Josiah Michael Hilderbrand was born on a snowy February morning in 1994. At the time, we were living in an off grid trailer in the mountains east of Arcata, California. There was a lot left to be desired about the trailer, but considering where we had come from, I was thrilled to have a roof over our heads.

In the three years following graduating from high school, I briefly attended college and then made a bold move to leave the east coast behind and move to California. When I first arrived, I worked as a ski lift operator at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe and then used the Spanish classes I took in high school to secure a job at a timeshare resort after the snow started to melt. I loved working at the resort. Squaw Valley had been an unwelcoming men’s club, but the Latina women I worked with at the Village Inn were warm and generous with both their friendship and the home cooked food they brought to share.

As summer began and the resort slowed to a near crawl, I was offered the option of taking a leave of absence and then returning before the next ski season began. Accepting the offer to go and spend the summer traveling proved to be a mistake, one that would alter the course of my life. When I returned, the job promised to be held for me was no longer there which left me unemployed in a place where I had no family, few friends and no money to hold me over until the snow returned. I was unable to secure housing, which meant I was homeless, then hungry and definitely afraid.

No one had ever warned me about the perils of homelessness, but I imagine that’s because the middle class family I came from had never experienced it. They had also never stood in line at a food bank, the welfare office, the food stamp office, waited all day for their names to be called at a free clinic, slept outdoors unless it was on a camping trip or rifled through free boxes trying to find something to wear. I will not say that my parents’ lives were easy. They were not. They worked very hard for what they had and they taught their children to do the same, but what to do when everything fell apart had not been modeled for me, so the world I found myself in was very foreign. One thing became painfully clear though, it’s a lot easier to become homeless than un-homeless.

I was still homeless when I got pregnant with Josiah. Some might wonder, why would someone have a baby if they were homeless? It seems like a reasonable question and all I can answer is that there were very few things that I was sure about then, but I was positive I wanted the peanut-sized baby that was growing in my belly. Josiah’s father was less confident.

His initial response was an angry look of shock, “Get an abortion,” he said.

“I don’t want an abortion,” I replied, plain-faced and feeling unwanted.

That brief exchange seemed to lay the foundation of our relationship – I won’t help you… Well, I’ll do it on my own then.

I chose to return to Humboldt County to get set up with healthcare and begin to build a life for Josiah and I both. I had fallen in love with the beauty on earlier trips through, with the towering redwoods, long stretches of blond beaches, swollen rivers and rolling mountains stretching out towards the east.

I spent the first few months of my pregnancy living in a tent in the redwoods, then managed to get a broken down van that I slept in until I was able to get it fixed, then secured a run down apartment in a triplex an hour outside of town. I remember our first night there. I tacked an ultrasound photo of Josiah on the kitchen wall and looked back towards the front door where there was a pile consisting of two backpacks and two sleeping bags lying there.

The emptiness of the room struck me. I took a moment to let it etch in my memory. I did not want to forget how hard it had been to get there. That baby, the one that I named Josiah when he was in the middle of his second trimester, not only grew in my belly, but he grew in my heart. I started to dream of things for him that I hadn’t been able to for myself. It had all felt too daunting before. And then, by loving him, I started to learn to love myself.

The struggle between Josiah’s father and I lasted two years until I finally left. Any benefit that I saw from having a two-parent home was far outweighed by the violence, unpredictability and lack of support – financial, emotional and just general help, no diaper changes, no babysitting so that I could work outside of the home. I felt like I was raising two children and it was hard enough raising the one. I remember feeling relief when we finally drove away that Josiah would be free from the fighting with custody shared, but soon after, his father disappeared.

We spent the rest of his childhood, just the two of us, even with the boyfriends that came and went. I had crawled out of the hopelessness I felt on the streets, through the powerlessness of poverty and the choices it stole from us, away from abusive relationships that I feared leaving because I did not want to be homeless again and I kept crawling towards freedom, opportunity, towards a college education and the independence that I thought money would bring.

What I found instead was that the same fight it took to not lose the house, was the same fight it took to keep it, which often robbed us of the ability to do what other families did – take vacations, spend weekends together, show up for back-to-school nights and the like. There was no free time for any of that, but what Josiah and I did have was each other.

As time went on, our lives expanded. I used every skill I had to make money. I sewed. I cooked. I catered. I built a successful jam business. I also went back to school. And when all of that still wasn’t enough, I made my way into the restaurant industry because I found that it was the highest paying blue collar wage I could access with my level of education and resume. You could say that I was resourceful, resilient, determined – all of these things would be true – but it was all born out of, and fueled by, a very real fear that if I didn’t, I would become homeless again and that was the last thing I wanted for Josiah. He deserved more.

I spent the second half of his childhood walking a fine line between pride and guilt. I was doing it, but I wasn’t giving Josiah what I really wanted for him – a two parent home and the ability to show him, really show him, that the life and experiences he deserved went beyond my willingness to work endless hours at mostly thankless jobs.

“You are a good mom,” people have said and although intellectually I agree, those years and the memories I have of them are tinged with regret. I think good parenting begets some amount of regret. It means you’ve taken the time to look back on the past with enough humility to see that in a more perfect world, you might have done things differently, but the world we all live in and try to survive in is far from perfect.

At the end of it all, Josiah had no doubt that I loved him more than the air that I breathed and that his presence had always been a gift, the root of everything that had grown and flourished in the life that we shared.

Remember, Mom?

“What’s that Josiah?

Remember that you said I saved your life, Mom?

Yes, more than once. You saved my life many times, I replied. Whatever you do, just don’t die on me, Josiah.

Ha, he laughed. I’m not going to die on you, Mom.

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In 2019, my son, Josiah, was murdered while en route to a concert at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State. This is his story. It needs to be told. You can find other chapters on the “Josiah’s Story” page.

This is a personal account of my own truth according to my memory, perspective and experiences.
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