed her to postpone her sentence until after she gave birth.

He granted Garcia a second stay after she learned that her baby was born addicted. Once the child was out of danger and released from the hospital, Garcia went to jail, leaving the infant in her mother’s care. That was when she decided to give the program a chance.

It was confidence-building sessions with Najera that Garcia said enabled her to face the responsibility of being a good parent, which meant confronting the consequences of her drug use, including serving her time in jail.

“My 9-year-old was really upset about me having to go into jail. Every time I leave, she’s afraid I’m not coming back,” Garcia said. “Now, since I’m not using (drugs), I had the patience to sit down and explain to her that I have to go, but I will come back.”

Garcia said her involvement in the program has helped her become a better parent and given her the courage to face life when she gets back to her neighborhood, a high crime area where drugs are readily available.

“But I’ve told everybody I’m not using anymore. I have to do it for my kids,” she said.

Garcia is considered one of the program’s success stories, because she changed her lifestyle to provide a safer environment for her children.

“Committing to be at a certain place at a certain time is very hard for a drug addict. And facing up to the consequences of their habit is tough,” said Sharon Zepel, who supervises the program for the Orange County Social Services Agency.

A two-year federal grant covers the cost of two social workers, two therapeutic counselors and one social worker to teach parents and relatives the special needs of caring for an infant born with a drug addiction. The majority of babies born to mothers who used drugs during their pregnancies are addicted, Zepel says.

In addition, the program workers coordinate with other county programs and private agencies to help the mothers and their children once the abandoned-infants-assistance program ends.

“This is Social Services doing something on the prevention side. We’re always known as the people who come in after the fact and take the kids away.”

Since the program was launched July, 1991, 160 women have been helped, Zepel said. There are no statistics on the number of Orange County women who could qualify for the program, she said.

The federal grant allows for women to be on the program for just 60 days after they deliver their babies. Zepel said that makes reaching the women early in their pregnancy crucial.

The first order of business, Zepel said, is to get the women in a rehabilitation program and get them medical care. About 99% of the women in the program are addicted to heroin, she said. But immediate withdrawal from heroin would be dangerous for the fetus, so the women are usually put onto a methadone program, Zepel said.

Finding medical care for these women poses another problem, according to Najera.

“A lot of these women can’t get medical care. People’s first reaction is to be afraid of a woman who has track marks on her arm,” Najera said. “I tell our clients if they want the baby they’re carrying, and they want it to be healthy, they need to be honest with me and their doctors.”

Zepel added that there are a few private doctors in the county who are now seeing the program’s clients. UCI Medical Center also provides prenatal care for them.

Najera and the other counselors will go to medical appointments with the clients and even attend the birth if the women need them. “We’re there to hold their hands and get them through whatever they need help with,” Najera said.

For most of these women, that’s more attention and support than they have had before.

“I heard about these women who come and take you to the doctors and stuff, but I didn’t believe it,” Garcia said. “Who’s going to want to help people like me? But then I met Laura and things really clicked. If it wasn’t for her, I’d still be using.”