DES MOINES -- The lavender house with deep purple trim seems out of place amid the tidy row of white and light gray colonial homes that line this northeast Des Moines neighborhood.

The house, which in the 1950s served as a Drake University sorority dorm, now serves another purpose: helping 13 women and their children reclaim their lives.

Angie Henderson strolls downstairs to fetch her 5-year-old daughter, Kristen, from her giggling friends who are watching "Beauty & the Beast." Angie is cooking tonight and they have chores to do before dinner. Kristen grabs her mother's hand and pulls her to their room upstairs, where she slips into a pair of worn ballet slippers and dances around her mother. Angie and Kristen have lived together only two months now, and it’s a simple moment Angie no longer takes for granted.

Angie, 22, had lost Kristen and her younger sister, Emily, 4, last year after Thanksgiving. Her mother kicked Angie and her daughters out of the house they shared in Newton, outside of Des Moines. She was tired of seeing drug paraphernalia in her home. Angie spent Christmas homeless, wandering around central Iowa scouring for the next fix of her favorite drug: methamphetamine. Family members were raising her girls.

"(Meth) made me feel strong. I had to keep smoking it to keep the high," she says. "Nothing else mattered."

Angie started smoking meth when she was 16, the same year she became pregnant with Emily. She says she stopped using drugs during both pregnancies, but she started again after her girls were born. "I kept on messing up," she says. "I never abused my kids...but I wasn't a good mom." Angie’s family was willing to give her another chance. She returned home and checked into a residential drug rehabilitation program. She came to Rainbow Recovery Center in March; her daughters joined her in May.

Down the hall from Angie's room, a woman who once shot daily doses of heroin carefully arranges her daughter's Barbie dolls next to a Barney doll, and a meth addict smooths her daughter's hair with her hand before the child joins other youngsters downstairs.

All the women are learning to piece together the lives they thought they had lost to drugs. Eleven of the 13 residents are meth addicts. At the Rainbow Recovery Center, these mothers undergo treatment alongside their children, providing an intimately different approach to rehabilitation.

"Here, you don't just learn how to care for yourself, you learn how to care for your kids, too," Angie says. "When you're using, whether or not they (users) like to admit it or not, they didn't feed their kids right or bathe their kids right because they didn't do it themselves."

Angie says they learn how to adhere to a schedule, mimicking the timeline they would follow if they held jobs and were getting children ready for school. They get up at 6 a.m., feed and clothe their children by 7:30 a.m., attend group "meditation" or counseling from 8 to noon; learn constructive ways to vent frustration during "community" from 3-5:30; then make dinner for the children. Lights are out by 8:30 p.m.

Rainbow’s executive director Robb Meyer, who worked as the executive director of addictions and treatment at Des Moines General Hospital, helped start the Rainbow Center, the first meth-specific treatment program in the region.

The women stay at the house for 90 to 120 days. They receive individual counseling and attend parenting classes twice a week. They learn how to make nutritious meals and how to manage money. The women who do not have high school degrees are required to take classes toward earning their General Equivalency Degree.

The two-story, 26-bed recovery center opened in early March. Before the program started, there were only 16 beds in Iowa that served drug-addicted women and their children in a residential setting.

Meyer opened the home using a $10,000 inheritance from his father and he hopes to keep it afloat with donations, volunteer work and Medicaid reimbursements. The non-profit treatment center is $220,000 in debt, but Meyer is optimistic: "We're doing the right stuff. We'll get it.

"We're different in the fact that we address every aspect of a woman's life. We don't shame these women; we find that one good thing, that one strength and build off that. I believe in these women."

He also believes mothers and children need to recover together.

“Being a responsible person in recovery means accepting their responsibility raising their children,” he says. “The child needs to be with its mother. That’s nature.”

Typically, children in meth-affected homes are placed with foster families or are sent to live with relatives without fully understanding why they cannot be with their mothers, Meyer says, and that can lead to resentment and anger.

"The kids are just as sick as the mom. They've been living in a house without structure," he says. "They're involved in this dysfunction, too. So why not let them be involved with treatment?"

When treatment at Rainbow is completed, families are placed in a follow-up treatment program where counselors help them find interim housing. Angie and her daughters will move to a nearby halfway house to continue treatment while she starts her first job.

"I'm not ready to leave (treatment)," she says. "I don't think I could go out there right now and stay clean. I know in my heart that I want to stay clean, but it's hard out there.”

Every night, Angie makes sure her daughters know how lucky they are to be together. Every night they pray: "My youngest cannot go to sleep unless we pray to God. We pray to keep the bad dreams away, to keep the monsters away.

"I just surrender every night and ask for one more day."

-- By Crystal Carreon