Dear IF readers,

I have a sister who’s a Sister. A nun. People always act funny when I mention it. Anyway, she came to stay with us for a few days this summer. My girls love her. We call her Aunt Boo, which is a childhood name that she hated, until she got too old to mind it. I’ve never stopped calling her that. When she was getting ready to leave our house to drive back to Pittsburgh, my youngest, Francesca, asked her to take a picture of us all together, so that we would have something to remind us of our ‘time of unity’. We laughed and she took the picture.

Aunt Boo is an incredible woman with a ferocious mission as a Sister of Divine Providence. She always wanted to be a mother, so she began taking in foster children who were severely challenged, so troubled that no one would adopt them. She took in the ‘unadoptable’. The harder they were to handle, the more gleefully she accepted them into her family, and by extension, into ours.

She spends months or years, or whatever it takes, patiently teaching them, working with them, holding babies for nights on end because they won’t stop crying. Putting up with tantrums, decoding childish language, feeding special diets, looking for new ways of coping with everything from fetal alcohol syndrome to spina bifida. And then, as soon as she works her miracle and a child who was completely unrespondant becomes a bright and lively, curious and loving little person, the exact right, hopeful parents come along and steal our new family member away. Heartbreaking. And then, you know what she does? She goes out and starts the process all over again.

We have our own ‘family extender’ in Aunt Boo. She spreads her love and allows us to spread ours to so many children who need a family, for just a little while, until they are able to enter a family of their own. We welcome all of her additions and we bravely hide our tears when they go on to their destinies. It makes our own family stronger, our own sense of unity.

Take care, good reading, Tess

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