By Claudia Rowe, May 3, 2019, The Seattle Times  Rising Strong

Twice a day for months, Cicelia Bracken and her children tracked the progress of their home-under-construction, watching as beams were erected to sketch the outlines of an imagined life with a working kitchen. At 31, Bracken hadn’t had a place where she could shut the door and sit with her thoughts for years.

Nor had her four young children, all of them under 6, who peered into the windows, jostling for first pick of the new bedrooms. For most of their lives they had shuttled between foster homes, relatives’ houses and shelters — upheavals so frequent that the mere sight of a policeman in an approaching car made Bracken’s 5-year-old daughter freeze with panic.

Since 2008, when she first began using heroin, then methamphetamine, Bracken had seen all but one of her children taken. By 2016, when her fourth baby was removed, Bracken could spot social workers from Child Protective Services 50 feet away.

But now she was part of an unusual experiment — a live-in drug treatment program that focused on rebuilding families, and some of those same social workers had become her biggest cheerleaders. They promised to be there when Bracken graduated from the program, called Rising Strong, in a year’s time. She’d have her education, sobriety and mothering skills back on track by then, they said. Bracken, addicted for the better part of a decade, wasn’t nearly as optimistic.

An alumna of the child-welfare system herself, she’d dropped out of high school in the 11th grade. Sometimes she worked a couple of months at Walmart, or as a health care aide. Other times, she panhandled. Burning with shame at a life of failure, Bracken had no idea what a familiar pattern her life represented.

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