Ex-Addict’s Happy About a Christmas Without Snow

Connie would like to tell you about last Christmas.

She’d like to, but she can’t remember much of it.

Christmas ’89 was a White Christmas for her, but not the kind Bing Crosby dreamed about. No, it was a White Christmas as in a Cocaine Christmas, and it left Connie in such a merry state that she figures it would have killed her had it continued much longer.

But this isn’t a Christmas downer story. It’s a story about one woman’s redemption of her own sins and the rescue of her own life.

We’re talking on Christmas Eve in the kitchen of a home in Santa Ana used as a shelter for homeless women--a far cry from the comfort that Connie knew as a child in Southern California. At 13, she went to work with her mother and was making such good wages working as a medical transcriber that she foresaw a career in the field. The only dabbling she did with drugs as a teen-ager had left her uninterested.

But at 20, she moved out of her parents’ house and lived with a boyfriend. She got pregnant and at 21 became the mother of twin boys born two months early. It was a difficult pregnancy, and she wasn’t ready to be the mother of twins. After an argument one night, she said, her boyfriend went out to buy some marijuana but came back instead with cocaine.

She had never tried it but didn’t think it could hurt her. “The first time I used it, I didn’t think about it. I said, ‘I’ll use it tonight and that’ll be it’ because when I had experimented before, it didn’t do what it was supposed to do. So I thought I could take it or leave it. But the coke really did what it was supposed to do. I thought, ‘This stuff is great’ because all of a sudden you don’t have any problems. So we just kept using it.”

That was in April of 1989, when her twins were 2 months old. Through the rest of 1989, she and the twins’ father continued using cocaine occasionally. She qualified for welfare and began using the money to buy coke, making sure only that the babies had clean diapers and formula.

By Christmas of last year, Connie and her boyfriend were ready for the toot of their lives. “We had gotten kicked out of our apartment in July and ended up in this motel (in Anaheim). We had been there since August and it was almost as bad as living on the street. . . . That’s when drugs became so easily accessible to us. We had them seven days a week, 24 hours a day, whenever we wanted them. We started a Christmas party on Dec. 1, because his dealer had just gotten out of jail, and we didn’t stop until Jan. 5.”

Her recollections of last Christmas are a prolonged foggy reel. “I don’t remember anything except that I was high. The family got presents for the kids, because we couldn’t afford presents, because we had to buy drugs. We must have had 200 to 300 people in and out of the motel room that month. They’d come and buy drugs and sit around with us and get high with us.”

And the twins, then 10 months old? “I remember them being as high as us. I don’t remember them sleeping a whole lot. They didn’t want to eat, they didn’t sleep. We were smoking the coke, so there was all this smoke and they (the babies) were getting it too.”

In May of this year, the system caught up with Connie and her boyfriend. Social workers placed the twins in the Orangewood Children’s Home and ordered Connie to enroll in a drug recovery program. She had two relapses until the time in late September when she separated from the babies’ father.

Since then, she said, she has sworn off drugs. The shelter is run by the Shelter for the Homeless, a Westminster agency. Connie is working as a clerk for the county and is enrolled in a drug recovery program. She hopes to reclaim her children by spring, after proving she is drug-free and able to provide for them on her own.

Of her drug ride, Connie, now 23, says: “I wonder why I did it. I really don’t know why. Knowing how I felt about drugs before I started using, it’s unbelievable I was as bad as I was. It makes me sick to think how I was, all the things I did.”

It isn’t lost on her that, with her children already taken from her, she also was close to homelessness. “There were many times when I thought I was going to die when I was doing drugs. In fact, there were many times when I wanted to die, because I didn’t feel I could give them (the drugs) up and I wanted to die, literally. I always knew it was wrong. I never lost touch with the fact that one of these days it was going to make me lose my kids, that it was going to kill me. I never rationalized. I always knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. I had a very serious addiction.”

This Christmas morning, Connie picked up her twin boys at Orangewood and took them to her parents’ home, where she spent the kind of Christmas she remembers as a child. She is reconciled with her family, with whom contact had ended during her drug-use days.

One of the relatives, she told me on Christmas Eve, planned to bring a video camera to record the day.

Not that Connie needed one.

This is one Christmas she’s seeing for herself.