(Tara and her daughters)

When I saw Tara Deering skipping down the bike path, racing two small girls as they headed toward the elementary school, I wondered at first if she was their older sister. She has long black hair and a tiny sliver nose ring, and she wears a youthful jeans-and-sneakers outfit.

Tara isn’t a teenager, but she is pretty young. Her older girl, who’s five now, was born when she was in high school. Tara said becoming a mother didn’t slow her down. She graduated a year after her daughter was born, enrolled at a for-profit college nearby and moved smoothly from an externship to a job as a medical assistant. Her younger girl was born while she was in college.

The job paid well, and things were going smoothly for the little family for a while. But then Tara’s dad, who had been watching the girls while she worked, ran out of the unemployment benefits he’d been collecting. He found a job, but that left her without anyone to watch the kids. She tried to get government assistance with child care but found she didn’t qualify.

So she quit her job.

“I ended up homeless,” she said.

The girls shuttled between a grandmother and an aunt while Tara slept in her father’s van.

She decided that if she couldn’t be with her kids because she didn’t have a place, she might as well get a job. She couldn’t find another position like her old one, but she eventually got two part-time jobs, one at Dunkin’ Donuts and the other as a receptionist. She saved up enough to get a one-bedroom apartment with the help of a housing subsidy.

As Tara told me her story, we were occasionally interrupted by the girls. Even weighed down by jackets, earmuffs, hats and mittens—ensembles that were almost entirely in varying shades of pink—they bounded exuberantly down the paths and sidewalks leading to the school. The younger girl, who’s three, stayed close to her mother, occasionally scolding the five-year-old for walking too far away or climbing up on a stone fence.

At one point, the older girl was dawdling, and Tara smiled, scooped her up and carried her, barely missing a step.

They were late getting to school that day, and Tara urged them forward, but she showed no signs of losing patience with them. She said the kindergarten teacher is understanding about the circumstances that can make things hard for the family.

“If you open up to them they’ll help you,” she said.

Tara’s circumstances remain complicated. While she was working her two jobs, she was also dating a boyfriend and ended up pregnant again. He promised he would take care of the baby while she worked, but after their son was born, she said, he became increasingly controlling.

Sometimes, she said, he got mad if she put on makeup before going to work and refused to take care of the boy. That meant she had to call in to take a personal day at the last minute. After that happened a few times, she got fired.

Tara got help from a group that fights domestic violence, and got out of the relationship. When I talked with her, she said her father was watching the baby, who’s 10 months old now. Her dad works a night shift job now and comes over to her apartment during the day. He helps watch the boy, taking naps when he can.

“If I didn’t have my dad I’d be walking in the freezing cold with my infant,” she said.

Tara doesn’t have a car, and she said she wishes the school offered busing for kindergarten. As it is, she has to walk with the two girls each day, drop the five-year-old off and then bring the younger girl back to the apartment.

When she’s on time, she said, she walks with another mother who doesn’t have any help with child care and has to bring her own baby with her no matter what the weather’s like.

Besides her father, Tara said her support network includes a landlord who’s allowed her to get $2,000 in debt to him. She receives a housing subsidy, but it only pays for part of her rent. She said she’s been behind on her payments before and then caught up, and she’ll do it again when she gets more income.

“I have the nicest landlord ever,” she said.

Tara said knowing that she won’t get evicted if she’s behind on the rent has allowed her to spend money on other things, like diapers.

“If not for the landlord, I would be stuck going to the soup kitchen” for diapers, she said. She’s done that before, and you can only get five or six diapers at a time that way.

Still, Tara wishes she could spend a little more to get better diapers than she does. Her son has sensitive skin, she said, and the cheaper ones seem to irritate it.

Tara wants to get back to work, and she’s interested in shifting gears and studying psychology. She’d like to work with high-risk teens, she said.

She doesn’t want to go back to being a medical assistant, partly because she didn’t like the attitudes of the staff she worked with in that job. She said they seemed like “uppity, rich people,” being nice to low-income patients and then making fun of them behind their backs. She felt like if she didn’t join in and laugh at the unkind jokes she wasn’t viewed as part of the team.

She said she doesn’t like the stereotypes that her coworkers seemed to buy into.

“When people lose medications, they always assume the worst things,” she said.

To go back to school, Tara would have to find subsidized child care, which means going back to the welfare agency that rejected her before, something she seems to be dreading. She said it’s hard to deal with the qualifications for different programs, and if you work hard and get away from assistance it’s hard to go back and get something like child care support to stay employed.

“They put us through so much just to get in,” she said.