Emma's Story

I didn’t go shopping for a cot, sheets or a pram when I was pregnant with my baby girl. I bought a few small things for her, but, because I had no idea if I’d be able to keep her, I held off. It wouldn’t have been helpful, mentally, to prepare for having a baby when I had no idea if I was actually going to get to be a mum…

While I was pregnant I was addicted to heroin, and, because of that, social services were involved. This meant that, for most of my pregnancy, I had no idea if I’d be allowed to keep my baby.

It wasn’t until a week before I gave birth that we had a meeting where I was told that we probably could go to live with my mum after all. But in my mind the meeting had gone terribly. I was criticised for not being prepared, for not having bought the things we needed. Plus, my mum didn’t present very well because she’s deaf in one ear, and everything felt a bit chaotic and out of control. I thought it had all been pointless. My response was to go out and use again.

As soon as I admitted this to the social worker, who was pressing me for a drugs test the following day, I was told that there was now no way I’d be able to keep my baby.

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I found out I was pregnant when I was 36. It felt like this might be the only opportunity to do it before the menopause, and I also thought it might be the one thing that could change me. I thought it would force me to sort my shit out.

But I still had a lot of anxiety and stress around whether I should keep the baby. I knew the reality of the situation, being addicted to heroin and struggling with self-harm clearly wasn’t a good situation to be in. But part of my head kept saying it would be OK. I waited and waited and eventually thought I should book an abortion – which I did. However, I couldn’t go through with it.

I told my midwife that I was a heroin addict straight away. I assumed it would come up anyway. But the only support that was on offer was the drug clinic where I would have drugs testing and the prescription for methadone that I was already on before I was pregnant. Both me and my partner had been involved in the drug service for years and nothing had changed. Even though I was pregnant, nothing was different than it had been before. I think social services thought all I needed was this level of help from the drug clinic, but I needed more. I needed to dig a lot deeper.

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I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder later in life, which is a serious ongoing mental health problem. However, looking back I was always quite an anxious child and I used to self-harm from a young age – I think, in reality, it was my first addiction – my way of coping with my feelings.

I didn’t have a great relationship with my parents. My mum, I think she self-harmed too, I saw her hitting herself in the face and things like that when I was just young and we always had to walk on eggshells around her. She had suffered postnatal depression too. I remember when she spent days in bed and, because she was deaf in one ear, we’d get back from school and we wouldn’t be able to get in the house because she couldn’t hear us banging on the door. Me and my sister would eventually have to break in through a window or something.

My dad was the opposite, he worked away a lot and he was really emotionally void - but he drank quite a bit. Looking back, I think he probably had a drink problem. I guess it was all a bit neglectful really.

However, we lived in quite an affluent, quite a well to do area, and my family, I suppose, on the outside looked quite good. My dad was an architect, and my mum studied psychology and child development. And they had these expectations for us too. But behind the façade, things weren’t good, and my parents didn’t really get on. Plus, whenever I rebelled and tried to be myself, it would create a lot of tension and sometimes they’d hit me. It wasn’t extreme abuse or anything, but I guess it’s still traumatic.

I struggled to understand my feelings, like, I didn’t know what they were and I couldn’t name them, I struggled to say I’m frightened. My parents couldn’t really meet my needs. It wasn’t their fault, but they just couldn’t do that. So I started self harming around 11 or 12 but I couldn't really talk to anybody about what was going on with me. Then, once I went into high school I was sort of invited into the popular crowd and just started smoking a lot of dope and drinking a bit which seemed to relieve some of the bad feelings I had.

I did my GCSE’s and I got pretty alright marks for that, but from the day I started smoking dope, I pretty much smoked every day - it was my solution for whatever was going on with me. I still self harmed, too. The dope and the self-harm was how I dealt with things.

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After I did my GCSE's I met this guy who was a lot older than me and I went to live with him. My mum didn’t want me to go but my dad just let me go. So I was living with this guy but I still went to school and I managed to do my A Levels. But we were just getting stoned all the time and all the money we had went on drugs so we didn’t have any food or anything.

I managed to finish my A Levels, I didn't do amazing but I didn't do terrible. But I was still in that really emotionally unstable state where I was self harming. I used to get really upset all the time and drink and smoke dope everyday to cover it up.

I left the guy I was seeing to go and do a gap year. After that I went to university and my first year was sort of the same really - getting stoned, taking ecstasy, living in halls and just doing what students do - and it was sort of acceptable because it was normal. And, funnily enough, out of all the people I lived with in halls, I was the only person who finished their first year, but I was probably one of the messiest people there what with my drug intake and everything.

I managed to complete uni by the skin of my teeth, and my parents got divorced at this point as well, and they sold the family home. So I was just bumbling my way through life, drinking and taking drugs…

Then I met this new guy, and I just got really obsessed with him. Like really obsessed. And I think he looked like my dad. I remember going back to his house and there was no furniture, it was a bedsit with nothing much in it. Anyway, he ended up moving in with me into mine and my sister’s flat and it turned out he’d been a heroin addict for years. My sister ended up leaving 'cause she couldn't deal with all the madness that was going on.

Quite soon into our relationship he became violent and controlling. He’d make an issue of me speaking with other guys and things like that. My world kind of went from a broad university world to getting smaller and smaller. But I didn’t really see it at the time. He hit me quite badly once and so I threw him out. But then he came back…and he had some heroin with him.

That was when I tried it for the first time.

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I ended up physically addicted to heroin, just like I was addicted to self-harming and smoking dope. It all offered a kind of relief. And I had those tendencies within myself, where once I’d had one thing that changed the way I felt, I couldn't stop. I suppose it cemented the relationship I was in as well because he kind of had complete control of me because I needed him to score drugs. I was so naive to that world - I was just this student who had been smoking a bit of weed but with heroin it's a very different world.

I was so ashamed of being a heroin addict that I cut off from everyone and I became really isolated. It got really dark, and we ended up selling the flat that my parents had bought me and my sister but the money went really quickly, funding mine and his drug habit. And, yeah, I did things to fund the addiction that I’m really not proud of. It was chaotic and I was ashamed and I knew I shouldn’t be doing those things but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know how to stop.

I stayed with him for 13 years and during that time landed myself in prison for burglary trying to fund my addiction. I never heard from him after that.

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So many of the women that were in prison were there because of drug offences, it just seemed a bit insane. The methadone queue was so long and you’d just think, is this working? Because all these people are going out and coming back in, going out and coming back in. There was clearly something not working.

I didn’t use heroin in prison but when I got out I was so ashamed – ashamed of being a heroin addict and now of having been in prison too. It felt like my life was over. I’d got a degree, but then all this happened and there was no way I could get a job now. I just thought, what’s the point? I’m not even gonna try any more.

So when I came out of prison I scored straight away and was back using again. Not long after that, I met this new guy at someone’s house - he'd been to prison too, and he was a heroin addict, and we spent a couple of hours talking about it all. I invited him to my house and then that was it - another person had moved in!

I just had no boundaries, no ability to understand that what I’d done was a bit of a stupid thing to do. But once he was there, I was like, how do I get rid of him now? He had a criminal background and he'd been an addict since he was 17, so he had a longer history of heroin use than me. But we were both pretty intelligent people – we were just both pretty messed up. And when I was with him, I've got to say that my use reduced, it was more manageable, it was less chaotic. I paid most of my bills, and we had food and electricity. It was better than it had been with my previous, violent, partner. But we were both still using.

It was then that I found out I was pregnant.

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Social services were involved straight away. It was quite brutal, it wasn't like hi, nice to meet you, but I totally saw it from their perspective. I’m not stupid, like, I got it. I could understand their concerns and I could see how my situation would be worrying.

I had five different midwives, one who had maybe seen me for like ten minutes but she was still called to give evidence against me in court. And some of the social workers I didn’t get on with. There was one who used to comment on how I dressed saying it was inappropriate going to a drug clinic in a short skirt or whatever.

I asked for a parenting course and I did get put on a course but it was more about what physically happens during birth than parenting. And they seemed to use this course to report back to social services about things I had said.

The other thing was that, if my partner was taking drugs we were seen as one – so if he was doing something bad that reflected on me too.

So social services came to our home and did assessments with us - having a chat and checking that the house was safe and things. They also had to do a family tree. My side of the family was so different to my partner’s – I had professors and people sitting in the House of Lords. But I didn’t tell them anything about the trauma that I suffered as a child. I thought it wouldn’t look good so I was quite guarded about it.

We also had drug tests every couple of weeks – sometimes urine tests and sometimes swab tests, which are more unreliable. Sometimes a positive result came out when I knew I hadn’t been using. But then sometimes I was using when I saw them and they couldn’t tell. It all seemed a bit ironic really, like they would visit me in my home sometimes when I had used but I was obviously coping, the house wasn’t great but it was clean and tidy, and I was managing.

But aside from the testing and the birthing course they didn’t really offer me anything to help, to dig a bit deeper. And I remember specifically asking about getting into a rehab but I was told there was no way, it was too expensive. But it did make me wonder how much they were spending on social services – it would probably amount to the same in the end.

I knew I didn't want to bring my child up in addiction - that was never my plan. And I thought that, if I was still using, them taking my baby would probably be a good thing. But I didn’t really get any help to stop, either.

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So they discussed me going to live at my mum’s with my baby - or the other option I had for childcare was my now ex partner's mother who said she’d have her, but she was a heavy drinker herself so I was worried about that. But she hid her chaos quite well.

Just before I gave birth, we were told to sign a section 20. I thought that it meant I was signing over my baby to the care of a family member until I could prove that I would be OK. But it proved to be much less straight forward than that. Never was it explained to me how difficult it would be to get my daughter back.

Towards the end of the pregnancy they said they wanted to induce me but I didn’t want to be induced - I wanted a natural birth. But I was told that I was being difficult and problematic, and that it wouldn’t look good for me if I refused, so I had to get induced. I couldn’t understand why - I wasn’t overdue. Anyway, I got induced, my daughter’s heartbeat dropped during labour and I ended up having an emergency C-section – I was fully knocked out and woke up completely out of it and with a catheter.

The people working in the hospital were all really lovely and supportive though, and it made a huge difference. But still, I felt so disconnected – the trauma of the caesarean, the drugs they give you, the fear of losing her, not being able to breastfeed because of the methadone…

It was like a severing of the bond all the way through, and, after five days, she was removed from the hospital – and from me.

I walked into hospital pregnant, but I left without my baby.

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The trauma of this meant that my drug use spiralled. It got really bad and I remember one day I had a fall and I looked terrible. I needed dental work and had cut my lip open, needing stitches. I looked like I had been badly assaulted and it was at that point I realised just how much of a mess my life was. And I knew I had responsibilities now – I was a mother.

At this point my mum paid for me to go into rehab in Portsmouth for eight weeks. I did relapse as soon as I came out but something was different. I had learnt a lot while I was in rehab and I wanted to get clean and I knew I had to start making changes.

Since then, I haven’t used.

It was as though having my baby taken away, and the subsequent spiral was like my rock bottom. And I was lucky to acknowledge my problem before it was too late.

Until this point everything had felt helpless. Sometimes, when you’re in the drug service for so long you’re seen as hopeless, it’s like once an addict, always an addict. I remember a social worker telling my mum that I was never going to stop using heroin. And the treatment and support I had was just being given the methadone - but that on its own didn’t work for me. There was more going on and I had to reach my rock bottom before I could turn things around.

Since then I’ve started going to 12-step meetings, meeting other women who have been in the same position that I was in – I’d never come across anyone who had their child removed before that. I think that was the problem with the drug service back then, it was all about getting clean, but there wasn’t really a recovery pathway to sustain it.

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My baby is still with my ex partner’s mum, and that’s not great – her life has become more and more chaotic, and of course, when I left my ex that impacted on how much I could see my daughter, because it was up to his mum to decide. But things have improved recently. She can see that I am clean now and serious about recovery and I’ve had more access to my daughter – I’m spending far more time with her now than I used to.

I never went to court to fight any of this because I thought I was a shit person, I thought I deserved for all of this to happen. But then, as I found recovery, I felt like I needed to prove to myself – and to my ex partner’s mum – that I could do it. So I kept my side of the street clean. I showed compassion and care towards her and I didn’t push or pressure her, I just did my bit as arranged.

Being able to tell my story is important too. I physically lost my voice for around a year, my vocal chords weren’t meeting properly so my voice was really croaky and I am sure this was because I felt so unheard. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say, I felt invisible and I certainly didn’t feel like a mother - I felt more like a surrogate.

But now I’m in recovery, that’s all really starting to change now. Now I can see that I am a mum.