The first time Kindering called to ask how they could help her newborn son Jacob, Cydney Knapp was still processing.
On a tree-lined street in downtown Kent in early November, young people set up a room to prepare for the next meeting of “Okay!,” a support group serving LGBTQ+ young people in South King County.
As music pumps through the Northgate Community Center gym, older adults move their bodies to their own beats. One woman marches in place and turns her head back and forth. A man sits on the ground and stretches his legs. A group walks around the gym’s perimeter.
Carneisha Grace, 34, was going to take care of her special-needs son and his two brothers on her own, no matter what. She thought self-sufficiency was the mark of a good mother.
Fear built into the core of a little body — whether it’s from wars and pandemics or from sick and dysfunctional family members — leaves its marks. And the marks cost. They cost the children who grow up carrying often unseen wounds that may compel them in adulthood to behaviors they don’t understand. And they cost everybody else, too.
Donnetta Jamerson has seen a lot at work. Severed fingers, broken limbs, chemical burns.
When Ollina Simmons went to Atlantic Street Center for food and diapers this summer, she found a familiar face who was offering so much more.
Abbas Abbas was new to the country, with a toddler son and mounting household bills, when he first saw the sign in his East Bellevue neighborhood that read “Salvation Army.”
Online school is not easy for anybody.
Online school is a lot tougher when you live in a small house with five brothers and a mom who works two jobs.
“Do you hear that background noise in my house?” says Renee Hipp, as the rambunctious sounds of her five boys talking, bickering, playing and living in one space echoes off the walls.
When she was a Sammamish High School freshman, Judith Mercado’s daily routine was unremarkable: go to classes, get her stuff done, go home. She felt lost in an educational system she didn’t understand while trying to navigate life as a first-generation immigrant and the oldest of four siblings.