Love Actually

Two Cups of Tea at Hope’s Cafe

My junior year in college I was startled when I called home only to hear the phone answered by a voice I didn’t recognize: “Emerson residence, Cathy speaking.”  Now even more confused, as at that time I was going by Kathy, I managed to ask to speak to my mother. 

This is how I learned that when I first started college, my parents had applied to be foster parents.  Given how hard foster homes are to come by, it is astonishing that my parents hadn’t been contacted until that year for an emergency placement “for the weekend.”  As often happens in Foster Care World, “temporary” can extend for lack of another placement. 

I had two older brothers.  As a child, I had sometimes pretended I had a sister and complained to my mother that I didn’t have one.  It was clear when I returned home at the end of my junior semester, that I now had a “sister.”  Cathy, who had begun to go by Catherine to decrease confusion, was seven years younger than I.  I tried to include her in some of my activities, though her attention-seeking behavior was annoying.  Once my boyfriend and I invited her to go to the lake with us to walk around, feed the ducks. She managed, quite deliberately, to fall in the water.  Neverthelesss, I endeavored to be the big sister: sewed her some new clothes for her birthday, invited her for a weekend at my dorm. 

We were perhaps developing some ties. But I was pretty consumed with my own life:  college graduation, taking my first job, moving away from home.  By the time Catherine was 17, she left my parents’ home and neither they nor I expected she would be back in our lives.  But the next year she asked to return.  My parents agreed and she lived with them for another year.  I was in Tennessee in graduate school by then and only kept up with her through my mother.  I recall she came to my parents’ fiftieth anniversary celebration and I saw her again at a family reunion some years later. I was always happy to see her.   But it was when my mother died that she and I really connected in a deeply shared grief.  My mother’s influence had made all the difference to her and she clearly loved her. 

After the funeral she and I spent some time together.  I learned the story behind the emergency placement all those years ago with my parents.  She, though not her  sister, had been adopted by a couple after she and her sister were removed due to severe neglect by their mother.  The mother would leave for days at a time while Catherine, not yet school age, was tasked with taking care of her younger sister. 

The adoptive home had become a living nightmare, the adoptive mother having some severe mental health problems.  She became abusive even to the point of locking Catherine out in the middle of a severe storm.  As the abuse escalated, Catherine felt this woman was intent on killing her.  One evening she gathered what cash she could find and some pancake mix, which must have been the only food she could readily find, and took a little suitcase to a local hotel to check in.  The desk clerk checked her in and promptly called the police, which led to the desperate call from the foster care worker to my mother.

The year following my mother’s death, my father died.  Catherine came to help me during that time and our connection and affection deepened.  I could not love her more if she were my biological sister.  I am grateful my parents took her in. I admire her for taking that opportunity over time to ground herself, to develop into a beautiful, caring human being.

  My mother had wanted to be a nurse but her father had thought that not fitting, claiming nurses had gotten a bad reputation as loose women in World War I.  He determined she should major in English.  Even that was not to be, as he died during her freshman year. Mother was unable to return the following year due to finances.  Catherine established a scholarship fund for nurses at the Baptist University in Oklahoma in memory of my mother. Eventually, Catherine became a nurse herself. 

“The most powerful force in life is love,” said Nelson Rockefeller.  I would add that love actually can start from such a tiny seed, as small as answering a foster care worker’s phone call, and develop in extraordinary ways. 

The invitation is open to share two cups of tea anytime at Hope’s Café or anywhere you share companionship and conversation.

May we bearers of hope, the “wait staff” at Hope’s Café, for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate