In a four-bedroom, white house by the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2-year-old Jacob squirmed around in Mickey Mouse pajamas, his explosion of poofy black hair pulled into a topknot. He smiled shyly, pushed a red toy car back and forth, and shoved his fingers into his mouth. He appeared to be a typical toddler. Meanwhile, his mother, Amber Briana Smith, was 40 miles away in Taft, Oklahoma, sharing a prison dorm with dozens of other women after having pled guilty to neglecting Jacob by using meth while she was pregnant with him. Three of her other six children were also born with drugs in their systems. She’s seen Jacob just a handful of times in the past year, she says, and some of her other offspring even less frequently. (I changed the names of all the children in this story to protect their privacy.)
Smith, who is African American and Native American, is 33, petite, and pretty. She considers herself curious and impulsive—the kind of person who will do something all the way or not at all (a quality which, perhaps, helps explain both the quantity of her children and the depth of her drug habit). When she was 10, both of the adults in her own life were sentenced to prison—her mother’s husband for abusing her and her mother for failing to protect her from him. Smith was sent to live with her aunt, Jammie Smith, for a five-year period she describes as “wonderful” and full of “life lessons.” Still, medical records show that she cut herself as a teenager.
[For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...y-of-another/392522/]
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