RECOVERING ADDICT PARTS WITH HER PAST, THEN HER BABY

Her newborn's eyes still shut, his skin still purple, Julie Wolfcale
motions to a nurse in Indian River Memorial Hospital's maternity wing.

"I want to have him with me as long as I can," she says. "I got my 48
hours with him, and I want them all."

She lifts the 4-hour-old boy to her face and says, "I'm thinking Sam.
. It'll be my name for him. I'm sure they'll change it."

His adoptive parents will drive in from Maryland this same October day.

There's a rerun of Judging Amy on the television in Wolfcale's
hospital room. The 34-year-old Vero Beach woman says she got hooked
on the program when courtrooms became a part of her life.

She ignores the show now, holding her baby close as the hours tick
away. He is her ninth child and the only part of a drug-abusing life
she hasn't given up. Yet.

She decided to put her baby up for adoption for these reasons:

o She was drunk when she met his father. At the time she figured
she'd live with him rather than keep sleeping on a pool table.

o She lives with her old boyfriend and their son again. She can't
bring another man's child into their family.

o And she has six children back in Indiana she talks to every day.
They want new sneakers she can't afford, and that kills her.

She talked this decision through with therapists and other addicts at
an inconspicuous rehab facility they call CRC, where stories like
hers have unfolded since it opened in 2000.

Down Orange Avenue in Western Fort Pierce, Past the Barred Windows
And Hand-Lettered Storefronts, Is a Little Blue House With White Trim
And a Small Sign in the Yard: The Counseling & Recovery Center Inc.

To the builders plopping gated communities on each side, the CRC is a
mushroom on the neighborhood lawn. But it's a sanctuary to the 507
Julie Wolfcales from Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee
counties who have been through its programs.

The clients are alcoholic and drug-addicted women, most of whom have
children or are pregnant. If they make more than $20,000 a year, they
have to pay for the services. Few do.

Florida's Department of Children and Families covers nearly $2
million of the center's $2.3 million annual budget.

At both outpatient treatment in the blue house and inpatient at CRC's
residential center 212 miles back into town, clients learn about
parenting, nutrition and self-reliance.

They learn not to mention their habits by name. "When I was using,"
they say. Never "When I was smoking crack."

"We don't need to know how big the bong was," clinical director Juli
Arnold says. Describing the drugs, she says, is romanticizing. It
triggers a craving.

Arnold believes in treatment because she's been through it. She lost
her driver license in 2004 after her third DUI.

She gets to the CRC at 7 a.m. each day and starts scrubbing the
bathroom, changing flat tires on the company vans and making room for
as many new clients as possible. She believes in this place.

About 82 percent of her clients stay clean long enough to have their
names frosted on a graduation cake. The CRC doesn't track the failure
rate after graduation but found that about a third of its 2005
graduates returned to treatment.

Most of the women, though they arrive at the center cursing and
court- ordered, drag their feet on the way out. Plenty come back to
share their stories, take voluntary refresher courses or have a few
hours away from the stresses that drove them here.

Some Don't Remember Who They Were Before It Got So Bad.

Even before the final months of her pregnancy, Julie Wolfcale can't
say what she likes to do in her free time. She has a baby on the way
and a rehab program to complete, but hobbies?

"You know, I really don't remember," she says one July morning.

She runs her fingers through her red hair and stares at the ceiling.
"I used to have stuff I was interested in. But I used and was drunk
for so long, I don't know."

Her pastime now is clearing her life of anything that might make her
want to drink or smoke crack cocaine again.

She scolds her boyfriend, Ken Miners, when he picks drywall off his
blue jeans and puts it on the table. Looks too much like a rock.

She doesn't go to Jensen Beach, where she lived at the height of her
addiction, and she doesn't listen to music at all. She's not ready
for that yet.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she wonders whether her soaring
highs and plummeting lows might come from pumping her body with
chemicals for years.

"It's kind of like the chicken and the egg," she says.

Unlike 90 percent of clients at the center, Wolfcale came without a
court order.

With her no-nonsense attitude and her familiar "what's up, girl"
camaraderie, she never let herself play the part of someone to be
pitied. Instead, she became a leader here.

On smoke breaks outside, she looks across the picnic table at new
clients. "I'm Julie," she says and then flicks the cigarette ash from
her 305 into a flowerpot.

If she thinks a woman lied in a group session, she calls her on it.
Often, the woman thanks her later.

And she tells all the women to write in their journals, because even
if they hate writing, it's better to get the thoughts out. But toward
the end of her treatment, which coincides with the end of her
pregnancy, Wolfcale's journal has the same line every day:

I don't feel like writing.

In their tidy tan duplex in Vero Beach, Wolfcale and Miners - both
addicts - work at being a normal family. Their living room has the
spartan look of people starting clean: two worn couches and a
dog-eared copy of Alcoholics Anonymous on the coffee table.

Their voices from the kitchen drown out the sound of a Little
Einsteins cartoon rerun, which commands their 4-year-old son's
attention this August morning.

Wolfcale sits down beside Randy and gives him a kiss.

"Is Daddy gonna beat you to the van?" she asks him.

Miners dashes from the kitchen and out the door. Randy leaps from the
couch to catch him.

Their trick worked again: The blond boy was on his way to the dreaded
day-care center.

As soon as they leave, Wolfcale thinks of the other child, almost
eight months along and growing.

Wolfcale and Miners tell Randy that Mommy just has a big belly. He
won't know when his little brother is born. He won't miss him when
the baby moves 1,000 miles away.

Wolfcale took up with the baby's father after Miners went to jail.
That was after Wolfcale and Miners smoked away all their money.

They blew about $50,000 on cocaine in four months, $3,000 in one
night in a Port St. Lucie Best Western - with Randy in the room.

"If they had tested him, I'm sure it would have come back positive,"
Wolfcale says. "Thank God he was only 2 and doesn't remember a whole
lot of what we put him through."

The Department of Children and Families took the boy away, and Miners
went to jail on drug charges. He emerged a drug court success story
and got Randy back.

Reunited with them, Wolfcale knows she has to focus on the family in
front of her.

The adoptive parents sent her a letter and photos in a book report
folder: snapshots of a red-walled dining room with a wide fireplace,
a smiling couple hugging their two boys, a pile of Christmas presents.

She's a company manager, and he's a vice president.

Their letter says: We cannot imagine how hard this is for you. But we
can assure you if you choose us, your child will be brought up with
so much care and affection from all of us.

The adoption agency pays for Wolfcale's living expenses to make sure
the parents in Maryland get what they're waiting for.

She's got one month to go.

Until then, she does what they tell her at CRC: She focuses on recovery.

The CRC van honks outside.

Another client, Joyce Hubbard, sits next to driver Annie Mazell
Harris and brags.

"I went to two meetings last night," Hubbard tells Wolfcale.

"Can I have one?" Wolfcale says. She has to catch up on her
Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous
meetings. Coin key chains marking 30 days clean and nine months clean
click on her key ring. She gave the coins marking three months and
six months to a young addict she mentored.

Hubbard says a woman who spoke at one meeting has been sober for 15 years.

"That's what I like to hear," Wolfcale says.

She hums along to How Sweet It Is, playing on the van's radio. Miss
Mazell - an older woman who hollers, "You stayin' clean?" to former
clients she drives by - winds the van through the back roads down to
the Counseling & Recovery Center.

A New Woman Joins Wolfcale's Group Session That Morning. She Has 11
Children but the Short, Thin Frame of a Preteen.

Seated in a circle, she shares with the others that she relapsed by
drinking four or five times in the past two weeks.

She didn't get caught with a dirty urine test, but now she sinks into
her plastic chair and confesses.

The woman finishes with a whisper: "I just couldn't keep it in."

She looks at the counselor, her eyes and nose tinged with pink. "You
were the one who I knew could see right through me," she says.

All the women stare at the carpet. They've been there.

Hands resting on her belly, Wolfcale breaks the silence.

"Yeah, it totally kills your buzz."

Wolfcale has real advice, too. "You gotta do something about that old
man of yours," she says. "Just the thought of Ken getting drunk makes
me jealous."

The woman nods, still slouched over with her eyes to the floor. A
month later she would fail out of the program.

Outside CRC, Wolfcale's Confidence Wavers.

On a stifling August day, she and Miners stand enveloped by lawyers
and social workers in a crisply cooled Martin County courtroom.

The judge, without hesitation, grants her unsupervised visitation
with Randy. But he orders her not to live with him at Miners' duplex.

A few months earlier, Miners asked Wolfcale what she was doing next
May - his way of proposing. They'd spent this year getting to know
each other sober for the first time in their six-year relationship.

Now the judge addresses Miners, noting the man graduated from drug
court just days earlier.

"I told you not to have the mother move in at this point, for safety
reasons," the judge says. He adds that he's "disappointed, for lack
of a better word" that Wolfcale is back so soon.

Wolfcale doesn't react. Her caseworker prepared her for this. She
begins leaving home at night to sleep at a girlfriend's house,
wishing the judge knew how far she'd come.

But on Paper, She's Still Another Addict.

Wolfcale started drinking when she was 10 or 11. Her mom was dying of
breast cancer and her dad worked long hours laying bricks. She grew
up in about 20 cities, some along the Treasure Coast.

Before this new baby, before Randy, she had a husband and six
children. The couple separated because of her drinking. She and a
high school boyfriend then had another baby, whom she also put up for adoption.

She met Miners when she moved back to the Treasure Coast in 2001. A
former sound engineer for rock 'n' roll bands, he liked pot. She liked vodka.

They slipped into heavier drugs during the 2004 hurricanes when they
sheltered with her family in Jacksonville and Wolfcale took off with
all her sister's prescription painkillers.

Her sister reported her to the Department of Children and Families,
and Randy went to a foster family.

Wolfcale visited him every night, giving him baths and singing him to
sleep in a stranger's home. She left Miners to get him back.

But the couple got back together, and by the time Miners was arrested
on drug charges, they were homeless with only $500.

"I blew that in a night," Wolfcale remembers.

She stayed with a dealer friend until he fell to his death from a
roof he was working on in Port St. Lucie. He had been up all night
smoking crack with her.

Homeless again, Wolfcale went to a hole-in-the-wall bar in Port
Salerno where she used to work. She slept on a pool table and washed
in the bathroom for months.

When she finally visited Randy at Hibiscus Children's Center in Vero
Beach, her little boy didn't know who she was.

Two weeks before her due date, Wolfcale shares parts of this story in
group therapy at CRC. She graduates today, as her contractions are beginning.

She waits until the end of her talk to discuss her pregnancy.

"I am giving this baby up for adoption," she finally says. "It took
me a long time and a lot of group sessions. ... But I have children
who haven't had a mom in two and a half, almost three years now."

She shares more than she intended and abruptly cuts herself off.

"Let's go have a cigarette, girls," she says.

When they return to the trailer with counselors, the other clients
take turns congratulating her.

One tells her, "You scared me."

She intimidates you because she tells you what you don't want to
hear, a counselor explains.

A few more clients admit Wolfcale unnerved them, too. "But I like you
more every day," one says.

Wolfcale - who shares her life without blushing, who once served
social workers coffee and pie while high on pills and convinced them
she was a stable mom, who saves her emotion for herself - cries.

"I will never forget this place or anyone I met here," she says.

She takes a deep breath. "Let's go have cake, girls."

She won't have any more children. During her Caesarean section on
Oct. 2, her fourth, she also has a tubal ligation.

She names her baby Conner Samuel. Her son's new family decides on Lucas.

Women from CRC visit her hospital room, sneaking her hot peanuts and
diet Coke, snapping baby pictures on their cellphones and
bad-mouthing the adoptive parents on cigarette breaks.

"I guess they were waiting for me to change my mind," Wolfcale says later.

The Maryland couple give her a silver angel necklace and their e-mail
address, and then she and her baby leave the hospital in separate cars.