On Wednesday afternoons, Toneshia Forshee picks up her son, a four-year-old who suffers from optic nerve hypoplasia and wears thick Coke-bottle glasses, from the early childhood education center he attends in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She brings him home to her immaculate two-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained complex down the street from a Sonic burger joint. She makes dinner for her son and her one-year-old daughter, and the threesome eats together at a table in the corner of the living room, under a painstakingly arranged gallery wall of family photographs interspersed with wooden signs reading "Hope," "Love," and "Life" in decorative script. After dinner, Forshee tucks her kids into bed and, four nights a week, she heads to work.
Forshee, 25, is a phlebotomist at a nearby hospital—she spends her nights doing blood draws, sometimes over 200 in a five-hour period. When she finishes her shift at 7 a.m., she heads home to take her son to school. She spends her days with her daughter, catching up on sleep whenever her daughter naps.
"I like night shift because it works out for me with the kids, and I like night shift because it moves fast," Forshee says with a smile. "The only reason I don't like it is because, when I go in the rooms, they get mad because I have to wake them."
[For more on this story by Dwyer Gunn, go to https://psmag.com/magazine/bre...the-cycle-of-poverty]
Illustration: Corey Brickley
Comments (0)