With the vigilance of a sentry, Jessica Darlington guarded the front door, ready to intercept her mother the moment she inevitably tried to slip out to buy drugs. She was the only one of her siblings to notice the pattern.
“I’d wait until they were asleep,” her mother, Cassandra Darlington, 53, recalled recently at her Bronx apartment. “Then I’d try to bolt.”
In the 1990s, it was rare for the older Ms. Darlington to even be home. So Jessica, now 28, was all the more determined to keep her mother safely there, with her siblings and grandmother, and vociferously pleaded for her to stay. It was always in vain.
She also hoped to spare Ms. Darlington from the seedier aspects of her crack cocaine addiction, often rallying her siblings to pool their money on their mother’s behalf.
“She didn’t want me to get it other ways,” Ms. Darlington said.
Drugs dominated Ms. Darlington’s life from 18 to her late 30s, through the births of her five children. She tried to quit several times, twice entering rehabilitation programs, but she always resumed her habit.
“It felt like it would be never-ending,” Jessica Darlington said. “Every time she said she would get help, she tried. But then she fell.”
Continue reading the main storyIn 2001, in what she acknowledged was a cry for attention, Ms. Darlington sliced one of her wrists. She was taken to a hospital, which prompted the city’s Administration for Children’s Services to intervene.
“My rock bottom was when my kids got taken from me,” Ms. Darlington said. Her children entered kinship foster care with their grandmother while Ms. Darlington went to a drug-treatment program at the Addicts Rehabilitation Center in Manhattan. She entered on the birthday of her daughter Janice Wright, now 23.
“I went on her birthday so I would never forget,” Ms. Darlington said, explaining that her addiction caused her to miss too many of those days, even when she had the best of intentions. She recalled one year when she left home to get a cake for her daughter Fatima.
“I never came back,” Ms. Darlington said. “Something took over me.”
This time, she followed through and committed to getting clean. Ms. Darlington obtained a job in security and acquired a Section 8 voucher for an apartment. Upon completion of the treatment program, where she stayed for nine months, Ms. Darlington was awarded custody of her children. Two of them chose to remain with their grandmother.
“They were afraid I’d relapse again and didn’t want to take that chance,” Ms. Darlington said.
Jessica Darlington leapt at the chance to be reunited with her mother.
“I didn’t know what it was like to have a mom,” she said. “Now I’m going home with my mother.”
Early into sobriety, Ms. Darlington was tempted by a tax windfall. Instead of using the money for drugs, she made a phone call to a loved one — a strategy she still employs — who told her that he trusted her to make the right decision.
Now 16 years into sobriety, Ms. Darlington is frank: The lure of crack never dissipates. She still has dreams in which she is smoking it and awakens relieved that the experience was not real.
“I don’t have the urge like I did back then,” Ms. Darlington said. “I’m good. Well, I’m not going to say ‘I’m good.’ I’m going to knock on wood to that.”
Her largest source of concern these days is her health. In 2005, Ms. Darlington began having serious chest pains. It was a heart attack, one so severe she could not move or speak. Her son, Titus Cleveland, then 5, called his grandmother, who called the paramedics. Ms. Darlington credits her son with saving her life that day.
Ms. Darlington, who now has three stents in her heart, is on medical leave from her job and struggles to make ends meet.
“I’m a single parent,” she said. “I do my best.”
Last year, as Mr. Cleveland was preparing to start his freshman year at St. Leo University in Tampa, Fla., Ms. Darlington reached out to Children’s Aid, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. While in foster care, her children had taken part in some of the agency’s programs.
Children’s Aid used $735 in Neediest Cases funds to give the family gift cards to Target and Staples so Mr. Cleveland could buy school and dormitory supplies. He recently completed his first semester studying sports media. Children’s Aid helped Ms. Darlington’s other children in similar ways.
Ms. Darlington said she felt blessed that all her children were successful despite her missteps. She has made no secret of her struggles, wanting her children to understand why she was missing so often and know the hold that addiction had on her.
“None of them have ever touched drugs,” Ms. Darlington said. “They saw where I came from. I’m so proud of that.”
The love of her family, which now includes three grandchildren, is further incentive for Ms. Darlington to stay clean. She cannot fathom giving up all that she has gained.
“When I got older, I started to realize the accomplishments she had made,” Fatima Darlington said of her mother. “I understood that it wasn’t easy for her. And the fact that she was able to become better for us made a big difference.”
The knowledge that all five of her children have embraced her again is powerful, Ms. Darlington said. She finds herself awed by their capacity to forgive.
“I was a mama’s girl,” Jessica Darlington said. “All the times that she failed, this time she proved me wrong.”
“I proved a whole lot of people wrong,” Ms. Darlington responded. “I’m sure there were quite a few people out there who thought I wasn’t going to make it. I’m glad I proved them wrong.”
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