Client Stories

Barbara and Khristina

Teenage Daughter Guides Mom to Path of Hope

After ten years of poverty and homelessness, Barbara knows all too well weight of the binding chains of poverty and addiction. This summer, she looks back on her life, knowing those chains are being broken and forgotten in her family.

Barbara serves as a Shelter Attendant at the Bridge to Life Center, exemplifying God's love and compassion for resident guests. At home she guides her three daughters, her three grandchildren and her husband to make healthy choices and to set goals for the future.

She'll never forget that simple question from her daughter "Mom...Are you coming with me?"

Barbara's childhood was defined by special memories of caring grandparents who instilled in her a reason to hope. Her caring aunt, employed at Travis Air Force Base at the time, convinced her alcoholic mother to move to Fairfield from Quincy, Massachusetts, providing Barbara with an adult advocate close by.

Despite the care and love of extended family members, Barbara became a teenage mother who ended up with a young adulthood full of alcohol, drugs, homelessness and an incarcerated husband. Child Protective Services intervened and Barbara clearly remembers the moment they "took 6-year-old Michaela out of my arms."

One hot summer day two years ago - after ten years of bouncing from the streets, to a cardboard bed behind the downtown Fairfield Library air conditioning unit, to temporary shelter anywhere she could find it - Barbara listened to the judge who told her "Look at yourself. You're a 39-year-old, drug addicted, homeless grandmother!"

After her release from jail, her eldest daughter refused to let Barbara walk past the Mission's Community Outreach Center on Travis Boulevard. She cried, "we're going back to the Mission, mom. Are you coming with me?" At that moment, Barbara made the choice and the commitment to a new way of living.

Through the support and love of the community and family at Mission SOLANO, Barbara lives her life today as an example for her three teenage daughters - all of whom want to follow in her footsteps to become counselors and social workers. She lives her life as an example to the young single and married mothers living at the Bridge to Life Center - caring for their children at night and throughout the day, and encouraging the moms at every turn.

Barbara helps guests believe in the life-giving principles of giving back, paying it forward, breaking the cycles of poverty, addiction and homelessness, and showing love to anyone, especially our downtrodden neighbors.

This Fall, Barbara plans to go back to school for a Human Services certificate. She will continue to go back home every night to care for her grandchildren and her husband. Most importantly, Barbara is there every day for her three daughters, who help their mother at home and at work, looking to her for inspiration, accountability, guidance and hope - and Barbara will tell you over an over again, her daughters have done the same for her, time and time again. She'll never forget that simple question from her daughter "Mom...Are you coming with me?"