A NEW DRUG DEMOGRAPHIC: SUPERMOMS

Drug specialists are reporting an unsettling trend of late: the
growing ranks of women who are selling and abusing methamphetamines.
And they are not just any women. According to the people who counsel
these abusers, a startling number of them are middle-class working
moms who are trying to top off their energy so they can make it
through a working mom's day.

They are women like 43-year-old Debra Breuklander, a divorced nurse
from Clive, Iowa, who found herself raising three children on her own
in a $150,000 home she could no longer afford. Determined to stay in
that house, and to continue to look like Supermom to anyone who might
be watching, she began to sell and to use "meth," a hyperstimulant
said to produce a euphoric high.

"The house, the kids, the cars, the groceries, the flower beds - I
thought I had to be perfect at all of it," said Ms. Breuklander, who
is now serving a 35-year sentence at the Iowa Correctional Institute
in Mitchellville for drug dealing. "My home was immaculate. I looked
fine. I fooled everyone."

I am often reminded by readers that mine is not the first generation
to be stressed. Point taken. My mother, who went through law school
while I was in high school, was regularly pulled in opposite
directions by life and work, and her mother, who taught third grade
full time until well into her 60's, also knew the strains of a working
parent.

Similarly, ours is not the first generation to look for mood-altering
assistance to get through the day. Housewives hit the sherry bottle in
the 50's and popped Valium, known as "mother's little helpers," in the
70's. Cocaine followed in the 80's, and methamphetamines are a cousin
to that.

"I grew up in the 70's, and back then housewives took Valium to calm
themselves down," Ms. Breuklander said in a phone interview from
prison. "Now we live in such a fast-paced world, we can feel we need
to speed up to keep up with everything."

In other words, the drugs we take are a warped reflection of our
times. Women who abuse meth see it as a jolt of energy for a life/work
dance that is more intricate and frenzied than it was before. With all
due respect to my mother and grandmother, things are harder for
working parents now. Technology has insinuated itself into every
moment of our lives as voice mail, e-mail, cellphones and Blackberries
allow us - and therefore force us - to work everywhere. At the same
time, our children cannot come home from school, hop on their bikes
and ride with carefree abandon around the neighborhood. They need a
watchful eye more than ever.

In Ms. Breuklander's life, there was that pressure plus the added
strain of finances. "I didn't want my kids to think they couldn't have
the standard of living they were used to," she said, even though she
was first divorced and then living off disability because of a back
injury. "For my self-esteem, I didn't want to let anything go."

This is enough to drive most women to distraction - and some of those
women to drugs. At first, Ms. Breuklander says she sold
methamphetamines for extra money - "the car payment, the house
payment" - but gradually, she became addicted herself.

"It was my twisted thinking that led to the substance abuse," she
said. "It begins with bad thoughts. Mine were, 'He's not going to take
me down,' " she said of her ex-husband and their battle over child
support. "I should have sold my home, and lowered my standard of
living, and talked to my children about how Mom can't do this anymore,
but I didn't want to let go of the fantasy that I could do it all perfectly."

And where does that fantasy come from? It starts, I would submit, with
the myth of the perfect mother, because, let's face it, if our mothers
were really all that perfect the nation's therapists would be out of
business. Then we layer onto that the equally mythical perfect
employee based on the model offered by our fathers, nearly all of whom
had a helpmate on the home front allowing them to work unencumbered by
domestic worries. Add one myth to the other, then go and try to live
up to both of them; multiply by two if, like Ms. Breuklander, you
really are both the mother and father in your home.

Since her arrest three years ago, Ms. Breuklander has been
participating in an intense prison program where she is learning to
banish the "bad thoughts."

For the rest of us, let me offer this exercise. You know that voice in
your head - the one that nags as you fall asleep, recalling every
misstep made during the day, every child shortchanged and every
doughnut consumed? Well, tonight shut that voice down. Replace it with
a checklist of all you did today. Because what you did get done - just
ask Ms. Breuklander - is darn amazing.