'Life changing'

PORTSMOUTH — Changing diapers between meager, restless slivers of sleep. Juggling unpredictable extracurriculars. Balancing the costs of medical appointments, grocery bills and rent.

They’re all everyday parenting challenges that claw away at even the strongest relationships and mental wellness strategies.

Now imagine doing them fresh into recovery from substance abuse.

As the number and acceptance of recovery pathways grow on the Seacoast, so too are the number of people in recovery struggling to learn, or relearn, how to be parents. And yet, few intensive, dedicated resources exist to specifically help navigate that process, despite the fact national studies indicate 4.8 million U.S. parents have substance use disorder.

“People think, ‘You get sober and life magically gets better and life gets easier,’” said Nico Eisner, a 29-year-old Rochester resident and father in long-term recovery. “It was a struggle. It was a huge learning process… I wasn’t equipped for that at first. So, it was still a lot of self-doubt. There was still a lot of, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’”

Eisner has 22 months of sobriety under his belt and is now intimately involved in the lives of his six children, who range in age from 23 months to 15 years old. He’s discovered a new strength to advocate for his family, to think beyond feeding his heroin addiction in order fund vacations and build happy memories with them.

Eisner said none of that was manageable up until recently, well into his recovery and well into he and his wife’s successful efforts to regain custody of all six children.

“I heard my whole life I was useless,” said Eisner, who didn’t believe he had anything to offer because of what’s he’s experienced and what others have told him since his active addiction began at age 12. “At the beginning, I was a shell. An empty shell.”

The difference for Eisner was a 14-week, non-medical program that’s available at the peer-based Safe Harbor Recovery Center in Portsmouth and SOS Recovery Community Organization’s peer recovery centers in Dover, Rochester and Hampton.

The program is Parenting Journey in Recovery, one of many parenting development offerings created by Somerville, Massachusetts, nonprofit Parenting Journey.

According to Parenting Journey officials and independent research conducted by the Institute for Community Health, Boston University and Boston Medical Center, the program is yielding positive outcomes across the country. Those outcomes, according to the researchers, are both in families’ short-term goals and in Parenting Journey’s long-term goals to end multi-generational social epidemics like substance abuse, housing insecurity, pay insecurity and trauma. 

“Researchers found that parents participating in this program reported decreased parenting stress, greater insight into how their upbringing affects their current parenting behaviors and increased ability to access social networks when compared with parents that were not enrolled in this program,” Parenting Journey wrote in a recent press release.

Safe Harbor and SOS each started offering PJR relatively recently, and each are seeing strong growth in participation.

The program is focused on equipping parents and caregivers in recovery with new tools in a supportive, nonclinical environment. It includes activities and discussion centered around increasing self-care and coping strategies, raising awareness of what influences their parenting styles and communication, and identifying their strengths to better support themselves, their children and their families.

“It’s not a parenting class,” said Parenting Journey Executive Director Imari Paris Jeffries. “It really is to help them understand how their parenting and how they were parented impacts who they are and their loved ones. It is not to make sure you eat your green, leafy vegetables or show up at your son’s school conference. It’s to help them understand the decision-making they have… so they have agency in the positive decisions they (can make).”

PJR’s strategies are on top of providing family-style meals and childcare during each week’s two-hour session, as well as assisting participants with transportation to get there if they need it. Those are crucial pieces of the program because they are huge treatment barriers for many parents, said Whitney Brown, a certified recovery support worker at Safe Harbor.

“(PJR) creates an amazing therapeutic environment that’s nothing like an intensive outpatient program, but there are certain aspects it shares with it,” said Brown, who is in recovery and went through the PJR program 18 months ago. “It’s its own thing, it has its own power… (It) was incredible to connect on a peer level and over such hard issues. To see people during the course of the class come through these issues out on top and get their children back and stay sober has been incredible and miraculous.”

In Parenting Journey’s nearly 40 years of existence, it has forged partnerships with more than 500 nonprofits and provided 40,000-plus hours of professional training to 2,100 human service professionals, according to the organization.

Since 2011, more than 2,800 families in the Boston area alone have been impacted by its programs.

PJR is offered at six total recovery organizations in New Hampshire, the next closest of which is in Manchester. There is nothing between Safe Harbor and SOS’s Seacoast options and similar offerings at peer recovery centers in Tilton and in the Lakes Region.

All of the New Hampshire PJR programs are supported through the state’s opioid response grant, though funding through that grant is limited and set to expire later this year. While the future is uncertain, Polly Morris of statewide facilitating organization Harbor Homes said funding is a challenge PJR supporters are committed to overcome.

“I’m certain (PJR) will not go away in New Hampshire,” Morris said. “We won’t let this go away. We need to find ways to get folks on board. We need decision-makers and community agencies and grantwriters to pick this up.”

Safe Harbor participants like Eisner stress PJR has value for people at all points of the recovery spectrum, not just people fresh into treatment.

Laurie Foster is a Portsmouth mother of two adult and two juvenile children who celebrated five years in recovery from her Percocet addiction while she was participating in Safe Harbor’s version of the program.

She had dug herself into an emotional and social grave to help maintain her recovery all those years, all the while thinking it was a lonely but indispensable part of the territory.

Foster’s emotions and tears flowed in full force during a recent interview as she described how PJR helped her realize, for the very first time, that she wasn’t alone.

“It was just mindblowing,” Foster said. “That’s my biggest thing — I don’t want people out there fighting addiction, fighting family issues, (fighting) child issues thinking they’re alone (and) that there’s nobody out there who knows how they feel and can direct them down paths they can take themselves.”

Foster said she’s making strides to repair and rebuild the relationships with her children, who had been separated from her for nearly six years.

She’s also now a PJR facilitator at Safe Harbor — one of the best, according to Brown, because of the way she connects with everyone, her heart and her “natural ease.”

“I honestly would go through this all over again just to be able to get that almost euphoric feeling that you get from being with other people who understand you, because now it defines me each and every day that I get up,” Foster said. “Every day I get up, it’s ‘What can I do today and help my relationships with my children or my job or my friendships or my commitments?’ It was just life changing.”