Every night, once Monifa Cannady puts her two sons to bed and her Staten Island apartment finally falls silent, she sits on the couch.
Then she thinks. And thinks. And thinks.
She thinks about the children she is raising on her own: Elijah Taylor, a bright 10-year-old who dreams of becoming a basketball player, and Aiden Taylor, 3, who loves candy (“He’s a garbage disposal,” Ms. Cannady said) and the color green.
She thinks about her learning disability that renders written words difficult to comprehend, and about what she can do to keep her children from facing the same educational challenges. She is always asking Elijah if he needs a tutor, and worries that Aiden, who has autism, will have trouble when he starts to read.
But mostly, she thinks about the months she and Elijah spent on the subway, riding back and forth from one end of the line to the other, after they were evicted from their apartment in 2015.
“You don’t know what it’s like riding the train, the 1 train, from South Ferry all the way up to God knows where, your child sitting next to you saying, ‘I’m tired,’” said Ms. Cannady, 35. “You lay him on your lap and you’re up, afraid.”
“Once you’re homeless one time,” she added, “it stays in the back of your mind.”
Soon after Aiden was born in 2016, Ms. Cannady found an affordable apartment, which she keeps meticulously clean. She works two part-time jobs — as a care worker in a group home for people with developmental disabilities, and as a nursing assistant at Richmond University Medical Center — and depends on the $1,600 she receives each month in Social Security Disability Insurance to pay the rent. She also receives $500 a month in food stamps.
“I don’t want to be on Social Security,” Ms. Cannady said. “Listen, I’m grateful for it, because it pays my rent. But I like to work.”
Social Security imposes an income cap of $1,220; if Ms. Cannady earns more than that in a month, her benefits can be suspended. That happened in November 2018, when the group home ran short on staff and Ms. Cannady had to put in extra hours. Without the assistance, she fell behind on her rent.
“I don’t want my kids to go through being homeless again,” Ms. Cannady said.
She reached out to the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and was introduced to Devorah Weiss, a Met Council social worker at the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island. Both the Met Council and the JCC of Staten Island are beneficiary agencies of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.
In June, Ms. Weiss used $2,050 from The Fund to pay Ms. Cannady’s back rent, and another $537 in October to settle her electric bill. (Ms. Cannady said God sent Ms. Weiss at the right time — she pulled up to Ms. Cannady’s home on a rainy fall afternoon just as a Con Edison worker was arriving to shut off her power.)
Keeping a roof over her children’s heads is Ms. Cannady’s biggest concern, but there are other everyday challenges to worry about, too. She needs a reliable car because Aiden’s autism makes it difficult to travel on public transportation, which can be crowded. And she needs a computer for Elijah, whose homework almost always requires one.
“It’s just always something,” Ms. Cannady said.
As a single parent, Ms. Cannady considers herself to be without a support system. But there is one woman who helped her early on — Jill Hand (“my Ms. Jill,” as Ms. Cannady calls her), who was Ms. Cannady’s classroom aide when she was in school. From sixth grade until Ms. Cannady graduated, Ms. Hand tutored her in and out of school. She knew how to calm Ms. Cannady when her struggles with reading pushed her to the point of physical frustration. And on Ms. Cannady’s birthday, Ms. Hand made her specialty: potato latkes and applesauce.
“She’s the one that said: ‘You can do it. You can graduate high school,’” Ms. Cannady said. “She’d sit next to me and push me.”
The two are still in touch, though Ms. Hand now lives in New Jersey. Her lasting influence is evident: Ms. Cannady worked as a substitute classroom aide herself after high school and aspires to return to that role permanently. Because of Ms. Hand, she said, she picked up the skills to work with children in special education and the adults at the group home.
However, Ms. Cannady failed the written portion of the classroom aide certification exam last year. Ms. Weiss is working with her to secure the right test accommodations for her disability.
For Ms. Cannady, passing that exam is vital — to getting off Social Security, to becoming more financially stable, to doing more for Elijah and Aiden.
“I just wish I could go to sleep and wake up in a better situation,” she said. “I love my kids so much. It’s just so hard.”
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