Parenthood: Single dad grows into the job
It’s past 8 p.m. on a school night and Eddie Tafolla Jr. wants his three children to take showers before going to bed.
But first he has to corral them.
His daughter, Nevaeh, 4, and his youngest boy, Nathaniel, 3, chase each other around the two rooms where they live with their dad and older brother Vincent, 5, who tosses a small ball — over and over and over — into a plastic basketball hoop on the backside of a door.
Usually, the children shower in the morning, shortly after their father wakes them, at 5:40 a.m. It’s part of a precise routine Eddie has developed over the past few months. But on this evening, they spent an hour playing outside and their dad wants them to at least rinse off before going to bed.
Nevaeh, (the name is Heaven spelled backward), is so excited she jumps.
“We’re taking a shower at night time!”
She is the first to head for the bathroom in the narrow hallway that separates the back room she shares with Vincent, and the front room where Nathaniel’s little bed butts up against his dad’s. Vincent pleads to go last, leaping on the beds.
“I want to play,” Vincent whines.
His dad’s tone is serious, but — as he puts away toys in empty diaper boxes and lines up shoes atop the credenza — calm.
“We’re not playing no more. Playtime’s over.”
He could say the same thing about himself.
At 25, Eddie Tafolla, has made some of the familiar changes. No more drinking. No more drugs. No more partying.
But that’s not the end of Eddie’s ‘no mores.’ He’s not lounging on his grandmother’s couch all day, unemployed and unmotivated to change that. He’s not letting himself balloon to 300 pounds. And, critically, there’s this:
No more shirking parenthood, letting others struggle to take care of his children.
Their mother, his ex-girlfriend, won’t get out of jail until next year.
His kids need somebody right now.
“I had to make the decision to at least step it up for the kids,” Eddie says. “I was ready to get off that couch.”
Success as a dad, in his view, depends on establishing the kind of order and discipline that was missing in the first years of his children’s lives.
But it is literally taking a village to help him learn how to raise them and lift himself up in the process.
Strict rules, strong support
In his easygoing manner, Eddie talks about how he’ll turn “365” on June 20.
That’s when he’ll mark a full year at the 262-bed Village of Hope transitional living program in Tustin, where he lives with his children. He’s one of only three single dads who will be among the family men at the Village of Hope for a Father’s Day barbecue.
The neatly landscaped complex resembles a small college, and the residents — single adults, couples, families — are, in fact, referred to as “students.” Most have struggled with homelessness. Many work to overcome an addiction, be it drugs, alcohol or even video games.
Operated by the Orange County Rescue Mission, the program centers around Christian principles. Meals and on-site work assignments start with prayers and devotions; Sunday church attendance is required.
There is zero tolerance for drug or alcohol use — enforced by 24/7 surveillance cameras, drug testing and random room inspections. Students returning from off-campus trips puff into breath testing devices and their bags are searched at the gates. Before they’re allowed in, they have to lift a pant leg to show they’re not hiding anything in their socks.
But there is also support: free rooms in dorm-style housing, meals, counseling, parenting classes, secondary education, job resume and employment search guidance, financial education and debt counseling, and other assistance.
The goal is self sufficiency.
While his children are in school and day care, Eddie’s days are busy from the time he is up ironing their clothes at 5 a.m. until everyone is in bed around 9 p.m — a routine that, he’s learning, is familiar to most functioning parents.
But he’s also making up for wasted time. That means three hours of daily class time to earn his high school diploma, and a half-day of work cleaning the campus’ restrooms and offices. He picks up the kids for lunch and dinner, plays with them for about an hour, then goes to tutoring in the evening.
Eddie confesses that for much of his life he did not spend a full day without either doing drugs or being around someone else who was doing drugs. His mornings would always start by smoking weed.
At Village of Hope, he’s dodging those temptations. “It’s not in here,” he says. “I don’t smell it or see it.”
But he has a recurring nightmare: He is off campus, on a weekend pass, and he gets high. Then, he’s overcome with fear that he’ll be kicked out of the program; back to his old life.
Even in sleep, he says, “I’m thinking, ‘just please be a dream.’”
Checkered past
Eddie’s mom died of cancer when he was 8.
His father, Eddie Sr., a plumber, was left with five kids under the age of 18. Eddie’s paternal grandmother helped to raise them. And Eddie and his siblings were signed up for sports and after-school programs. They went to ball games and ice skating. They were loved.
Still, Eddie drifted.
He started drinking and smoking pot in his early teens. He left high school without earning a single credit. Then, at 17, he discovered methamphetamine.
He looks back with regret on the things he did when he and his girlfriend, who met when they were 18 and 16, used meth — especially after they had kids.
Eddie preferred to smoke the drug rather than stick a needle in his arm. He remembers how he would stuff a towel under a door and light up while his kids were in the next room; how people, other addicts, came and went all hours of the night.
If anybody had called protective services, he knows now, the kids would have been taken away.
But he did work. For several years he washed dishes and later cooked at a Mexican restaurant in Lakewood — until he got fired for being late too often. He landed another job at a convalescent home, but lost that too as his relationship with his girlfriend slipped into chaos.
By the time Nathaniel, nicknamed Nano, was born, they were apart. She eventually ended up with the two older kids while Eddie brought the baby with him back to the apartment in San Pedro that he shared with his grandmother and father. He saw Vincent and Nevaeh on weekends.
It only took a few months for things to get worse.
His girlfriend would go missing for days at a time, her meth habit taking control. She’d leave Nevaeh and Vincent with her mother, Teresa Resendez, who worked nights at a postal service warehouse. And Resendez would lose her job, too, after missing time when her daughter didn’t come home to watch the children.
Evicted from her apartment, Resendez — with Vincent and Neveah — began sleeping in her SUV in Long Beach. Finally, desperate, she called Eddie with a shameful message:
You have a place to sleep, she told him, but your kids are living in a car with me.
Turning point
Eddie and his father picked up the kids, and they all crammed into the already crowded apartment in San Pedro.
By then, Eddie no longer worked at the convalescent home. He was facing arrest for failing to attend a court-mandated class and AA program for a DUI conviction.
“He wasn’t motivated to do anything,” recalls one of his aunts, Rosa Tafolla Ixta, who works as a childcare provider.
“He was like a couch potato; he was doing nothing. And (he had) no patience with the kids; screaming and that kind of stuff.”
The chaos got to his grandmother, who is in her late 80’s. She told him something had to change.
Eddie tearfully turned to another aunt, Claudia Sauceda, who lives in Nevada. She agreed to keep the two older children for six months while Eddie cleared up his record.
Vincent and Navaeh were a handful.
“They had a lot of love, but they never had structure; never had discipline,” said Sauceda, a religious woman who takes in foster children.
Eddie had no idea what he would do once he got the children back.
His family believes what happened next is divine intervention.
Ixta’s name bubbled up on an affordable housing list for a home in the Columbus Square neighborhood in Tustin, within walking distance of Village of Hope. She didn’t know much about the program, but they were talking about it at church. She paid a visit to the campus to find out more.
After Eddie completed his DUI classes, she convinced him to go to Village of Hope. The kids — all three — could come too.
“If that hadn’t happened,” Ixta says, “none of this would have happened for Eddie.”
‘It’s a fellowship’
At Village of Hope, residents follow a treatment plan at their own pace. It might take them a year or two to finish; maybe longer. Every student wears a lanyard on campus, with a photo ID, and every lanyard has a color to denote the student’s progress — yellow for freshmen, green for sophomores, blue for juniors, red for seniors.
For now, Eddie’s lanyard is green. He wears it always, same way he always wears a black baseball cap that says “OG Moonwalker.” He even kept the lanyard on during an off-campus outing to a park, near Ixta’s house, on a Saturday in April to when Nathaniel turns 3.
“I don’t have no shame of it,” Eddie says.
Eddie supervises the children as they take turns whacking the piñata, and cuts Nathaniel’s cake. Then he has something to say to the family — his father and grandmother, his aunt, an older brother and several cousins — who’ve turned out for his son’s birthday
“Thank you guys for supporting me and my little boy. It feels good to be sober, and (to) be able to understand things differently,” he says. “I honestly mean that. It means a lot.”
His Aunt Rosa has noticed how, when Eddie comes around on weekend passes, he steers clear of anyone drinking alcohol. She is amazed, too, at his physical and emotional development. He’s lost at least 40 pounds. He’s earned 60 of a needed 110 credits to graduate high school.
He’s also learning this from the parenting classes he’s taking — patience.
“He tells me, ‘Tia, now I know when they start getting cranky, either they’re hungry or sleepy.’”
He’ll get down on a knee to talk to his kids at eye level.
Spending time with them isn’t obligation; it’s joy.
He’s even attentive to other children, whether it’s loading several into the big wagon he uses to transport Nevaeh from her Pre-K class, or responding to a little girl near the elevator in his building when she trips over a skateboard and bursts into tears. Eddie is the one grownup to pick the girl up and hand her to her mother.
Another afternoon, with Nathaniel in his lap, Eddie sits in a chair next to the basketball court and turns one end of a jump rope used by Vincent, Nevaeh, and another resident’s little girl. A few other dads sit nearby as their children ride scooters and play.
“Slow, slow,” Eddie says to Vincent when his son mistimes a jump and lands on the rope. “You’re going too fast.”
Vincent laughs and points at his dad, “It’s you.”
Eddie had just gotten trounced in one-on-one basketball, 15-4, by Xandro Tinajero, another student at Village of Hope. The two exchange some friendly smack talk, but as sweat runs off his face, Tinajero, 43, says the game isn’t about winning.
“It’s a fellowship,” says Tinajero. “We are winning here every day. We’re hurting every day, struggling with our pasts. It helps, definitely.”
Tinajero has two kids himself. They live with relatives, in another county.
During mealtimes, in the cafeteria, Tinajero sits behind Eddie and the kids. He watches the other dads on campus, too. Tinajero says he sees all that and wishes things were different for him.
“They motivate me.”
Learning along the way
Eddie has misstepped; landed on campus probation. The infractions have been for things like leaving his kids alone while he ran down to the laundry room, or talking disrespectfully to staff.
He had to negotiate leaving his high school study class a little bit early so he could pick up Nevaeh from her half-day of Pre-K. Until he earned off-campus pass privileges, which took a few months, he had to find an escort to go with him to the school.
The effort, he says, was important.
“It’s about her seeing that her dad picks her up from school. I want her to know that her daddy is going to be involved in that.”
Otherwise, he adds, “How am I supposed to learn how to do this once I’m out of the program?”
Eddie is dealing with an infraction now, even on Father’s Day. It has cost him his off-campus privileges.
So, today, instead of visiting his dad, Eddie will spend the day on campus with his youngest, Nathaniel. The other two kids, Vincent and Nevaeh, are spending summer with their maternal grandmother, now that her life has become stable again after a move to Reno, Nevada.
Derrick Burton, program director for Orange County Rescue Mission and Eddie’s case manager since March, says he’s confident that Eddie is learning, and that he’ll succeed in the program. “I’m impressed with how he has grown as a man and is really taking on the responsibility of being a single dad.”
If Eddie needs any reminder of how suddenly trying to change your life can go off course, he and other residents got it — in the harshst of ways — one recent afternoon. They were called unexpectedly for a gathering in the chapel. Eddie arrived after emptying trash cans and scrubbing toilets for his campus work shift.
Taylor was dead.
The man who had been at Village of Hope — who’d moved to a sister program near Temecula, the Double R Ranch — had smuggled in some drugs and overdosed.
It’s the first drug-related death on-site at one of the Rescue Mission programs.
Eddie knew Taylor. They’d been friends before Taylor was transferred. Eddie even keeps a snapshot of them together, with a few other Village of Hope dads.
“He was a good man,” Eddie says of Taylor.
“He always asked how my kids were doing.”
Right now, Eddie can say his kids are doing OK.
SCNG staff photographer Mindy Schauer contributed to this report.