Tracey Huggum is a single working mother who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her two sons. She's got her own car, a driver's license and car insurance. She takes her kids regularly to the doctors for checkups. Helps the oldest with his homework.
Pays the rent.
She pastes her children's artwork on the kitchen wall. It's a lifestyle that less than two years ago was unthinkable for Heggum.
"My life right now is the best it's ever been", she says, sitting on the futon bed in her living room with 4-year-old Andrew in her lap. She wraps her arms around Andrew and hugs.
Compared to her past, Heggum's life is now nothing short of a miracle. No more drugs, no more welfare, no more treatment centers. Most of importantly, she's got her children and she's taking care of them.
It's what she has prayed for.
Last year, the Heggums were one of several hundred families adopted by the county Volunteer Center's "Adopt a Family " program. Heggum, 27, and her sons, Andrew and Ryan, 7, were living in New Life Center community shelter in Santa Cruz while Heggum was still struggling to get on her feet. After nearly a lifetime of drug abuse, she was finally off drugs and going to Bethany College to become a drug and alcohol counselor.

She had little money, no home of her own and not much to give the children for Christmas.
"It was amazing to me to see how giving people are and how willing to help," Heggum says.
There were eight children at the center last Christmas--some from homeless families, others whose parents were going through treatment for addiction. The Adopt a Family program provided Christmas for them all.
"It was unbelievable how much stuff there was for the kids," Heggum says. A skateboard, pajamas, a jacket, a handmade puppet set, a train set. "The whole couch was full. All those kids wouldn't have had Christmas without it."
Heggum's small Santa Cruz apartment is sparse but tidy. Paintings of angels decorate the walls. Her certificate of baptism into the New Life Church is displayed prominently.
Heggum is wearing makeup. Her fingernails are painted red, her hair is stylish. She looks like a pretty young mother in overalls.
"I look completely different," she says, pointing to a picture on the wall when she was smoking methamphetamine. She was thinner then. Her hair a different color.
Heggum has been an addict since she started smoking dope and drinking alcohol as the age of 11. Her mother's a drug addict. Her father's a recovered alcoholic who has been divorced three times.
"I was a latch-key kid," she says.
Throughout her teen-age years, she was in and out of treatment centers, group homes, juvenile hall. She continually ran away from home, went through periods of sobriety and then started using again.
"Mainly I used to feel normal. It gave me a sense of well-being. I wanted to be clean and sober. I just didn't know how. I was just totally powerless."
She couldn't keep a job, a car, car insurance or a drivers license. She couldn't even keep a doctor's appointment.
And then finally, she couldn't keep her kids.
Her parents took them away through the courts in June of 1995. Heggum went into detox. Six months later she got her children back on New Year's Day.
"It was so hard. Looking back on it, it was so necessary. These kids needed something better than I was giving them. I wasn't taking care of them at all. I hated my parents for taking them. But they really saved my life. "
Heggum works as a counselor at the Paloma House now, a treatment center in Watsonville for clients with both addictions and mental illness. She loves her work.
"She's one of the cases we look back at and say wow, it's amazing," said Emmanuel DeNike, the director of New Life Community Services. "It's amazing she's come so far so fast. She's really a miracle."
This Christmas, Heggum and the boys will be celebrating Christmas with their grandparents for the first time in many years. She's already bought them "a ton of cool stuff."
"It's still hard sometimes. Life on life's terms is hard," she says. Then she smiles. "I just feel like the pieces are coming back together. "
And she'll always remember the past.
"These guys have a lot of anger and hurt," he says, looking at her sons. "They remind me of where I don't want to be. They help me remember where I came from."

The Santa Cruz Sentinel--November 30, 1997