Enduring Love: Tammy’s Story of Family, Struggle, and Triumph

Every window of Tammy’s house is shut, the glass covered with curtains or blankets to block the sun beating down. An A/C unit whirs and rumbles, straining to keep up with the demands of a Kentucky summer. In the hottest months, cooling the home is a necessary expense. Lights are another matter, and so, even when Tammy and her family are home, the house often remains dark.

“It’s a struggle,” mom Tammy admits. “We make it, but prices affect us really bad. Gas, insurance, water bill, Internet for the kids’ school – I’m not going to be able to run heat this winter because of last year’s utility bill. I’m just going to have to get electric heaters.”

Tammy’s youngest, five-month-old Evan, coos on her lap. The older kids are playing outside, unbothered by the temperature.

“Three of my kids are actually my cousin’s,” Tammy says. “I don’t want to get all the way into it, but my cousin, he picked drugs over his kids, and so did their mama. CPS told me if I couldn’t take them, they were going into foster care. I said, ‘Put them in my van.’”

Help others when you can. It was a lesson Tammy learned early on from her own mom.

“My mother was a good person,” Tammy says. “You know, she raised ten of us, and she only had me and my sister. She took a lot of kids in that needed homes.”

It was three years ago that Tammy took in her cousin’s three kids. She never looked back or second-guessed her decision, and she’s currently working towards an official adoption. All her kids, biological or not, are “my world, my everything.”

But it hasn’t been easy. Even after the COVID pandemic, which disproportionately affected low-income families, Tammy and her family have faced other difficulties. Her husband lost his job and went through a period of unemployment before finding work again. Her mom, who was a rock for the family through their toughest times, passed away after suffering a series of strokes.

As Tammy said: “We make it.” But making it, day by day, was getting more and more difficult.

“I’ve had to choose from paying a bill or buying food,” she says. “Summer’s been awful. The food cost is just ridiculous; I don’t know how to explain it. The thought of the kids not having enough food has really stressed me down. It really got me down.”

But fortunately, there are many others who also believe what Tammy’s mother did: help others when you can. They include the team at 4Good Community, a local nonprofit and Feed the Children community partner, as well as all the generous donors who believe in our mission.

“It makes me feel good that there’s people out there who care,“ Tammy says. “It kind of makes me feel like I have family again.”