MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Three things stand out within a few minutes of talking to Beverly Aikins: Her grandchildren are her everything, she is deeply grateful she has earned her nursing license back, and the mother of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican vice presidential nominee, has found redemption and peace through helping others struggling with addiction.
Aikins said it is a life of purpose.
“I want people who are struggling with addiction or who have family members who are struggling with addiction to know that recovery is possible, and you get back so much more from recovery than you ever think you can get back,” she said.
She also admitted there is a little mischief sprinkled in when it comes to her profound love for her grandchildren involving some pretty typical grandma shenanigans, Pokemon cards, and parents who think their children are being showered with too much stuff.
“Usha and J.D. have told me I cannot buy any more Pokemon cards. … I am cut off,” she says with the kind of smile every grandmother has when the parents try to curtail a little grandma spoiling.
Vance and his wife, Usha, told Aikins that at dinner the night before at a Skyline Chili restaurant, where they had all gone out for family dinner, with Aikins having the Vance contraband cards ready to hand out to the kids.
The kids were naturally unhappy with the turn of events.
Aikins said she leaned in and told them with a wink and a smile not to worry, that grandma will work on their parents — something any grandparent does, including me.
Smiling broadly, she recalls 4-year-old grandson Vivek taking command of the situation by hijacking Aikins’s sister’s smartphone, FaceTiming his grandmother, and telling her, “Nana, have a plan,” which involved Aikins reminding his parents who was the real boss in the family.
“I see so much of J.D. in each of them,” she says, laughing at their secret hijinks. “But it’s a different kind of love. I can’t even explain it, but they are, I would do absolutely anything for them,” with the same awe you hear from grandparents across the world describing the emotion that fills them when discussing grandchildren.
Just under 10 years ago, Aikins would not have been able to enjoy her relationship with her children, nor would she have been able to do the other passion in her life, nursing, because of the debilitating addiction to alcohol, heroin, and pretty much anything else she would use to get high that had consumed every aspect of her life.
The daughter of a turbulent marriage, her mother, Bonnie Vance, “Mamaw” to J.D. Vance, was profoundly influential in her grandson’s life and helped raise J.D. with the help of his older sister Lindsay when Aikins could not.
Vance recalled his tumultuous childhood with the up and downs of Aikins’s addiction in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which came out the year after she became sober. She made her debut on the national stage during the Republican National Convention, when her son accepted former President Donald Trump’s nomination to be his running mate.
The world saw the petite Aikins, her thick curly hair framing her face glowing with pride and emotion as her son recalled the challenges in their lives before announcing she had been sober for almost 10 years — a proclamation that caused those in the crowd to rise to their feet and burst into chants of “J.D.’s mom!”
Her addiction began with a powerful headache while she was at work at a hospital as a nurse. She took a Vicodin pill and was astonished at not just how good she felt after taking it but also the energy it gave her to do mundane household things, such as cleaning the house when she got home after a long day.
It was a high that led to wanting more, even at the cost of one of her biggest accomplishments, her nursing license.
“I worked retail, and I knew that if I ever wanted to get ahead, I would have to have a profession, and I think I was just drawn to nursing,” she explained.
Aikins, who had Lindsay at 19 and J.D. five years later, said she knew that if she could get an associate’s degree, she could have a decent income and provide for her family.
When she started nursing school, the children were little. “I graduated in ’90, J.D. was born in ‘84, and Lindsay was born in ’79, so they were fairly young. Once I got into it, I loved it. I knew that was where I was supposed to be from day one,” she said of the profession she says is her calling.
“I loved the science classes. I loved just learning about that stuff. And I don’t know, I’ve always felt like that’s what I was supposed to be. J.D. thinks I’m so smart that I should have been a doctor, but you know, nursing is a science on its own,” she says.
“Doctors give the orders, and nurses, we’re the ones that carry them out. We’re the ones that the patients learn to trust, and I think if you have a good nurse, you’ll have a good experience anywhere you go,” she explained.
It was a good time in her life.
Last year, when covering Vance visiting one of the Great Oaks Career Campuses, a vocational-technical school system in Cincinnati, I watched him walk into the surgical technology class and see something very familiar to him: students practicing having their blood drawn for final exams — something he told the classroom his mother used to practice on him when she was in nursing school.
Vance was only there to observe the class, but when he noticed that one of the students was anxious about having her blood drawn by her classmate, he casually removed his suit jacket and offered to take her place. When no objection from the teacher or students materialized, he sat down, rolled up his sleeves, and smiled.
He explained he had some experience with this with his mother to the nervous student about to stick a needle in his arm. Vance said quietly, “Don’t be nervous. If you have to do it again, it’s fine with me. I am here for you until you get it right.”
Aikins said she definitely practiced on her children and parents when she was in nursing school: “Back then, you were encouraged to do that. I don’t think you’re allowed to do that nowadays.”
She recalls the time her son had pneumonia in the third grade that got so bad he had to be hospitalized, “When we were in the hospital, the nurses couldn’t get an IV started. After several attempts, J.D. told the nurses to get his mom — she’ll get it,” she explained of the son who had all the confidence in the world in his mother.
“One of the nurses said, well, your mom doesn’t work at this hospital, and we can’t let your mom start the IV,” she said.
After some back and forth over whether or not the nurse really wanted to stick this very sick child for a fourth time, Aikins said she finally told one nurse who kept insisting she could not do it, “’It’ll be our secret. Do you really want to stick this poor child another time or just let me do it?’ And so I did it, got the IV in, and he always thought I was like the greatest because I knew his veins, because I practiced on him for years.”
As her addiction worsened, so did her judgment. “I sold drugs from the hospital that I was working at, in particular morphine. I stole morphine,” she said. “I got caught. I got sent to treatment. And then I got out of treatment and I was doing good for a while and I relapsed. And I self-reported to the Ohio Board of Nursing that I had relapsed, and they suspended my license.”
She was devastated but not devastated enough to quit using, she said.
“You can’t practice. You can’t do anything as a nurse. You have to follow their recommendations. And I originally started out with a one-year suspension, and I couldn’t get it together. I couldn’t quit using. I couldn’t quit. So I just kind of let that go. I just couldn’t get it together,” she explained, the weight of her addiction momentarily flashing over her features.
At that time, she had moved on to the hard stuff: “I had graduated to heroin. I just thought I would never be a nurse again.”
The journey back to nursing seemed impossible, and that thought ate at her. “I hated it. I hated myself. My whole identity was in being a nurse. I felt like that was my calling,” she said. “I just thought the opportunity was gone.”
Oddly enough, it was at a 12-step meeting, which is an Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meeting, that a nurse there shared with Aikins that she wasn’t just using drugs on the job — she was stealing drugs and admitted she knew that if she got caught, she was going to lose her license and her livelihood.
“I remember after that meeting, talking to a couple of my friends in the program, and [I] said, I’m just here. I am doing everything right. I should be a nurse. And here’s this nurse who is doing everything wrong who is able to practice,” she said.
She said she had words with that nurse after that meeting that changed both of their lives, “I did tell her, you don’t get your head out of your ass … if you don’t straighten up, you’re going to be like me.”
Aikins warned her that she wasn’t as slick as she thought she was: “The Ohio Board of Nursing will catch you. They will punish you, and you’re absolutely right. You will not only lose your life — you will lose your livelihood, you’ll lose your family, you’ll lose everything. You got to get into treatment, you’ve got to fix this.”
The nurse then asked her why she hadn’t got her license back since she had been clean. Aikins admitted she actually wasn’t sure. “They had told me when I was suspended it was for a year, and I never came back. Nine years had lapsed at this point,” she said.
The nurse pushed her to call the state licensing board. “And I thought, she’s right,” Aikins said. “What do I have to lose?”
Aikins met with the Ohio Board of Nursing and was told she had to give a new date for the start of the suspension. Although it happened 10 years earlier, she would still have to wait a full year to begin the process.
“I was told I was going to have to get drug screens all the time at my own cost. And if, for any reason, you ever say you can’t continue with these drug screens, be it I can’t afford them anymore or whatever reason, that will go against you,” she said. Then she was told to put about $6,000 in the bank to dedicate to the costs of getting her license back.
“At the time, I was cleaning houses, and $6,000 was a heck of a lot of money to me, and I thought, I’ll never have that kind of money at one setting. And then they decided to make a movie out of J.D.’s book,” Aikins said. “And I said, this is God telling me he’s putting this money in my hands, and this is the world or the universe or whatever saying this is the one thing you want. You’ve got to go for it.”
Six months after the first meeting with the Ohio Board of Nursing, she called again and said, “Let’s do this,” and her year suspension started the very next day.
COVID-19 shutdowns of services dragged the process out longer than normal. Then, one day, a hair test showed up. If she failed it, she would be disqualified.
“That was not a problem for me because I am never, at least today, I’m not going to ever get high again. So I knew that was not a problem,” she said. Still, she worried what type of bureaucracy was going to get in the way next.
“A week later, I was on the eLicense site … where I always look because it would always say suspended status under my RN,” she said. “And I was at work and I looked and it said ‘active.’”
She was good to go, almost. Because she had not been in the field for 11 years, she had to take 500 hours of refresher courses, she blew through that in record time. She then called her contact at the state board and told him she had done everything it required of her.
“I remember when I called my contact, he said, you really want this, don’t you? And I said, I waited a long time to be able to call myself a practicing nurse. You have no idea how much I want this,” Aikins said. “And I guess the rest is history, as they say.”
Vance, in an interview in Pittsburgh before Aikins and I spoke, said that throughout his mother’s journey and the struggles in life, her compassion had always remained intact even when the drugs tried to rob it from her.
He takes a selfie of us during the interview and sends it to her as we discuss how her nursing and grandchildren have renewed her purpose.
“I think mom’s always had a big heart. She’s always loved people. She’s always been one of those people who you meet her and two minutes later you’re like her best friend. And that’s just a gift that she has,” he said.
“Obviously, she got sidetracked by the addiction issues. And it’s a little bit of guesswork here, but I do think that one of the things — if you know somebody who’s ever been addicted, they go through periods, maybe it’s a few months, maybe it’s a few years, where they’re clean. And for me at least, I’d kind of given up hope that she would just be clean and stay clean,” Vance explained.
Vance said he does not know what combination of the grace of God, faith, and purpose it was that got her to this moment of nearly 10 years sober, “but it was some piece of all of that.”
Vance said her 10-year sobriety anniversary early next year is a big deal: “Anybody who’s gone through NA or AA knows that. The 10-year medallion is a really big one. And if you think about it, my son is about 7 1/2 years old. And so I think building a relationship with him was definitely something that really gave her some pretty firm roots and motivated her to stay on the right track.”
The senator said getting her nursing license back was a major thing for his mother: “At a certain level, the addiction just seemed ever-present. It’s like the pants that you’re going to fit into one day, but it’s like, ah, you know, come on. I love mom. I wanted her to get clean, but I just never really had faith that she’d be clean enough to get back on that particular course.”
As he watched her make real progress in her addiction and her recovery, as well as saw her dedication to getting her nursing license back and to being a good grandmother, it all finally came together for her, along with a little help from “honestly the grace of God because, you can see, she wears this little cross necklace. And I think she has unconventional faith in a lot of ways, but it’s still very real and very present. And that combination worked for her.”
As for the drama around the Pokemon cards, Vance throws his head back and laughs, “She’s a very good grandmother. She spoils them a little. You know what I mean?”
Of course I do. I have four of them. It is our inalienable right as grandmothers to do that.
They have way too many Pokemon cards, Vance insists. “Mom is a very special personality, where she can engage with everybody at their level,” he said. “So an addict comes into her clinic and he’s been clean for 12 hours and he’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’m just going to go use tomorrow.’ And she finds a way to connect to that guy.”
“And my 7-year-old, [my mom will] learn the Pokemon cards because she wants to be able to talk with him about Pokemon. But then the 2 1/2-year-old, she’ll find some way to connect with Mira. And I think it’s one of the really cool things about Mom … just that she finds some way of building a relationship with the person at their level,” he explained.
“And it’s made her a remarkable grandmother because they love her,” Vance added with a broad smile.
Aikins now works at a substance abuse treatment center.
“I was a detox nurse and I loved it, and I’m still in substance use. I’m not a detox nurse now,” she said. “My title is nurse educator. I teach the patients, and then I’m just there for them. That is my purpose — to help people.”
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As for the nurse who was using on the job, Aikins said she eventually did get caught and lose her license.
“But she currently has two years clean, and she is working in a nursing home as a recreation assistant. And, you know, she says I’m a huge inspiration to her, but she’s actually a huge inspiration to me. Because of her saying if you want it bad enough, go for it — I don’t think I would have ever pursued it if I hadn’t met her and realized I could.”
Salena Zito is a national political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
