A Troubled Child Changed Her Life, Kindling a Labor of Love

Six years ago, Marleen Marx met a troubled 18-month-old child named Mark, lost her heart and changed her life. At the time, Marx was making a modest living designing and manufacturing educational toys in her home and working very hard at single parenting her 11-year-old daughter, Angela.

Mark had been taken away from a severely neglectful family environment and put in a foster home. And another. And another. By the time Marleen met him, Mark had been moved 11 times in 14 months. “He was incredibly smart,” says Marx today, “and intensely angry and totally out of control. And this anger was upsetting whole families.”

Marx, who is both idealistic and stubborn, saw Mark as a child with enormous resources who had never been permitted to develop. He needed a sense of stability and self-worth. “I have a strong distaste for injustice,” she says, “and what was happening to Mark was unjust. The system that was trying to help him was not malicious--just overworked. So I tried to take some pressure off.”

She followed Mark for a year, relieving his foster parents when the pressure was building, mediating when his natural mother came for visits, giving love and time whenever and however they were needed. Result: Mark was stabilized and adopted and is growing up to be a useful citizen. And Marleen Marx got into a new line of work.

Well, partially. She still had to earn a living, and so she continued to work hard at her toy line, which she calls Busybodies. But her experience with Mark and subsequent research that told her there were dozens--even hundreds--of lost children like Mark in Orange County set her off on another course. If volunteers could be found who would be willing to do what she did with Mark, wouldn’t it ease the burden on public agencies and foster parents and, most important, give the children a better shot at stability they had never known? She believed strongly that it would, and so she started an organization called Foster Care Ministries. Its intent was to find people willing to do what Marleen did with Mark.

There were some conspicuous successes. A young computer programmer named Bill in his mid-20s offered help, and Marleen introduced him to a 7-year-old we will call Mike (real names are not used unless the child has been adopted) with learning disabilities. Together they rode bikes, went to the beach and played football; Bill even took Mike along on some of his dates. He saw Mike twice a month for almost five years, making it possible for Mike to stabilize his life in one foster home. Last year, Bill was married, and Mike was his ring bearer. The flower girl was a foster child that Bill’s new wife had befriended in the same way.

Assistance to foster parents sometimes took unexpected directions. One foster mother had an infant die in her home of medical complications for which she was in no way responsible. But she was desolate and full of remorse. So FCM bought her a plane ticket to go to her family home for Thanksgiving and get her head straight. Another sickly child, deeply loved, died in a foster home. The child’s real parents had disappeared and the foster parents couldn’t afford a proper funeral. So the child had to be buried with public funds--which meant a pauper’s funeral with no flowers. This deeply distressed the grieving foster mother, so FCM came in and supplied flowers, a minister and caring people. “For a few hours,” Marx recalls, “we created an extended family.”

She also remembers vividly a troubled 3-year-old girl who had been moved six times in seven months. Her new foster mother was loving and well-intentioned, but she had four other children in her home and the load seemed intolerable. FCM helped her pay for day care twice a week to relieve the stress and stabilize both the home and the foster child who, now free of behavior problems, was soon adopted.

FCM worked well enough that Marleen Marx was named 1984 Volunteer of the Year by Orange County Social Services. But Marx is very tough on herself--and so is her assessment of those years. “I suppose I accomplished a lot,” she says today, “but it’s hard to see it now. I established a summer camp for abused kids and had two dozen volunteers, and we prevented several dozen kids from being moved by giving relief to foster parents. But in the midst of all this activity, I realized that what I was doing was pretty futile because there was no formal support organization. I just jumped into the middle of providing services. But I don’t give up easily.”

Not even when health problems get in the way--which they did when Marx arrived at that place in her thinking in 1985. She went to the hospital with cardiovascular problems that could have been congenital or simply caused by stress. It would take a while to find out. Which gave Marx time to think.

Her life style had not allowed much of that up to this point. Born in New Mexico, she was the daughter of an itinerant aircraft worker who followed jobs around the country. She moved almost yearly until she came to Orange County at age 11. She was in the first graduating class of Costa Mesa’s Estancia High School and, she reports proudly, the founder of the Estancia Band Boosters.

She was married at 19 “to my high school sweetheart.” Angela came a year later, then there were two miscarriages and later the crib death of a second child. “We were too young,” says Marx today, “and there were too many tragedies.” She was divorced after six years of marriage, “although we have a good relationship today.”

Marx was talking in her modest home at the end of a cul-de-sac in an old section of Costa Mesa. It is the first home she has ever owned, and she feels good about it and about the way she has coped with single parenting. “I like kids,” she says, “and I’m good with them.”

She got certified in Orange Coast College’s Early Childhood Program, then won an AA while majoring in psychology before she went to work in a preschool. There she found she liked to make equipment for children with coordination problems even more than she liked to teach. She also felt a very strong need to be at home while Angela was growing up, so she started a business in her home designing and making educational toys.

She moved to her current home just a year ago. Before that she had a shop in her home. No longer. She farms that out now in order to concentrate on being a foster parent herself (she has had several dozen foster children over the years and right now has a sunny 9-year-old foster daughter) and building a new and better organization to perform and expand the services of Health Care Ministries. The need is enormous.

Contrary to popular belief, child abuse--there were an estimated 12,000 cases in Orange County last year--is not limited to the poor or the minorities. It spreads its poison across the social spectrum. A recent monthly report of the Child Abuse Council of Orange County shows that the 1,172 cases reported (an increase of 6% over the previous month) were spread almost equally among the high and low income areas of Orange County. Physical abuse was most prevalent (42%), followed by neglect (29%), sexual abuse (21%) and emotional abuse (4%). (Marx pointed out that emotional abuse is hard to pinpoint and is probably involved in virtually all of the cases of abuse.)

A whopping 65% of the cases involved Caucasian children. Latinos followed with 20%, and blacks trailed far behind. Almost 23% of the cases involved children under 3 years of age, and almost half were under 7; 56% of all victims were female. During the same month, approximately 40 of these abused children are moved in placements each month and half are replacements (children moved from foster home to foster home)--almost a third of them under 5 years of age.

Acutely conscious of these problems and given a clean bill of health, Marx, at 37, set out to do it right this time. She formed a committee of interested business people to set up a viable organizational structure. Then a board of directors well acquainted with the field of social services was selected to give the new organization stature and direction, with Marx as the operating head.

Marx’s new organization, which will incorporate the present Foster Care Ministries, is called ARK (Advanced Resources for Foster Kids). It is aimed specifically at helping overburdened public agencies reduce the number of placement failures now taking place in the Orange County foster care system. It hopes to achieve this goal through four new resources:

A volunteer program to provide information to families and volunteers on how to care for a foster child in crisis, networking with community resources available for foster children, and a center where foster parents and volunteers can talk with each other and consult with the ARK staff.

A child-care center to make possible time off for foster parents of small children when behavioral problems have caused high stress periods that might result in the child being moved.

A counseling center to provide individual counseling to foster children, their foster parents and their natural parents in an effort to improve and stabilize the care of the child and promote the constant goal of the foster parenting program: to provide a safe, nurturing environment until the child can be reunited under stable conditions with the natural family or placed with a new permanent family.

Right now, Marx is in a fund-raising period when she would much prefer to get on with the work. She is also looking for a buyer for her business so she can devote full time to the foster-care program.

“I go nuts at this stage,” she says. “I’m willing to do the work, and I understand the issues. I just wish we could attract a few large corporations to generate consistent income for us. We can’t make computers, and they can’t hold a child’s hand, but we can join hands in this effort--and we’ll do the work.

“There’s so much at stake. Mark could have become a Charles Manson. The energy and brainpower are there, as they are with many of these children. It is a matter of whether it is used to build up or tear down. Just in the past three months--while we’ve been trying to get this program launched--118 children have been moved from one foster home to another. Think what it was like your first day in the Army; then think of going through that a dozen times a year as a small child.”

Her passion and dedication are palpable. So is her perception of children. She had an egg hunt for foster children in her yard this Easter and one little Asian child who spoke no English had no idea what was going on until he discovered that food was hidden around the yard. Then he became a star, racing around the yard and digging under trees and shrubs with his hands. “It was almost,” says Marx, “as if he were remembering how he used to have to forage for something to eat.”

In an introspective moment a few weeks ago, Marx wrote in her journal:

“A life should have value. Freedom is pointless without value--and children are our hope. Our children must not be robbed of their potential; they must be allowed to use and develop their resources. Living in a safe country means nothing if a child isn’t living in a safe home. As a free society, we can’t police all homes to prevent unknown abuse. But we can make a bold, healthy stand in defense of a child once he is visible as a victim.”

Marleen Marx is devoting her life and her considerable skills and energies to that mission.