Child psychology

Son's love pushes mother to kick drug habit

No sooner than he strolls in through the back door after school, 11-year-old Alex Alicea, a fifth-grader at Ellsworth Elementary School, is right back out again. Sure he has to study for social-studies and spelling tests the next day, but, said Isabel Alicea, his mother, "He's all boy."

So, by her way of thinking, he needs 10 minutes to an hour to ramble around the block, searching for buddies from school and dropping in on all of his neighbors. He plays with some of their dogs and helps one of them repair his motorcycles. He has even gone on a camping trip with the grandparents of a friend from across the alley.

"He has become quite the young man," Alicea said.

He always has been. No telling where she would be without him.

About four years ago, Alicea's addiction to crack cocaine caught up with her. She found herself and her son sleeping in her car parked outside her sister's home. So Alicea could be close to her dealers, the mother and son had spent the previous year moving from one apartment to another in the shadier neighborhoods of Chicago, ducking past-due rent with each move, just to support her habit. Too ashamed to knock on her sister's door, Alicea cried all night until she "fessed up" to her sister the next morning.

The next day, at her sister's insistence, she enrolled in rehab.

"He was my motivation to go into treatment because he kept saying, 'Mom, you're going to die,'" Alicea said of her son.

At first she told Alex she was going away for a while to stop smoking. Then she decided she had to be honest with her son because he knew she needed help.

"I said it was either quit this, and I showed him a cigarette, or quit this, and I showed him my crack pipe," she said. "And (pointing to the crack pipe) he said, 'Oh no, you need to quit this because when you smoke this, you get real stupid, Mom.'

"And that was such a slap in the face because he was in the first grade. He was 6. It really hurt me that he knew so much."

The fact is, Alex had known his mother only as an addict. Before crack, cocaine was her addiction, and before cocaine it was marijuana. Before marijuana it was alcohol. Throughout it all, he took care of her, she said.

"He wouldn't leave my side for a moment. When I was sleeping one off, he was right there all the time," she said. "Sometimes I'd be getting high and he'd be in my bed and he'd watch. He'd be playing, but he was really aware of what I was doing."

Eventually Alex joined his mother in recovery. There he met the children of other mothers in rehab and received counseling to help him with issues he faced as the child of an addict.

After a year and a half of treatment from three different recovery clinics, Alicea had kicked the habit and had to find a home for her and Alex.

What she found was Naperville's Families Helping Families, a grassroots neighborhood organization started by resident Vicky Joseph in 1994. Families Helping Families supports homeless families for one to three years by paying rent, utilities and other expenses and providing mentoring assistance while the head of the family goes back to school to get the job qualifications to become self-sufficient.

Families Helping Families' $200,000 budget comes entirely from private donations. Because it is composed entirely of volunteers, not a cent of those donations goes toward administrative costs.

"So our money goes to the roofs over the heads, the hot water and the heat," Joseph said.

Families Helping Families had never assisted an addict in recovery before, but the volunteers liked Alicea so much, Joseph said, they decided to give her a chance.

And she has not disappointed them.

"I've never seen anybody who's more mindful of the goal," Joseph said. "She has never lost sight."

Alicea never hid her past. Before moving into her Naperville apartment owned by Community Housing Assistance of DuPage and paid for by Families Helping Families, she made sure her mentors knew she was a drug addict in recovery.

"I said, 'I'm coming clean. These are my red flags. You need to be aware of them, and if you see any of them go up you need to call me on them,'" Alicea said.

When Alicea introduced herself to Joseph, she suspected Joseph was skeptical of her intentions. Joseph "tested her waters" to see how bad she wanted in, Alicea said.

"She was like, 'Well, we're in your face all of the time,'" Alicea said. "Then I was like, 'You know what? I need somebody in my face because I was a drug addict so long that I could manipulate the best of them.'"

Apparently the in-your-face approach Families Helping Families took with Alicea is paying off. Two and a half years after encountering Families Helping Families, Alicea, 46, anticipates graduating from College of DuPage in June and becoming a nurse. And now, she said, Families Helping Families is not in her face. She considers the mentors her friends who drop by each week to see how she and Alex are doing.

Five years ago she would have laughed at someone who told her she would be a suburbanite and a college student studying to be a nurse. It is a future she never envisioned.

"My last year of actual addiction, I would try to visualize myself out of my addiction," she said. "And it was OK for the moment while I thought about it, but did I do something about it? No. My addiction was in control of me, not me of it."

She hopes to start a nursing career in this area and to have a home of her own soon.

"Even if it's a little, tiny house," she said. "I want it to be mine."

Alicea is grateful for the future Families Helping Families has helped provide her, and she feels blessed that Alex has been given back his childhood.

"It was very nice to see him adjust and go back to being the little boy he was supposed to be, because he was this little man who had taken the responsibility of my care," she said.

While he loves to run around the neighborhood, Alex still checks in often, Alicea said. And he will get to that homework when his mother's kitchen timer, set to 10 minutes, goes off. Maybe she'll get to hers too.

That's an image that thrills Joseph.

"When they both sit down at the table at night to do their homework together, that's a powerful message," she said.

12/28/04