A single room, where a family gets its footing
“She’s a Christmas baby,’’ Shaleia Taft said of her daughter, Zaniyah, who will turn 1-year-old tomorrow. The little girl with a curly ponytail loves to cuddle with her mother at bedtime when they read “At the Playground With Sesame Street’’ and other favorite books.
Their home is a motel room north of Boston just a few blocks from Route 1.
They arrived seven months ago, before Zaniyah could walk. She recently took her first steps in front of the bed. “She took four steps and then she fell right here,’’ Shaleia, 21, said, smiling as she pointed to a spot on the blue carpet.
Zaniyah has since discovered the stairs outside. “I have to keep her away from them,’’ her mother said, a mix of amusement and worry in her voice. “I’m hoping for her birthday to have a little party for her.’’
Shaleia, a single mother, and Zaniyah have been living in the motel since May. Until then, the two had been staying with family. “It just wasn’t working out,’’ she said, seated on the bed in her motel room. “My aunt said, ‘You have to find a place.’ ’’
She applied for help at her local welfare office. “I said to them, ‘I’m here because I don’t have a home. I got kicked out.’ . . . After a day or two, I got my paperwork and they sent me on my merry way.’’
Their room has twin beds, but Zaniyah sleeps in her playpen. A small refrigerator stands in a corner. Cases of water and juice are stacked against a wall. There is a television and a microwave, the only source of cooking. “We eat a lot of cereal and rice,’’ she said. “There isn’t a lot you can cook in a microwave. . . . It’s like living in a box.’’
Zaniyah’s seven teddy bears fill one chair. Clothes hang in an open closet and sit in plastic bins. On a desk, there are baby wipes, Zaniyah’s books, and a Bible that is open to Psalm 23, which starts: “The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures.’’
“It makes me feel safe,’’ Shaleia said after reading the psalm aloud. “The first week I got here, I cried and cried and cried. I said, ‘Oh, my God. I am here by myself.’ I just felt, like, lost. . . . It was pretty hard. We had been in a house, with family, and then it was just the two of us here. I didn’t like her seeing me cry. She would just kind of look around the room.’’
But soon mother and daughter got into a routine. They head out the door a little after 7 a.m., when Zaniyah gets picked up for day care. Shaleia takes a 7:35 a.m. bus to Boston, where she is studying for her Graduate Equivalency Diploma at Crittenton Women’s Union. She stays at school until about 3 p.m., arriving back at the motel to meet Zaniyah’s bus at about 3:30 p.m. “If I am running late, the [motel] staff will get her off the bus for me,’’ she said.
Shaleia dropped out of high school when she was 16. She moved to Maine, where she studied medical coding and billing at a vocational training program. “It was good hands-on training,’’ said Shaleia, who completed an internship at a health center.
But Shaleia found she could not get a job in a hospital without also having either a high school diploma or a GED. She is thinking about going to college, but realizes she must first find a permanent home. “It’s stressful and it can get lonely,’’ she said. “But I still have to be patient. . . . I take it one day at a time.’’
Kathy McCabe can be reached at kmccabe@globe.com. 
