How motherhood helped former drug-addicted sex worker turn her life around
Trudi had already been a sex worker for four years to support her $600 a day heroin habit, when the 28-year-old addict found herself pregnant.
A life of prostitution was never something the Melbourne woman thought she was destined for, but her drug dependency escalated after “dabbling” first in marijuana, before progressing into harder drugs.
Her first attempt to get clean was at 21, when Trudi successfully completed 12 months in rehab. Determined to turn her life around, she gained a certificate in youth work and landed a job helping others at risk.
“I remember seeing girls come in that were doing street work and I’d think ‘you poor girl’. It was a point I never thought I would ever get to,” she told Yahoo News Australia.
She admitted to biting off more than she could chew in her second year of studies, causing the young woman to relapse into drug use when she struggled to cope, and was fired.
It was one of the countless jobs she lost because she was using drugs, so the young woman turned to prostitution when she exhausted all other options. She began working at a legal brothel, but only lasted about a month before she turned to the streets.
While other workers were using drugs to cope with the sex work, Trudi said she was working to support her $600 a day heroin habit.
“At parlours the shifts were 12-hours [long] so I kept thinking ‘I can’t work for 12 hours before I can use again’,” she said.
Drug addict’s baby almost didn’t survive
Trudi continued street work for about four years before she fell pregnant at 28 to a man she was seeing personally. That’s when she realised she was no longer responsible for just one life and needed to make some drastic changes, but it wasn’t easy.
“I never wanted to have children in those circumstances. I didn’t want to bring a baby up in a drug addicted environment,” she said.
During her 12-week scan, doctors feared her unborn baby boy wasn’t going to survive the pregnancy given the amount of drugs his mum had been using. The woman was put into a “high risk” detox at the Women’s Alcohol and Drugs Service, and against all odds, her son was born at 38 weeks in 2013.
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He was induced and placed in the special care nursery where he spent the first three months of his life experiencing a myriad of health factors, including seizures and pneumonia. At one point he even stopped breathing.
“There was no way possible this baby wasn’t going to go through withdrawal symptoms. It was horrible watching a baby go through withdrawal symptoms like an adult does,” Trudi said.
How the single mum was helped on her feet
Following detox, the pregnant mum was placed in a boarding house until a more permanent option became available, and remained clean through the transition.
“At one stage I thought I’m going to be homeless with this kid,” she said.
With the help of family crisis charity St Kilda Mums, Trudi was set up with newborn essentials for her baby’s arrival, like a pram, cot, and baby and maternity clothes.
“I had nothing. I wasn’t in a position to go and buy things. St Kilda Mums are not judgmental, they don’t care where you’ve come from,” she said.
She told Yahoo News Australia she would have been too embarrassed to attend mothers’ groups wearing old, shabby, clothes, without a proper pram, and called the support a “blessing”.
“It makes a big difference in your self-esteem, especially if you’re feeling postpartum stress.”
The new mum picked up a job working at a market, but relapsed when her grandmother died. Trudi was never close with her mum, so she leaned on her 83-year-old nan as a motherly figure, and fell apart when she died.
“It broke me,” she said of the grief, which caused her to relapse.
Mum’s fear was her turning point to get clean
One afternoon the single mum woke up in her kitchen after passing out from a heroin hit. Her little boy was playing quietly in the lounge room while his mother was out for about 40 minutes. Trudi became racked with guilt for potentially putting her child in danger, and that was the turning point which helped her on the way to becoming clean.
She called the relevant support services, who alerted the Department of Human Services and they became involved.
While Trudi said her children were never taken away from her, she feared that was a real possibility so she sought help for both her drug addiction and her grief, and stopped taking heroin.
“I thought I can’t believe I am here again, and this time I have a child… I started pulling myself together.”
Her second child came along in 2016 while Trudi was in a relationship with a man she’d known for years. But she left him soon after, when she says he grew increasingly violent.
Forced to support herself and two kids, the single mum again turned to St Kilda Mums for help to get back on her feet.
Coming close having her children taken away
She said having the resources to set up a house adequately played a huge part in being able to keep her children.
“Having no baby goods would have made a difference. The Department would have taken them. It came close. I did all I could to keep them,” she said.
Now almost 36, and clean for more than a year, Trudi said she and her six-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter are all healthy and happy, with a roof over their head thanks to the “village” of services that helped them along the way.
She has even donated anything she no longer needs back to St Kilda Mums for other families in crisis. Once her daughter is a bit older, Trudi hopes to gain employment in welfare work to help other families doing it tough.
St Kilda Mums is currently fundraising to move to a larger premises, to keep up with the growing demand and continue to support mums like Trudi.
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