A COMMITMENT TO HELPING OTHERS AVOID THE MISTAKES SHE MADE

SHE CAN joke about it a bit now.

``When I have to do a quick introduction,'' Rosemary Tisch says, ``I
sometimes say, `I have a bad habit: starting non-profits.' ''

Indeed, Tisch, 52, is the founder of Kids Are Special, a non-profit
agency dedicated to breaking the cycle of chemical dependency in
families. She's the founder of the Family Education Foundation, a
non-profit agency that develops collaborative trainings and programs
for children and families to address multiple issues of mental health,
addiction, violence and abuse. It's work that has won her national and
international acclaim in those fields.

It's also work that probably wouldn't have come about if it weren't
for another habit of hers -- a genuinely bad habit.

``I am in recovery from alcoholism,'' Tisch announces firmly. ``I have
16 years in recovery now. A long time, but still one day at a time.''

She acknowledges just as firmly that her interest in chemical
dependency is selfish. That guilt helped launch those non-profits.
That what she has learned in her life motivates her to help keep
others from making similar mistakes -- especially at this time of year
when holiday parties and wassail bowls abound.

Had she known earlier in life what she knows now, things could have
been much different.

``My belief is that it (alcohol addiction) is genetic,'' Tisch says.
``I have a grandparent who died of the disease, and I have a brother
who is not using at this time but was heavily hit by the drug part of
that. I believe there's an environmental piece to addiction, too, but
I think it's highly genetic.''

But when everything seems to be going swimmingly in your
upper-middle-class life, who looks to the past for problems? Tisch,
whose father is a contractor and her mother a teacher, grew up in
Walnut Creek and Santa Barbara. She attended Mills College and the
University of California-Santa Barbara, where she studied anthropology
and music. She got a master's degree in counseling psychology from
Stanford University, worked for Hewlett-Packard Co. in human
relations, married and began to raise a family. She got a master's
degree in piano performance from College of Notre Dame so she could
teach piano at home while minding the children. But then things began
to unravel.

``It started with just the ordinary social drinking that all of us
do,'' Tisch says. ``Wine with dinner, the Grand Marnier afterward. But
I couldn't do just that. And very soon it would be, `Well, my
husband's traveling, but I'll have a glass of wine while I give my
daughter a bath. You know that's drinking alone, but in your head it's
`Well, he's probably having a glass of wine with his dinner; why can't
I have a glass of wine?' My addiction went very quickly.''

Tisch says she drank for about 12 years, with the addiction process
taking five to six years of that. Her husband tried to talk to her
about the problem. Other people began to notice. Two of her friends,
fellow musicians, sat her down and told her, ``We don't know what this
is all about, but we know that you need help.''

That was a major wake-up call, Tisch says, but she thought she could
handle things herself. ``I said, `Maybe if I got a job outside the
house . . .' I tried that. `Maybe if I changed this or that.' That
didn't work. Finally came the day when I had to say, `I just can't do
it.' '' She checked herself into a treatment center.

Reclaiming her life

The treatment worked. Gradually, she began to reclaim her life. And to
look at it closely.

``I began to say, `Well, who am I and what am I good at?' It would
have been easy for me to just go back and be a housewife and forget.
So I made the decision, in a very selfish way, that I would work in
the alcohol and drug field.''

Using her counseling psychology experience, she got a job organizing a
lecture series on drugs and alcohol. ``That was a God-given
opportunity for me to get an education,'' she says gratefully. That in
turn led to increased awareness that drug use affects more than the
user.

``We in this county needed to do something for children whose parents
had this problem. Whether you think it's environmental or genetic, we
still need to go to work with these kids.''

That led her to found Kids Are Special, which initially focused on
education support groups for children but soon widened that focus.
``What we learned very quickly is that many of the parents with
addiction problems had parents with addiction problems,'' Tisch notes.
Parenting classes were added.

``And then we opened a clinic for kids suffering from child abuse,
because child abuse and domestic violence and all sorts of other
things also run in these families.''

Tackling teen pregnancy

Five years ago, Kids Are Special merged with Eastfield Ming Quong, a
larger non-profit working in the same field. Tisch stayed with the new
operation for almost three years, and then began to branch out again
when her friend Pat Compton suggested she work on teen pregnancy,
another all-too-common facet of alcohol/drug abuse. That led to a
grant for cross-agency training on the issue, with Tisch coordinating
efforts by almost 20 groups, including Planned Parenthood, the
Giarretto Institute, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Pathways and the
Network for Battered Women.

``So we started the Family Education Foundation to keep these efforts
going,'' she says. ``Our first program was Young Mothers Are Strong.
Then the Packard Foundation gave money for a Young Men Are Strong
component. And the Compton Foundation gave money for us to work with
school-based health clinics.''

Tisch was really off and running.

``I've known Rosemary for years, and she is an incredibly accomplished
woman who commands national and international respect,'' says Gay
Crawford of the American Cancer Society. ``She has testified in
Washington, taught alcohol awareness to professionals in Russia and in
Mexico, and has founded, funded and led programs which help people and
professionals deal with this difficult issue.''

Collaboration is the key, says Tisch. ``We try to address all the
issues on the table. Don't come and talk to us just about addiction. I
want to talk about the domestic violence, the child abuse, the
learning disabilities -- all the pieces that we've learned are part of
this.''

And what Tisch especially wants to talk about this month is Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome: the harm that can happen to kids when pregnant women -- and
fathers, too -- drink.

``In earlier generations, women didn't drink as much,'' she says,
``but there's been a six-fold increase in women drinking during
pregnancy in the last 10 years. That doesn't mean they're alcoholic.
It doesn't mean they're using (other drugs). But it means they are
drinking. And we know that almost 10 percent of the kids born in Santa
Clara Valley hospitals in 1992 had alcohol in their systems.''

The effects of alcohol on fetuses are manifold, she notes. Fathers who
drink near conception may produce gene-damaged sperm. Mothers who
drink may give birth to children with facial abnormalities and central
nervous system damage ranging from severe mental retardation to
attention-deficit disorder and learning disabilities.

``The March of Dimes has found that as few as one or two drinks a day
can cause lowered IQ, low birth weight and attention disabilities,''
Tisch points out. ``Other drugs such as tobacco make it worse. But
early intervention can prevent secondary disabilities as the kids grow
up, including school failure, trouble with the law and chemical dependency.

Learning-disabled child

``The advice from the surgeon general,'' she continues, ``is: No
drinking 30 days prior to conception, male or female. And if you're
not planning, then certainly once you know you're pregnant, stop. The
sooner you stop the better.''

But don't blow it off as just more medical scare stories. Nobody knows
they're true better than Tisch.

``I drank during my second pregnancy,'' she says softly. ``That child
does have learning disabilities and attention-deficit disorder. Do I
carry that with me? Every day.

``But she did very well in school,'' Tisch continues, ``because we did
lots of early intervention. She's a wonderful example of what can
happen when you get the family in recovery, you get specialists
involved, you get every resource that you can lay your hands on,
going. It can be done. She graduated with honors from high school.
She's on an academic scholarship now at college. She gets a lot of the
credit. She did all this work. But could she have been more? Did I
spend nights crying? Yes.''

Tisch's current efforts include working toward providing Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome screening for Santa Clara County children so that others can
benefit from similar early intervention.

``It makes no sense to keep building more jails,'' she says. ``Let's
find out early which of these kids are likely to have problems and
work quickly to help them avoid them.''

She has seen in her own life what alcohol -- one of our legal drugs --
can do if misused. She worries what it may yet do to others.

``It haunts,'' she says quietly. ``Don't drink in pregnancy so you
won't have to worry about this.''

A Conversation with Leigh Weimers appears each Sunday in Silicon
Valley Life. Weimers' columns also appear Mondays, Wednesdays and
Fridays. Write to him at the Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Drive, San
Jose, Calif. 95190; phone (408) 920-5547; fax (408) 271-3786; e-mail
lweimers@sjmercury.com

Checked-by: Patrick Henry