Jamie took off running to her friend’s house a block and a half away. Her heart was beating like it was going to pound out of her chest. When Jamie found her friend in the bathroom of her house, the girl said, “it’s about time.” She said it was probably meth, that it was doing what it was supposed to do.  Jamie, she said, was wired. 

Jamie walked back home. Then she started to like it.

She liked it because she cleaned her mom’s entire house that night. She liked the way the metal toaster shined when she wiped off every fingerprint. She liked how she had so much energy. But most of all, she liked how she stopped feeling anything: not the bruises on her legs that she’d hid from her teachers, not the way she wanted her mom’s attention and everyone else got it. Jamie didn’t feel any of it. She just felt like mopping the floor.

Jamie thought her mom might be happy the house was clean, but she didn’t want her to know she’d snorted dope. In the morning, when she heard her mom come home, Jamie ran to her room and hid. But her mom and the roommate, both meth users themselves, knew. They found Jamie in her room upstairs and looked at her eyes, with their pupils dilated. Her mom told her roommate to check her stash.

“Yup,” the roommate said after a quick trip to her room, “some of it’s missing.”

Jamie said “no,” “no way,” “not wired,” and “no” again.

Her mom looked into her eyes and said, “yes.” Then she left Jamie in her room and went to bed.

Jamie started using meth with her friends at parties and bringing it home. Maybe it was a day after she first tried it, maybe a week, when Jamie’s mom came at her like she’d always done when she was going to beat her. Jamie ran up the stairs like she always did, but this time she was high and felt different. She realized she was running away out of habit, not fear. On dope, she felt no fear. She turned and hit her mom. That was the last time Jamie’s mom tried to beat her.

After she found dope, Jamie didn’t care if she hit her mom back. She didn’t care if her mom paid no attention to her, or if those three men had paid too much attention. She felt numb for the next 15 years, with one exception.

Two years later, when Jamie was 16 and pregnant with her first child, a mothering instinct surfaced from beneath her addiction. She had a photograph of her own mom when her mom was pregnant with Jamie. In the picture, Jamie’s mom had a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Looking at that photo, Jamie thought she had been an addict since before she was born. She wanted to give her first daughter a fighting chance. And so Jamie didn’t use drugs for the nine months she was pregnant with Kayla.

Today, Jamie can’t believe that’s all she gave her first daughter, or her next three children. She didn’t use drugs when she was pregnant with them. She was home, most of the time, with them. At one time, she thought that was enough. She actually thought she was a good mother.  But the drugs were clouding her mind.

When Jamie was using, she couldn’t handle it when she made a nice dinner like tacos, and one child said he didn’t like beans in them, and the other didn’t like cheese. It was too much to keep track of when she was wired. On meth, she had attention to detail, but she didn’t have control over which details she focused on. She couldn’t stop thinking about the flashing red computer screen, or the bugs she thought were crawling on her skin. She felt like she had to get back into her bedroom, shut the door and start playing video poker again.  So she often gave the kids Cheerios for dinner.

Once, Jamie spent hours trying to get to the tiny screws in the back of the VCR. She took apart the whole VCR, all its components, looking for them. She just had to get them because they were tiny, and they were screws. Today, she shakes her head when she remembers looking for them. “Now that,” she says, “was tweaking.”

Meth users don’t like to think of themselves as tweakers. That’s what other people call them. Tweakers twitch and salivate. They smell like meth, which smells like cat pee to some and wet dog to others. Tweakers decide they have to do things that make no sense to sober people.  They have to scratch sores into their own skin, trying to get bugs that don’t exist off their faces. They have to clean the whole house, over and over. Then they have to sleep for days. Tweakers are edgy and moody, and are avoided, even by other drug users. But they don’t know that, at least, not about themselves. When Jamie used meth, she kept her addiction secret from the police, from welfare, and sometimes from herself, but not from her oldest daughter.