To Three Siblings in Need, Opening Home and Heart

By STEVE KENNY
January 2, 2010

Lynette Byers was in her early 60s when she became a mother for the second time. She had been married, raised a son to adulthood, worked for years as a private pediatric nurse and lived in her Harlem apartment for decades when a scrawny 9-month-old named Curtis came into her life. He was sickly, and his mother could not care for him. He was not expected to live.

And even if he survived, it was just a foster-care arrangement, a way for Ms. Byers to keep busy while she recuperated from a car accident. But Curtis ended up thriving in Ms. Byers’s care, and about a year later she was asked to take in his older brother, Daniel. In 1995, the boys’ sister, Rayshell, came to live with them, too. She was just 17 days old.

At the time, Ms. Byers said, she thought of herself as simply a loving caretaker of another woman’s family.

“I kept them a year or two, and the mother didn’t show up,” said Ms. Byers, now 78. “I had a feeling that if I didn’t adopt them, these children would be split up.”

So she went to court and made them her own. Which is how a woman who is well past retirement age finds herself the mother of three teenagers. “It hasn’t been easy,” she says with a chuckle.

One rainy day in late autumn, the scene in the family’s two-bedroom apartment — the boys share one, and Ms. Byers and Rayshell the other — is the familiar chaos of teenagers coming home, sharing stories from school, and then racing out to meet friends.

Curtis, now 16, well over six feet tall and with a thick halo of hair, is the first home, but he is out the quickest. He’s shy, Ms. Byers says, and doesn’t like to talk about himself, even with her.

“He’s smart, and he likes science and history,” she said. “But his mind is not at school.”

Rayshell comes in next. Fourteen and a student at the High School for Law and Public Service, she has a plan: to become a model and use her earnings to pay for college and law school.

“I want to become a lawyer because I’m loud,” she jokes. In a more serious vein, she confides that her goal is to become a judge because “I like helping people, and everyone deserves a second chance.”

Daniel, 17, is last in the door after a day of classes at Park West High School in Hell’s Kitchen, where he is preparing for a career in cooking.

“He’s wanted to be a chef since he was 5 years old,” Ms. Byers said. “He says he wants to be a pastry chef, and I told him, ‘I don’t like pastry. I like food.’ ”

Daniel says he would like to enroll in a culinary school and is looking for restaurant jobs to hone his skills. To help him prepare, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, has provided $110 to help him buy an electric mixer and baking tins. The agency also has given the Byers family $50 in Neediest Cases money to pay for Rayshell’s application fee to an after-school arts program and $129 for a toolbox for Curtis.

The children have never heard from the woman who gave birth to them, but they are clear on who their mother is — even when others are not.

Rayshell says people often ask if Ms. Byers is her grandmother.

“I don’t get mad. I just say, ‘This is my mom, and I love her,’ ” she says, “and my brothers.”

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