Vance’s Mother Deals With Her Past and His Future

Here is the way JD Vance introduced his mother to the world in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”:

He described how she hit him. Trapped him in a car, floored the gas pedal and told him they were going to die. Made him pee into a jar so she could use his clean urine to pass a drug test. Moved him around a lot. Overshared. Disappeared. Burned through other people’s money. Slit her wrists. Crashed her minivan into a telephone pole.

These days, when Mr. Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, introduces herself, it is often in far simpler language. “Hi, family. I’m Bev,” she said at her regular Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Middletown, Ohio, one Sunday this month. “I’m an alcoholic addict.”

A group of mostly older men murmured back, “Hi, Bev.”

She had invited a reporter from The New York Times along on the condition that none of her fellow group members would be identified. They were meeting in a tough-looking part of town, inside a squat brick building with cracked concrete floors and cinder-block walls painted white. Ms. Aikins wore denim overall cutoffs and a white T-shirt, her highlighted hair piled atop her head. She picked up some recovery literature and began to read from it: “These are our 12 traditions. …”

It has been almost 10 years since she got sober from alcohol and heroin and all other manner of substances she used to put down her throat and up her nose. In that time, the book her son wrote became a best seller and then a movie. He got elected to the Senate. He may very well be this country’s next vice president.

His rise has thrust her, unexpectedly, into the world of national politics. This summer, he brought her to the Republican National Convention and shouted out her sobriety, framing the arc of her life as a tale of redemption.

It is all still a bit new to her. She is dimly aware that her son has become the figure of much outrage of late, but, for the sake of her own sanity and sobriety, she says she remains purposefully oblivious to many of the controversies swirling around him.

Last Sunday, after her A.A. meeting wrapped up, she stuck around to explain that she would like to use this new platform of hers to help others who struggle with addiction. “I want people to know to reach out, to try to get help,” she said, “and that recovery is hard but it’s so worth it.”

It was nine years ago that her son first told her about his memoir. They were at a Waffle House. “He said, ‘Mom, I wrote a book, and there’s probably some things in it that aren’t very favorable,’” Ms. Aikins recalled. “I just said, ‘Will it help you heal?’ He said, ‘I think it will.’”

She remembered reading it for the first time. “It was heartbreaking in some parts,” she said. “But it helped us grow as a family, and it opened up a line of communication that we never really had. Addiction in our house was like the elephant in the room. Nobody ever said anything about it. We do now.”

She grew up in an abusive household herself. Her father was an alcoholic who beat her mother, Bonnie Vance, who was known as “Mamaw” to JD Vance. When Ms. Aikins was 19, she had a daughter, Lindsay, who is five years older than Mr. Vance. Mamaw and Lindsay looked after Mr. Vance when his own mother could not.

Ms. Aikins’s struggle with addiction began many years ago one day at work. She was a nurse. She got a bad headache and took a Vicodin pill. She loved the way it made her feel. She went home, bathed her children and cleaned her house. Soon she began to purloin stronger pharmaceuticals, such as Percocet. She lost her job and her nursing license and, with it, her access to prescription pills. She began to snort heroin. “My brain loved it,” she said.

She lived that way for a long time. “For years, I had made excuses for Mom,” Mr. Vance writes in his book. “I had tried to help manage her drug problem, read those stupid books about addiction, and accompanied her to N.A. meetings. I had endured, never complaining, a parade of father figures, all of whom left me feeling empty and mistrustful of men.”

She eventually lost touch with her children. Rock bottom came in 2015, when she was living out of her car, a red Chevrolet Aveo. She checked into a sober living facility across the Ohio River in Covington, Ky. After she got out, her daughter helped her find a place to live back in Middletown. But life was hard. “The apartment that I had was in the ghetto, and it used to be a trap house,” Ms. Aikins said. “Do you know what that is?”

A “trap house” is a drug den. Ms. Aikins would wake up to find addicts on her front porch, searching for the dealer who lived there before she did. She would threaten to call the police. “I just dug my heels in,” she said.

Five years later, her son, who had by that point graduated from Yale Law School and worked in private equity, bought her a house in a safer neighborhood. (She lives there now with her daughter.)

Around that time, Netflix was making Mr. Vance’s book into a movie. During production, Ms. Aikins attended a dinner with the film’s director, Ron Howard, and the actress who would play her, Amy Adams. It was a manic portrayal, all frizzy-haired and frenzied. “She said she wanted to get my sarcasm down,” Ms. Aikins said of Ms. Adams. “I think she did an amazing job. I was very flattered.” (This was said unsarcastically.) The real-life Ms. Aikins comes across today as a more hardened, confident character. She has the sort of unfazed affect of a person who has lived many years on the edge.

When the film came out, Ms. Aikins watched it for the first time with her children on Mr. Vance’s porch in Cincinnati. At first, she could not understand why they were so emotional. She said they told her: “‘Mom, you were out of it all those years. You don’t even remember.’ It’s like, ‘Oh, yes, OK. Go ahead and cry.’” She laughed and then added, a touch defensively, “It’s a movie! Quit crying.”

‘JD’s mom!’

When Republicans gathered in Milwaukee in July to officially nominate former President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Vance as the top of their ticket, one of the more cinematic moments involved an unexpected cheer for Ms. Aikins.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Vance described “single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up.”

He continued: “I’m proud to say my mom is here, 10 years clean and sober. I love you, Mom.” The cameras panned to a teary-eyed Ms. Aikins as the convention hall broke into a spontaneous chant: JD’s mom! JD’s mom! JD’s mom!

It was a surreal experience for a woman who had never even watched a political convention on television before. None of it was remotely familiar, including her seatmate in the V.I.P. box that evening. “I said, ‘Hi, what’s your name?’” she recounted. “He goes, ‘Mike Johnson.’ I went, ‘What do you do here?’ He goes, ‘I’m the speaker of the House.’ I went, ‘That sounds very impressive, but I’m not sure exactly what you do.’”

Ms. Aikins’s parents were Democrats — Mamaw had an affinity for Bill Clinton — but these days she is a registered Republican. She described herself as “bipartisan,” but then wondered: “Is that the right word? I don’t vote the party. I vote the person.” In 2016, the person was Mr. Trump. “Nobody can buy him,” she said. She got to meet him at the convention. “He was just very humble and very nice to me, and told me I had a great kid,” she said.

Part of the reason her son’s book was such a hit was that it was read by elites and the commentariat as a field guide for understanding places like Middletown and its inhabitants, the sorts of people who would send Mr. Trump to Washington. Back in those days, Mr. Vance’s view was that Mr. Trump was cynically preying on the despair of a destabilized white working class. How did he go from describing Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin” to becoming his running mate?

“I’m probably not the best person to answer that,” Ms. Aikins said. “But I do think that JD saw, when he was in office, that things for people in our area got better. I think that’s why he changed his mind.”

‘Trump country’

The day before Ms. Aikins attended the A.A. meeting in Middletown, she was out in the Appalachian foothills, in Hillsboro, Ohio. It is a place of winding roads and cornfields and tiny graveyards that poke out from hillsides. Off one particularly barren stretch of road sat parked a classic square-body pickup truck. A large sign had been propped up in the bed of the truck for anyone who happened down that lonely way to see. It read: “FENTANYL KILLS.”

Beside the truck was a long, narrow drive that led to a field with a pitched roof and a pavilion in the center of it. Gathered there were a few dozen people. There were parents who had lost children to drug overdoses and fentanyl poisoning. And there were children who had lost parents the same way. They were all mad with grief. They wore it on their faces, and you could hear it in their voices.

They had heard that JD Vance’s mom was going to be there. Many of them had seen her moment at the convention.

“I was so excited, because I really wanted to meet her,” said Debbie Evans, a 68-year-old retiree from Woodbridge, Va. She was wearing a Trump hat that had belonged to her son before he had died. “I like how she came from where she came from, and how he did, and how wonderful he is now, and how far he went,” she said.

Margie Perkins, a 66-year-old hospice nurse from Spotsylvania County, Va., brought a copy of “Hillbilly Elegy” with her. “I hope she signs it,” she said. “I want her to be an example that family can come back together after all of this,” Ms. Perkins said.

It was not a political event, but, as one mother pointed out, “This is Trump country.”

Ms. Aikins took a seat a few rows back from a stage at the front of the pavilion. She sipped from a Diet Mountain Dew bottle as people got up to talk about how addiction had robbed them. One young woman wailed while recounting what it was like to grow up the child of an addict, how she had seen the inside of motel rooms and strip clubs and crack houses, and how, finally, her mother had died. The young woman held up a plastic bag that contained her mother’s last belongings — what had been found on her body. There was a bus pass and a cheap piece of jewelry in there. “This is all I have left of my mom,” said the woman.

Ms. Aikins was there with two colleagues who work with her at a substance abuse treatment center called Seacrest. The colleagues are also in recovery. One got up and talked about what it was like to get dope-sick while seven months pregnant and in jail.

Then it was Ms. Aikins’s turn. She seemed almost shy. “For my five-year clean anniversary, my son bought me a house,” she told the crowd. She did not mention who her son was. But everyone knew.

“Wow, this lady’s got some street cred,” said the man who got onstage after her. The parents in the crowd nodded as Ms. Aikins quietly returned to her seat in the back. “She’s got a heck of a story,” the man continued, “and if you guys know her, well, you know her.”

A small group of mothers approached Ms. Aikins and asked if they could take a picture with her. “You’re famous,” one said.

‘My own little bubble’

Two days after Mr. Vance’s convention speech, Ms. Aikins posted a long message on Facebook. “It’s been an exciting week,” she began, but then the post took a turn: “Seeing how my town, that I choose to live in and love has so much vitriol and hate for my child is devastating to my peace of mind I’ve fought so hard to have.” She wrote that she would stay off social media until after the election.

“You see this hometown boy who’s doing so good, you would think no matter what your politics, you would just want to get behind him and root him on,” she said after her A.A. meeting in Middletown this month.

But her son’s combative style and his commentary about “childless cat ladies” and “the childless left” running the country have turned off many Americans, who find his views to be rather retrograde and judgmental. How could someone who was raised by women — his sister, his “Mamaw” and Ms. Aikins — end up being so dismissive of so many women’s lives?

Perhaps he has idealized a traditional family unit precisely because he never had one growing up. “I would agree with that statement,” his mother said. “For both of my kids, they didn’t grow up with a positive family unit. I know that they seemed to gravitate towards that in their adulthood.”

Asked how Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, has weathered the scrutiny, Ms. Aikins said: “She’s very supportive of JD. She’s quite brilliant. They kind of feed off of each other. You will never, ever, ever, ever hear JD ever say anything bad about Usha. That’s his No. 1, and I love that for them, and I think she’s doing really well.”

Three of the most famous women in the world — Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift and Jennifer Aniston — have all knocked Ms. Aikins’s son for his “childless cat ladies” comment. “I just choose to ignore that,” she said, “and ignoring the bad, I also have to ignore the good. I can live in my own little bubble and be comfortable.”

That bubble is important to her continued sobriety. The morning of her A.A. meeting, her son had given an eye-popping interview to CNN in which he tried to explain why he was spreading a debunked rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were feasting on people’s pets. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Not only had Ms. Aikins not seen this, she also claimed to have no idea what was happening (or not happening) in Springfield, which is just 50 miles from Middletown. “I’m not even on social media,” she said. “I watch Investigation Discovery. Is there something happening in Springfield?”

Cats. Dogs. Haitians. Her son.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

She added that she was really too busy with her own work to keep up with the news. She said she got her nursing license back and she teaches at the treatment facility. “This week, we’re talking about sexually transmitted infections,” she said, “so I’ve been doing a lot of research on chlamydia.”

One political program Ms. Aikins does intend to watch is Mr. Vance’s debate against Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on Oct 1. Asked what she thought of Mr. Walz, Ms. Aikins replied: “I don’t really think about him either way. Is that bad?” She thought for a moment. “I’ve heard he was a teacher, which I have a lot of respect for teachers. If he attacks my baby, he might want to hide from me. But I think my baby can pretty much handle himself.”

And yet, this is a dangerous job her baby has taken. It did not end so well for the last guy who had it. When former Vice President Mike Pence tried to certify Mr. Trump’s defeat on Jan. 6, 2021, the mob of pro-Trump rioters that attacked the U.S. Capitol chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” and accused him of being controlled by the Devil. Mr. Trump watched it all on TV.

Ms. Aikins said she did not worry about any of this. “I think that JD is probably the smartest, most amazing young man, and everything he touches turns to gold,” she said.

In fact, she added, “JD will be president one day. You know how I know that?”

She said that “he used to watch all these political shows” when he was little. “I would say, ‘Why do you watch that?’ He would say, ‘Mom, this is about our country. I need information.’ I would just think, ‘What a nerd.’”

One night, he was desperate to watch a debate, but his stepbrothers at the time would not give up the remote, because there was a wrestling match on. “So we went and got a motel room, so my baby could watch the debate on TV,” Ms. Aikins said proudly.

But who was debating?

“I don’t even remember,” she said with a laugh. “I was probably high.”

Read by Shawn McCreesh

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.