Who is JD Vance’s mom? Nurse Beverly Aikins’ journey of addiction and redemption

JD Vance often mentions her on the campaign trail, Amy Adams plays her in a movie and her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting attendees just know her as “Bev.”

Vance’s mother Beverly Aikins has been a fixture of the Ohio Senator’s life .since he entered politics, and he mentioned her struggles again during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night.

“I was raised in a working class family,” he said in his opening comments at the debate. “My mother required food assistance for periods of her life. My grandmother required Social Security help to raise me. And she raised me in part because my own mother struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my early life.”

Ms Aikins has been sober and clean for 10 years from alcohol and heroin, according to the New York Times.

In that decade,her son wrote a bestselling memoir which became a movie, was elected to the US Senate and has now ascended to become the GOP vice presidential nominee. As Vance’s profile rose to the national stage, so did his mother’s.

Here is everything we know about JD Vance’s mother.

Ms Aikins grew up in an abusive household. Her mother Bonnie was abused by her father, who was a “violent drunk,” according to Vance’s memoir. Ms Aikins, raised in a chaotic environment, went on to provide a similar upbringing for her own children, Vance says, including what he called a “revolving door of father figures.”

The nurse had her first child Lindsey at the age of 19. Five years later, she gave birth to Vance. Ms Aikins’ parents’ volatile relationship had calmed by the time her children were growing up, providing a safe haven for her young son. He dedicated Hillbilly Elegy to them, writing that his grandparents were “without question or qualification, the best things that