McMullens share love, life with foster kids over the years

Carl McMullen recalls his wife Deborah’s cries fifteen years ago like they had just happened yesterday.

“She was a blubbering mess,” Carl said with a chuckle. Deb smiled, nodding in agreement.

“Those kids came to our house all the time. They played with our two kids (Carl Jr. and Candace) and the neighbor’s kids. Everyone was having a great time. I’d make them all lunch. They always knew they would be fed – all of them,” Deb said.

But one day, the kids from down the street didn't show up. Deb marched down to their house to find out why from the children's grandmother – and stood in stunned silence.

“She told me, ‘Deborah, those kids are in foster care. They came to take the kids a few days ago. They were just here visiting for awhile.’ You don’t know what that did to me. How could kids be taken like that?”

And that, Carl said, was the beginning of what would become 15 years of fostering seven boys in the care of Hamilton County JFS. “We had good luck with the boys,” Carl and Deb recalled. They would eventually adopt one, a young boy named Jonathan, who would join Candace and Carl Jr. in the McMullen family.

The McMullens' years of fostering and adopting have been life changing and eye opening, said Carl.” He described the children they fostered as “just like any other person in the family.”

“When they’d come to us, we’d have to find out what made them tick, lay down rules. We’d also give them some responsibility for things around the house. That gave them some structure,” Carl said, “sometimes for the first time in their lives.”

Some of the children they fostered were reunified with their biological families. They weren’t necessarily the strongest families coming in, Deb said, but “you just knew that when those kids went home again they would be in a more secure place, a more secure family.”

Jonathan, though, would lead to something different. He came to the McMullens’ home as the fifth child they would foster. Carl Jr. called his time with all of his foster brothers “great”, but with Jonathan it was just a little different. “I think because he ended up being adopted and moving away,” said Carl Jr. “Then, not long after that, he was back.”

Deb recalled that event well. “He had moved to Cleveland, but we had heard later that he was on his way back. It wasn’t long before he was in our house again – and we knew this was the place he was meant to be.”

Today, Jonathan is 22 years old and living on his own. Deb and Carl are proud of him, as they are of all their children. “He’s come a long way,” Deb said, “and he’s become a good person – not that he hasn’t tried as like any child would try his or her parents, Lord knows,” she said with a smile.

While they aren’t active foster parents right now, Deb and Carl both say fostering is a wonderful and enriching experience.

“It’s life changing. We as people tend to see the world in one way when we’re going through our day-to-day lives. Before we started fostering, Carl and I didn’t really see that families lived in so many different ways. It’s given us new perspective on our own lives,” she said.

Carl agreed. “We take some things for granted – food, clothing, a house, and people staying around. We learn through experiences like this that these kids’ families could just as easily be us, because we could just as easily find ourselves in those same situations that led them into services and their children into foster care.”

Now Carl and Deb talk actively with others about becoming foster parents. They talk of the results that they have seen in children and families that get back together – or in the new adoptive families kids may find.

“I love talking about it,” Deb said of her talks with others. She also teaches foster and adoptive parent pre-service training at HCJFS and the Southwest Ohio Regional Training Center.

Carl nodded his head, and said he has loved nothing more than sharing time with the kids that have come into their lives.

“How do you treat them? Just like your own,” he said. “They love that – and so do we.”