All for the sake of the baby.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Evan Spencer climbed in his mother's lap and tangled himself in the locks of her long, blond hair. The smiley 1-year-old patted his mother's arm while she explained what kind of life she wants for him.

Stability, 18-year-old Felicia Spencer said.

Stability is most important. Evan shouldn't have to deal with too many houses or too many schools as he grows up.

Felicia snuggled her son while sitting cross-legged on the floor of the bare, two-bedroom subsidized town house that she rented recently, one week before she finished 13 months of getting clear of her methamphetamine addiction.

He needs a rock-solid sense of himself so he won't be swayed the day somebody - maybe even a family member - offers him drugs or drink, she said.

Felicia clings to a learned ideal of what Evan's childhood should be. When she was growing up in Portland, she had few of the ordinary parental supports. And that's the life that Evan would have had, too, if Felicia hadn't made a hard turn.

Felicia vows, now, to do better for Evan.

She draws her confidence from the boy himself.

"I just look at Evan, and I know I can do it," she said.

A judge, two caseworkers and a child development specialist are ready to intervene if she can't pull it off.

A life apart

Felicia grew up with more than any kid's share of inattentive parents. She said she's the eldest of five children her mother bore with four different men.

Her mother always had some way to get high, Felicia said. It changed with the man. Sometimes it was marijuana, sometimes methamphetamine and sometimes just a lot of alcohol. Her family life was sometimes without routine and other times pure chaos. Felicia said her mother, for instance, didn't insist that she brush her teeth, and they rotted down to the gums.

Felicia grew unusually tall - 5 feet, 10 inches - and became a target at school. The kids called her names such as "toothless" and "skank." She said her affair with methamphetamine began the week she turned 16. Her mother was smoking, and she spontaneously decided that she should give Felicia a line to snort.

Felicia knew even then that she didn't want her mother's life, but she lowered her head and sniffed in the powdery drug anyway. She was desperate for something.

"I just wanted to get close to my mom," she said.

And why on earth would Felicia's mother believe it was OK to introduce her own daughter to a highly addictive drug?

"Her mom gave her her first line when she was 13," Felicia said.

Felicia got pregnant at age 16. She was living in a Portland garage with her mother and her mother's new boyfriend. The three of them would smoke meth and drink beer and then crash for days on end, she said. Felicia conceived during one of the reveries with someone she called a "drinking buddy," although it was five months before she knew. She only saw a doctor because her sister bonked her chin on a pit bull's head. Her mother was taking the girl to the hospital emergency room, and she asked Felicia to come along.

"She had this motherly instinct that I was pregnant," Felicia said.

The hospital enrolled Felicia in a program of medical care. Somebody alerted child welfare officials at the state Department of Human Services, but they have limited power to help older teenagers, especially if the teenagers are resistant to help.

"They won't get involved until after the baby is born," said Georgia Bronson, program manager for the Willamette Family Treatment Center's teen program. "Then it's too late. Then the damage is really done."

Felicia said she smoked meth for 1 1/2 months after the initial doctor visit. Then, at her mother's insistence, she said, she switched to marijuana.

Every sample of urine that doctors collected from Felicia while she was pregnant came out tinged with either marijuana or methamphetamine, Felicia said.

When labor began, her first impulse was to light up. "I was trying to make the pain go away by smoking some weed," she said.

Felicia believes her life took an abrupt turn toward sobriety the moment she saw Evan.

A child welfare worker was there, prepared to take custody of the infant, and suddenly Felicia wanted more than anything to keep the infant boy. The lucky thing was, Felicia said, the welfare worker had once been assigned to Felicia's mother. He knew what kind of chaos was in her past; he gave her one last shot.

The caseworker ordered residential treatment, and he found her a place at Willamette Family in Eugene. He also ordered Felicia not to see or to speak with her mother, she said.

She agreed.

"Everything I told him was the truth. I wanted my son more than anything," she said. "It was my only priority."

All eyes on Evan

When Felicia arrived at Willamette Family in August 2004, she looked gaunt, staff members said.

The methamphetamine had demolished her already rotting teeth, and they throbbed. She didn't, at first, look like she belonged in the adolescent program, which tries to give girls the things that teenagers need, such as a high school education. She looked so bad she might have been in her 30s, Bronson said. She was 17.

But Evan, he looked the opposite of his mom. His baby book is full of photos of him gurgling in the arms of Willamette Family staff members.

He was pink and bright, chubby and healthy.

Felicia said she still can't believe her good fortune.

"Maybe God has something for him," she said. "He's adored wherever I go. He's my No. 1 treasure."

The months beyond were rugged. Felicia couldn't get along with the other teens in the treatment program. She longed for her family in Portland. They'd tell her they were on their way to Eugene for a visit. She'd wait in the treatment center lounge full of anticipation, but they disappointed her time and time again.

Then, they'd telephone with a crisis, such as when they didn't have money for rent.

"I couldn't breathe at all. It hurt," she wrote in her journal after one such call. "I feel like it's all my fault 'cause I'm not home to make everyone not fight."

But Krista Dolby - a therapist who has since left the program - talked and talked with Felicia. Dolby, like her, had been through the worst of it, Felicia said.

She understood everything.

"I know they count on you a lot, but what good are you gonna be if you're using and without the little one?" Dolby wrote in a note to Felicia. "You deserve this time to heal. You need to heal."

Another time, Dolby wrote: "I will do whatever it takes to keep you strong. Lean on me."

In three-hour sessions four days a week, treatment center staff tried to teach Felicia how to exercise her own judgment; to develop a sense of right and wrong apart from a calculation of whether or not she got caught.

Felicia realized that it was the girls who'd cheat on little things that failed at treatment - for instance, those who bought soda on an outing at McDonald's, when the girls were instructed to stick with water. She practiced toeing the line precisely.

The Child Development Center located inside of Willamette Family taught Felicia how to be a parent, how to keep regular hours, how to feed the baby nutritious foods, how to discipline with kindness - how to remember that the baby's needs always come first.

Felicia had to think back to her great-grandparents for a model of that. They were of German ancestry and strict, from Felicia's point of view.

Their household had no alcohol in it. Children drank milk for breakfast, not soda pop. They kept a close watch on their granddaughter as if she were precious. That's what she remembers. When she played outside, she had to stay where they could see her.

She would stay with them when she was small. Later, when her mom went to jail, she'd run to them. They were steadfast.

"It may be why I'm so strong," Felicia said.

Felicia decided to make a life for Evan in Eugene rather than return to Portland and her family's chaos. She attends school at the McKenzie Teen Center. She plans to get a high school equivalency degree and then transfer to Lane Community College with the eventual goal of becoming a drug and alcohol counselor herself some day.

In June, the Oregon Health Plan paid for a full set of dentures. Now she has a generous, dimpled smile.

Her large adopted family of therapists and helpers at Willamette Family worry about Felicia and girls like her, girls so vulnerable to men who exploit their need for love.

"You are a beautiful girl," Bronson told Felicia recently at her Willamette Family graduation ceremony. "A lot of people who aren't healthy are going to be attracted to you. You've got to be willing to say: Get lost."

Felicia approaches the problem the way she analyzes everything these days, asking, What would it mean to the welfare of her son? She said she could not be interested in a man who didn't treat Evan the way he deserves to be treated.

That's the measure, she said.

"I want him to be loved."

CAPTION(S):

A mom at 17 while addicted to methamphetamine, Felicia Spencer is getting her life on track after completing a program at the Willamette Family Treatment Center in Eugene. Spencer fixes a bottle for 1-year-old Evan in her subsidized town house. The treatment center's Child Development Center taught her how to care for her son - lessons, she said, she was denied from her own mother. After her graduation ceremony at the center, Spencer wipes chocolate frosting off Evan, whom she calls "my No. 1 treasure." Can she stay off meth, after her 13-month treatment? "I just look at Evan, and I know I can do it," she says. Felicia and Evan say goodbye to friends at the treatment center as they turn toward a new life.