Rescued from the edge

A three-day Appeal-Democrat series is focusing on three major aspects of the Mid-Valley meth scourge: changes in the sources and distribution of the drug; local education efforts to combat meth use and addiction; and meth's impact on families and communities.

In today's third installment, reporter Nancy Pasternack details a mother's decline into meth addiction and her long road toward rehabilitation.

When a Child Protective Services case worker showed up to inspect Regina Wallis' trailer in East Nicolaus five years ago, the home had no running water and no electricity.

Wallis' son, Justin Davidson, was promptly taken from the premises.

By then, the 8-year-old had endured far more than unsanitary living conditions. His mother had become engaged in increasingly dangerous relationships. The boy once saw her put a fist through a plate-glass window in an effort to escape a choke-hold from her then-husband.

"A lot of bad things happened," says Wallis. "Each relationship ended more violently than the last."

No one but Justin knows the extent of what he experienced during those years.

"Their lives are in constant crisis," says Ben Payne, chief administrator at Children's Hope Foster Family Agency, about Justin and hundreds of other children in the region who are taken from homes of methamphetamine addicts each year. "They don't have any security or stability in this world."

Today, Justin is back with his mother, where he says he belongs.

Wallis has been clean and sober for five years, and happily employed for more than three years.

She rents an apartment in Yuba City that she, Justin, and his younger half-brother, Steven Wait, are finally proud to call home.

Last Thursday, the family dug into a take-home dinner of fried chicken before preparing for a holiday weekend with friends.

They joked over their meal about pro sports team allegiances and rivalries, and teased one another gently.

Steven, removed earlier from the East Nicolaus household during a custody battle between his parents, celebrates his eighth birthday today. Justin is 13.

"We have a clean house now," says Justin of his current circumstances. "I don't have to worry about my mom being home alone and doing drugs."

Wallis studies her son's handsome young face, and his adult-like expressions.

She says she is learning now just how much she missed.

"I wasn't a mom," she says of those lost years. "I wasn't there.

Neglect

Unlike most hard-drug users, Wallis did not start out drinking or smoking marijuana. She started with cocaine, right out of the gate.

She was 19 and married at the time.

Until then, she says, "I'd been a good girl."

She had grown up surrounded by habitual beer drinkers, but her parents functioned adequately enough, she says, in their work and home life.

Using drugs, and later, alcohol, served as a way to feel accepted by her husband and their peers.

When her husband began working as a long-distance truck driver, Wallis says, she was 24, with a 2-year-old son. She had never heard of methamphetamine.

Her husband had used it to stay awake on the road, she says, and one night, he gave her some to try.

"I kept taking it until I practically overdosed," she says.

What followed was a long, slow decline into addiction, followed by several intense years of hard-core dysfunction.

By the time Sutter County CPS took Justin, her middle son, in 2003, she had been married three times, divorced twice, separated from her third husband, and had a third son — Steven — from yet another relationship. Her oldest son was an adult, and had moved out on his own.

A drug addict's over-complicated life — particularly when meth is involved — often is devastating for children, emotionally, Payne says.

A child in such circumstances is powerless to help, yet often feels responsible when law enforcement or social services agencies intervene.

Of family scenarios requiring CPS intervention, about 80 percent involve parents who are meth users, according to Tony Roach, program manager for Yuba County Child Welfare Service.

Neglect is the most common reason for intervention.

"You get kids who have been exposed to unsavory environments," he says. "The parents are not monitoring people who come in and out of the home."

Payne, whose Gridley-based foster care agency serves Yuba and Sutter counties, says meth-addicted parents often leave children unattended for days at a time, or in the care of complete strangers.

"They sleep for days without looking after them," he says.

In addition, use of the drug is associated with increased sexual activity and aggressive behavior.

"Domestic violence and pornography go along with it. Kids (of meth-addicted parents) are exposed to open sexual acts," Payne says. "The parent does everything, right there in their presence."

Hard facts

On May 22, Wallis celebrated her 47th birthday, and the fifth year of her new life as a sober parent.

The fact that the wake-up call of sobriety fell on her birthday, she says, is no coincidence.

"God took me to my knees the day they took my son," she says.

But her first years in recovery were spent beyond arm's length of her children.

CPS placed Justin in foster care and Steven's father had legal custody of Wallis' youngest son, who was 2 years old at the time.

Wallis was entered in a 60-day drug rehabilitation program at a facility in Redding, and then in a live-in, year-long recovery program at The Depot in Marysville.

The time between those first weeks of sobriety and the day in 2006 when she finally had full custody of both sons, she says, was an eternity.

Meanwhile, Justin's foster care experiences were a mixed bag.

He had trouble at the first home he was placed in, a fact that, according to Roach, is not unusual for children who have lived under the same roof as a methamphetamine user.

Children in those circumstances, he says, "have not had structure in their lives. They haven't been socialized, and often, they have a hard time settling down in the foster home."

Many, like Justin, suffer from disabilities that date back to the womb.

When Wallis discovered she was pregnant with Justin in 1994, she was in the throes of addiction, and nearing the end of her first trimester.

That is the time, says Payne, "when all that important wiring is taking place in the brain."

A majority of the 130 foster families his agency currently employs are housing at least one child of a meth-addicted parent, he says, "and we're seeing so much attention deficit disorder."

Eventually, Justin landed in the home of Jay Alexander, a mental health crisis specialist and youth drug and alcohol counselor who Wallis says really connected with her son.

Alexander and his wife have been foster parents in Yuba City to 41 children over the past seven years.

"I tell them, 'once I'm your foster dad, I'm always your foster dad,'" says Jay Alexander, who still spends several afternoons a week with Justin.

Alexander says that Wallis' son is one of the brightest children he has worked with as a foster parent, "but he is struggling."

Anxiety comes on at the slightest suggestion of change. News that a stranger will be visiting Wallis' apartment prompts fear that he will again be taken from his mother.

This, and her son's Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, are among many hard facts Wallis says she faces each day as a recovering addict.

During the years when she was using drugs, she says, "everything I did was to cover up something."

Now, she has nowhere to hide from shame and guilt.

Each week, at least once, she shares the grim particulars of her own story with other recovering alcoholics and addicts at 12-step meetings in the area.

Others in the same boat, she says, have become her family.

"There's never been anyone there for me before," she says, "but in sobriety, you have people who really care and understand."

Stopping the cycle

Wallis has been employed as an office manager with California Rural Legal Assistance now for more than three years. With the help of financial planning services provided through the Sutter County housing authority, she hopes to buy a house of her own in the next year or two.

"Most of my life has been the fastest roller coaster ride," she says. "Now it's a Ferris wheel; I've still got ups and downs, but it's slow, and I can see where I'm going."

Her kids, especially Justin, she says, have seen too much in their young lives. Justin watches strangers vigilantly and is distrustful, Wallis says, of people who use drugs or alcohol.

Wallis prays her recovery began early enough to stop the cycle of drug and alcohol abuse in her family.

Recently, she has seen increasingly healthy attitudes in her sons, and says she feels encouraged.

And life in their apartment complex has been a more wholesome experience than she had expected.

Justin, "is really starting to get out and meet people and be social," she says.

After the dinner dishes have been washed and put away, kids knock at the door, looking for Steven and Justin.

Wallis gives them permission to play outside.

"They've got friends in the neighborhood now," she says. "It's so cool."

With each new parenting responsibility and challenge, Wallis says she feels stronger.

She is learning, she says, to relax and to be happy.

At night, when both of her young children have been tucked into bed, "It gives me calmness. I know everything's going to be OK," she says. "I never had that before."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or at npasternack@appealdemocrat.com