Alcohol while pregnant haunts a mother
Daughter with fetal alcohol syndrome robbed of ‘so much’
Kathy Mitchell wants to share something with you. She’s not proud of it, and it’s not a behavior she hopes you’ll emulate. It’s just the truth: As a teen, Kathy drank alcohol while pregnant with her daughter, Karli. It was a perilous if unwitting mistake that has defined both of their lives.
Karli Schrider is now 43 but is the developmental age of a first-grader. In the home she shares with her mother and stepdad, she collects dolls and purses, and pores over coloring books. Karli has fetal alcohol syndrome, the result of alcohol exposure in utero.
In middle age, Karli has none of the awareness, selfdetermination and independence that most people take for granted. She can’t recognize social cues, is easily led and manipulated, and can’t predict dangerous behaviors. She can only follow one rule at a time and doesn’t understand sequence.
To Kathy, Karli’s is simply a life snuffed of promise.
“I adore my very sweet daughter,” Kathy says. “She’s a forever innocent child. But not a day goes by that I don’t ask myself, ‘What if? What if alcohol hadn’t been a part of my life?’ ”
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, covers a range of impairments from severe, such as Karli’s fetal alcohol syndrome, to mild. Its effects can include impaired growth, intellectual disabilities and such neurological, emotional and behavioral issues as attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder, vision problems, and speech and language delays.
Kathy’s lengthy affair with alcohol was nearly a birthright. She grew up in Rockville, Md., the fifth child of seven in a family in which, she says, problems were barely acknowledged and rarely discussed — especially the alcoholism that Kathy says was a part of her family history.
In 1964, when Kathy was 10, her parents opened a restaurant in Olney, Md., which they would own for the next 33 years.
Kathy and her siblings all helped in the business, which took on a nightclub atmosphere after 8 p.m.
By the time she turned 12, Kathy had been drunk more than once — and figured out that she liked intoxication.
“Drinking made me feel grown-up, cuter, smarter and helped me flow with the rest of the world,” she says.
In 10th grade, Kathy got pregnant. She married the baby’s father and dropped out of school. Their son was born a month after Kathy turned 17. The child was healthy, and Kathy went back to waiting tables and tending bar. Nine months later she was pregnant again.
In those days, she recalls, people would say, “If you want to have a big fat baby, drink a beer a day” and “red wine is good for the baby’s blood.”
Nor was drinking her only risky behavior.
“The fact is, I had poor nutrition, smoked cigarettes, worked in bars and drank alcohol. None of this was conducive to a healthy pregnancy.”
In 1973, just a few months after turning 18, she gave birth to Karli.
That same year, researchers at the University of Washington Medical School published a landmark paper that described children with physical and intellectual disabilities whose mothers had drunk heavily throughout pregnancy. Alcohol was a teratogen, a substance that kills or damages developing cells, the researchers said. For the first time, the term fetal alcohol syndrome was used to describe the result.
From birth, Karli was plagued by relatively minor health problems that didn’t raise red flags at the pediatrician’s office.
Yet, Karli’s problems grew more pronounced as she aged. She exhibited fine and gross motor difficulties, poor joint mobility and speech delays.
And Kathy continued to drink.
Her third child, a girl, was born healthy, but by the time she became pregnant with her fourth child, Kathy had added an addiction to heroin to the alcohol and cigarettes. Six months later the baby, a boy, died at birth. In 1982 she gave birth to her fifth child, a girl who stopped breathing in her crib at 10 weeks. When Kathy found her lifeless, she had a breakdown.
“All I remember is screaming and screaming and screaming,” Kathy says. “I ended up being carted off by the police to a mental institution in Sykesville (Md.), where doctors decided that I was an addict, not insane, and I was sent off to an inpatient treatment center to detox.”
As she recovered, she resolved to change her life. Therapy segued from a 30day regimen at the inpatient facility into a 10-month stay in therapeutic community. She moved back in with her parents, took evening courses and learned the basic skills of mothering. She was 30.
Soon she was hired as a counselor’s aide at Montgomery General Hospital’s detox center in Maryland and became a certified addiction counselor.
Now a teenager, Karli lagged far behind her classmates in all ways. She couldn’t tell time or ride a bicycle, and she couldn’t understand money or abstract math concepts.
So in 1989, Kathy took Karli, then 16, to Georgetown University Hospital. Kathy sat down with a team of doctors and specialists to hear the verdict. The geneticist spoke first: “Your daughter does have fetal alcohol syndrome.”
“I thought I would die from the grief and guilt,” she says.
Today Kathy, 61, is vice president of the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, a nonprofit that aims to increase awareness of the risks of alcohol use during pregnancy and its effect on families. She hopes that her own history will prevent another young mother from doing what she did.
FASD statistics are not definitive, but some recent research suggests that as many as 2 to 5 percent of children in the U.S. and some European countries might have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
For Kathy, “the guilt and remorse are painful, but it’s even worse to think of what Karli might have been. What I didn’t know ended up robbing her of so much.”
Karli’s days are pleasant and full, framed by her devoted family. An aide helps her every day while Kathy and her husband are at work. Karli takes Zumba and water aerobics classes and goes grocery shopping, and every Friday she sees a matinee. She has a paid job one afternoon a week as a stock clerk, supported by a job coach, at a discount clothing store near her home in Olney.
Every night, Karli puts on some Hello Kitty pajamas. Kathy tucks her into bed with her two favorite dolls, Laura Liz and April. In the glow of a Tinker Bell night light near her bed, Karli smiles up at Kathy. “I love you, Mommy,” she says.