In high school, Ally was a cheerleader, and she fell right into the folds of the ‘cool kids.’ A gentle spirit, Ally was soft spoken and tended to follow the crowd as a teenager. Looking back now, Ally realizes, “I don’t think people actually saw me.” Her high school sweetheart, a boy younger than her, didn’t fit in with the popular crowd. They had one child together post-graduation, then Ally broke up with him, choosing to build a life with another high school classmate instead.
By the time they’d had a few children of their own together, things began to crumble around the young mother. Her former classmate and father of her children changed into someone she no longer recognized. Initially, her partner convinced her to quit her job and be a stay at home mom to her three kids. As things progressed, he took her phone from her, cut her off from her friends and family, and began controlling every aspect of her life.
“I thought that was love,” Ally recalls, noting that she’d grown up in an environment that had been abusive at times. “I thought he cared about me, but he was just controlling me. He stole my light for a really long time.”
It wasn’t long before the family became homeless, and both Ally and her partner, only in their 20’s, were in active addiction. For a while they stayed in a camper parked out in the woods, but that only lasted for so long. Eventually, Ally was pregnant with her fifth child and found herself sleeping in a trailer without electricity or running water. “A home isn’t really a home without power or water,” she says.
She was also incarcerated briefly on three separate occasions during this season of her life. It stemmed from one charge, and then subsequent failures to appear because she had no transportation to make it to the hearings. Child protective services became involved and removed Ally’s children from the couple’s care. Her two youngest children, both born in 2019, are only 10 months apart. When baby #5 arrived in December, she was immediately taken from Ally as a newborn.
“That was it,” she remembers. “I deserved to raise my kids. They are mine and God blessed me with them.” Ally decided to separate from her children’s father and she began cooperating with DSS to regain custody of her children, a process that took nearly two years. She made new, healthy friends, then went to rehab. She began working one-on-one with a life coach through a nonprofit education and training program called Life Works. “When I put my mind to something, I will do it,” Ally declares, also mentioning that it’s been no small feat to earn back the trust of people in her life.
“When I put my mind to something, I will do it”
When her stimulus check arrived in 2020, Ally hadn’t had money of her own in nearly five years. “I knew I had to be smart with it,” she says. She purchased a small, used vehicle for $600 and put new tires on it. Her priority was making it to visitation to see her kids. Since then, she’s upgraded to a reliable minivan, big enough for her entire family, and she makes manageable payments on it to build her credit.
She also moved into income-based housing. Even when she was making $11 per hour at Starbucks, she paid over $600 per month for a small apartment. “I knew I was going to have to have a career to take care of five kids by myself,” she says.She went back to school and completed the phlebotomy certificate program at Blue Ridge Community College, inspired by someone she met while serving a five-day sentence in jail. Now she works in the lab at Pardee Hospital.
Ally says she is interested in taking courses to become a registered nurse, but she’s conscientious about spreading herself too thin while her children, ages 4-11, are still young. She also dreams of taking dance classes as a way to cope with life’s stressors and maintain her physical health for years to come. It was her life coach, a valuable connection she still meets with to this day, who told her about Habitat for Humanity.
Currently, Ally lives in a two-bedroom apartment with four of her children. Her oldest daughter temporarily lives fulltime with her father while Ally awaits her four-bedroom Habitat home. “This house has allowed me to think about my future and my financial goals,” Ally says. “I never thought I would have all these plans or even options.”
“Back then, I didn’t even know what I wanted for dinner. Now I’m thinking about things I want to accomplish in the future. I’m not going to live paycheck to paycheck anymore.” These days, Ally maintains a strong support system of friends, family, and helping professionals. Her father, her oldest daughter’s father and stepmom, and her younger children’s former foster parents are all people that Ally keeps in close contact with.
“I’m a very spiritual person, and I believe everything happens for a reason,” she explains. “God brought all of these people into my kids’ lives to be supportive to them because He knew it would be just me, and I can’t do it on my own.”
“I’m a very spiritual person, and I believe everything happens for a reason”
After completing her sweat equity toward her new home, Ally enjoyed taking her kids to just go and sit inside the walls of their house, citing how calm and peaceful it was. “It was the coziest feeling,” she says. “Yeah, you might’ve messed some things up. But you can get it back.”
