Hero Grandma Uproots Life to Save Grandbaby From Foster Care After Son Dies
We hope family always has our back, but sometimes folks step up beyond the call of duty – like Renee Rucker, a successful Baltimore business owner who uprooted her entire life and moved to Los Angeles in order to raise her 1-year-old granddaughter, Skylar.
When Renee’s 28-year-old son, Gary, died suddenly from a heart-attack in Dec. 2016, his baby girl was slated to become a ward of the court. Grandma was having none of that!
“The law in California had indicated that any child under the age of 3 years old who was in foster care was automatically up for adoption six months,” Renee told PEOPLE TV for their new series, Family Portrait. “I could not have my only grandchild up for adoption, I would never be able to see her again.”
So she and her 12-year-old daughter Jael put everything aside – home, business, school – to move to Cali, where they had no friends and no family… except for little Skylar.
It hasn’t been easy, but now the family is living together under one roof. Renee, who said Gary “never even wanted to have a child unless he was there for that child, and was a father to that child” thinks he would approve because she’s raising Skylar more as a grandparent than a parent and always taking into account what he would have wanted.
Gary “will always continuously live on in Skylar,” Renee says. “She was his light and his love, and I want her to know that, and I am going to continue to let her know that all the days of her life, how much her daddy loved her and how much she was his princess.”
Now that’s what family is about!!
You can watch Family Portraits on PeopleTV.com or download the PeopleTV app. The series centers on personal stories covering embryo-adoption, in-vitro fertilization, blended families and more, including the emotional look into the lives of the Rucker family.
