Cori Henderson Hoffler doesn’t shy away from telling her own story, but she’d rather her teammates and the people around her get the spotlight first. That’s just how she’s wired.
She’s soft-spoken, even quiet at times, but when she speaks to tell her story, anyone within earshot should sit down and pull up a chair.
This is a good one.
There’s no fairy godmother, no pea under the mattress, and no yellow brick road. It’s a story that is uniquely Cori’s to tell, one of heartache and heartbreak, but also one of restoration – and of redemption.
*****
Life was not easy for young Cori. She wasn’t a Henderson back then, but we’ll get there.
The growing-up years were difficult. Her mom left the family when Cori was seven years old and her father was plagued by issues of his own. As Cori says it now, “a lot of the time, I needed somebody to just take care of me.”
“No one knew really what was going on at my house and with my dad,” Cori recalls now. “No one knew that there were issues there; he always covered them up really, really well… looking back now, I really had no idea then that it wasn’t normal. It *was* normal [for me]. The way I know to say it now is that it was a ‘survivor mentality’. Always just ‘let’s get through this’.”
Over time, some things became more obvious. Frequent moves meant new houses, evictions, and a lot of living out of hotels. There were a few instances where Cori lived with friends for a few months at a time in order to be able to stay in her same school or to be able to continue playing sports.
“I saw my friends’ lives and theirs were normal, but that wasn’t what my life was like and that was okay.”
For the preteens and teenagers in Cori’s middle school-aged social group, youth nights at a local church were a popular place.
“The cool thing to do was to go to the youth ministry at this church,” Cori recalls now. “I started going there, me and my group of friends, and we would just go to youth nights and stuff. It was fun, you know? And then I just kept randomly going; I wasn’t consistent at all, but I was going.”
It was because of those youth nights that a young woman named Megan Henderson entered the picture. The daughter of the church’s pastor, Megan was the small group leader for middle-school girls, one of whom was Cori. The two quickly became fairly inseparable.
“She took care of me consistently,” Cori recounts. “[Megan] would pick me up from school almost every day, take me to get food, pick me up anytime that I was in a situation that wasn’t good.”
The Henderson home itself also entered the picture swiftly and often. Though she doesn’t use the exact word to define it, the house became a refuge, of sorts, for young Cori; a place to escape and, at times, simply a place to go.
“As I needed a place to go more and more, that’s where I started going was the Henderson house,” she says.
*****
It’s at the Henderson house that two important people enter our story.
David and Mendy Henderson – Megan’s parents, for those keeping track – are the patriarch and matriarch of the Henderson clan. David, an ordained pastor, planted a church in North Carolina in 2000; the church has since grown to over 500 members and he still shepherds the flock.
The more time that Cori spent at the Henderson house, the better she got to know David and Mendy. And the more they sought to know her.
“They just bought in and really fought to know what was going on behind the scenes, things that nobody else could see and didn’t know,” Cori says.
“They are fighters for people who need someone to fight for them and they really, really fought for me.”
Eventually, when another change in living situation necessitated Cori simply finding a place to go, one door opened and it was a familiar door, one that she had stepped through many times prior.
Paperwork was done to make Cori’s residence official with the Hendersons; it also gave her an address to be able to stay in the same, familiar school and to play sports. For Cori, the move was just like any other – the latest in a long line, lasting until the next change came along. She may have been the only one on that wave length, though.
“In my head, yes, I was just there for ‘safekeeping’,” Cori said, borrowing a phrase from the question itself. “In [the Hendersons’] head, no – I think their intention was that I was going to be in their family forever.”
“The biggest differences were in how [the Hendersons] treated me,” Cori added. “In some other situations, I was taken really good care of but I was a guest – but [the Hendersons] loved me, but also corrected me. As a 15-year-old girl, I didn’t like that at first, but if I did something wrong, I was disciplined; I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted… I was treated like one of their kids from the start.”
*****
Valentine’s Day and February 14 have never been just a random holiday for Cori – for someone born on February 13th, she always knew that the nearing of Valentine’s Day meant that it would be her birthday one day earlier.
In 2019, the “holiday of love” took on a whole meaning for Cori and the Hendersons.
Amidst the celebration of her 18th year of life, one gift in particular stood out. In the bag was a Bible with the name “Cori Henderson” printed on the front.
“That was the first thing that had that name on it for me, but I still didn’t process it,” Cori remembers. “It was kinda just like ‘oh, that’s really cute!'”
She may not have processed everything after seeing the name on the Bible, but the second gift in the package left no doubt. It was a manilla folder with paperwork inside – paperwork already filled out and needing only to be filed legally, paperwork that would officially make Cori the newest member of the Henderson family.
By this time, Cori had lived with the Hendersons for nearly three years; very quickly after moving into the Henderson house, she saw the other kids as siblings. Referring to David and Mendy as dad and mom was a little tougher, but even that came with time. The paperwork wasn’t totally out of the blue, but seeing what had been just an idea now in actual, physical form brought tears to Cori’s eye.
“We had definitely talked about it, we would talk about if I wanted to get adopted,” Cori said. “But [the Hendersons] were always like ‘It’s whatever you want to do; you’re our daughter, no matter what you last name is, no matter what the courts say’. And I always knew – yes, this is what I want. It couldn’t be a thing until I was eighteen, so for a while up until then, it just wasn’t really talked about anymore. So I was really surprised on my 18th birthday. I had no idea what they were doing.”
When she sat there, on her birthday, staring at the paperwork in the manilla folder, Cori was overcome with emotion. The reality of what the papers meant affected her emotionally; “it was just like a new identity”, as she puts it. The family wasn’t new and the love and care that each of them had for one another wasn’t some kind of startling revelation, but the new name and what came with it had a deeper meaning:
“I didn’t have to be attached to my past anymore.”
*****
For the daughter of a pastor, even a daughter who joined the family later in life, you can guess the importance of faith in Cori’s life and you’d be right.
That faith sustained her through some of the toughest moments – even as a child, she relied on her young faith to get through some of the darkest times: “I never felt hopeless and I remember always feeling like something good was going to come out of it eventually, that there was always a light at the end of it.”
It was that same faith that, months into her taking up residence at the Henderson house, put life into new perspective for teenaged Cori.
“I was in a lot of trouble and I’d gotten caught; I was doing whatever I wanted to do and not following any of the rules they set for me,” Cori admits. “I was just in a lot of trouble and one night, I officially gave my life to the Lord and actually started following the Lord and it changed literally everything. The way that I saw my family, everything.”
As part of that total change in perspective, there was another, more over-arching piece of the puzzle that also came with that new outlook on life. The presence of two true parental figures in her life was not something that Cori was used to at any point. There were struggles, in recognizing the value of structure and of rules, but that changed, too, with her new perspective.
“It changed how I loved, how I received love, and it completely changed how I saw that they cared so deeply for me.”
*****
In the years since, Cori Henderson has become Cori Hoffler, marrying her longtime beau last fall. Of course, there is also softball – she’s the starting second baseman and a key offensive player in the lineup of a Charlotte team that has burst onto the scene in the last couple of years.
She’s a hometown kid and her family is a fixture at games. Most families don’t have a story like this one, but most families also don’t get the opportunity to tell how they fought for one another and how they *chose* to be one unit.
The Henderson family, and Cori specifically, are the exception.
