Pubdate: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Section: Business Author: Lisa Belkin Note: This column about the intersection of jobs and personal lives appears every other week. Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine) A NEW DRUG DEMOGRAPHIC: SUPERMOMS Drug specialists are reporting an unsettling trend of late: the growing ranks of women who are selling and abusing methamphetamines. And they are not just any women. According to the people who counsel these abusers, a startling number of them are middle-class working moms who are trying to top off their energy so they can make it through a working mom's day. They are women like 43-year-old Debra Breuklander, a divorced nurse from Clive, Iowa, who found herself raising three children on her own in a $150,000 home she could no longer afford. Determined to stay in that house, and to continue to look like Supermom to anyone who might be watching, she began to sell and to use "meth," a hyperstimulant said to produce a euphoric high. "The house, the kids, the cars, the groceries, the flower beds - I thought I had to be perfect at all of it," said Ms. Breuklander, who is now serving a 35-year sentence at the Iowa Correctional Institute in Mitchellville for drug dealing. "My home was immaculate. I looked fine. I fooled everyone." I am often reminded by readers that mine is not the first generation to be stressed. Point taken. My mother, who went through law school while I was in high school, was regularly pulled in opposite directions by life and work, and her mother, who taught third grade full time until well into her 60's, also knew the strains of a working parent. Similarly, ours is not the first generation to look for mood-altering assistance to get through the day. Housewives hit the sherry bottle in the 50's and popped Valium, known as "mother's little helpers," in the 70's. Cocaine followed in the 80's, and methamphetamines are a cousin to that. "I grew up in the 70's, and back then housewives took Valium to calm themselves down," Ms. Breuklander said in a phone interview from prison. "Now we live in such a fast-paced world, we can feel we need to speed up to keep up with everything." In other words, the drugs we take are a warped reflection of our times. Women who abuse meth see it as a jolt of energy for a life/work dance that is more intricate and frenzied than it was before. With all due respect to my mother and grandmother, things are harder for working parents now. Technology has insinuated itself into every moment of our lives as voice mail, e-mail, cellphones and Blackberries allow us - and therefore force us - to work everywhere. At the same time, our children cannot come home from school, hop on their bikes and ride with carefree abandon around the neighborhood. They need a watchful eye more than ever. In Ms. Breuklander's life, there was that pressure plus the added strain of finances. "I didn't want my kids to think they couldn't have the standard of living they were used to," she said, even though she was first divorced and then living off disability because of a back injury. "For my self-esteem, I didn't want to let anything go." This is enough to drive most women to distraction - and some of those women to drugs. At first, Ms. Breuklander says she sold methamphetamines for extra money - "the car payment, the house payment" - but gradually, she became addicted herself. "It was my twisted thinking that led to the substance abuse," she said. "It begins with bad thoughts. Mine were, 'He's not going to take me down,' " she said of her ex-husband and their battle over child support. "I should have sold my home, and lowered my standard of living, and talked to my children about how Mom can't do this anymore, but I didn't want to let go of the fantasy that I could do it all perfectly." And where does that fantasy come from? It starts, I would submit, with the myth of the perfect mother, because, let's face it, if our mothers were really all that perfect the nation's therapists would be out of business. Then we layer onto that the equally mythical perfect employee based on the model offered by our fathers, nearly all of whom had a helpmate on the home front allowing them to work unencumbered by domestic worries. Add one myth to the other, then go and try to live up to both of them; multiply by two if, like Ms. Breuklander, you really are both the mother and father in your home. Since her arrest three years ago, Ms. Breuklander has been participating in an intense prison program where she is learning to banish the "bad thoughts." For the rest of us, let me offer this exercise. You know that voice in your head - the one that nags as you fall asleep, recalling every misstep made during the day, every child shortchanged and every doughnut consumed? Well, tonight shut that voice down. Replace it with a checklist of all you did today. Because what you did get done - just ask Ms. Breuklander - is darn amazing. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake