When Amanda Wilson relapsed, she lost everything: her home, her stability, custody of her daughter Willow.
After treatment, she was determined to rebuild, but she struggled to map a way forward.
“I'm six months pregnant, so I was starting to stress out about finding a place, working and then spending the time with Willow to bring her home,” Wilson said.
She didn’t have a place that was safe for her children and for her to recover from addiction – until she found Brighter Beginnings, a new sober-living house in Warren that’s designed for families. The home opened in March with funding from OneOhio Recovery Foundation, the state's private nonprofit distributing opioid settlement dollars.
Recovery can be especially hard for mothers, like Wilson, who are trying to regain custody of their children. Brighter Beginnings, a partnership of Trumbull County Children’s Services and First Step Recovery, gives them a chance to start over with their children beside them.
“Parenting is hard, period,” said Jeannie Gurich, Brighter Beginnings house manager with the treatment center First Step Recovery. “And then you come in: you’re early recovery, you have to start working and you still have treatment goals.”
A stable home
Every room of the Brighter Beginnings house shows signs of family life. A crib sits in the corner of one bedroom. The kitchen table boasts a booster seat. A small spiderman bicycle with its training wheels is parked outside on the patio, ready for play.
“It's a good feeling when you know they're comfortable and they've made this their home,” Gurich said, as she toured the three-bedroom home.
Three families live here, and more are waiting for space to open up.
To live at Brighter Beginnings, moms must complete at least 90 days of treatment. They agree to attend meetings and counseling. All the while, their children are slowly reintroduced into their life through supervised visits and overnight stays, with the ultimate goal of reunification.
“It's a transition to bring children back in your life when you haven't had them there for so long,” Gurich said
And, she said, having support staff and peers goes a long way.
“The women are all going through the same journey. Just knowing there’s other people out there like you, having the same struggle, it’s great.”
Barriers to getting custody back
Around 75% of the cases that come to Trumbull County Children Services are connected in some way to substance use, according to Megan Martin, the department’s director of out-of-home services.
But, even after recovery, finding affordable housing remains a huge roadblock to reunification, said Angela Cochran, a caseworker with the department. Safe, stable housing is hard to come by, especially since families are working against tight deadlines.
In Ohio, agencies are required to seek permanent placement for a child who has been in their custody for 12 out of 22 consecutive months.
“Recovery timelines don't match up with child welfare timelines,” she said. “It's really hard for our agency to make a decision to put children in the home when there isn't a home established for that family in order to reunify.”
Yet, despite the need, recovery housing that focuses on families hasn’t existed in the county and remains rare across Ohio, Cochran said.
“We have a wealth of treatment, sober-supportive housing for men and women. But, it didn't exist for women with children.”
A ‘firm foundation’
Heather Setser waited for months to participate in a similar program in Lorain County, west of Cleveland. When she finally participated, she said it changed her outlook.
“Losing my children is not something that I ever wanted to have happen … but knowing they were safe where they were, I was able to work on myself and get my head and my heart back on the same page and get a firm foundation under me before having that full time responsibility of being a mom, too,” Setser said.
Setser is sober and she’s regained full custody of her children. Now she’s a peer support specialist at the Brighter Beginnings house, answering the residents’ questions on which recovery meetings allow kids and how to get through the terrible twos.
Wilson is hoping for that same outcome. Hopefully, by the end of the year, her daughter Willow will move in and they can learn to be a family again before her baby brother arrives.
In her view, losing custody hasn’t stopped Wilson from being a mom: It’s fueled her to work toward being a healthy one.
“It is a cycle and I really want to break the cycle,” she said.
