She has been an Air Force switchboard operator, a prison guard and the owner of a day-care center, but Lois Coby didn't find her true calling until a certain Thanksgiving dinner guest showed up at her door.
Gerald Eley, a young man with a developmental disability, had no place to go for the holiday. Purely by chance, a social worker asked Coby if she would mind taking him in -- just for the long weekend.
Nearly 12 years later, Gerald's photograph can be found in the family's photo albums -- along with pictures of at least two dozen foster-care children who discovered the love and comfort they needed.
In a society where drug-addicted mothers routinely give birth to children with dire physical, mental and behavioral problems, Coby is something close to a savior. The career she discovered was motherhood, caring for society's most damaged kids, and it has demanded more than she knew she could give.
"This is the work I was meant to do," said Coby, 44, without hesitation. "They're my special angels."
Some will return to Coby's home in Woodlawn today for a Mother's Day dinner. Even after her foster children have turned 21 and "aged out" of the foster-care system, they tend to come back -- for meals, or help, or sometimes just a good hug.
Lois and her 61-year-old husband, John, wouldn't want it any different. To the Cobys, these children are family -- always the priority in their lives.
"She just loves kids," said John, her husband of 22 years. "Every time a new one arrives, I always tell her, 'Lois, now don't get too attached to this one.' It just never seems to work out that way."
In Maryland, there are more than 10,000 children in foster care -- out-of-home child placements assigned by the courts. Traditionally the toughest to place are the special-needs children with multiple medical problems to whom Coby is most attracted.
While foster care has gotten its share of bad publicity in recent years -- kids getting shuffled between homes, and incidents of abuse or neglect -- the system remains the vital safety net for children whose families are incapable of raising them.
Coby's work demands that she be willing to change dozens of adult-sized diapers each week, to deal with kids who bite or fight or act up, or who may be destructive or carry the HIV virus. Johns Hopkins Hospital is practically a second home, so often must she take one of her children there to treat some chronic disease.
Mannie, a 10-year-old boy she has cared for since he was an infant, is autistic, bipolar, blind and profoundly mentally retarded. He was born to a woman who tried to abort him with a needle full of heroin.
His behavior can be unpredictable, and the webbing around his bed is zipped up each night to form an enclosure so that he can't harm others while the family is sleeping.
But he can also be loving and sweet- natured, a 93-pound boy with the innocence of a toddler. Coby makes no bones about it: He is the toughest case she's ever had, the one she complains about the most, a candidate for institutionalization, and above all else, her favorite child.
"Last time at the hospital, his neurologist asked me, 'When are you going to say enough is enough?' "
"I told him, 'When they throw dirt on my face.' I'm not blowing smoke, either. That's the truth. Nobody's getting my kids."
As she says those words, her eyes blaze and the twang of Coby's native Arkansas ratchets up a notch. The 12th in a family of 14 children, she tends to talk fast and excitedly -- and plainly, too. She has little patience for the indolent, particularly bureaucrats or school officials who aren't doing right by her foster children.
"I admire her, and I know the pain- in-the-butt side of her, too," said Louis M. Tutt, president of the Maryland School for the Blind, the Northeast Baltimore school where Mannie and Coby's other current foster son, David, is enrolled.
"She's a go-getter. You don't mess with her kids."
That's a far cry from the shy, small-town girl with curly brown hair who escaped by enlisting in the Air Force. She was introduced to her future husband at a disco on Valentine's Day in 1976. Her girlfriends had advised her never to give a stranger their dormitory phone number, but this one time, she thought it would be OK. They married later that same year.
Their union left her estranged from most of her siblings. It was a painful ordeal. John Coby, who grew up near Prince Frederick in Southern Maryland's Calvert County, is African-American. Lois Coby is white.
Her parents remained supportive until the day they died. Coby speaks particularly fondly of her mother, who almost single-handedly raised the family because her husband, a tire salesman, was on the road so much.
"If I could be a tenth of the mother she was," Coby said.
After the Air Force, the couple lived in Nevada, where Lois worked as a prison guard in Carson City ("The easiest job I ever had. Dangerous, but easy," she recalled). They moved to Maryland in 1983 to be closer to John's family and opened their home as a neighborhood day-care center.
Coby gave birth to two children, John Jr. who is now 19, and Kimberly, now 21. John is a private in the National Guard and seeks a career in the Army Special Forces. Kim works part-time as an in-home medical assistant to the elderly. The mother of a 3-year-old, she recently became a foster mother to a special-needs child.
After the family's encounters with Gerald -- he returned for Christmas and summer vacation -- Coby quizzed her family: Would they be willing to take on special-needs foster children?
"If they had said no, I wouldn't have done it," she said.
Since that day, Coby has looked after Joe, Roy, Valerie, Naja, Bill, Rick, Cherry, Tim, David, Phil, (not to mention Gerald, who stayed for four years) and many others whose names are hard to recall. Some stayed briefly; others she looked after for years.
Currently, they have three foster children, including Mannie and David.
David, whom Coby took in nearly five years ago from a crack-addicted mother, has a rare syndrome that has caused dwarfism and glaucoma, as well as kidney and liver ailments. Angel, 3, arrived two years ago. Also born to a crack-addicted mother, she has crippling cerebral palsy, mild to moderate mental retardation and crossed eyes. She also loves to hug most everyone who comes through the door.
Rounding out the family is Theresa, 8, whom the Cobys took in when she was just 6 weeks old and later adopted. Like the other children, she is both visually impaired and developmentally disabled.
To get the children to school requires Coby and her husband to rise at 5:30 and work continuously bathing, dressing, feeding and administering medications for most of four hours. It is exhausting work -- small wonder that the average foster parent lasts only about five years.
"All our parents do great things, but Mrs. Coby is exceptional," said Kris Butcher, chief of foster care for the Baltimore Association for Retarded Citizens, which supervises Coby's work. "Every child we send to that home, she welcomes with open arms."
Coby doesn't view herself as anything special; she's just fond of her foster children. Dozens of their photographs line the living-room walls and staircase of her modest, two-story home near Security Square Mall.
Sometimes, all she'd like in return is a day off. "And maybe dinner at Phillips [Harborplace] and a walk around the [Inner] Harbor," she said with a sigh.
BARC officials encourage foster parents to seek guidance from Coby, and fellow moms frequently call her when questions arise.
Phyllis Sweetwine, a Pikesville mother of three, was a longtime bank employee who used to send her kids to Coby for day care. She was so taken with Coby's example, however, she decided to quit her job and become a foster mother.
"The thing that impresses me the most is that her house is a kid's house," said Sweetwine. "She's not upset if someone sits the wrong way or knocks over a glass."
Under a government subsidy, BARC pays Coby $4,650 per month to look after the children, a far higher rate than the $535 monthly average normally paid per foster child in Maryland.
But Coby's expenses are greater, too -- like the eight cases of diapers and three cases of formula her children go through in a month, not to mention the long hours both she and her husband put in each day.
"This is not the way to get rich," she said.
Still, there are rewards. Doctors never expected Mannie to develop as far as he can. Angel wasn't supposed to walk -- but does.
The worst moment in Coby's life as a foster mother took place eight years ago when a little girl she had named Sissy was taken away. The girl was HIV-positive and had been raped at age 4 months by her mother's boyfriend. Coby loved her desperately and raised her from 6 months to 22 months. But a member of her extended family ultimately stepped forward and adopted the child. Coby has not heard from the girl's family since.
"My philosophy with the children we have now is that before we lose them, we'll adopt them," she said. "I'll take on a second job if I have to. These kids are mine."
Information
For more information about how to become a foster parent in Maryland, call the state Department of Human Resources adoption and foster-care hot line at 800-555-1345.
Pub Date: 05/09/99