Now, Patterson is ready to retire.
“God put me here to do something on this Earth,” she said. “I think that was what he designed me to do, something I truly enjoyed. I loved every one of my children.”
Sakina Scott, then 15, and her baby had bounced between several foster homes before landing with “Miss Patterson” in the early 2000s in Silver Spring, Md. Once there, Scott said, she “pretty much never left.”
Patterson became her anchor, caring for her daughter and making sure she finished high school, Scott said. Years later, she remembered the love that Patterson showed her child as “a huge blessing.”
“We were both strangers,” said Scott, now 37. “But she’d never treated us that way.”
Scott’s child, Madison Scott, is now a talented basketball player at the University of Mississippi with her sights set on entering the WNBA draft next year. She’s running a short camp for middle school students this summer, aiming to teach them about teamwork, communication and patience through basketball.
Madison Scott said she learned how to coach from her “Nana” Patterson, who she said maintained high expectations for her foster children while helping them grow.
“You felt like you weren’t alone,” she said. Patterson “understood that each kid … brought up through her house, that they were different. She knew their journeys were going to be different.”
Those journeys varied from the moments Patterson met them. Sometimes she brought children home from the hospital soon after they were born, their young mothers in tow. Other times she took in toddlers or older children.
Patterson usually cared for about five children at a time, although sometimes she was fostering eight or nine. She continued to take in children long after her two biological kids had left the nest.
“I always had a pretty good-sized family that I would be walking in the door with,” she laughed.
Patterson credited her mother and grandmothers with teaching her the generosity and resourcefulness that she leaned on while caring for her foster children. Her mother and maternal grandmother always gave food to the relatives and friends who stopped by their family home in Northwest D.C., Patterson said, especially those who needed a little help. Loved ones who visited would return home with containers of coffee, bologna sandwiches and leftover stew.
“Whatever my mother and grandmother had, they always managed to share it and take care of somebody else,” Patterson said. “People were always coming to our front door. And I don’t think my grandmother or my mother ever turned anyone away.”
Despite the challenges of the Great Depression, Patterson said, her mother and grandmothers never let her and her three older sisters think of themselves as poor.
“They always made you feel like you had everything that you needed and whatever you had,” she said. “They were able to do it in a way that you always felt proud.”
Patterson wanted all her children to have the same things she had as a young girl. Her own clothes may not have been brand new, but they were unfailingly clean and starched, with bows placed neatly in her hair by her mother. As a foster mom, Patterson didn’t think twice about staying up all night to sew a dress for one of her daughters.
Sakina Scott still connects with Patterson almost every day. While talking with a Post reporter, in fact, another call buzzed through on her phone.
It was Patterson, Scott said, calling to check in.
