by Jenny Molloy
Things changed once they spotted the track marks on my arms, the scabs and scars, and the rash I’d got from scratching and picking at imaginary insects when I was high.
Now, excitement long over, lying in the dark in the small hours as the nurses rattled around with their trolley filled with pills, I overheard one of them say: ‘If she loved her baby she would have stopped taking drugs.’
I didn’t know I was pregnant for two months. And then Del said it was dangerous for the baby to stop taking heroin. Not that I needed much of a reason to keep going. Being pregnant, I could have leapt right into a methadone programme, but I didn’t consider that. Methadone, heroin – one drug was as bad or as good as another, as far as I was concerned.
Now my baby was being fed methadone, an addict just like her mum.
He looked normal, beautiful. But the seizures weren’t. They started a few hours after he was born, and were followed by fever. The nurses had already alerted the doctor, and when he came I could tell he knew. He didn’t say anything and he was nice, but there was a look in his eyes that I recognised.
And now the baby was in a neonatal high-dependency unit. He. I didn’t even have a name for him.
I was the evil mother whose baby was born addicted to heroin. Was I that person? I never hurt anyone. All my life I’ve been a victim. But I had to admit the facts: I was that junkie who took drugs all the way through her pregnancy.
My baby’s better off without me. Better off here. With these nurses who hate me and love him.
They eventually left with their trolley on the midnight run. I sat up. I felt rough as hell but I was able to walk.
It’s amazing what you can achieve when you’re being driven by something even more powerful than love.
I was a drug addict. My addiction defined me. We’re seen as liabilities; the root of all crime, and much of the country’s social ills. People quickly give up on you once they know you’re a drug addict. It’s a natural response. We value our health and general wellbeing less than the possession and intake of drugs, drugs that eat away at our bodies, making us ill, killing us slowly. Even when we’re seriously ill, we won’t do anything to change that – or let anyone help us.
It’s easy to judge. And I also think that it’s impossible not to.
My mum was an alcoholic. When my dad left, Mum used the hall cupboard as a babysitter, locking me in – I was eighteen months old – while she went out drinking. Mum had another child after me, Colin, ‘Col’, who died aged seventeen from a drugs overdose.
I tried to come off drugs several times but failed every time. When I was seven weeks pregnant, I started going to a drop-in centre, where I frequently threatened to kill myself. At this time, I was using more heroin than I ever had. I wanted my baby and I wanted to stop using heroin. Both of these things turned out to be impossible.
People just know. It’s like they can smell the drugs a mile off. They avoid me. They see me but they don’t see me, like I’m invisible. Like stepping over the cracks in the pavement, they steer around me. Heaven forbid they should touch a junkie like me. I just don’t feel right until I’m inside with my own kind and high.
To me ‘normal people’ live in a world that I don’t understand and a world that rejects me wholeheartedly. I see it on TV. It’s like nothing I know. I just live day-to-day.
In between the rages, the binges, I suffer awful moments of reality. The kind of reality that brings the kind of pain that only the drugs will stop. I know my addiction comes from my past and the emotional state it’s left me in. Only illegal highs can numb my reality.
I’ve been told, time and again, variations of: ‘Your actions bring about awful results, so stop them.’
If only it were that simple. I bet you do one of the many things that are bad for you: drink, smoke, eat fast food, stay up too late, watch too much TV, gamble, get into debt, pay for sex.
There are no pills that can stop my addictive desire.
And when you look at it objectively, you have to wonder why anyone would put something into their body that is a poison which is slowly killing them (or might kill them through overdose or some kind of contamination), that leaves them insensible, unable to function, to understand and interact with other human beings, to care for their child?
Drug addicts are more afraid of life than death. Death is easy, it comes naturally to the addict. Life, on the other hand, is full of pain. Why do we use words such as ‘it hurts’ when talking about emotions? Or say that something is painful to discuss? The pain centres in our brain are tied up with our emotional centres and opiates connect with both. Whatever the addiction, it is born of pain and feeding that addiction somehow combats the pain – but only temporarily of course. For the hours that the drugs blank out the pain, there is the awakening, the comedown, when everything feels worse, when the pain and emptiness return.
Drugs kill emotions along with feelings of emptiness; they eliminate boredom, loneliness, weariness; they make you feel like you’re worth something and give you the confidence to deal with other people.
You have to ask addicts like me, not why we take drugs – I take drugs so that I don’t feel like I do when I don’t do drugs, so I don’t feel the awful pain that is my life – you should ask us where the pain comes from.
Everyone suffers from painful emotions at some time in their lives; it’s part of being human. We all cope in different ways and people who have been abused as children have a lot more pain to deal with than most. Nearly all of us addicts have suffered serious abuse as children, whether it was neglect, or physical, psychological or sexual abuse or a mixture of some or all of the above.
I saw my own addicted mother turn to prostitution to support herself, repeating what she saw her mother do. Don’t forget that addicts like me were once the children we now feel so sorry for when we hear of terrible stories of abuse on the news. Learn to love and try to help all humans, not just the children.
I was three months pregnant when I trashed the kitchen at the drop-in centre. The microwave was on the floor, along with broken plates and the remains of a Pot Noodle. I was trying to pull the cupboard from the wall, and had almost succeeded, the door was hanging from one hinge, when I collapsed on the floor, sobbing.
What had set it off ? I had seen my face in a small mirror hanging on the kitchen wall. I could see a young woman and an old woman at the same time, my face thinning and falling apart thanks to all the drugs I’d wasted my life chasing. I was in a giant hole, alone with my mind, the mind that wouldn’t shut up and wanted to talk about my past – all the terrible things.
I didn’t have enough money for my fix and I was in pain, physical, mental and emotional. It seemed as though my face could only express distrust, anguish, fear and helplessness. Drugs gave me a sense of what that childhood would have been like without pain.
I was sexually abused by my step-father for several years before I ran away from home aged seventeen. This was just a short time and yet a whole lifetime ago.
I was twenty-two years old.
Drugs take away the pain but they also add to the pain.
I wanted to keep my baby. I believed my baby would somehow make it all right. I never considered having an abortion. I wanted the baby more than anything. But to do this meant giving up the heroin. To demonstrate to my social workers that I was truly determined.
I nodded along with my social worker and fully agreed with her, believing with all of my heart that: ‘No one was going to take my baby from me.’
My history was stacked heavily against me.
As it was too dangerous for my baby to withdraw from the opiates during pregnancy (there’s a danger of neurological damage), it was better that the addiction was dealt with using methadone after the birth. I was supposed to attend a methadone programme.
The father, who was around for a while, had made vague promises to do the right thing and support his child, but he disappeared when I was six months pregnant. I was devastated. I was still using her
oin and hadn’t attempted to enter a methadone programme.
‘You will lose your baby,’ the social worker said. ‘You can’t be a good mother if you’re having to buy heroin every day.’
‘I’m stopping, I’m stopping, really I am.’
‘You have to. Otherwise you’ll lose your baby.’
I gave birth to a healthy (albeit opiate-addicted) little boy. It was a fairly straightforward process to deal with the opiate dependence. Less so for me when I heard my baby had been taken into emergency protection. I remember being so, so fucking angry, and I was hit by a rage the likes of which I’d never known.
I screamed over and over: ‘He’s my fucking baby! They won’t let me see him! My fucking baby! He’s mine, mine, he’s all I have!’
Now I’ve lost my baby and that means more pain. For a while I deluded myself with fantasies of getting him back. But I couldn’t stop the drugs.
For a while I had a therapist and he told me that people who have been abused have an understandable fear of authority and of anyone with power. I could identify with that. I had been victimised by the powerful once more, which only increased my sense of helplessness, before I was told that I wasn’t fit to be a mother. The child needed to come first, be the number-one priority. Security and emotional stability are key. Impossible to provide when you’re high.
I knew. I came to accept that my baby needed to be with someone who lived in that alien world most people call ‘normality’. This would be the most selfless thing I could do as a mother.
But, of course, giving away your baby only adds to the pain.
Something else for the drugs to deal with.
SEAN AND CARL
As the day of the meeting drew near, we grew increasingly anxious. Karen, our social worker, did her best to put us at our ease.
‘She’s coming to meet you,’ Karen told me over the phone. ‘She’s accepted the decision and now she’s accepting you. This is a confirmation, a reassurance.’
‘I’m so nervous. What if she doesn’t like us?’
‘You’re nervous, she’s nervous. More nervous than you. She believes she’s the one at fault here, the woman who couldn’t be a mother to her child, unlike millions of other women. She’s going to worry about rejection a lot more than you. You have many more reasons, she thinks, to reject her. She needs you to like her.’
‘I suppose. But what if we don’t like her? Suppose we just don’t get on.’
‘Well that could happen, but I think it’s unlikely. We’re all here because we want what’s best for Donald. Just be yourself. That’s who she wants you to be.’
‘What are we going to talk about?’
‘She’s going to want to know all about you. You might want to bring a photo album of you growing up, include your families. It gives you something to look over and it’s a really good way for them to get a sense of who you are.’
‘What can we ask her?’
‘Best to avoid sensitive questions, about the father and so on. His history, the drug use, violence etcetera. We can answer those sorts of questions. Just be positive and let her know how delighted you are to become parents. At the same time, be sensitive to her thoughts about her own failure to become a capable mother.’
On the morning, I got up at dawn. I was really worried about what to wear. ‘If you think twice about any item of clothing, then you probably shouldn’t wear it,’ Carl advised. The bed was soon covered in shirts, T-shirts and jumpers.
‘At least you didn’t try any ties,’ Carl said. ‘What would you have put on if this was Saturday morning and we were going into town? Just as long as it’s clean and free of wrinkles.’
Pushing thoughts of the meeting to one side for a moment, I chose a plain jumper and jeans.
‘So, shall we make a move?’ I asked, as Carl nodded approval.
‘We’re not meeting until this afternoon; we’ve got hours before we need to leave yet.’
‘What about traffic? Good parents would always be on time, wouldn’t they?’
Carl gave me a look.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m just so nervous.’
‘Me, too.’ We hugged. This was such a big deal. I didn’t realise quite how much I’d be affected by meeting the birth mother. Were we good enough to be parents?
The door opened and a social worker entered, smiling, with a young woman, pale, thin and below average height, dressed in skin-tight black jeans, black trainers and a white top with a denim jacket. She looked as scared as I felt. Somehow we made it through the introductions and sat down.
I’m well known for foot-in-mouth syndrome and this was really dangerous territory for me. The first thing I said was, ‘Oh, Donald takes after you. I mean . . .’
Carl looked appalled.
She laughed and that broke the ice. From that moment on we discussed our family, what they all thought about us being gay – how we came out – and then about what they thought about us adopting children and whether we planned to adopt any more children, which we did. Luckily our families were very supportive of us both, and we had two pairs of grandparents we could rely on to help us.
And then she asked: ‘How will you tell Donald about me?’
‘From the start,’ I said. ‘Well always let him know about his other family, his mum, so it’s normal for him from the beginning. We don’t want to keep secrets and it’s kind of obvious, us being a gay couple, that we’ve adopted, anyway, so he’d realise from a very young age, even if we didn’t tell him.’
Our plan was to have letterbox contact, a method by which Michelle could keep in touch with us, just to know that everything was OK and she could, as long as her social worker approved, write to Donald and even send him photographs and Christmas and birthday presents. ‘So there is a place for me in Donald’s life?’
‘Well, yes, we certainly don’t have a problem with that. I think we have to run everything by your social worker but that’s fine with us, too.’
‘I’m a heroin addict,’ she said. ‘But I’m going to stop.’ This led to a slightly longer pause before Carl said: ‘I’m sure you will.’
Then Michelle said she had to go. It was obvious this had been much harder for her than it had been for us.
A few weeks later, shortly before Donald was due to arrive at his new home, we received a package from Michelle. It contained a framed photo of her and a neatly handwritten letter. Carl and I immediately sat down to read it together:
I wanted Donald more than anything in the world. I never considered abortion. He was a wanted baby and I need you to know that. I love him so much. I loved being pregnant with him and, thinking of that time, there are real moments of happiness for me.
I put my own needs first and that was wrong. But by accepting you both as his parents, I hope I have done the best thing I could for my son, and that one decision will make his life as good as it can be, whether I am there or not. It is a decision I came to accept as his mother and I hope Donald will know that I only made this decision because I wanted to be a good mother but I just couldn’t at this time in my life. More than anything I want to be able to look Donald in the eye and tell him how much I love him, and to hold him, hug him, like he needs to be hugged. I know I have to make some changes if this is to happen. I also hope that you will tell him about me and pass on my messages to him whenever you can and will help me make sure that he understands why this had to happen. I wish I could be there to explain to him in person but, as long as he knows I love him, care for him and want to be a part of his life, then I can go forward with my life and do something about this terrible addiction of mine. I will never stop thinking about Donald, he is part of me and he is there every day of my life. Although I wish every day that I didn’t have to give him up, I will never try to interfere or demand anything from you. You are Donald’s parents now and that is how I will think of you from now on. The thought of that makes me feel happy and removes so much of the sadness of giving Donald up.
I have said goodb
ye to Donald. I kissed him and touched him one last time. He seems so happy, full of life. I look forward to hearing about all the amazing things you will do with him and the wonderful life he will be leading.
Needless to say, we were in bits by the time we finished the letter. We were sad for Michelle but at the same time we knew we were so lucky. We had found a child to love, to call our own, we would know what it means to be parents and we would try to make Michelle a part of this family, too.
Epilogue
LOVE WORKS
People who have suffered from a lack of love are driven to find a substitute because one cannot survive as a human without receiving and giving love. Being shown love through touch, through cuddles, is incredibly important to us, so much so that many people damaged through lack of love as children use sex as a way to ‘feel’ love, and to feel as though they are wanted and that it is possible for them to be loved. Addictions and this kind of sex are poor substitutes for love, though – the drugs really don’t work. The brain, ‘fooled’ by its orbital frontal cortex into placing fake desires above genuine needs, is never satisfied with what it receives in place of love. It cannot relax and let its ‘owner’ get on with life.
And when these love-starved people become parents, the cycle is perpetuated. They fail to attune with their children because, as long as they continue to feed their addiction, until someone shows them how to love, they don’t know how. They are unable to be emotionally present in a way that their baby will understand – the language of true love will be missing. This is an extremely subtle process which is easily undermined by brain processes damaged when the parent was a child. The parent might be fully attached to their child but not attuned – distracted by their addiction for example – and the child will sense this, becoming stressed, increasing their own chance of addiction in the future.
