Rich and meaningful, that’s how Cindy Locke describes her life as a foster mother.
“If you want an easy life, it’s not the way to go,” she said Monday. “I have always had a heart for kids. Tons of kids need help, and there are so few places to put them.”
There’s abundant space and plenty of love in Locke’s seven-bedroom Lynnwood home.
Right now, the household includes Locke and her husband, Lenny Locke; their three biological children, daughters ages 12 and 14 and a 19-year-old son; two adopted children, a 9-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter; and one foster child, Mykal, 17.
Mykal has been in 15 homes, according to Deborah Schow, a state Department of Social and Health Services spokeswoman. That fact doesn’t begin to explain all he’s had to endure.
On Aug. 8, Mykal underwent heart-transplant surgery at Seattle Children’s hospital.
Cindy Locke, a nurse who began her career at the hospital, said that Mykal had a cardiac tumor as an infant. “Before he was 2, he had his first transplant,” she said.
Last fall, Mykal suffered a severe heart attack. He’d been living with a foster family in the Tri-Cities, but was moved to Locke’s home near Seattle Children’s as he awaited a new heart.
He was home last week, but had to return to Children’s for some “fine tuning,” Locke said. “He’s doing pretty well.”
A tragedy at another foster home was back in the news last week, an unspeakably sad story of loss in a home where foster parents had been helping children for years. The Herald reported Thursday that an Arlington fire that killed two foster children may have been set by another foster child in the home. The Snohomish County prosecutor’s office has yet to decide whether the 11-year-old boy will be charged in the case.
With news so heart-rending, it’s easy to overlook a happier story, or the ongoing need for foster homes for thousands of children.
The DSHS Children’s Administration Performance Report 2007, the latest available, said that on any given day, about 10,000 Washington children were living in an out-of-home placement. The Lockes’ home sheds hopeful light on a critical need.
“She and her husband have taken in 25 different special-needs kids, some of them with terminal illnesses,” Schow said.
In 2007, they lost their adopted teenage son, Ivan, to Ewing’s sarcoma, a type of bone cancer. “When we started the adoption process, he had a 75 percent chance his cancer would come back,” Cindy Locke said. “We just loved him.”
Ivan’s death was a lesson in compassion and a painful experience for their children. “It has made my kids deeper, richer, more wonderful people,” Locke said.
She was in her 20s, working as a rehab nurse, when Locke knew she couldn’t say no if a child was in need.
“I started taking patients home with me. They were kids who had been injured, with burns or paralysis,” she said. “They needed placement, and it was hard to find families that would take them.”
She was single when she became a licensed foster parent in 1986. When she met Lenny Locke, she had three foster children with serious medical needs. “He was the oxygen delivery man. He knew what I did,” she said.
Locke doesn’t sugar-coat foster parenting. She watches for danger signs when a new child comes to stay. “We usually keep our daughters and our 9-year-old boy upstairs, and the other kids downstairs, until we have a really good grasp — are these kids a threat? Our kids have grown up around it. If anything is amiss, they tell me,” she said.
Through Mykal’s hospital ordeal, she was happy her family was large enough so someone could almost always be with him.
“I can’t make suffering stop in this world. It just is,” Locke said. “I can make sure they’re loved and not alone.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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