My Girl

I have two sons, I don’t have a daughter, at least not in the traditional sense.

I met Catie at the Air Force Academy when she was a sophomore. She came to my cooking classes with her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend, who were two of my favorite people. In Catie’s junior year, the roommate was away for the first semester, so she came to my classes by herself, the first one I remember was a wine appreciation class. 

If I was asked to describe Catie in one word, it would be fierce. She is passionate about everything. She talks loud and if she’s telling you a story, she rarely takes a breath between sentences, even if it takes her a half hour to tell it. She’s this way when she’s angry, hurt, happy, everything. And I love it about her. 

When she first started coming to classes, I didn’t really think Catie liked me. Or better put, she wasn’t one of the cadets I thought I connected with. The wine appreciation class was different. I overheard her talking about me, saying that she’d heard I was a good sponsor mom. 

At the Air Force Academy families sponsor cadets. It usually starts in their freshman year. Cadets are assigned to families who bring them to their house on weekends, feed them, let them do laundry, give them a haven for a few hours or a day or a weekend. Being a cadet is not for the faint of heart. And it’s especially hard the first year.

Sometimes the sponsorship works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the cadet decides they don’t need it, or they’re not comfortable with you, and sometimes it’s the family who decides it isn’t a good fit.

After their freshman year ends, cadets are on their own for sponsors. Some stay with the original families they were assigned to, some don’t bother with it. Some find coaches or in this case, instructors they connect with. And as long as your family is already in the sponsor program, you can "adopt" a cadet. There isn’t anything formal about it, it just happens.

When they were seniors, our family adopted two gymnasts, who I also met in a class I was teaching. While we were their sponsor family for only a few months, these two young men mean the world to our family. We had a party at the house after their graduation and everyone agreed, it felt more as though Dan and Matt had been our sponsor sons forever. I’ll always love them as though they were. 

When she asked, I told Catie we’d be happy to adopt her. Our only requirement was that she email me. I’d had other cadets ask and never follow through, so when she did, I knew she was serious about it. I’m pretty sure she came over that next weekend, or if not, the weekend after that.

And soon, Catie became my adopted daughter. She has wonderful parents, who she is very close to and I respect that relationship, but in my heart, she is also one of my children. I never could have predicted how close we would become. 

I listened to Catie talk about her trials and tribulations at the academy, with friends, with her family. I’ve laughed with her, cried with her, cried on her shoulder, let her be the first person who read the first book I ever wrote. We’ve had wonderful nights out, girls' day where we’ve gone shopping, or gotten our nails done. She’s helped me as much or more as I’ve helped her. 

I predicted, for most of her senior year, that I was going to be lost without her after she graduated. My prediction was accurate, but the truth is, I never expected to be this lost. I never imagined I would miss her as much as I do. 

She’s in Texas now, at tech school. So she isn’t that far away. She and I text sometimes, she was the first person who read And Then You Fall, back when it had a different title, and she read it as I wrote it, which meant I sent her ten or twenty pages at a time. She is my biggest supporter and I don’t know if I would’ve kept writing without her. She knows how to tell me what doesn’t work without destroying me, and then turns around and tells me what does work, so I feel better.

Catie texted me Sunday and told me she was drinking Starbucks, getting her nails done and missing me. My response was, come visit. Twenty minutes later, we had a plan, and if all goes okay, she'll be here the second weekend of November. I will be counting the minutes.

I cannot wait to see my girl, the girl I consider my daughter. She is smart, funny, beautiful, independent and fierce. I’m proud of her every single day and I know that, because I am reminded of it every day, when I find myself missing her.