Tiffany McCartney grew up with a father who was very abusive and a mother who was a drug addict and could have gone down the wrong path herself.

But she didn’t.

Her daughter was diagnosed with autism at a young age, and her son was diagnosed with meningitis, affecting his vision and hearing. Raising them as a single mother, she could have let that get her down.

But she didn’t.

She could have stayed with a controlling husband and let that impact her and her kids.

But she didn’t.

At only 23, McCartney has made the right choices throughout her life. A positive mindset and a determination to do the best for herself and her kids helped her get to this point.

“If it was not for my kids, I do not believe that I would have changed my life around,” the Seymour resident said.

“They completely changed me, and I fully love being a parent. If I could, I would also have my daughter 24/7. That’s just not the circumstance. I only get her 50/50,” she said. “But without my kids, I couldn’t see my life. Without them, it would literally cloud all of my judgment and be like, ‘What is the point in living?’ They give me complete purpose, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

McCartney’s daughter is 4-year-old Zaya, and her son is 8-month-old Atlas.

“I never pictured myself getting as far as I did,” she said. “Everyone follows the family tradition. Everyone stays in this negative aspect and mindset. I don’t want to be that person. I’m going to break the cycle. My kids don’t need to grow up in what I grew up in. I always am trying to think of ways of how can I change that.”

McCartney said her dad left when she was young, and due to her mother’s drug addiction, she and her younger brothers were placed by Child Protective Services when she was a teenager.

“Growing up, it was like walking on eggshells, like you were constantly terrified. You didn’t know,” she said. “CPS came in and out of our lives so much, and they had a little sit-down to plan out how we were going to talk to the case worker and figure it all out and just kind of wing it and make it seem like everything was OK, and it worked for quite a bit.”

The siblings had a few placements, but none of them panned out.

“Finally, it didn’t work one time, and that’s when everything happened. It was like you hold onto a lot of hatred with your biological parents,” McCartney said. “I had talked to the social worker, and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to go get evaluated. I feel like I need some kind of help.’”

She went to an acute stay facility before going to residential because she refused group home placement. She was at Columbus Behavioral Center for a few months.

“They gave me a different perspective because it’s like I was stuck on this whole ‘This isn’t fair. This isn’t right. Why is my mom on drugs?’” she said. “I would go over all of these what-if scenarios. Then I was like, ‘OK, you know what?’ I took a step back and I was like, ‘It’s not my fault.’”

She was 17 when she left there after Christmas, and her grandmother took her in. Whenever she turned 18 the next spring, she went to court to get out of the CPS system.

She and a man who had been with her through her residential stay got a place together and then married May 28, 2018. They divorced, though, a couple of years later.

“He stayed with me through some of the hard parts,” McCartney said. “I had an ectopic pregnancy, so that kind of folded the marriage, and everything started unraveling.”

Zaya was born Feb. 19, 2019. A few months before she turned 1, she started seeing a behavioral specialist at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, and she was diagnosed with autism.

“She’s very picky on foods, textures, colors, the whole nine yards,” McCartney said.

She now goes to Schneck Medical Center in Seymour for physical, occupational and speech therapies and is in a class for kids with autism at Seymour-Jackson Elementary School.

“I’ve noticed improvements,” McCartney said. “Her speech has gotten so much better. She was really lacking on the whole speech thing, and now, she’s having full-blown sentences and she’s going crazy with it. The speech is becoming phenomenal.”

Every now and then, McCartney said her daughter will mess with some foods.

“Even if it’s wasting food to get her to try and interact with it … we’ll sit there and we’ll work on textures and ways to get her to bring food to her mouth,” McCartney said. “First, you’re touching the food with your hands, so you’re going to eventually get the hang of it and bring it up to your mouth, so she’s doing a little better with that.”

In 2021, McCartney met the man who became her son’s father, and they married. That relationship, however, also ended in divorce.

“Half the time, I wasn’t in the right mental state of mind. I was still grieving and didn’t know how to deal with it,” McCartney said.

After Atlas was born Sept. 9, 2022, the father’s visits became supervised and will remain that way until he turns 8 months old, which is soon.

Atlas was perfectly healthy until one morning when his mother woke him up, he was completely lethargic, so she called her pediatrician. She was told if that continues with Atlas to take him to the emergency room, and then he started having a seizure and his lips turned purple.

Living in North Vernon at the time, McCartney took her son to Schneck, where he was intubated.

“It was nonstop seizure after seizure. They were suctioning out his mouth,” she said.

A spinal tap revealed Atlas had meningitis, an inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, and he was lifelined to Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital.

On the third day there, a neurologist told her she has to look at quality versus quantity of life.

“‘Your son may never walk. He may never talk. He may never eat on his own.’ There was a bunch of different things that he had said,” she said.

Atlas had three strokes during the process of his seizures, and his mother wasn’t sure if he was going to come out of this. He wound up staying at the hospital for 21 days.

“He could not regulate his own body temperature. He was under the lamp 80% of our stay. We were in the NICU most of our stay until the last week,” McCartney said.

Doctors decided to take him off of a ventilator, and fortunately, Atlas started breathing on his own. On Day 20, his gastronomy tube was placed.

Even when Atlas was back home, they were going up to the hospital at least once a week to meet with specialists. He had failed all of his hearing tests, so an auditory brainstem response test.

“Getting a new brain scan, it’ll let us know what kind of hearing aid options are available and right for him,” McCartney said.

Atlas’ eyesight isn’t good, either, so he’s seeing an eye specialist.

“They’ll continue checking his eyesight. If it continues to stay the way it is, then there are ways to go in and reverse it,” she said.

For a while, she said she was terrified she would do something wrong while taking care of her son’s needs. It has been a work in progress.

“I’m his voice. I’m the only one that knows him,” she said. “I just try my best. Now I’ve got the hang of everything, I don’t even question myself anymore.”

Fortunately through it all, her employer and landlord have been understanding of her situation, and her grandmother helps take care of Atlas when she has to work.

Her job? A mental health technician at Columbus Behavioral Center, where she once was a patient. She works with kids with behavioral, family relationship or self-harm issues.

In 2022, she took a big step in asking Ryan and Stacey McCartney to be her adoptive parents. Ryan was one of her teachers when she attended Seymour High School.

“I had her as a student in 2016 and knew she was not your typical 17-year-old,” Ryan said. “She already had a number of tattoos and wasn’t exactly excited to be at school; however, you could tell she was mature beyond her years and intelligent in a way that told you her life experiences had made her very aware of her surroundings.”

When she asked them to adopt her, Ryan said the decision was easy.

“By the time we reconnected in 2021, Tiffany was struggling. When she asked us to adopt her, we didn’t even hesitate,” he said. “She mentioned it to me a couple times before officially asking in spring 2022. By May, we had met with the lawyer, and she was adopted Aug. 27, 2022.”

Tiffany appreciates the McCartneys for treating her kids like their own grandchildren and welcoming them with arms wide open.

“Tiffany is like most mothers. Her kids are her life,” Ryan said. “With the needs both kids have, she is in constant motion: Doctor visits, multiple phone calls, dealing with insurance or benefits or the pharmacy. She’s constantly looking for programs that offer services for her son. Her days are certainly busy.”

Tiffany said her childhood showed her what she doesn’t want to be, and she has focused on what she can do to make life better for herself and her kids.

“You’ve got to trust your mom judgment in everything,” she said. “It could be an impact on someone else’s life because they are like, ‘OK, maybe I have fallen down the path of drugs or something.’ I grew up in that environment, and I chose to break that cycle.”

The way she sees it, anybody can change their life around.

“I’m one that if I can do better, then I will,” she said. “Whether it means I need to step out of my comfort zone, if it is going to impact my family in a better aspect, I’m going to take that risk. If you’re willing to take those proper steps to do so, kudos to you, I’m happy for you, I’m proud of you.”