At first, she tried to stay strong for her grandchildren. But finally, Melissa Tatman broke down with them.
The mother the kids were crying for was her daughter. She wasn’t in their lives as she struggled with addiction.
“We cry together. ‘I know you want your mom. I want your mom.’ That’s my little girl out there, and I don’t know where she’s at, so we just cry together.”
Tatman is currently raising three of her grandchildren. Their mother, Tatman’s oldest daughter, has been more than 90 days clean from heroin now.
She gave birth to a baby boy less than a year ago, and he was born addicted. The Department of Child Services became involved and he went to live with Tatman.
“She had overdosed twice during her pregnancy with him. He was born with some complications. He is just a miracle child,” Tatman said.
Tatman and the baby spent the first five weeks in a bedroom together.
“There was oxygen, there was monitors. There’s other kids in the house, so I was worried about cross-contamination. We literally spent five weeks in the bedroom before I really felt safe to bring him out,” she said.
“I’ve fallen in love with him.”
She makes her way to the playroom in the basement of New Life Community Church. A smiling, barefoot young woman meets her at the door holding the sweet, dark-haired infant.
“He’s perfection. There’s nothing wrong with him,” Tatman said as she smiles and takes him for a hug.
She hands the baby back, knowing they will be reunited in less than an hour after the Battlefield for Freedom recovery ministry meeting ends. Tatman, who is years into her own addiction recovery, leads those meetings each week at the church.
But soon, Tatman will have to give the baby back with no return time, as DCS is working to reunify her daughter with her infant son.
“If giving him up is part of keeping her alive, if she’s working for recovery so that she can be reunified and have a life with her baby, then that’s what I want for her,” Tatman said.
“But at the same time, there’s going to be a lot of changes, and it’s scary, it’s heartbreaking to think about. It’s the sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
Tatman is far from alone. Statewide, as of 2015, 7.4 percent of grandparents were raising their grandchildren. Brown County ranked No. 10 among all 92 Indiana counties for the percentage of children living with a grandparent.
Tatman spent many years worrying about her first baby, her oldest daughter, as she struggled with addiction living in Greensburg.
“There’s a gloom that hangs over your head every day,” she said.
Tatman would get phone calls from family who had police scanners in Greensburg whenever 911 was called and her daughter’s name was said.
“Sometimes that was just a couple of minutes and sometimes it was 10 to 15 minutes before I found out whether she was still alive or not,” Tatman said.
“It actually removes every ounce of energy from your body. You can’t move. It’s devastating. I got those phone calls eight times (last year). … You quit breathing, you can’t move. As soon as I would find out she’s OK, I would go to bed, because I just needed to sleep. I never experienced anything so draining.”
Tatman was not in contact with her daughter, who was homeless. But she would watch her lifestyle play out on social media.
“For some reason, they are not afraid to put their pictures on Facebook. It’s like, do they not see themselves? You got to wonder what their perception is, because I watched her go from 180 to 200 pounds to 110 to 120,” she said. “(There was) no life in her eyes, and (she was) living a life I knew wasn’t conducive to who she was.”
Tatman has had legal guardianship of that daughter’s other two children, ages 10 and 12, for the past six years. They will continue to do live with her until they turn 18.
“My daughter is sound about it. She knows we’ve given them structure and stability and all of those things,” Tatman said. “It’s been so long that there’s no taking that back now.”
‘Love with boundaries’
Tatman’s oldest daughter must finish drug treatment before she is allowed to live with her again. She is enrolled in a program through the Amethyst House in Bloomington, and if she completes that program, she can stay with her mother and the baby if she needs to.
“We don’t call it tough love, we call it love with boundaries, because we’ve got to protect ourselves,” Tatman said.
When her daughter would get out of prison, she would want to come home, and Tatman and her husband, Gordon, would welcome her with open arms. They would try to help her, but then they would wake in the morning and she would be gone.
“The kids were having a hard time going to sleep when she was around because they wanted to be able to stop her when she left,” she said.
“We call it love with boundaries just to protect our hearts and to protect the children’s hearts.”
Her daughter has had regular visits with her infant son, which should help when she gets custody of him. But it’s not going to be easy.
“I have to believe that, growing inside her womb, that he recognizes her, he knows her voice, he always knows who she is, but he cried for me the other day,” she said. “She had him, and he cried, because I wouldn’t take him from her.”
The transition will have to go slowly for the baby’s sake, so that he won’t be traumatized, she said.
“It needs to be about him. It hadn’t been. With her, it’s not been about her kids, ever. If she’s going to do this for real, then it’s time to be the big girl and make the sacrifices for your children,” Tatman said.
Not enough
Tatman carries a burden of her own from when her three children were young.
During her first marriage, which she entered into after running away at age 17, she became addicted to alcohol, then started doing crack, cocaine and other drugs. It didn’t end until she left that husband in 2002.
“I was just addicted to my kids as I was anything, so I, like, kept them home from school, kept them with me whenever I was using and stuff, probably because I felt guilty for my lifestyle,” she said.
“Whenever I sobered up, then I wanted them with me, so I would overcompensate for my guilt. They saw that. They lived that life with me. They saw me beat up. They saw me drunk. We took them to parties. They just were active in that lifestyle.”
When Tatman’s granddaughter was 3, she went to work with her papaw, Tatman’s husband, every day on a farm.
“He had her writing her name, reading. He spent a lot of time just connecting with her, because she didn’t have a dad and she didn’t have a mom,” she said.
“We didn’t have any of that with our kids, and she is still like, ‘Well, they’ve got a dad. They’ve got a mom.’ She’s jealous (of kids with parents),” Tatman continued.
That granddaughter is now 12. “We’ve been doing everything a parent is supposed to do and it’s still just not enough,” she said.
“We try to remind her she is blessed and she needs to count her blessings and to look at the facts, that there are people out there who have it worse. Not to undermine her pain, but … it’s a balance, and we just love her.”
Tatman said she has raised her grandchildren differently from how she raised her own. Her grandchildren are sheltered. “We go to church. We homeschool, for Pete’s Sake. … Our hope is just that we’ve done it differently enough.”
However, the Tatmans have never sugarcoated the reason why the kids’ mother was absent. “People will tell their kids all kinds of stuff, and I’m like, ‘No, she’s in jail.’ ‘Why is she in jail?’ ‘Because she made bad choices,’” she said. “You’re always going to have to mind, whether it’s your parents or your teachers or the police, there’s always rules even when you’re grown-ups.”
Tatman said she never wants her grandchildren to think they were “abandoned” because they were not loved. The drugs were to blame.
“They know about addiction, and that it’s mind-altering and it makes people different then they would be without it. While it may look like that they’re not loved by their mother, she is just under the influence of drugs, so she is not able to feel her real feelings,” Tatman said.
“That’s one of the things that addicts battle the most when they get clean is feelings, because they haven’t felt them because they’ve been numb. They’ve been displacing everything, so to even to feel joy is abnormal to them.
“In her mind, she loves them.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”ABOUT THIS SERIES” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
The United States is in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in its history.
With alarming frequency, opioids, including prescription drugs, heroin and fentanyl, are killing Americans, including people in Brown County.
The Brown County Democrat is taking a yearlong look into a public health crisis that touches nearly every segment of our community and crosses all socioeconomic lines.
We are telling the harrowing stories of people who have been addicted and families who have lost loved ones.
We’re talking to doctors, addiction specialists, law enforcement officers and others on the front lines of a problem that is ruining lives and putting mounting pressure on social service agencies, hospitals, the judicial system and the economy.
And beyond that, Addicted & Dying is exploring solutions and a path forward — what treatments and approaches work, what communities can do and how to help people in need.
Our project continues this week by exploring how children are being affected by addiction. This is one of the greatest impacts Brown County is seeing, according to statistics.
Got an idea for our project? Contact us at [email protected].
[sc:pullout-text-end]OTHER STORIES IN THIS SERIES:
Addicted and Dying: An introduction
‘Addiction works when it gets to hide’
‘#DoSomething movement uniting the community
OPINION: In the midst of addiction, there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’
Local churches reaching out as ‘spiritual hospitals’
Local task force aims to educate, prevent drug use
‘I judged so much. Then it happened to me.’
GUEST OPINION: The impact of opioid use on families
‘I want your mom, too’: Grandmother raising three grandchildren as daughter battles addiction
Hidden victims: Addiction’s effect on Brown County children
Health board declares addiction a public health threat
Local opioid summit planned in May
‘Don’t give up’: Recovering users step up to counsel others
