Raising Roxy

Spend an hour with 33-year-old Erin Kerrigan and you’ll fight for airtime. Don’t worry about offending her with personal questions. She’ll tell you how she “couldn’t wait” to grow up so she could join the alcoholic elders in her family, and how she began “blackout drinking” while still in high school. She eventually dropped out, and by age 20 she was hooked on methamphetamine and turned to topless dancing for cash. Her daughter, Roxy, was the product of a one-night stand during which Kerrigan was so high that she can’t remember the man’s last name, and won’t swear to his first.

Ask her how it was that a county social worker came to take the newborn Roxy from the hospital nursery, and the pony-tailed Kerrigan will tell you about her drug-soaked pregnancy with such rapid-fire delivery that your hand will cramp trying to write it all down.

She’s so eager to tell her story because she wants you to believe that she’s finally given up the wild life. She wants to show you that she loves her daughter--loved her even when a nurse sternly announced that the drug-exposed newborn would not be leaving Valley Presbyterian Hospital with her--and that she still cries about her stupidity. Above all, Kerrigan wants to convince you that she and Roxy--now a babbling toddler--are OK.

She makes it easy to believe, but you and she know what lies ahead. You both know, as the experts do, that despite Kerrigan’s longest streak of sobriety since she was 13, “recovery” is always eggshell-fragile.

Los Angeles County children’s social worker Rodney Hammons understands that as well as anyone. He’s the one who first took Roxy away from her mother. At the time--November 2001--Kerrigan was on her knees in the hospital chapel sobbing, “Please, God, don’t let those strangers take her. I swear, I’ll never use again.”

Hammons is the one who cradled the days-old infant in his arms, tucked her into a car seat and took her from the hospital to the Lancaster home of Kerrigan’s aunt for safekeeping. He’s the one who suspected, correctly, that Kerrigan would use again. But the 34-year-old Hammons also is the one who, a year later, began pushing hardest for Roxy to return to her mother. That’s him, a lanky and soft-spoken father of two, who’s holding his breath when Kerrigan telephones, listening for cracks in the eggshell.

Roxy landed in Hammons’ arms at an important moment. Parental drug or alcohol abuse such as Kerrigan’s figures in 70% of the 38,700 kids whom county foster care workers monitor. Dismayed that thousands of children have drifted for years in foster care, too often graduating at age 18 to life on the streets or behind bars, officials who took the helm of the Department of Children and Family Services last year vowed to return youngsters to their biological parents sooner, or legally free them for adoption. Returning a drug-exposed toddler to a newly sober mother such as Kerrigan represents a bracing test case of their wisdom and resolve.

To Hammons, Kerrigan’s story “was about as negative as a case can be.” When she sporadically visited him during the first five months, “I could tell [she] was high.” By spring 2002, with Kerrigan still vowing to clean up, then disappearing again, Hammons’ patience gave out, and he began to draft papers to terminate her parental rights.

Kerrigan says her epiphany came on Mother’s Day two years ago. She has recounted the moment at so many recovery meetings that the wind-up sounds rehearsed. Then her face reddens and her voice chokes, and the memory of how close she came to forever losing Roxy blindsides her again.

“It got to the point where I didn’t leave the house because it freaked me out to see babies. My friends who were users kept wishing me a happy Mother’s Day, and I was yelling at them, ‘Don’t even talk to me!’ I felt so humiliated.”

The next day, Kerrigan checked herself into the Oasis Women’s Recovering Community in Sylmar. After three months, she started visiting her daughter. Hammons watched them carefully, and by the fall, he’d concluded that the pair had forged such a strong bond that the little girl should live with her mother permanently. On April 4 of last year, Roxy moved in with her mother, and on Oct. 8, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia Spear declared that she was “totally delighted” to sign the order closing the county’s case. The fragile mother wept, promising Spear, “You’ll never see me again, your honor.”

Kerrigan has remained sober through trying times. Using her $9-an-hour salary as a receptionist and counselor at a methadone clinic, she struggled to pay the $1,120 rent on their apartment in Santa Clarita until a federal rent subsidy kicked in. She also has battled Medi-Cal bureaucracy to make sure Roxy got her vaccinations and well-baby care.

A sort of whistling-in-the-dark faith carries Kerrigan along these days. Outside her new apartment complex this winter, she panicked about taking the plunge to independent living. “I sat in my car, crying. I didn’t think I could make it. But I called my [Oasis] counselor, who told me, ‘Now Erin, either God is or he isn’t.’ In other words, you have to have faith.”

Mark Roach, Kerrigan’s boss since she started at Western Pacific Med/Corp North Hollywood, has “no question that she’s beat the monster.” He says he has seen thousands of addicts intent on recovery, but Kerrigan “really amazes me.” Hammons also stays in touch, buoyed by her success but still hoping he made the right call. “Erin surprised me,” he says. “She decided to fight for her baby.”

Still, Kerrrigan admits to moments of doubt. “I’m terrified of ever using again,” she says, pouring coffee in her new kitchen. But she also says she draws strength from seeing how the clinic’s patients work through their addictions. She talks many times a week to her sponsor at Oasis, another former addict, and attends meetings and holidays at the facility. She mentors the clinic’s newer residents and even shares her story with troubled teens at a county facility for juveniles.

Now, she says, “I want to get my GED and a junior college degree in addiction studies.” A well-thumbed copy of “Readings in Ancient History” sits in her living room, amid Roxy’s “Blue’s Clues” videos and Mother Goose stories.