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 is now 43 but is the developmental age of a first-grader. In the home she shares with her mother and stepfather, she collects dolls and purses, and pores over Hello Kitty coloring and sticker books. Karli has fetal alcohol syndrome, the result of alcohol exposure in utero. In middle age, Karli has none of the awareness, self-determination and independence that most of us 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. She can cross a street at a lighted crosswalk, but if the light is out, she’ll step in front of a car. Post was created by G SA Content G enerator Demoversi on!
She likes to wear pretty clothes, decordeals.shop but she can’t remember to brush her teeth. 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 attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, vision problems and speech and language delays. FASD is also sometimes characterized by a cluster of facial features: small eyes, a thin upper lip and a flat philtrum (the ridge between the nose and upper lip). And, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put it, the disabilities "last a lifetime.
But Kathy says that rather than "sit in self-hatred and self-blame," she has made it her mission in life to tell the story of her and Karli so that others won’t make the same mistakes. 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, makeup problems were barely acknowledged and rarely discussed. Especially the alcoholism that Kathy says was a part of her family history. In 1964, makeup when Kathy was 10, her parents opened a restaurant in Olney, which they would own for sneakers the next 33 years. Kathy and her siblings all helped in the business, which took on a nightclub atmosphere after 8 p.m. "Customers would come for dinner, then dance and drink all night. At 1 a.m. they’d be stumbling out to their cars to drive home," she says. By the time she turned 12, Kathy had been drunk more than once - and figured out that she liked the euphoria of intoxication.
"Drinking made me feel grown-up, cuter, smarter, and helped me flow with the rest of the world," she says. In her chaotic, sibling-filled household, she was essentially an "invisible child," she says, with no one noticing her drinking. Maid of honor at age 14 at her sister’s wedding, Kathy remembers drinking beer after beer until, decor thoroughly intoxicated, she fled the scene - before the wedding photographs were even taken. "It was just, like, ‘Oh, that’s Kathleen! ’ Looking back now, I can say that I was in the early stages of alcoholism by then, having blackouts. In 10th grade, Kathy got pregnant. She married the baby’s father - a teenage boyfriend - 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." Kathy again drank throughout her pregnancy, but usually just with friends.