Taylor Dolven & Erica Breunlin | The Colorado Sun
After two of Chelsea Breese’s kids lost their father in November, her daughter, then age 7, began asking her the same question many mornings: “Is my dad alive?”
Her 5-year-old son still hasn’t stopped sleeping in her bed and has struggled with setbacks in potty training.
Grieving their dad so early in life is the family’s latest battle in a long fight for stability, shaking both children to their core, their mom said. Before he died, the kids had already lost part of her.
Facing domestic violence and addiction that led to legal trouble, Breese landed in jail, lost her apartment and, after she was released, became homeless, she said. Her two older kids stayed with their dad while she was behind bars and afterward as she shuffled back and forth between her mom’s couch and a friend’s spare bed with her third child, a newborn at the time.
Now, after more than a year living at Warren Village in Denver, an organization helping her family with housing, child care and other support, Breese has slowly collected the shattered pieces of her kids’ childhood to fasten them into something new: a steadier future with a greater sense of certainty and, one day, a home of their own.
Building a foundation for her family’s life would not be possible without reliable child care — something Breese has been able to afford only through government help under a program known as the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program.
“I really don’t feel like I would be able to build stability without it because if you can’t leave your kids somewhere safe, then how are you supposed to work on anything else?” said Breese, now sober. “It’s a parent’s job to create stability and create that platform and if you can’t even put your kids somewhere, you can’t do that.”
Breese, 34, is perhaps one of the lucky parents. She still has access to subsidies while a growing list of other Colorado families wait and hope for the program to open up to their children.
The number of eligible kids without a subsidized child care spot climbed to 13,869 as of last week, up from more than 5,700 children a year ago, according to data from the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.