Struggling to stay clean

Monique Knudsen is an Orchard Elementary School PTA mom now. She doesn't tell many people in her West Valley neighborhood about her past, but she's not embarrassed about it. She was born into a biker family — her dad was a recruiter for the Sundowners — and some might think it would have been hard to escape a troubled life.

But she always had food, always had a bedtime, always went to school. "We always had rules," she said recently. "That's not how it is in the meth world."

It wasn't until she became hooked on the deadly drug that her life fell apart. First came the chaos of the meth community. Then came the state charges for forgery and federal convictions after she got caught with a counterfeit $100 bill. She was in and out of jail most of her older daughter's life.

Now she's making things up to 5-year-old Brandiy and 16-month-old Alizaye.

"A lot of addicts mistake contentment for boredom." She's working on that.

Sitting in the home she shares with her mother and two children, next door to the elementary school and not far from where she attends community college, Knudsen seems content.

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Cathy Anderson, 41, had a normal life once.

Her girls are 4 and 8 now, but it has been a long time since Cathy has talked to them. She won't any time soon. She was informed in a letter she received at the Utah State Prison she is not entitled to any information about where the state places the girls, who adopts them or even if they stay together.

Once upon a time, Anderson had an 8-to-5 job at the IRS office in Ogden. Later she worked at the Newspaper Agency Corp. as an account person. She had two beautiful daughters, a house and a husband. He had a bad temper though, and when he went to jail for domestic violence, she moved to Ogden where she tried meth for the first time.

Soon it was all she did.

Anderson once spent an entire night raking her yard, which had no grass. She made perfect lines in the dirt until the sun came up. She yelled at the paperboy not to mess up her drug-induced handiwork.

"That's when I knew I was way out there," she said.

She's working hard in prison, and she expects to be paroled in March. She wants to start a support group for mothers battling methamphetamine addiction. "Teach them they don't need a man to feel important like I did."

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By the time this text is published, Heather White, 24, may not be clean any more. She's honest about how fragile she is, teetering on the fence between sobriety and the meth world in which she was burrowed for a year.