Help the Usher Family Fight for Security & Hope

Fundraiser on behalf of the Usher family. A message from Valerie (my sister) is below:

 

I'm gonna hand it to you straight: Our family is in our deepest, rock-bottom moment ever, and we are asking for help. We have been struggling and facing emergencies for years, and while our families have helped us enormously when able, the intersection of our disabilities and two years of a global Covid pandemic leaves us needing far more support than they can provide alone. At this moment, I’m scared for my family. We could become homeless. We could be forced to split up between Ohio (where my son Ian, 11, lives with his father) and Illinois (where my extended family is). Our family is our whole life, and so this possibility is devastating.

 

Who You Are Helping

We are a tight-knit, neurodivergent family: Valerie (mom), Clay (dad), Elayna (8), Peyton (6), Emberly (4), Ziva (dog), and Libra (cat). My oldest son, Ian (11), lives with his dad. I, Valerie, have a Bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, and I hope to get my Master’s in Social Work in the future. My children are smart, loving, hilarious, and energetic; they hope to join sports like basketball and gymnastics and swimming in the future. My partner, Clay, strives to be our breadwinner and works in one of Ohio’s Amazon warehouses. But Clay and I both have significant mental health diagnoses that make daily life tasks extremely challenging. Managing our own mental health disabilities is a full-time job on top of everything else we do as parents.

 

The Help We Need

Our most urgent needs are financial, and this is where we will be spending any money received :

Why We Need Help

I, Valerie, have acute, invisible, and debilitating disabilities. You might remember me as seeming like a lost soul with deep, withdrawn, and depressive times. On the flip side, you might also remember me as a hard worker with a drive to completely master everything I want to. Both of those are me. Over the past few years, I have faced the most challenging mental health times in my life. I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum, and PCOS (hormone disorder). I am currently unable to work, even though I desperately want to, and I am going through the long process of applying for disability benefits. Three-and-a-half years ago, I began freelance writing as a flexible job option while also full-time parenting three children under 5 (my oldest son splits his time between us and his dad). I was good at freelance writing, and in my first year working from home, I earned $12K. But when a financial crisis hit, my at-the-time undiagnosed mental health issues pushed me into crisis. It has taken three years to find adequate mental health care and to move myself forward—three years of misdiagnoses, debilitating side-effects from a constant stream of changing prescriptions, several hospitalizations, and doctors who seemed to do more harm to me than help.

 

But I now have a therapist who I love and who I see twice a week, and together we have been carving a path forward. But that path of healing and stability is a lot of work mentally and logistically, and it continues to be blocked by financial crises and the domino effects of living in a global pandemic for two years. My partner, Clay, has seen his hours at Amazon cut significantly, and he was without pay for several weeks while he was moved between warehouses. He has also had to take significant time off, which is now unpaid, to care for me and the children when schools have closed, when we have tested positive for Covid, when I worked through a mental health crisis, or when he himself was sick with Covid. The pandemic has just magnified how precarious our situation is.

 

When we received help in the past, it filled the emergency hole so we could keep the roof over our heads and food on the table. However, our income has never been enough to build momentum toward security, which is our ultimate goal, and so we keep finding ourselves in this place of precarity. Plus, we live far from family and have no local safety net.

 

All The Things We Are Doing To Address Our Situation

Other Ways You Can Help

If you are not able to or comfortable with contributing to this fund, there are so many other ways you can help us. Reach out to me, Valerie, directly if you are able and willing to help with any of the following:

And if you’re in the Oxford area:

One Last Thing…

We hope that by reaching out to our world, we are also creating awareness for all the invisible families like ours who are facing unique intersectional emergencies of their own. We hope that we are helping you see that families like ours are not lazy, but that we lack support for navigating our disabilities in this relentless world. We hope that we are making clear how hard it is to plan for our future hopes and dreams—economic security! hobbies and careers! a clean and stable home!—when we are always surviving from one crisis to the next. We hope we are helping the world see that struggling families deserve compassion rather than judgment.