INDIANAPOLIS — There's a special place on the north side that's just for mothers who are fighting to overcome addiction.
This is the Heart Rock Recovery Center, a six-month housing program for women and their small children that is affiliated with Overdose Lifeline.
"Addiction has always been part of my story. I grew up in a family with addicts," said Amber Grider, Heart Rock's child advocate specialist. "My mom would say she did every drug when she was pregnant with me and I came out fine because I had 10 fingers and 10 toes."
Grider was pregnant with her now-11-month-old son, Xziver, when she came to Heart Rock a little more than a year ago.
She said she was locked in a cycle of addiction.
"I lost everything," Grider said. "And I didn't even really lose it, I gave it away because I decided to put drugs before them."
She said she completed an in-patient rehab and was working on sobriety when she got pregnant.
Still recovering after years of addiction, Grider had been staying in a sober living house that she said didn’t have room or services for both her and her soon-to-be-born child.
She found Heart Rock and moved in not long after it opened in the fall of 2022.
"Xziver was born at Heart Rock, and he worked the program with me and graduated the program with me as well,” Grider said.
Grider is a success story.
Sober for two years, Grider now works for Heart Rock, lives in her own place and said she is working to rebuild relationships with her other children.
Heart Rock is actually two houses right next door to each other with room to house 13 mothers and 13 babies.
Inside, it has the feel of a preschool with toddlers on the floor and babies in arms.
But there is real work going on here. Recovery and motherhood are both emotional and very difficult, Heart Rock Director Nikole Young said.
"There's a lot of hormones involved when moms are pregnant (and) early recovery is absolutely a struggle,"
Young said. "It can be a disaster sometimes."
But the staff here know first-hand how to help others cope.
Before Young became director of Heart Rock, she said she was a mother struggling with addiction.
"Heart Rock is amazing," Young said. "This is something that wasn't available for my daughter. My daughter had to go to foster care."
There is a great need for programs like this, Young said.
According to Indiana University, drug overdoses nearly double in Indiana between 2010 and 2017 and about 4,000 Hoosiers have died from opioids in the last decade.
In Marion County, the coroner's office reported that overdoses claim the lives of 2.3 people every day
Heart Rock is special, Young said, because it teaches moms to fight through substance abuse issues and supports them while they raise their children.
"They get a place to come and learn how to be a mom. They get to learn how to be sober," Young said. "So we can merge both lives. So it's not recovery and mom. It becomes one."
The center is growing, Young said.
When WRTV visited this week, a construction crew was building an addition that Young said will allow Heart Rock to house a total of 20 moms and 20 babies.
The goal, she said, is to help these mothers break the generational cycle of addiction.
"Let's get in the trenches and let's pull one more out because people are dying left and right," Young said. "And this allows moms and babies to not be torn apart."
There is a strict application process to get into the program. The center is for mothers 18 and older who are pregnant or have young children. They must have already completed an in-patient recovery program.
To find out more, visit their website at heartrockrecovery.org; call 317-800-0631 or email contact@heartrockrecovery.org.
Contact WRTV reporter Vic Ryckaert at victor.ryckaert@wrtv.com or on X/Twitter: @vicryc.
