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  The tough trek to redemption and reunification By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer It was one year, four months and two days. That's how long Lueana Coward's kids were in foster care. She knows the dates like she knows her own birthday and her own redemption day, that being July 6, 1996, the day she quit smoking crack cocaine. She'd stopped using from time to time before. But this was different: She was ready for recovery, really willing to quit for good. Coward is an Allegheny County Children and Youth Services success story. She completed drug rehabilitation, stayed clean and got her kids back after they were in foster care for one year, four months and two days. She has cared for them for six months now, surviving some tough settling-in problems. Rehab programs call her constantly to give inspirational talks to other addicts. While her success is remarkable, it is what a majority of abusive or neglectful parents achieve. Sixty-seven percent get their children back from foster care, though critics say the number is artificially high because it includes cases in which children bounce between foster care and home as their parents reform, then relapse. The number has risen since 1980 when a federal law urged agencies to work harder on returning children to their parents. Then, only about half of the parents whose children entered the child welfare system got them back. After children had been in foster care for 18 months, the 1980 law required judges to rule on whether to continue efforts to return them or to terminate the parents' rights so the children could be adopted. Coward beat that deadline. She got her kids back in 16 months — on July 16 last year. Four months later, Congress passed new legislation mandating earlier hearings and quicker terminations. Under that new law, Coward's family reunion might never have happened. Coward thinks the new law requiring a petition for termination of parental rights after children are in foster care 15 months is too tough. She says such quick terminations would psychologically scar children like hers, youngsters who at ages 5, 6, 9 and 15 know their mother and don't want a replacement parent. Also, she says, addicts don't abuse drugs because they want to. Addiction isn't a lifestyle choice, it's an illness, she says, "This law is like telling me I have cancer and I have to take treatments but I can't have any relapses in 15 months time." Her feelings resonate because half of all kids in foster care are there for the same reason hers were — neglect, not abuse. And most parents guilty of neglect were too high to know it. As long as they are progressing toward recovery, Coward feels they should get more time. Recovery may include relapses, say treatment experts, especially if the drug of choice is crack. Coward talks of that from experience. She began abusing alcohol as a young teen-ager and then added illegal drugs. She tried various rehab programs and stopped using drugs for periods up to six months. She started smoking crack about two years after her youngest child was born in 1992. She didn't eat. She didn't watch her kids. Their fathers weren't around to help. To pay $300 a day for her habit, she sold almost everything she'd worked to buy over the years, even her clothes. "There were times when I glimpsed reality, but I didn't want to look too hard, so I got high again," she says. The reality included a growing array of problems for her oldest son, who landed in reform school at age 12 for burglarizing a house in their Duquesne neighborhood and, while home for a Christmas visit, landed in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the buttocks that he says was accidentally self-inflicted. He recovered and returned to reform school. Coward continued using crack until just before her son was to be released. Then she signed herself into another treatment program, leaving her three younger children with her elderly mother and invalid father. That was Feb. 8, 1996. Less than a week later, on Feb. 14, the children were removed from their grandmother's house after someone called CYS to report she couldn't control them. CYS placed them in foster care and asked Common Pleas Judge Cheryl Allen Craig to order that the children remain there. Coward left rehab to attend the hearing. She was wearing a wool suit and matching pumps. Her hair and makeup were perfect. She'd spent two weeks in treatment and felt reasonably well. She thought all that would be enough to persuade the judge to give her the children. But Craig was unimpressed with the costume Coward had thrown over her addiction. She saw a woman who was thin and frail and she told her it was going to take much more than two weeks in rehab to get her kids back. "I felt like someone vacuumed the breath out of me," Coward recounts. Two months later, she was smoking crack again. The next hearing to evaluate her case was May 1. She promised her kids she'd be there. She broke that promise. The children were devastated. The younger ones banged their heads on a wall outside the courtroom. The older boy, who'd been released from the reform school and was living with a foster parent, ran away that afternoon. Coward says she didn't go because she knew she wouldn't get the kids back. "I felt useless and worthless . . . I was suicidal and signed myself into McKeesport Hospital." When she got out, she went back to crack. Early in June, a friend dragged Coward out of bed and took her to Braddock Hospital. From there, she went to a treatment program called Greenbrier, where she stayed only two days. "The crack was calling me," she says. She smoked before she made it home. On June 17, however, she returned to Greenbrier for two more days as an inpatient and another week as an outpatient. When she left, she knew it wasn't enough. She was finally ready to stop. "I didn't want to go on that way. I was sick of myself. I hated myself and what I had become," she explains. She entered another residential treatment program on July 6, 1996, the day she says her real recovery began. She stayed a month, then went to a halfway house in New Castle. CYS took the children there to visit her every other week. Each time, she ached to leave. "It was so hard to watch them walk away." But she knew she had to take care of herself so she could take care of them. The halfway house kept her six months, twice as long as normal. She left Jan 21, 1997. Then, she enrolled in a day-treatment program at the local mental health center and a month later started therapy and parenting classes. For women like Coward to shake the addiction, there must be both the will to change and the availability of treatment programs. In many places, there are long waiting lists for such programs. It's nearly impossible to find one that allows children to live with the parent during treatment. Several of the federal lawmakers who drafted the new legislation acknowledged the difficulty some parents have in getting treatment. They ordered a study. On July 16, Judge Craig gave Coward, now 39, her three youngest kids back. Two months later she got the oldest after he was released from another reform school. There's no happily ever after for Coward though. Her children are angry with her. The oldest boy has been chronically truant from school. Her youngest boy, a 5-year-old, tried to stab himself in the face and neck with a sharp-pointed cooking fork. Every morning Coward prays for the strength to stay off drugs.
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