Maternal Instinct and Addiction Battle for Control

April Day strapped her daughter in the car seat most mornings and drove from her Irvine tract home to score heroin.

She would park her Jetta and buy on the mangiest streets of Santa Ana littered with junkies, then it was up to her girlfriend’s house in Silverado Canyon. For the rest of the afternoon, she and her housewife pals would tie off an arm and plunge hypodermics into their veins.

“We used to joke about the talk shows they should do: ‘Heroin Addict Housewives on Geraldo! Domestic Drug Addicts on Donahue! Opiate Addicts on Oprah!’ We’d go up there and shoot speedballs and then go home and cook dinner for our husbands,” Day said.

“I grew up very middle class in Seal Beach, and I thought it was all really cool, really romantic. We thought we were the only yuppie heroin addicts.”

Once pregnant , Day stopped shooting up, but continued taking Percodan--even after delivering her daughter. The day she gave birth, her friends arrived at the hospital with her needles and heroin, although she turned it away for a few more months.

Even though she was still popping pills, she realized she was endangering her daughter through breast-feeding. So she switched to bottles.

“It’s a miracle nothing happened to her,” Day says now, holding her healthy toddler in her lap. But she only committed to long-term rehab under threat of losing her 18-month-old daughter. “I wouldn’t be in a program if they wouldn’t let me have her here.”

For about a month now, Day has been drug-free at Heritage House, Orange County’s only residential treatment center that allows women with children.

There are only 15 beds at the Costa Mesa facility, a grouping of condominiums cheerfully decorated in blue and pink pastels that the women and their children share.

Here, the substance abusers--drug addicts and alcoholics--spend every day participating in group or individual counseling sessions and parenting classes and studying 12-step program material, as well as cooking and cleaning for their children.

There is a two-month waiting list for the six-month program.

Experts in the field advocate prevention and treatment before delivery and say mothers of substance-exposed babies should generally be treated like patients with an illness. The cost of treating newborns with extreme medical problems and, later, children with the lingering side effects of prenatal drug exposure, are ultimately far greater than the cost of pre-birth rehabilitation.

Heritage House costs the county $54 a day per mother or child, whereas care for a newborn with drug exposure problems in one day at a neonatal intensive care unit can soar into the thousands of dollars.

The sound-bite picture of drug moms many people foster is one of poor inner-city women, often black and Latino, rather than your next-door neighbor or grocery store clerk. A visit to Heritage House illustrates the reality: National studies show mothers from all walks of life drink and do drugs while pregnant.

“It’s much more prevalent than we think, because it’s across all socio-economic strata,” said Margaret McMillan, the nurse who runs the delivery room and maternity wing of St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, where more than 5,200 babies were born last year.

Prenatal substance exposure, she said, “is just everywhere, and anyone who thinks they don’t have the problem because they’re in a nice area, with a nice hospital, is making a mistake. And just like wife abuse and child abuse, the problem doesn’t belong to ‘them’; it belongs to us all.”

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Day, 31, certainly mocks our stereotypes. She grew up middle class in predominantly white Seal Beach and has a smile like former model Cheryl Tiegs’. She frequently visited her father in Northern California but lived with her single mother, who worked.

At 8, she tried smoking pot; at 12 she drank Old English 800 malt liquor under the Seal Beach Pier. At 17, she dropped out of her junior year of high school and went to work. By age 19 she had married a man she met at a Santa Ana bar.

“I turned 20 July 5, and my daughter was born July 27. I wasn’t using then,” Day said.

She and her husband split up after a few years, and she moved in with her mother in Irvine. At her job as a dental assistant, she began nicking codeine-laced Tylenol and learned how to forge prescriptions.

“Opiates did it for me; they relaxed me, made me not worry. Codeine doesn’t leave a hangover,” she pointed out.

She had begun dating and found it nerve-racking, so she began using more codeine.

Some time later, a group of her friends from childhood told her about a guy they’d gone to school with who was then in prison. Day had lost her virginity with him and felt a type of bond with him still, so she wrote him at the Terminal Island prison. Three weeks later she visited, and eventually she learned he was a heroin addict, which drove him to rob banks for his fix.

Three months after his prison release, nine months before they married, Day used his needles to inject herself.

“I grew up upper middle class. Everything was so square. I thought, ‘Ew! Cool! I’m doing something forbidden.’ I thought it was so cool. I looked so square; I looked so girl-next-door. I didn’t look like the people digging through the trash for things to sell.”

With his clean-cut looks and Polo sweaters, her husband didn’t look like a drug addict either.

Eighteen months ago they had Alexandra, a sweet-faced baby who Day says shows no signs of drug exposure.

“I didn’t know I was pregnant but stopped using when I was three months’ pregnant (and found out),” Day said of the codeine. Her husband continued shooting heroin.

She didn’t last long after delivering her baby. Soon she and her girlfriends were shooting speedballs, a mix of heroin and cocaine.

“You know it would have to feel pretty great when people give their children, their houses and cars away for it. It’s a 30-second rush, and it’s like your whole body has an orgasm,” Day said with a laugh. “Ten or 15 times a day we were using it.

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Although she and her husband tried countless times to kick heroin, none of their efforts stuck for long.

One of the problems was that she’d had to leave her daughter behind when she checked into another rehab program, and Day swore she would never willingly part with her again.

It was only after her mother-in-law called a social worker and reported Day’s heroin use that she sought rehabilitation help at Heritage House, which contracts with the county of Orange as well as taking private individuals.

She had to wait two months to enter the six-month program, which she pays for with her welfare check.

“I knew I’d lost my (oldest) daughter Sarah emotionally, who was living with her dad, and I was about to lose Alexandra, because my husband’s mother would report me.”

Now, her husband is in a clean-and-sober facility and struggling but staying off the drugs.

While her children may not suffer physical drug side effects, they suffered from her addiction in more subtle ways, she sees now, with the clarity of a month sober.

“I’d be up doing coke until 4 (a.m.) and sleep till 9, but Alexandra’s up at 8. There were days she wouldn’t go outside because I was too tired. So Alexandra was neglected in some ways emotionally.”

Alexandra, she says, seems rather bright and advanced for her age.

“What I do worry about is in her tiny body; she has the seeds of addiction in her future.”

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Kim Holloway could have the same concerns about her son, Clifton, 4, with whom she has lived the past five months at Heritage House.

Holloway, 23, of Huntington Beach, also grew up middle class, and said she was introduced to speed by the mother of a high school boyfriend who was selling the drug. But she never thought she was an addict because she held a job at Sav-On Drugs and never injected or smoked drugs, she said.

“I got pregnant when I was 18, and I was about five weeks along before I knew I was pregnant,” said Holloway, a pretty woman with long brown hair. “I was using heavily. I tried to stop but probably went on using it through my fourth month, then I smoked weed after that.

“I stopped probably about my eighth month, just before I had him,” she added. “I’m not sure, but I think it was because he was moving so much more, I guess it hit me that when I did the drugs, he did the drugs. Before that I thought, ‘maybe if I just don’t use the last month, maybe the baby will be OK.’ ”

And he was, testing negative for drug exposure.

She breast-fed her son for about four months, she said, and smoked marijuana the whole time.

“As soon as I stopped nursing him I went back to using crystal meth(amphetamines) and smoking grass,” Holloway said.

It was only five months ago, after she was reduced to living with her son and a drug dealer in motels and passing the day popping pills, that Holloway finally got help. Her ex-husband confronted her about the ratty way they were living.

She only checked in for help, however, when she thought her son’s father might try to take him away from her. Holloway recently registered for classes at Orange Coast College, and when she leaves Heritage House in a few weeks she will continue her studies for a career in drug and alcohol counseling.

Of the four kids in her family, she said, “I keep trying to think, ‘Why was I the one who got hooked on drugs?’ I came from a normal family. I’m not really sure what got me into it, except I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere, and using drugs I was able to be the person I thought I wanted to be.”

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Geri Williams, 36, of Long Beach, loved the biker life. Even after she had her first child 17 years ago, she hung out with the motorcycle set doing speed. Even after she got pregnant again six years ago, she did drugs the whole time, including the day her daughter was born. She knows her little girl is still paying the price.

“She’s real hyper, hard to control, and she’s been moved around because of my addiction, which has caused her a lot of problems,” Williams said.

“I don’t remember when she first started crawling, because I was high and I wasn’t paying any attention to it.”

Williams, a native of Cypress, didn’t come from a messed-up family; she enjoyed “a real good childhood. . . . It doesn’t matter where you come from. Dope’s everywhere.”

Her son has been raised by her parents because she was getting high, and he turned out beautifully, earning straight A’s and captaining his water polo team. Her whole life she told herself she gave him up for his own good. Only now that she’s clean “can I see that I left him there because the dope was more important.”

When she turned 18, she began working at bars and started taking speed for fun. It also helped her stay awake during her after-hours shifts. Pretty soon she was popping speed daily. For years it was a kick. How could it be a problem if she could function at work?

Eventually the fun went out of drugs, but she couldn’t give them up. Being pregnant didn’t slow her down, nor did motherhood. It took being on the skids.

“A heroin addict had stolen my car, I had no place to live, I’d left my daughter with her dad for three weeks and didn’t come pick her up. Every time I started thinking about my daughter I’d just do more and more dope and just not think about it.

“One day we broke down on the freeway. Sitting there at a gas station, my ex-husband was screaming and yelling at me, and I just looked in the rear-view mirror. I just looked like hell ; I just looked so bad. And so I called my mom, told her I needed help.”

Williams has graduated from Heritage House and works for another one of Heritage’s programs in Downey.

“We’re both in counseling,” she said. “If I hadn’t gone to Heritage House, she’d be suffering a whole lot more, because I’ve learned how to be a mother myself.”

Where to Get Help

Women addicted to drugs or alcohol can receive treatment for themselves and their babies by calling Orange County’s Health Care Agency. The agency contracts with several facilities countywide, and most provide services on a sliding fee scale. The average stay in a residential program is six months. Women can call the health care agency or the facility nearest them to discuss the programs. DRUG ABUSE SERVICES Health Care Agency (714) 568-4800 Perinatal Drug Abuse Services/PATIENCE 1200 N. Main St., Suite 630 Santa Ana Phone: (714) 568-4279 Santa Ana Methadone Treatment Program 1725 W. 17th St. Santa Ana Phone: (714) 834-8600 Heritage House 2212 Placentia Ave. Costa Mesa Phone: (714) 646-2271 Mariposa Women’s Center 812 Town and Country Road Orange Phone: (714) 547-6494 ALCOHOL ABUSE SERVICES

Health Care Agency (714) 568-4934 Orange County Alcohol Outpatient Treatment Programs East Region 1200 N. Main St., Suite 100-B Santa Ana Phone: (714) 568-4165 West Region 14180 Beach Blvd., Suite 206 Westminster Phone: (714) 896-7574 South Region 5 Mareblu Aliso Viejo Phone: (714) 643-6930 Source: Orange County Health Care Agency; Researched by CAROLINE LEMKE / Los Angeles Times