Kayla and Jamie have been arguing for three days. They stand in the living room of their apartment, undistracted by the high-pitched giggles of cartoon characters coming from the TV, staring each other down.  Kayla is a thin and wiry 16-year-old with penciled-in eyebrows.  Jamie, her mother, is 32.   She is one of the few people who can withstand Kayla’s anger.  Kayla, in turn, is one of the few people Jamie can’t manipulate.  Not that Jamie tries anymore. She is sober, and part of sobriety is taking this conflict head on.

Kayla, although a teenager, is already an adult. She has shared bedrooms and apartments with boyfriends. She has helped her mom take care of her three younger siblings, now 11, 8 and 6, since they were born.   She has survived both homelessness and methamphetamine addiction. She has fought when she needed to, run when she had to, and stopped using drugs when she finally wanted to. Kayla thinks she’s earned the right to be part of this decision about her little brother.

Jamie says, again, that Dylan is failing in school, he’s out of control, he’s getting in trouble all the time, and he can’t listen. He needs to be on Ritalin. It’s just the way his brain works.

“Why don’t you just make him a fucking drug addict now, mom?” says Kayla.  She opens the front door of the apartment and walks into the parking lot where her brother pedals in fast circles on his bike. She wishes he would be more careful. She’ll stay careful herself this evening, just go over to the neighbor’s apartment around the corner and see if she has any cigarettes.

It’s early, but Jamie thinks about going to bed. She had a hard time getting up this morning, a hard time all week.  She wishes she could get stoned, just stoned enough to feel mellow. But part of sobriety is walking out the door to watch her son ride his bike.

At least this argument isn’t like the ones Kayla and Jamie used to have. Neither Kayla nor her mom is going to get wired in its aftermath. Kayla isn’t going to go beat up someone, and Jamie isn’t going to stay up for days playing video poker in her bedroom. Kayla and her mother, both meth addicts, have been sober for more than a year.  Within their extended family, they are the first women in many generations of addicts to form a sober family.

Jamie is not proud of a lot of things about how she raised Kayla. But at least she raised her to be a fighter. Jamie didn’t know how to fight back until she was a teenager. She didn’t really defend herself until she used methamphetamines for the first time. 

The only daughter of a cocktail waitress in Modesto, California, Jamie grew up without supervision. By the time she was eight years old, she was cooking herself dinners of Top Ramen or hotdogs and putting herself to bed. She got herself up and to the school bus in the morning, and when she came home, her mother would be in the bathroom putting on makeup, getting ready to work the night shift.  Every once in awhile, her stepfather was home at night. But he wasn’t safe to be around. Jamie had already been molested by three different men, and he was one of them. Sometimes, when her mom had a day off, Jamie would watch the two of them fight.  Once her mom had to go to the hospital. Once, someone shot a gun in the house. Jamie knew they drank. She knew they used drugs. In the garage Jamie had seen a crop of marijuana plants hanging from the ceiling to dry. She liked the sweet smell.

By the time Jamie was 14, she was throwing parties at her house when her mom was at work. Most of her friends used not only alcohol and pot but also white drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines, which they called, simply, dope. Most kids she hung out with thought she was silly for not using, but she was scared.  You’ll be fine, they said.

Today, Jamie wishes she had stayed scared. Maybe she would have, had she known what she knows today: that meth is more addictive than other drugs she’d tried, that it can cause long-term depression and schizophrenia, that it can sap your ability to care about other people, even your own children. But when she was 14, Jamie was scared the way kids are scared of things they haven’t tried. She never imagined that meth would bring her to the point where she’d tell her first child: “You’ve hated me for a long time and I don’t blame you, honey. I don’t blame you at all. You’ve had every reason.”

One afternoon when she was 14 years old, Jamie was snooping around in the room her mom rented to a friend. She was looking through a cabinet when she found a picture frame with powder on it, a razorblade and a straw. The woman kept her stuff ready to go. Jamie wasn’t sure what kind of dope it was, but she thought, you know what? I’m gonna try it. She scraped off a little bit, made a line and snorted it. It felt like something burning hit the back of her head. Her eyes started watering, and she started to panic.