Manika Davis, once living in a Concord homeless shelter with her two children, still has her hands full.
Her youngest of two boys, 1-year-old Cayden, has just bumped his head on the dining room table, creating a high-pitched, toe-curling scream that spreads through the three-story apartment building in Franklin like the smell of her recent Thanksgiving dinner.
Meanwhile, Davis’s other son, 6-year-old Calvyn, says he’s hungry. He eyes a sleeve of crackers, while Davis tries to convince me that she’s turned her life around, from a reckless mother with no home of her own, to a matriarch with military-style discipline and goals for a better life.
Then, from the other room, comes the jingle of her cell phone, its alarm set for 10:30 a.m. “Snack time,” Davis tells her children, and I begin to feel and see the change.
I ask what her life is like now, following years of abusive boyfriends, her own erratic behavior, filled with beer and weed, and disrespect toward her parents and anyone else who’d try to tell her what to do.
“Entertaining,” she says after a lengthy pause. “Less hectic. Everything I’ve taken on is more successful, so I’m less stressed than before. I manage everything so well now.”
She’s the beneficiary of the Emergency Solutions Grant and the Community Action Program’s New Start Program. The philosophy, invented to fight Concord’s homeless problem, is to find housing first for those struggling, then, hopefully, watch them grow into productive citizens, with a new sense of self-esteem.
Davis, a Concord native who’s lived in Franklin for three months, is a shining example of this, a poster child of how this should work. I found her through Andy Labrie, a homeless outreach worker for CAP. He and his colleagues searched for a week before finding the right candidate.
Others, I was told, did not want to bring attention to themselves, the stigma and shame they feel trailing them like a stalker. Davis? Bring it on, she told Labrie.
“She was a little edgy, but determined,” Labrie told me by phone. “She did everything she was supposed to do, and she’s really determined, I’ll tell you, to make it work.”
She’s eager to show me, saying, “The repetitiveness of getting into a schedule now has folded into my life. We are now in a very tight schedule in my house.”
We begin to look around her apartment. The determination Labrie spoke about is everywhere. There are meatballs simmering in a crock-pot, part of her weekend meal-time prep that will feed her children through the week.
There’s a clipboard on the wall near her desk showing completion dates for her online course work, in business law and marketing, at Southern New Hampshire University.
And, on another wall, there’s THE schedule, entitled, “A Day in the Davis House!” It starts at 7 a.m. with “Wake up, take medications,” and moves through the entire day, breaking down what Calvyn and Cayden and she need to do and when. Colorful drawings accompany each time and chore.
“Get on the bus. Breakfast. Workout. Snack. Nap time. Lunch. Get Calvyn off bus. Dinner. Homework.”
“Right now she’s making a very good decision from what she’s come out of,” Davis’s grandmother, Irene Cromwell of Concord, told me by phone. “Her life has turned around for the better. I tried to show her right from wrong, but you know how kids are with parents and grandparents.”
Added Manika’s mother, Lisa Davis, “She’s done a 180. She hit rock bottom and turned herself around. These kids today have to learn the hard way. It was all about her, don’t tell me what to do.”
Manika, who’s 25 and African American, says living her entire life in a mostly white state has had nothing to do with the chip she admits always rested on her shoulder.
She dropped out of Concord High her senior year after getting pregnant with Calvyn. She hoped to build a life with Calvyn’s father, but says it didn’t work because of the man’s “bad habits, drinking, abusive, domestic violence. Very abusive verbally, mentally. He stopped hitting me after I had Calvyn, but he was physically abusive toward others and had a short temper.”
Cayden has a different father, from a one-night stand. Davis has no contact with either man and depended on herself, her parents and Cromwell to raise her children.
She’s lost friends to heroin addiction. She lost her father last year when, at age 49, he suffered a heart attack while driving. She lost her apartment then, too, after conflicts with roommates.
And as happens often, the bad stuff led to the current good stuff. “I hit rock bottom,” Davis says. “Losing my father, I lost my friends, losing everything left and right. I was living in a shelter and I hated it.”
That would be the Friends Program, which Davis says she had a love-hate relationship with. She hated following rules and the loss of self-esteem that came with living there. But, she says, she loved the staff and fellow residents, and she loved the perspective it gave her on life.
She was on a long Section 8 waiting list for housing, then took stock in herself by completing the New Start Program’s course work, learning basics she’d never paid attention to before: Cleaning, budgeting money, being a good neighbor, being a great mother.
She’s been living in Franklin since September, and her relationships with her mother and grandmother, once strained because of her lifestyle, are back on track. Davis had 13 family members over for Thanksgiving dinner, cooking two turkeys and alternative, low-calorie food in keeping with a diet that has seen her lose 23 pounds.
Her new place is looking good, too. On a window sill, near the clipboard with college deadlines, a prelude to her associate’s degree, sit three cups of water, each containing baby avocado plants, each bathed in sunlight.
“They’re coming along,” Davis says. “Sometimes it takes weeks for them to sprout.”
And, sometimes, years for people to do the same.