On The Road To A New Future

            Tammy Jordan was 12 the first time she snorted cocaine. She tried it again three years later while cleaning house for a friend of her mother's boyfriend, finding it in a plastic zippered bag stowed under a refrigerator. Now, at 37, she's a mother herself, and she is trying to leave behind a life of intermittent drug addiction and homelessness.

            "I was tired of the way it looked on people and what it was doing to me," Jordan said. "It was just tearing me down. It's time to grow up."

            In July 2005, Jordan became an in-patient at Willamette Family in Eugene, Ore., where she was treated for chemical dependency. She then enrolled at Lane Community College in their Transitions to Success course, a program that is assisting Jordan to become economically self-sufficient and helping her plan for a career as a physical therapist.

            On a sunny spring morning in Eugene, Jordan sipped a mug of coffee and looked out the window of her second-story apartment, her brown hair fastened behind her head and hanging down her back. A black 20-inch television played cartoons in the corner and a bed sheet-covered couch lined the wall beneath the window. Next to the television, green and pink stuffed animals surrounded a teddy-bear themed blanket.

            In the adjoining room, 7-month-old Samuel Nolan Reeves, the youngest of Jordan's four children, slept in her queen-size bed, snuggled beneath a tan comforter. It was 7:30 a.m. and Jordan looked tired. She had been up through the night feeding her son when the phone rang at 5 a.m. It was Samuel's father, Nolan Reeves, checking in to see how Jordan and Samuel were doing before he left for work.

            Reeves was calling from New Mexico, where he is living with his mother. His job is pressure-washing trucks, and he is also taking classes to earn a Commercial Driver License so he can become a semi-truck driver. Reeves had taken their 5-year-old son, Daniel, in March, and lelt behind Jordan, Samuel and Eugene, Ore. Jordan's two other children live with her ex-husband in Eugene.

            In New Mexico, Jordan said, Reeves has greater work opportunities. Moving also helped him escape Eugene's drug scene of familiar dealers, addicts and meth cooks.

            Jordan says she wasn't ready to leave with Reeves because she had yet to reconcile her own drug addiction.

            Finishing her coffee, Jordan, wearing tan khakis and a white V-neck T-shirt, lifted Samuel from bed and changed his diaper on the teddy bear blanket. She then prepared his daycare lunch and packed her backpack with two schoolbooks, "Moving Through Life Transitions with Power and Purpose" and "Career Transitions: A Journey of Survival and Growth."

            Her bag on her back and Samuel in his stroller, she began her 10-minute walk to Willamette Family, a treatment center for chemically dependent women, for her biweekly group therapy.

            Therapy at Willamette Family has given her the support and education she missed during childhood, Jordan says. When she was a year old, her parents divorced. Jordan's father, now living in Idaho, has been a logger, firefighter and restaurant owner, she says, but she and her sister were left to their mother's care.

            "Basically, I looked at what my mom had and what she had to give," Jordan said. "She gave it her best, and that's all she had. And I'm taking a look at it in that perspective, like, OK, now what do I have? What do I have to give? And I want to give more. I want to be more."

            Her mother, now 59 and living in Veneta, Ore., became pregnant with Jordan's sister at 16 and dropped out of high school. She had Jordan when she was 20. She became a bank teller and tried her hand at professional billiards and arm wrestling. However, she never made much money. But Jordan said her mother was once a straight-A student and a child prodigy,

            "I've read some of her poetry and short stories," Jordan said. "She never did anything with them. But, you know, that's her life and her choices. I really love my mom, and I'm really proud of her for a lot of things she did for us."

            A line of alcoholism runs in Jordan's family. Her mother made certain Jordan and her sister were educated about alcohol addiction. During high school, Jordan feared she was becoming addicted to alcohol. But she then applied her mother's lessons of moderation.

            "Every time I've been warned about something, I've been fine with it," Jordan said."But every time I haven't been warned, I go ballistic."

            Jordan says she was never warned about other drugs because her mother didn't know about the addictiveness and dangers of drug use other than alcohol. Her mother used drugs as well.

            "Her kick was mostly marijuana," Jordan said. "She always kept it away. But of course being in a family that was involved with it you're bound to run across it."

            Don't ask mom - and try it, Jordan thought, and that's what she did. A cousin her age helped her experiment.

            "We were like best friends growing up," Jordan said. "He was down for a visit and he introduced me to cocaine."

            At 12, drugs had become a part of her life.

            Marijuana became Jordan's drug of choice in her teens, but she eventually found help in high school and quit because it severely affected her grades.

            At 17, she was partying at Eugene's Whittaker Creek Campground when she stumbled upon a glass vial of methamphetamines lying in the dirt. The vial resembled a container Jordan associated with cocaine, she says, recalling that she was drunk and thought it would help get her over the fear of socializing with others.

            "And wow, I could concentrate," she said. "I was more aggressive. I was a little more outspoken. And I wasn't so reserved. I was some of the things I wasn't that I wanted to be,"

            Jordan went to Churchill High School in Eugene and got her General Education Development certificate at Lane Community College in 1986. She then enrolled at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Ore., where she studied for two terms. She dropped out because of her methamphetamine addiction. In 1989, she met a man and married him in Reno the next year. They had two children and bought a house. Jordan worked security and maintenance at the Gateway Mall in Springfield, are.

            Then Jordan "flew the coop," as she puts it. She divorced her husband in 1996, and her children stayed with their father. Jordan sees them occasionally

            A year later, Jordan traveled to New Mexico with her new boyfriend, Nolan Reeves. They returned to Eugene virtually broke and lived in an International Harvester Travelall, a 1970s sports utility vehicle, parked outside a friend's house. For the next two years, the pair was frequently homeless.

            "The thing is you can't move very far when you're using drugs or when you have that in your life because it's not just the getting and the using part," she said. "lt's just the money that you put into it and the energy both. You can't have a life––period."

            It was hard to use drugs and be responsible, Jordan said. So when Daniel was born, Jordan and Reeves felt shell-shocked. They were still homeless and now they had a child.

            "It's scary out there going on starting winter," Jordan said.

            They sought the help of the First Place Family Center, a St.Vincent de Paul of Lane County mission for the destitute and homeless.

            "They were such a big support for us," she recalled. "We stayed with them, and eventually we got our own apartment."

            However, their continued drug use increasingly interfered with their lives. Jordan stopped going to church. She and Reeves started to argue frequently and she lied to her mother and sister about her drug use.

            When Jordan would visit her two older children, Reeves would suggest getting high before they left to help them cope with the emotional stress of the trip. She never did, she says, because when she was with her children, she never felt like using. But when she was away from them, she would use and then felt guilty. She thought she could handle it but she ended up hurting her family she said.

            "It's too painful," she said. "Oh, my God. To live with that kind of toxic shame is just incredible."

            When she became pregnant with Samuel, she stopped using drugs as she had done during all her pregnancies, she said. Counting the times in high school and college when she quit using for a while, this was her tenth try. She was determined to succeed.

            The morning of Reeves' phone call, Jordan entered the glass double doors of Willamette Family. A sign on the wall read, "We can say what we mean only if we have the courage to be honest with ourselves and others."

            Passing the sign, Jordan maneuvered through a hallway crowded with women as she made her way toward the Child Development Center. She then signed Samuel into daycare where he stayed while she attended her two-hour therapy

            When she first began treatment in 2005, Jordan shared an in-house dormitory with two other women. She stayed for five months, including one month with Samuel, before moving into a safe house for two and a half months with a roommate who also had a baby.

            The women were required to check in and out, and each had daily chores and responsibilities. Their room was simple: two beds, two cribs. Finally, Willamette Family assisted Jordan in finding and renting her current apartment in West Eugene.

            After her counseling session, holding Samuel to her chest, Jordan continued to the bus stop, boarded the 51, got off at Eugene Station, boarded the 82, and got off at First Place. She again dropped Samuel off at daycare, and 15 minutes later boarded her final outbound bus, the 82 again, which took her to LCC for her biweekly class, Transitions to Success.

            When treatment stops, Jordan said, Transitions to Success will continue to influence her movement toward economic stability and social mobility.

            "It was the perfect decision for me as a person," she said.

            The class is a higher education re-entry program for single mothers of low economic status as well as for professionals seeking a career change.

            "What we found was that a lot of women got the message somewhere along the way that they're not college material," class instructor Cara DiMarco said.

            The class aims to change that. By helping Jordan create a five-year-plan, the class has directed her toward the profession she will pursue: a career in physical therapy, which she chose, she says, because it heals people.

            When class finished, Jordan retraced her bus trips home. There, tucked away somewhere safe, she keeps a plane ticket. When she finishes her course and treatment in June, she will use that ticket to fly with Samuel to New Mexico to reunite with Reeves and Daniel.

            As part of her five-year plan, Jordan plans to enroll in a local community college there and after two years transfer to a university where she will get the education she needs to become a physical therapist.

            "I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it," she said."lf you have a positive outlook and you work hard with it, and you just really go for what you believe in and it's a good thing, it'll happen."

            Jordan is also rebuilding her relationship with her mother and sister. During treatment at Willamette Family, she realized she had been solely focused on Reeves and drugs. A homemade card Jordan created for her sister became a turning point in their relationship.

            Though patching up her relationship with her mom will still take time, Jordan visits her mother in Veneta every few weeks. They talk about birds and animals, cooking, family, Jordan's other two children, and her future.

            "I'm slowly but surely gaining that trust back," she said. "My sister, the last time she visited, said, 'Tammy, we thought we lost you."

Link to the original article in Mosaic: mosaic.uoregon.edu/archives/mosaic2006.pdf/