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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Starting Over - Sober At Oxford House, Recovering Alcoholics And Addicts Get A Chance To Find Order In Their Lives

Two little boys race through the living room, trailing garlands of silver and gold beads. Their mothers wrap strings of twinkling lights around a 7-foot fir.

This ordinary Christmas scene, appearing in homes all over the Inland Northwest this season, is, for these women, extraordinary.

It is a visible sign of normalcy in their lives. These women struggling to untangle three new strands of blinking lights are recovering drug addicts. Their Christmases past are enough to turn Dickens in his grave.

Kathleen Terrey, 28, and Pam Ranzinger, 39, are two of the first residents of Spokane’s new Oxford House for women. They live in this ranch-style brick house in a quiet north Spokane neighborhood and are learning to reorder their lives. Part of a national organization, these houses are self-supporting and run by the residents themselves.

This season Terrey and Ranzinger will discover a new holiday here without the haze of alcohol or drugs.

“I used for 25 years,” says Ranzinger. She was addicted to alcohol and cocaine. Today she’s clean and sober. She wears long, straw-colored hair with dark roots, blue stretch pants and a sweet, sad smile.

“If I went to my family’s house (for the holidays), I couldn’t wait to leave so I could use,” Ranzinger says. “I sit here and think back. Where did all those Christmases go? Some of them are real foggy.”

Terrey has a vivid memory of last Christmas. It was the year she and her drug-addicted boyfriend agreed not to mention the holiday to her children. They were broke and Terrey was addicted to methamphetamines. She injected the drugs with a needle.

Terrey spent Christmas Day curled up in a chair in a house in Tacoma, sick, and alternately sleeping and crying. Her two younger children were with her, but the day passed without Santa Claus, without a tree, without presents.

In the months since, Terrey hit bottom and left her boyfriend. She sent her 6-year-old daughter to live with her mother in Florida who already had her 9-year-old. She brought 4-year-old Jayme to Spokane where he began the YWCA’s therapeutic day care and she underwent drug treatment at Isabella House.

“I started a whole new life this year,” Terrey says. She wears long, permed brown hair and a take-charge attitude. “I escaped a hole that felt 20 feet deep.”

Terrey has now been drug-free for nine months. “This is the first time I’ve been clean since I was 13 years old,” she says. “To experience real feelings is just incredible.”

There will be a jumble of feelings this Christmas: guilt, grief and gratitude. She’ll miss Kayleigh and Jaran, her two daughters in Florida.

“I feel a lot of guilt that I’m not taking care of them when I should be,” she says. But when she talks to her girls on the phone, they don’t ask when they’ll see her again.

“They’re just glad they know where I am and that I’m doing what I’m doing,” she says.

This will be the first Christmas in Jayme’s memory. Jayme is a solemn 4-year-old with light brown hair cut short with a tail, and a passion for Buzz Lightyear. He missed Christmas last year, and he doesn’t remember the Christmas he was 2.

So Terrey and Jayme will have Christmas with their “new family”: Ranzinger and her 3-year-old son, John.

Terrey and Ranzinger plan to savor simple Christmas activities: taking their sons to see the lights, baking sugar cookies, opening presents Christmas morning.

“Just to cook dinner and watch football on TV and be family together is just amazing,” says Terrey.

Myrna Brown, the state Oxford House outreach director, understands this feeling.

“It’s something they haven’t done in the past,” she says. “Holidays typically were a dysfunctional, chaotic time. The alcohol or the drugs superceded everything.”

In 1975, Paul Malloy, a former congressional staff lawyer and a recovering alcoholic, helped organize the first Oxford House in Maryland. He pushed for federal legislation which, in 1988, created revolving loan funds in each state to help finance such houses.

Today there are 44 Oxford Houses in Washington state alone. They get started by borrowing $4,000 from the loan fund, which pays for the first and last month’s rent, deposits and other expenses. The residents have two years to repay the loan.

Residents pay bills, divide up chores, and enforce rules themselves. One rule is absolute: If you relapse, you’re out.

“We’re coming in as a bunch of dysfunctional people trying to make a functional family,” Brown says. “I’ve seen such miracles and watched the transformation in people’s lives. Oxford House gives them a chance to change their behaviors.”

Terrey believes she’s leading a changed life. On Dec. 25 last year, she says, “I was five minutes from going insane.”

But this Christmas, she is president of her house. Four women and two children live there now. Terrey leads meetings and settles conflicts.

“It’s neat,” she says. “I’d rather have all this responsibility than none at all.”

She and Ranzinger each live on public assistance checks of $440 a month, plus $187 in food stamps. Each woman pays $300 in rent at the Oxford House, which eventually will house nine women.

They’ve managed to budget a bit of money for Christmas. Terrey recently bought a small crystal and some blue beads at Rings ‘N Things and made a necklace for Ranzinger.

“I wrote her a letter and said she’s the best thing that happened to me all year,” Terrey says. “I’m really looking forward to spending Christmas with her.”

Says Ranzinger, “Kathleen and I are real, real close. We can talk about anything … our kids, life. If I have a problem, I can go talk to her. Sometimes we get angry just like sisters, but it doesn’t last too long.”

Both women were adopted, and they share a similar longing to discover their birth parents.

“If you haven’t been there, you can’t know,” Ranzinger says. “The rough road behind us in the past is why we have so much warmth and understanding towards each other.”

Terrey’s son will have memories of being homeless and living in a car with his mother. “It’s something we’ll be processing in therapy for many years to come,” Terrey says. “When you become sober, you feel a lot of guilt. The best way we can make it up to our children is to make it better from now on.”

John and his mother have already had one good Christmas together. It was last year, when Ranzinger was sober, although she was grieving her adopted mother’s death. Someone from John’s Head Start program arranged to have them “adopted” for the holidays by Key Tronic employees.

“I forgot all through the years that there were nice people,” Ranzinger says. “I call it the pithole of despair. I thought everyone was hateful and hurtful, but that’s not true.”

Key Tronic employees came to their apartment with a tree, lights and gifts. “I found out there are still people who are warm and giving,” Ranzinger says. “I just sat there and cried.”

Ranzinger and Terrey hang the last of the red satin balls on the Oxford House Christmas tree, and pause to watch the tiny lights rotate crazily through eight routines. The top strand blinks all green, then all yellow, the middle strand slowly fades in and out, and the bottom strand chases light after light in swift circles.

There appears to be no way to synchronize them.

Neither woman particularly cares. Perfection is not the issue here. Terrey sprawls on the sofa, and Ranzinger sinks down next to her.

Christmas won’t come easily this year. There has been snow to trudge through, and both boys have chest colds. Terrey has money for one gift for Jayme, either a race car set or an Erector set, but no more.

The women muse about people who adopt poor families at Christmas time. “I can’t imagine having so much money that I could give myself a good Christmas and somebody else, too,” Terrey says.

The two friends grow philosophical. That morning, Terrey woke up and thanked God for all the good things in her life now. At this moment, the little boys are blissfully quiet. The tree lights are twinkling and racing and chasing. The smell of Ranzinger’s pot roast is wafting into the living room.

Ranzinger sighs.

“God’s not gonna put nothing in front of us we can’t handle,” she says.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT IS AN OXFORD HOUSE? Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts are allowed to live in Oxford Houses as long as they stay off drugs and alcohol. Residents run and pay for the houses themselves. The first Oxford House opened in 1975 in Silver Spring, Md. In 1988 federal legislation set up revolving loan funds in each state to help start similar houses across the country. This year three Oxford Houses opened in Spokane, two for men and one for women. At the women’s house, rent is $250, and an extra $50 per child. Women pay the rent with private funds or public assistance payments. The national Oxford House organization claims a 75 percent success rate.

This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT IS AN OXFORD HOUSE? Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts are allowed to live in Oxford Houses as long as they stay off drugs and alcohol. Residents run and pay for the houses themselves. The first Oxford House opened in 1975 in Silver Spring, Md. In 1988 federal legislation set up revolving loan funds in each state to help start similar houses across the country. This year three Oxford Houses opened in Spokane, two for men and one for women. At the women’s house, rent is $250, and an extra $50 per child. Women pay the rent with private funds or public assistance payments. The national Oxford House organization claims a 75 percent success rate.