Pubdate: Mon, 06 Nov 2006
Source: Palm Beach Post, The (FL)
Copyright: 2006 The Palm Beach Post
Contact:  http://www.palmbeachpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/333
Author: Allyson Bird, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

RECOVERING ADDICT PARTS WITH HER PAST, THEN HER BABY

Her newborn's eyes still shut, his skin still purple, Julie Wolfcale 
motions to a nurse in Indian River Memorial Hospital's maternity wing.

"I want to have him with me as long as I can," she says. "I got my 48 
hours with him, and I want them all."

She lifts the 4-hour-old boy to her face and says, "I'm thinking Sam. 
. It'll be my name for him. I'm sure they'll change it."

His adoptive parents will drive in from Maryland this same October day.

There's a rerun of Judging Amy on the television in Wolfcale's 
hospital room. The 34-year-old Vero Beach woman says she got hooked 
on the program when courtrooms became a part of her life.

She ignores the show now, holding her baby close as the hours tick 
away. He is her ninth child and the only part of a drug-abusing life 
she hasn't given up. Yet.

She decided to put her baby up for adoption for these reasons:

o She was drunk when she met his father. At the time she figured 
she'd live with him rather than keep sleeping on a pool table.

o She lives with her old boyfriend and their son again. She can't 
bring another man's child into their family.

o And she has six children back in Indiana she talks to every day. 
They want new sneakers she can't afford, and that kills her.

She talked this decision through with therapists and other addicts at 
an inconspicuous rehab facility they call CRC, where stories like 
hers have unfolded since it opened in 2000.

Down Orange Avenue in Western Fort Pierce, Past the Barred Windows 
And Hand-Lettered Storefronts, Is a Little Blue House With White Trim 
And a Small Sign in the Yard: The Counseling & Recovery Center Inc.

To the builders plopping gated communities on each side, the CRC is a 
mushroom on the neighborhood lawn. But it's a sanctuary to the 507 
Julie Wolfcales from Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee 
counties who have been through its programs.

The clients are alcoholic and drug-addicted women, most of whom have 
children or are pregnant. If they make more than $20,000 a year, they 
have to pay for the services. Few do.

Florida's Department of Children and Families covers nearly $2 
million of the center's $2.3 million annual budget.

At both outpatient treatment in the blue house and inpatient at CRC's 
residential center 212 miles back into town, clients learn about 
parenting, nutrition and self-reliance.

They learn not to mention their habits by name. "When I was using," 
they say. Never "When I was smoking crack."

"We don't need to know how big the bong was," clinical director Juli 
Arnold says. Describing the drugs, she says, is romanticizing. It 
triggers a craving.

Arnold believes in treatment because she's been through it. She lost 
her driver license in 2004 after her third DUI.

She gets to the CRC at 7 a.m. each day and starts scrubbing the 
bathroom, changing flat tires on the company vans and making room for 
as many new clients as possible. She believes in this place.

About 82 percent of her clients stay clean long enough to have their 
names frosted on a graduation cake. The CRC doesn't track the failure 
rate after graduation but found that about a third of its 2005 
graduates returned to treatment.

Most of the women, though they arrive at the center cursing and 
court- ordered, drag their feet on the way out. Plenty come back to 
share their stories, take voluntary refresher courses or have a few 
hours away from the stresses that drove them here.

Some Don't Remember Who They Were Before It Got So Bad.

Even before the final months of her pregnancy, Julie Wolfcale can't 
say what she likes to do in her free time. She has a baby on the way 
and a rehab program to complete, but hobbies?

"You know, I really don't remember," she says one July morning.

She runs her fingers through her red hair and stares at the ceiling. 
"I used to have stuff I was interested in. But I used and was drunk 
for so long, I don't know."

Her pastime now is clearing her life of anything that might make her 
want to drink or smoke crack cocaine again.

She scolds her boyfriend, Ken Miners, when he picks drywall off his 
blue jeans and puts it on the table. Looks too much like a rock.

She doesn't go to Jensen Beach, where she lived at the height of her 
addiction, and she doesn't listen to music at all. She's not ready 
for that yet.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she wonders whether her soaring 
highs and plummeting lows might come from pumping her body with 
chemicals for years.

"It's kind of like the chicken and the egg," she says.

Unlike 90 percent of clients at the center, Wolfcale came without a 
court order.

With her no-nonsense attitude and her familiar "what's up, girl" 
camaraderie, she never let herself play the part of someone to be 
pitied. Instead, she became a leader here.

On smoke breaks outside, she looks across the picnic table at new 
clients. "I'm Julie," she says and then flicks the cigarette ash from 
her 305 into a flowerpot.

If she thinks a woman lied in a group session, she calls her on it. 
Often, the woman thanks her later.

And she tells all the women to write in their journals, because even 
if they hate writing, it's better to get the thoughts out. But toward 
the end of her treatment, which coincides with the end of her 
pregnancy, Wolfcale's journal has the same line every day:

I don't feel like writing.

In their tidy tan duplex in Vero Beach, Wolfcale and Miners - both 
addicts - work at being a normal family. Their living room has the 
spartan look of people starting clean: two worn couches and a 
dog-eared copy of Alcoholics Anonymous on the coffee table.

Their voices from the kitchen drown out the sound of a Little 
Einsteins cartoon rerun, which commands their 4-year-old son's 
attention this August morning.

Wolfcale sits down beside Randy and gives him a kiss.

"Is Daddy gonna beat you to the van?" she asks him.

Miners dashes from the kitchen and out the door. Randy leaps from the 
couch to catch him.

Their trick worked again: The blond boy was on his way to the dreaded 
day-care center.

As soon as they leave, Wolfcale thinks of the other child, almost 
eight months along and growing.

Wolfcale and Miners tell Randy that Mommy just has a big belly. He 
won't know when his little brother is born. He won't miss him when 
the baby moves 1,000 miles away.

Wolfcale took up with the baby's father after Miners went to jail. 
That was after Wolfcale and Miners smoked away all their money.

They blew about $50,000 on cocaine in four months, $3,000 in one 
night in a Port St. Lucie Best Western - with Randy in the room.

"If they had tested him, I'm sure it would have come back positive," 
Wolfcale says. "Thank God he was only 2 and doesn't remember a whole 
lot of what we put him through."

The Department of Children and Families took the boy away, and Miners 
went to jail on drug charges. He emerged a drug court success story 
and got Randy back.

Reunited with them, Wolfcale knows she has to focus on the family in 
front of her.

The adoptive parents sent her a letter and photos in a book report 
folder: snapshots of a red-walled dining room with a wide fireplace, 
a smiling couple hugging their two boys, a pile of Christmas presents.

She's a company manager, and he's a vice president.

Their letter says: We cannot imagine how hard this is for you. But we 
can assure you if you choose us, your child will be brought up with 
so much care and affection from all of us.

The adoption agency pays for Wolfcale's living expenses to make sure 
the parents in Maryland get what they're waiting for.

She's got one month to go.

Until then, she does what they tell her at CRC: She focuses on recovery.

The CRC van honks outside.

Another client, Joyce Hubbard, sits next to driver Annie Mazell 
Harris and brags.

"I went to two meetings last night," Hubbard tells Wolfcale.

"Can I have one?" Wolfcale says. She has to catch up on her 
Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous 
meetings. Coin key chains marking 30 days clean and nine months clean 
click on her key ring. She gave the coins marking three months and 
six months to a young addict she mentored.

Hubbard says a woman who spoke at one meeting has been sober for 15 years.

"That's what I like to hear," Wolfcale says.

She hums along to How Sweet It Is, playing on the van's radio. Miss 
Mazell - an older woman who hollers, "You stayin' clean?" to former 
clients she drives by - winds the van through the back roads down to 
the Counseling & Recovery Center.

A New Woman Joins Wolfcale's Group Session That Morning. She Has 11 
Children but the Short, Thin Frame of a Preteen.

Seated in a circle, she shares with the others that she relapsed by 
drinking four or five times in the past two weeks.

She didn't get caught with a dirty urine test, but now she sinks into 
her plastic chair and confesses.

The woman finishes with a whisper: "I just couldn't keep it in."

She looks at the counselor, her eyes and nose tinged with pink. "You 
were the one who I knew could see right through me," she says.

All the women stare at the carpet. They've been there.

Hands resting on her belly, Wolfcale breaks the silence.

"Yeah, it totally kills your buzz."

Wolfcale has real advice, too. "You gotta do something about that old 
man of yours," she says. "Just the thought of Ken getting drunk makes 
me jealous."

The woman nods, still slouched over with her eyes to the floor. A 
month later she would fail out of the program.

Outside CRC, Wolfcale's Confidence Wavers.

On a stifling August day, she and Miners stand enveloped by lawyers 
and social workers in a crisply cooled Martin County courtroom.

The judge, without hesitation, grants her unsupervised visitation 
with Randy. But he orders her not to live with him at Miners' duplex.

A few months earlier, Miners asked Wolfcale what she was doing next 
May - his way of proposing. They'd spent this year getting to know 
each other sober for the first time in their six-year relationship.

Now the judge addresses Miners, noting the man graduated from drug 
court just days earlier.

"I told you not to have the mother move in at this point, for safety 
reasons," the judge says. He adds that he's "disappointed, for lack 
of a better word" that Wolfcale is back so soon.

Wolfcale doesn't react. Her caseworker prepared her for this. She 
begins leaving home at night to sleep at a girlfriend's house, 
wishing the judge knew how far she'd come.

But on Paper, She's Still Another Addict.

Wolfcale started drinking when she was 10 or 11. Her mom was dying of 
breast cancer and her dad worked long hours laying bricks. She grew 
up in about 20 cities, some along the Treasure Coast.

Before this new baby, before Randy, she had a husband and six 
children. The couple separated because of her drinking. She and a 
high school boyfriend then had another baby, whom she also put up for adoption.

She met Miners when she moved back to the Treasure Coast in 2001. A 
former sound engineer for rock 'n' roll bands, he liked pot. She liked vodka.

They slipped into heavier drugs during the 2004 hurricanes when they 
sheltered with her family in Jacksonville and Wolfcale took off with 
all her sister's prescription painkillers.

Her sister reported her to the Department of Children and Families, 
and Randy went to a foster family.

Wolfcale visited him every night, giving him baths and singing him to 
sleep in a stranger's home. She left Miners to get him back.

But the couple got back together, and by the time Miners was arrested 
on drug charges, they were homeless with only $500.

"I blew that in a night," Wolfcale remembers.

She stayed with a dealer friend until he fell to his death from a 
roof he was working on in Port St. Lucie. He had been up all night 
smoking crack with her.

Homeless again, Wolfcale went to a hole-in-the-wall bar in Port 
Salerno where she used to work. She slept on a pool table and washed 
in the bathroom for months.

When she finally visited Randy at Hibiscus Children's Center in Vero 
Beach, her little boy didn't know who she was.

Two weeks before her due date, Wolfcale shares parts of this story in 
group therapy at CRC. She graduates today, as her contractions are beginning.

She waits until the end of her talk to discuss her pregnancy.

"I am giving this baby up for adoption," she finally says. "It took 
me a long time and a lot of group sessions. ... But I have children 
who haven't had a mom in two and a half, almost three years now."

She shares more than she intended and abruptly cuts herself off.

"Let's go have a cigarette, girls," she says.

When they return to the trailer with counselors, the other clients 
take turns congratulating her.

One tells her, "You scared me."

She intimidates you because she tells you what you don't want to 
hear, a counselor explains.

A few more clients admit Wolfcale unnerved them, too. "But I like you 
more every day," one says.

Wolfcale - who shares her life without blushing, who once served 
social workers coffee and pie while high on pills and convinced them 
she was a stable mom, who saves her emotion for herself - cries.

"I will never forget this place or anyone I met here," she says.

She takes a deep breath. "Let's go have cake, girls."

She won't have any more children. During her Caesarean section on 
Oct. 2, her fourth, she also has a tubal ligation.

She names her baby Conner Samuel. Her son's new family decides on Lucas.

Women from CRC visit her hospital room, sneaking her hot peanuts and 
diet Coke, snapping baby pictures on their cellphones and 
bad-mouthing the adoptive parents on cigarette breaks.

"I guess they were waiting for me to change my mind," Wolfcale says later.

The Maryland couple give her a silver angel necklace and their e-mail 
address, and then she and her baby leave the hospital in separate cars.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Elaine