Wanda Jordan apologized to God and has done her best to keep herself clean ever since.

That was in April, when a man she met tried to choke her and held her hostage for two hours with a knife pointed at her neck.

“I said, ‘Please, God, I am sorry for the way I have been living.’ A light went on in my head and I realized I brought this abuse on myself,” said Jordan, a 42-year-old mother and former streetwalker.

“I am doing a lot better now than I used to be doing,” she said. “The lessons I have learned in life are from when I fall, and those are hard falls.”

Jordan’s troubles began with alcohol.

“The hard stuff. You get a few drinks in me and forget it,” she said. “I’m trying so hard to stay away from coffee brandy.”

Jordan sips hard iced tea to feed her habit and keep her away from her beloved brandy. “(Brandy) does unthinkable things to me,” she said. The tea she drinks has only 5 percent alcohol, just enough to get her through the day.

Jordan never drank as a teenager or young adult – she couldn’t cope with the hangovers associated with too much booze, she said. Instead, she would smoke joints, rev up on speed and trip on mushrooms. It wasn’t until the other hard stuff – cocaine – came into her life that she fell hard on alcohol.

She has to be drunk to use crack cocaine, she said. “It’s living and breathing inside of you,” she said of her drug addiction. “I’m trying to keep clean,” she said, but “it’s really hard.”

Jordan has lived on the streets since she was a young girl in Lewiston, where she was raised by her grandmother. “My dad was never there and my mom was never around. (Mom) was always looking for love.”

Jordan had her first son when she was 16. Since then, she has given birth to five more boys. “If I ever get them all together, I will have me a baseball team,” she said with a laugh.

She has been in and out of jail 14 times on drug charges, Jordan said, and served six years in state prison for drug trafficking.

She remembers weighing “110 pounds soaking wet” when she walked the streets to feed her crack habit. “I would walk all night long for six nights in a row.” She was so high that she did not eat for days. “I would sit down on the street curb and fall asleep,” she said. “Working the streets will do nothing more than take everything from you.”

She took herself off the streets three or four years ago, she said, but “the damage is done. I will never let my life get that bad again. Never.”