“I’m ready for something else,” says Tammy LaRochelle, a stay-at-home mom of four children, ages 9 through 20. ” I feel that I need to do more for my kids, for my family, for myself. I don’t want to be here.”
LaRochelle lives in Northampton’s subsidized housing neighborhood, Florence Heights, and she says she feels stuck.
Before she had children, LaRochelle worked for 10 years as a certified nursing assistant. But, over the nine years that she has been home raising her children, she has lost her certification. Now that her children are older, she says, she is ready to return to work.
To that end, LaRochelle recently returned to school, and received a certificate in accounting from Greenfield Community College. Sometimes, her youngest children had to go to her classes with her, when her boyfriend was working, and couldn’t be home with them. Now, she says, she’s excited to work as a bookkeeper, but hasn’t been able to find a job yet.
“Everyone is looking for experience,” LaRochelle said. I have experience as a CNA, and as a mom, but I need experience in bookkeeping in order to get a job as a bookkeeper.”
Though LaRochelle wants a job, and is looking for one, she says the money she will eventually make will not help her to move out of the neighborhood; it won’t help her save toward a down-payment on a house, or pay first- and last-month’s rent, plus deposit, for a rental house. In the meantime, she says, if her income increases, her rent at Florence Heights will increase, as well.
“That’s how it is, living here,” she said, “I’ve been here for 12 years. I thought it was going to be temporary, moving here — a stepping-stone. But it traps you. No matter what you do to try to save to get out, you can’t, because they take it. If you get a raise, they take it. If one of my kids worked, they’d take the extra money. If we lived in an apartment with a rent that cost the same every month, we could work more, work overtime, the kids could all be working, and it would be our extra income. It’s depressing.”
LaRochelle, who is 40, doesn’t have retirement savings, or life insurance.
“I’m not young. … I don’t have the stability that a lot of people out there have,” she said as she gestured to the world beyond her street.
She did have life insurance and retirement savings at one point, but when her bills backed up, she had to dig into her savings, and then drop her life insurance.
“We were on the right path,” she said, “but we had to take a few steps back. … Now I can’t get back on that track. It’s scary.”
But, she adds, she is thankful for having a roof over her family’s heads.
“We have food on the table, so we have what we need. It’s just that I didn’t want to be here this long. I know there are other people who have it worse. I just wanted to raise my kids somewhere else.”
Keegan Pyle can be reached at ValleyStoryPlace@gmail.com.