New home for moms fighting alcohol and drug addictions - Nashua, NH

New home for moms fighting alcohol and drug addictions - NashuaTelegraph.com

By PATRICK MEIGHAN
Staff Writer

Keystone Hall volunteer Cynthia Day, center, greets visitors Monday during an open house at the new family center named for her. The Cynthia Day Family Center is a residential program for mothers or expectant mothers recovering from addiction to drugs or alcohol. At far left (in purple) is Thisvi McCormick, the program coordinator.

NASHUA – The program is new, the location only temporary.
Keystone Hall opened the doors of its newest facility to the public in late morning Monday. Though a hard, cold rain kept attendance down, the relatively few soggy people who made it caught a glimpse of a new program for mothers or expectant mothers who are recovering alcoholics or drug addicts and their children.
The Cynthia Day Family Center opened Jan. 6 at 440 Amherst St., a former housing site for homeless veterans. Keystone Hall is run through Harbor Homes, Inc., which also manages the veterans program.
By spring of 2012, the family center will move to a new Keystone Hall facility further west at 615 Amherst St., said Annette Escalante, vice president of Keystone Hall, or as it’s formally known, the Greater Nashua Council on Alcoholism.
Up to eight women or expectant mothers can stay at the center, said Thisvi McCormick, the family center’s program coordinator. Each resident can live there for six months with one child up to age 6.
Currently, five women reside at the center. It opened with seven, but “a couple” were discharged from the program, McCormick said,
To enter the program, a woman must have already gone through detox and must have remained clean for 30 days, McCormick said.
However, no one is turned away, and those waiting to be admitted can detox at Keystone Hall, she said.
Highly structured with little free time allowed residents, the family center program is for “sobriety maintenance,” McCormick said.
Residents meet one-on-one with case managers and in small groups of two or three for counseling in such areas as parenting skills and domestic violence or to attend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
Residents can’t leave the facility unless they’ve earned an overnight pass, but they can be visited by their sponsors if they’re in a 12-step program.
Women can only live at the center with one child. Residents with multiple children can see their other children on weekends.
The family center includes small, individual rooms for the mothers and their children, a play area and a kitchen – though food is cooked at Keystone Hall and brought to the center.
When the new facility opens, the family center will be in a separate wing and the residents isolated from the rest of the Keystone Hall clients.
The youngest woman now in the program is 22. McCormick said the program likely wouldn’t take someone older than 40.
Some of the residents are from outside Greater Nashua, and the program is open to New Hampshire residents only, McCormick said.
Many residents who come to the program are referred by the court system or by state child welfare officials. Some approach the center on their own, McCormick said.
One of the unusual aspects of the center is that it does accept women on methadone or Suboxone treatments as part of opiate replacement therapy, McCormick said.
“Coming off opiates can be damaging to fetuses,” she said.
Rooms are small and don’t contain televisions, though there is a TV in a community room for limited viewing hours.
With the structured program, there is a lot for residents to do, and they don’t have much free time, McCormick said.
Women also are forbidden from having iPods with screens, cell phones or laptops, she said.
Residents are required to commit to the program for six months with an option to receive services for up to a year, McCormick said.
Children can attend child-care, preschool or a kindergarten program through a contract with Marguerite’s Place, and children old enough for first grade will attend public schools, McCormick said.
The family center is named for Cynthia Day, a longtime volunteer at Keystone Hall. Day was a corporate vice president whose career and marriage were destroyed by alcoholism. After recovery, she became a psychiatric nurse working in the field of chemical dependency.
She attended the open house.
Patrick Meighan can be reached at 594-6518 or pmeighan@nashuatelegraph.com.