It is 2am and the telephone wakes Cathie and John Ridgeway.
It’s an emergency call notifying them that, within the next hour, two children will arrive at their home needing temporary care.
The details of the children’s situation are minimal. There isn’t time to worry about that. Those children will have nothing but the clothes on their backs and they will be in distress and exhausted.
For anywhere from 24 hours to the next two to three weeks, those children will find refuge in the Ridgeway home.
For Cathie, that moment is the reason she became a foster parent 30 years ago; she has the opportunity to help a child in need and she is ready.
“I think it must be really difficult for these children. They are scared, upset, angry; a lot of heavy emotions,” Cathie explained. “I don’t like any child to come into foster care, but I am always happy to have them.”
She sets to work arranging her guest room, considering details such as the ages of the children, whether it is a girl or boy, and then rearranges the room decor to suit their needs. It may be a temporary situation, but she is determined it feels like home to them.
“If they get a call at two in the morning they have to open their home to these children and it can be quite demanding … but Cathie always opens her door to them,” said Kirk Jenkins, a foster care worker with Family and Children’s Services Guelph and Wellington County. “John and Cathie are part of our emergency care team and they have taken hundreds of children into their home.”
Jenkins explained the Ridgeway’s are part of the RAFT foster program – Receiving Assessment Foster Treatment homes, meaning they offer a temporary safe place on an on-call emergency basis until the agency can establish if the child will be returning to its home or to a permanent foster family.
“It’s frustrating. It’s rewarding. It’s responding to a 6 year old boy who says his parents have cut him out of their family, or a 14-year-old boy crying in his sleep … and you ask him if he’s all right and it gets quiet, and you have to let him be,” Cathie explains. “I feel for any child who leaves their only home to come into a stranger’s house. It must be terrifying.”
Cathie’s empathy and compassion comes from the experience of her own childhood. Her parents separated when she was 6 and it wasn’t until she turned 42 that she reconnected with her birth father to make peace with her past.
Cathie and John come from large families and together raised five children of their own. But as their children grew up and left home, they decided to help other children. Fostering was a way the Ridgeways could give back to their community.
“I’ve always enjoyed having children around and as a child, I wanted to grow up and run an orphanage,” Cathie recalled. It might have seemed a whimsical idea, but she did go on to run Mount Forest Day Care Centre and later, Cathie’s Day Care Centre, taking care of children and supporting families in the community.
In 1984, they became foster parents. Since that time, 496 children have come into their home. The shortest stay for a child was overnight: the longest was the commitment to be a guardian for four years.
“I think just realizing there are children out there who needed someone to care for them – many people like to help children in other parts of the world, and I think that is wonderful,” Cathie said. “But we decided we would like to help children in our community, in our own country.”
Jenkins said, “It takes a special kind of person to want to keep giving back to their community. You have to have a real love of children and a passion for what you’re doing.”
Jenkins added, “It is not something everyone can do. You have to be willing to open your home to a child but you also have to be willing to work with the home parents.”
Cathie finds that particularly rewarding and she has the empathy to reserve judgment. “I like to interact with the parents because they often feel like they’ve failed, and that must hurt,” she said.
Instead, she prefers to focus on what those parents have done right, respecting their circumstances and focusing on the efforts they are making for positive changes in their home life.
In October, the Ridgeways received an award honouring their 30 years of service as foster parents, during the Family and Children’s Services awards event in recognition of National Foster Family Week.
“Very few people will foster for this amount of time. It is rare and amazing,” Jenkins said of that honour. “Cathie and John are exceptional foster parents and 30 years is exceptional too.”
The accolade follows their 2007 award for Ontario Foster Parents of the Year.
“It is wonderful to receive an award,” Cathie said, but it is clear that recognition is not the real reward for her or John. “ I wish people knew how rewarding fostering parenting is; how much joy there is.”
It is this positive attitude that keeps them working with the agency, even into their retirement, a time when most people want to relax into their golden years. Jenkins credited the teamwork of the couple for getting through the obvious ups and downs of fostering.
“Cathie is very committed. She goes that extra mile in her work with the children,” Jenkins said, noting that role comes along with being a wife, mother and grandmother in her own family.
“John is always right there behind her. Supporting each other is important and John always supports Cathie.”
Keeping a family together is tough enough, but keeping a marriage together in the midst of the demands of fostering seems equally difficult. To the Ridgeways, married since 1958, they look at their role as foster parents much as they do their role as spouses.
“We are very much a team. If one of us says ‘no,’ it is a ‘no’,” Cathie said.
When it comes to their parental roles, they seem to meet halfway. “John is a very calm sort of a fellow … He enjoys interacting with the children.”
He explained, “There was a lot that I left up to Cathie to do because I wasn’t home. I was working. He retired from his own plumbing business several years ago. “There is extra work, for sure, but Cathie puts everything into it.”
He jokes that he took on the role of foster parent “because it pleases my wife,” but when one sees John show off the miniature acoustic guitar he has for the children, so they can encourage the kids to share his love of music, it is easy to see he is happy to be an active part of the foster family.
“We play cards together, I help with homework, piano lessons and guitar. They help me practice for my band, [John and the Gang] and I teach them old country music,” he said.
Cathie admitted she enjoys watching children try something new, be it music or Sports or whatever they do in their time with her family. “Every child needs their own place to shine.”
They credit their son Jamie, 32, who lives with them, for also being a support. “When Jamie knows we have a young child coming, he gets them a Teddy bear ready in their room,” Cathie said. “Something they can keep with them when they leave.”
And those children will leave. They are told upon arrival the Ridgeway home is not a permanent place for them. But that doesn’t make the transition any easier for the foster family to let go of their “friends,” the word Cathie uses for all the children in her care.
“You have to put your own needs aside and do what is best for the child first,” Jenkins said.
“You do have to show emotion, to be caring to the child and form an attachment with them, but when the child returns home, you have to let them go and do what is best for that child. It is an emotional process, but even if you are sad to see them go, you have to be happy to see the move into their future.”
When asked how she says goodbye to the foster children, her friends, Cathie’s reply is simple: “With a hugs and a telephone number and I say, ‘We’d really like to hear from you’.” She added, “It never gets easier.”
When asked if she is a strong person, someone who controls the emotions of letting go of the foster children, Cathie smiles. “As hard as it is to be a foster parent, you have to have emotions. You have to have feelings and I believe having emotions doesn’t make you weak; it makes you strong.”
In all their years of fostering, the Ridgeways said fewer than a dozen youths were really difficult to manage. That was likely due to the empathy and respect they are shown when they enter Cathie and John’s home.
“The young people we get only know what they’ve seen or experienced. How could they know anything different?” Cathie asks. “To be a foster parent you have to be open and accepting. Acceptance is important. You have to be open and willing to grow and have compassion.”
Jenkins believes it is the generosity and love in the Ridgeway home that makes the couple a successful foster family, and Cathie and John lead by example.
“Cathie has been very positive, and there have been ups and downs, but her positive attitude keeps her above it and she never gives up on the children,” said Jenkins.
That is because, as Cathie said, “It is an honour to see the children become themselves.”
There is a need for more foster parents in Wellington County, particularly for teenage placements. For more information, visit www.fcsgw.org.
