How Acceptance Can Change Everything

On late Sunday mornings, the Shaler Area Elementary School swimming pool is a lively scene.

A group of mothers gather in one corner of the bleachers holding travel mugs filled with whatever’s left of their morning coffee.

There are people all over the pool. Some paddle with blue kick boards, others throw a football and some just want to splash and play in the water.

It is a scene of organized chaos.

If you look closely, you may notice some people in the pool fall somewhere on the spectrum of Down Syndrome, autism or another form of special needs.

But from afar, everyone looks the same. It’s like an indoor version of any day at the community pool.

“Take me to the finish line, Ben!” someone yells over the commotion. Mid-race, she then hops on her opponent’s back and points towards the end of the pool as if she’s ready for blast off.

This is Cate.

Cate has brown hair that used to fall halfway down her back, but now sits just past her shoulders after recently donating it to children with hair loss. She has a round face that’s usually spread into a smile with dimples on either side.

At 22 years old, Catherine Potter has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Duquesne University. She is in pursuit of a second degree in education as she student teaches 7th and 8th graders at Pine Richland Middle School.

This fall, she started to coach middle school and high school girls’ basketball in the Hampton School District. She grew up in Glenshaw, PA and attended Shaler Area High School.

Cate has faced the indescribable hardship of losing a parent and has the equally indescribable experience of living life with an autistic sibling.

Over the years, she’s become involved with four programs involving people with intellectual disabilities, one being the swim program on Sundays from 11:30-12:30 called Shaler Area Activities for the Handicapped (SAAH)
“My interactions with special needs kids is not me trying to be this big person, but more so just part of who I am,” Cate said. “It comes natural to me.”

Her approach is simple. She said people with special needs are people first. Their disability comes second.

She can’t remember a time when her mom told her or her siblings that her brother has autism. She told them that Ben is their brother and they will love him the way he is.

Ben is 27 years old, but he won’t admit he’s older than 20. He tells everyone he is Peter Pan and he’s never growing up. He is timid and shy and he squints when he smiles.

Cate also has two older half brothers, an older sister and a younger sister. Her older sister, Carrie, is one of her role models and works as an emotional support teacher at Seneca Valley High School. Her younger sister, Marnie, is two years apart from her and she is her best friend.

Growing up with Ben inspired Cate to get involved in the special needs community.

“On a day-to-day basis, Ben just makes me happy,” Cate said.

In high school, she volunteered with SAAH and a summer baseball league called Reserve All Stars. She continues to volunteer at both programs today.

“I have been so fortunate to immerse myself in a community of individuals that hardly ever have a bad day, will forgive you for any shortcoming you may have, and will give you a hug every two seconds if you truly needed it,” Cate said.

She gets others involved, too. Marnie is now a junior at Duquesne and is involved in many of the same programs as Cate.

She’s also gotten many of her high school and college friends to go to Reserve All Stars. The program presented Cate with an award last year for recruiting over 10 volunteers, which was a big involvement increase and huge help.

“You always want to include people in the things you do that make you happy,” Cate said.

She strives to show others that although people with intellectual disabilities may not be capable of understanding at a usual level of understanding, “they know happiness more than any other human being and that’s what you need to embrace them for,” Cate said.

At all of these programs, each volunteer is paired with an individual with special needs. They refer to each other as “buddies.”

One of Cate’s first buddies was a completely nonverbal boy at the swim program. If he did talk, it was only yes or no answers.

Cate loves to talk and talk she did. She would talk his ear off and she said she knows there were days where he did not want to listen to her chitchat.

Today, he walks up to her and says, “Hi, Ms. Cate,” and initiates full conversation on his own. Cate can’t get over how much he’s grown.

“I feed off of the impact I have on other people,” Cate said. “Seeing other people happy… that’s like satisfaction that I did what I was supposed to do for the day.”

For Reserve All-Stars, she has had the same buddy for six years now. She is a small girl in a wheelchair with a rare neurological condition called Angelman syndrome and she is nonverbal.

She always tells the girl about her day and all the good things (and rather frustrating things) that happened throughout it. Although the girl can’t talk, she smiles and laughs.

“That is a constant reminder to me,” Cate said. “Like, ‘ok Cate, somebody cut you off in traffic, it’s not the end of the world.’”

Around the same time Cate found her place within the special needs community in high school, her father’s cancer took a turn for the worst.

When she was in seventh grade, her father was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). He underwent chemotherapy, radiation treatments and went in and out of remission several times.

She took on a lot of responsibility as her father went in and out of retirement due to treatments and her mother went back to school to get a nursing degree.

Sophomore year of high school, her dad went into cardiac arrest two times within 24 hours. The second time, he could not be revived.

Cate said Ben didn’t understand what was going on at the time. He went into a sort of panic mode.

“Losing a parent is hard enough in itself and trying to understand that whole situation, then watching your brother struggle… it was really hard to deal with,” Cate said.

After her father passed, Cate took time to work on herself, her needs and her goals so she could continue to give the best of herself to the community she’d grown to know and love.

“You are more important than anyone else,” her high school teachers had told her.

Her teachers’ support during this time inspired her to pursue a degree in education and she decided to fulfill her dad’s wish for her to pursue a future in mathematics.

“People that didn’t know anything about my past, told me, ‘I’m here for you, you need to be there for yourself,’” Cate said about her teachers. “It was huge in how I approached my life from then on.”

She dove head first into the challenging math program at Duquesne, but also made time for Best Buddies and Duquesne’s work-study program with St. Anthony’s.

Best Buddies is an international organization that focuses on friendships between individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Through this program, college students can volunteer their time to create a one-on-one friendship with an individual with an IDD.

Cate had the same buddy all four years of Best Buddies and became a member of the executive board her last two years on campus. She got to know all 150 members with IDDs.

She planned and attended events for college students and the IDD community to participate in together. Last year, she helped the program with its first ever talent show. Her brother, whom she mentioned is extremely shy, performed “Do You Want to Build A Snowman?”

“Needless to say, I cried,” Cate said.

At the end of the program as Cate walked across the stage at their mini-graduation ceremony, her buddy said to her, “you can’t leave me, Cate Potter.”

“People sometimes forget things,” Cate said. “But he remembers the impact I’ve had on his life over the past four years and that is monumental.”

Two days a week, Cate also worked for the St. Anthony’s program.

This program is a post-secondary program for individuals with IDDs. It helps build a bridge between the “school world” and the “real world.” Students work at different sites around the Pittsburgh area to learn job skills. They also learn life skills, like how to manage money and navigate transportation. The program helps these individuals learn how to be as independent as possible.

Cate’s position was in the life skills apartment located in Squirrel Hill where she helped students learn how to cook, clean, do laundry, grocery shop and other skills involved with living independently. Her supervisor, Ann Hanley, was sad to see her go last year, but thankful she had the opportunity to meet Cate.

“Cate just gets it,” Ann said. “She doesn’t treat them as if they’re any different than anybody else because they’re not. I mean, I guess they are in some ways as far as abilities, but she treats everybody the same.”

Ann said Cate’s positive attitude is something that has had a lasting impact on her life.

Marnie continues to work at St. Anthony’s and follow her sister’s lead within the special needs community. She’s learned a lot from her sister, but above all else she shares Cate’s values of kindness and acceptance.

“Cate’s big thing is accepting people for their differences,” Marnie said. “Just because somebody is not like you doesn’t mean you can’t accept them or interact with them. She wants everyone to feel that they’re accepted and that there’s nothing wrong with the way that they are.”

Cate’s approach to life is quite simple. She treats people like people. She surrounds herself with happiness and positivity. She looks forward, not back.

She said she is constantly aware of the impact people have on her life. And she recognizes that it is a privilege to be a part of all the lives of the people she’s met.

To everyone she knows today and to all the people she will meet someday, here is what she has to say:

“My mission in life is to allow people to realize that our hearts have the ability to hold so much joy and love, regardless of how many holes may be in it.”