Dawns House, a Bend nonprofit that offers transitional housing for women recovering from addiction, received grant funding from the Cow Creek Umpqua Indian Foundation.

Micaela Zacarias, who goes by Mikka, had to fight hard to earn the privilege of watching her children grow.

She spent years battling addiction and homelessness, and weathered many cold, wet nights out on snowy streets looking for a place to get warm. And the Oregon Department of Human Services had given custody of her children to her mother.

But after overdosing twice in one day, she knew if she was going to survive and hopefully see her children again, she had to change her life.

So, she put her mind to it. And got sober.

“After I overdosed, it was like a real reality check for me,” Zacarias said.

Now, Zacarias is the first mother to be reunited with her children as part of a new program started by Dawns House, a nonprofit in Bend dedicated to rehabilitating women suffering from drug addiction and alcoholism. Zacarias and her children — Kamren Madison, 12, and Angelina Madison, 10 — will be allowed to live together in one of the nonprofit’s new cabins.

The new program draws from Dawns House participants who have shown they can consistently maintain sobriety, employment, attend parenting classes, and recovery and therapy sessions.

“We are so excited and grateful and blessed to have all of this,” Zacarias said. “Because without this, I wouldn’t have been able to have my kids. It is very exciting.”

Zacarias, who has worked her way through the program at Dawns House and remained sober for nearly a year, will also become a certified recovery mentor in two months. She wants to share her story and experiences to help other women escape going through what she went through. One day, she hopes to start her own recovery program, she said.

Dawn Holland, the organization’s founder and executive director, said the nonprofit’s approach is tough, but she is confident that it works. Holland said she hasn’t seen anybody work quite as hard as Zacarias to get to the point that she is at in the program.

“If they show the motivation with the things that we are requiring in our program, then they are going to show us that they really want to be with their children,” she said.

Dawns House has operated an addiction recovery program for women that first places them in a group home where they are not allowed to live with their children. The new cabins will allow women the next step, and reunite them with their children.

Holland said what makes her organization’s new program different from others is that the women who earn their way into one of the new cabins get to be alone with their children as opposed to living with multiple other women and children in the same house.

Holland believes women need to get healthy before they are reunited with their children.

“There are no children allowed in my houses because I truly believe moms are sick. And they need to get well before they do a unification,” Holland said. “The program we have set up is we bring mom in, we stabilize her, we get her work, we get her mental health and her addictions, into counseling and therapy and everything she needs to stabilize herself, and then we’ve created these cabins to do an individual unification so that they are alone and she can truly take on the mother role.”

Holland said for a woman like Mikka, reunification with her children will be a shock, but having her own space to be their mother is all part of how the program works.

“It was what I call, a very soft, healthy reunification,” Holland said, “which I believe is something that will make the long term happen.”

Zacarias said a lot of her struggles began a few years ago when her children were taken away. They were around the ages of 4 and 5. “I wasn’t able to see them or talk to them. And they were with me ever since they were born. And for them just to take them from me like that, I just kind of lost it and totally went and got back into addiction and pretty much lost myself pretty bad,” Zacarias said.

She said being homeless and moving from place to place, city to city, made her feel alone, isolated and hopeless.

“I literally felt like I wanted to die because I didn’t have anyone besides my puppy, and he’s helped me a lot throughout my whole addiction as well,” she said. “I ended up overdosing twice in one night. And I never in my life thought I would go through anything like that or even do the things I was doing. I couldn’t believe I had let myself get that low.”

After the overdoses, she started to pick herself up and work toward a better life. The first step was getting clean, she said.

“So, once I did that, I just really focused on my kids and how much I missed out and how many years I’ve been gone,” she said. “It’s just like I missed a lot of their very special years, when they were younger, first starting school and stuff like that.”

Margarita Estrada, Zacarias’ mother, stood outside her daughter’s new cabin. Estrada had played a major part in her daughter’s story, and kept Zacarias’ two children, while she struggled with addiction and homelessness.

“For me, I’m really happy to see where she is at. She’s come a long way. For a while I thought I was going to lose her. A couple of times I thought I had lost her. It was heartbreaking,” Estrada said. “So, to see her at this point, it is like ‘yes, thank you’… I am absolutely grateful and happy that she is able to come back and be able to stand on her own two feet.”

To donate to DAWNS House, visit the organization’s website and scroll down to the donation button.