Redemption for time served
When I ask 62-year-old Julia Ford how she’s doing, she says “Blessed!” and keeps pushing the wheelchair of the elderly spunky white woman she cares for. The vibrant splash of color in Ford’s hair matches her style and personality. She is part of a team of women who provide round-the-clock care for a 70-something-year-old woman I’ll call Jan, who lives in my building and struggles with a slew of health issues and the angst that comes with needing to quit or cut back on smoking, which has been her favorite past time for six decades. As I watch Jan try to hustle cigarettes from passersby and observe her publicly scolding or calling her caretakers derogatory names, I reflect back on something Angela Harrelson, the aunt of George Floyd, wrote in her book, Lift Your Voice, about the kind of hostile environment caretakers, many of whom are women of color, face on the job.
Ford tells me, just before sunup, that she was technically meant to end her shift a few hours ago, but a woman I’ll call Roda is running behind this morning. Roda, a woman in her mid-60s, is houseless and slept in her car in a Walmart parking lot or whatever safe place she could conjure up until her car got totaled and towed away—except for the nights she cared for Jan. Roda drops into the Trinity Center in Walnut Creek for showers and daily needs, but since losing the stability and shelter her car offered her, life’s been a little extra challenging.
Ford knows the struggle. She’s been there. She remembers living a good life; she grew up in Antioch befriending the elders in the community, who she helped out with household chores for a little pocket change. She shares that she’s always felt a little bit indebted to elders for being role models and for giving her a safe place to land as she grew up. That’s in part why she gravitated toward adult caregiving as her profession in her 60s—instead of retiring, as she once imagined doing by this stage in life.
When Ford was 17, she experienced the trauma of being sexually assaulted by a family friend. Instead of talking about it, she bottled it up and covered it with shame. She became a hip hairdresser and lived a pretty good life, except for the weight of the trauma she carried inside of her. In her early 20s, a boyfriend introduced her to an escape in the form of drugs, which she began using recreationally. How she went from being a hip hairdresser to a woman in the throes of addiction living in an abandoned school bus in Oakland and pushing a cart past some of the same people she once styled, is a blur.
“It was like living in the wilderness. We felt like a bunch of animals. You wake up every day. You don’t have money. You have to go and graze for food,” Ford says. “I went through people’s trash to gather anything I could. I would tell other women, ‘I don’t want your man. I want your trash.’ I was a fun drunk and a person who used drugs. At first it was recreational and a fun way to stay up. It’s a thing you do when you’ve got a little extra money. And before long, it went to the point that I didn’t have anything left to pay bills. It took over my life.”
In her early 30s she learned she was pregnant and became desperate to make a change. “When I was ready to get all the way clean, I went to the bus and found all of my clothes and threw them away,” Ford tells me. “My boyfriend was older than me. He didn’t want me to leave so he called the cops on me and said I was vandalizing his belongings—but really I was throwing away my own stuff.”
When I asked her why she didn’t just leave everything behind, she said she couldn’t. She needed to break all ties and discard not only the clothes, but everything they represented and remove any and all temptation to ever go back to that same place again, where she would be in the company of people she loved but people who did not necessarily share her investment in sobriety. The road to recovery has been a long one filled with bumps, interventions for a few relapses along the way while confronting childhood trauma, and a will and determination to pay forward the blessings she has received and overcome the hardships she’s endured.
“Back then, I thought I was getting clean for the baby inside of me. But I realized I had to get clean for the whole community,” Ford says.
The man Ford left behind in the bus that night pressed charges against her and although the charges were dropped, she wound up with 24 months probation.
Today, Ford is in a different place—literally and figuratively. She rents a three-bedroom house in Antioch with her husband. She’s got four children, some stepchildren and some college education, and she cares for the elderly. “I’m blessed,” she repeats.
The one hiccup getting in Ford’s way of building long-term job security, and by extension housing security, is a blip on her record that she acquired while starting her long, uphill journey to recovery. Although it’s been well over two decades since the incident, the professional blemish has interfered with her ability to get licensure for in-home caretaking.
“I love caring for old people,” Ford says. “It’s a population that has desperately needed attention since the pandemic happened, and it makes sense for me to spend the rest of my working years providing that care. I do the work already, but having a license would give me the capacity to get better pay and give me more options.”
Like many people in the Bay Area, Ford is just a paycheck and a hardship away from losing the home she’s worked so hard to get. While she’s not in the company of the million Americans who are currently incarcerated, she is one of a growing number who, in spite of completing their probation or “doing their time” behind bars, are weighed down or stopped from moving forward professionally or, in some cases, finding housing or casting a vote.
If the way in which we care for elders is a deciding factor for the merit of the system we live in, Ford’s story, along with Roda’s story, suggest that perhaps change is in order. If the people caring for the eldest and weakest elders are, in many cases, elders facing housing insecurity, homelessness or added layers of financial insecurity due to records for time or probation already served, we have a long way to go.
As for Ford, she knows with certainty that she’ll not let her struggles, her financial inability to retire, the impatience she encounters from time to time or even the reality that she’s just a paycheck away from encountering housing insecurity weigh her down one tiny bit. “I’ve always known there’s something bigger than me—even when I was out on the street—and I’ll be OK,” Julia says with a smile. “I’m blessed.”
