"Mom: The Most Common Nickname of a Meth User in Utah"
Every morning in my neighborhood, the meth moms come out in force, with their babies and their toddlers and their strollers. At first glance they appear to be in their thirties or even forties, but, up close, their conversation is so shockingly inane it seems they cannot be out of their teens—child-women, pushing their strollers from the halfway house to the daycare center up the street, and then heading off to work or to their recovery program. These women’s lives, their maturity and their personalities have all been arrested by the drugs. Many of them have had children taken away and husbands and boyfriends who betrayed them, and many cannot hold down a job, so a large part of their program involves learning job skills. A friend who works at one of the halfway houses told me that most of them were introduced to drugs by their boyfriends, and once they leave the safety of the program many will go back to those boyfriends and eventually back to the drugs.
From time to time they come into the library and ask for help on assignments they’ve been given, usually research on addiction and recovery. Most of the books on drugs are for teens, but sometimes the women complain that they are too hard and too complicated, that they have too may words, so we give them the kid’s books, which are full of pictures of syringes and pills. Then (because the program requires them to account for all of their time) they ask to use our phone to call and check in with the halfway house.
Utah seems to think that the solution to meth addiction is a series of embarrassing and misleading ads featuring purses, diaper bags and minivans (“Another blatant sign of a meth user in Utah”). Utah does have some frightening female addiction/arrest statistics; I just wonder how effective it is to imply that every mother in the state is a meth user.
And every morning, there the meth moms are, on the sidewalk, at the bus stop, at the TRAX station, with their babies and strollers and diaper bags.
