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Living

Empty nest

A house feels kind of lonely when the last of 800 kids is gone.

By RODNEY THRASH
Published April 30, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Scott Keeler] Maeietta Jones, left, checks the mail of Dr. Virginia F. Lewis, 100, who lives in the College Harbor Apartments, St. Petersburg. Jones cares for Lewis, a retired high school principal and assistant superintendent of schools in Chicago.

ST. PETERSBURG - Maeietta Jones hates Saturdays. They're quiet.

She works five days a week as a caretaker. Sundays she has church. Saturdays are the only days no one needs her.

She can't remember a time when she wasn't taking care of somebody. For more than 40 years, a cacophony of sounds filled her house: babies wailing, teenage girls arguing for more time in the bathroom. She misses those sounds. Grating at times, sure. But they meant activity, life.

Now Maeietta is 78 years old. An unfamiliar stillness permeates the white and brick house north of Lake Maggiore. Maeietta's house is empty for the first time. The kids - all 800 of them - are grown.

She tunes the kitchen radio to a Christian station. The radio crackles, like someone balling up sheets of paper. In an adjacent room, static. She's been trying to figure out how to work the new television for hours. She can only get one channel, and the reception is poor. Even the air conditioner is unusually loud, humming like cars in a drag race. Maeietta prefers the noise.

She became a foster mom in 1966. A church member nudged her to take in three girls, sisters. "Marilyn, Gloria and Clara, " she said.

"Marilyn was the oldest. She was 5.

"Gloria was a year-and-a-half younger.

"Clara was 7 months old."

Their mother would leave them alone to go get drunk. One time when she was away, the house burned. Maeietta couldn't say no. Not after a story like that.

She didn't even have a crib, so she made do with a bottom drawer. Soon her brood mushroomed to five.

Then seven.

"The twins, Ronald and Donald."

Then 10.

"Pete, Derrick and Helen.

Then 14.

She loses track of the names. Deborah Haynes, one of the 14, helped jog Maeietta's memory on a recent afternoon visit.

"Gwen, Yvonne, Genevieve, Ruby, Loretta, Delvin, Glenis, Shirley, Alice, Wanda, Deborah."

Maeietta's three-bedroom house on 19th Avenue S quickly became inadequate.

"I wonder why, " Deborah said.

She moved the family to a seven-bedroom, three-bath house on 30th Street S. She bought a station wagon. She implemented "Maeietta's Rules."

Deborah and Marilyn Johnson, the oldest foster child, also visiting that afternoon, went down the list.

Marilyn: Be in the house before the streetlight comes on.

Deborah: Keep your room clean.

Marilyn: Everybody had a day to cook in the kitchen, wash dishes, and sweep and mop the floor.

Deborah: Nobody was allowed in the house when she wasn't home.

Marilyn: Five minutes on the telephone. And everybody had to be in bed by 11.

Deborah: When you started dating, you had to be at home by 12. Not 12:01. 11:59.

"And if she didn't meet the boys before you went out, you weren't going. You needed to be here about a month in advance on a regular basis so that she knew you and where your mama stays, works and what kind of car she drives. And if you were pulling off in a car, she got your tag number. She got the color and make."

Church and school?

Deborah, without pause: "We living."

In other words, graduating high school and attending church were mandatory in Maeietta's house.

One more thing.

"You weren't allowed, " Deborah said, "to use the term foster child."

* * *

Maeietta has always been the maternal type.

Back in Tallahassee, where she grew up, she kept house. Her mother was a domestic and hardly around. Two older sisters had already moved out, leaving Maeietta to raise her two young brothers.

She quickly started a family after moving to St. Petersburg in 1958. She met a man. "We just fell in love, " Maeietta said. "So I got married." She was 31, he was 33. Together, they had two girls, the only biological children she would have. Shortly after the birth of their second daughter, her husband died of a brain aneurysm.

She remarried, twice. And divorced, twice. Both men had some philandering ways.

"Why you men like that?" she snapped.

Through it all, she had somebody to look after.

For 40 years, she helped raise "at least 800" children, said Laurallyn Segur, assistant director of licensing, placement and recruitment for the Safe Children Coalition. No one in Pinellas and Pasco counties has been a foster parent as long as Maeietta.

Even today, Maeietta cares for a 100-year-old woman at the College Harbor retirement community next to Eckerd College. Five days a week, she gives the woman breakfast, bathes her, tidies her house.

"I've been that way all my life, " she said. "I help somebody else."

* * *

The first foster child, Marilyn, is a data entry clerk for Fidelity Insurance. Deborah is an assistant manager at Bob Evans Restaurant.

Maeietta's kids have gone to college and vocational schools. They are nurses and blue-collar professionals. Others have entered the military.

When they left, she sent them with pictures of holidays and dinners. Most foster kids grow up without childhood pictures. She still has some photos in the house, faces of children who have gone on to other things.

* * *

Maeietta's last foster child, Shameka Thomas, graduated high school last spring and left for St. Petersburg College shortly afterward.

Maeietta's house, a three-bedroom model that her brother built 10 years ago, feels too big now for one tiny-framed woman. Maeietta has never lived alone. She's not sure how.

She still buys toys. It's just habit. They sit on top of a bed in an empty bedroom. She ends up giving most of them to kids in her neighborhood. Those same kids help her around the house sometimes. On that recent Saturday, some of them helped her hoist the new television atop the old one.

Her foster children visit often, too. Some still attend the church she raised them in. It's not the same as them being there, in her house, all the time.

The empty bedrooms with their neatly made beds are a constant reminder that they're gone.

Maybe she wouldn't think about the void if she could do the things she used to do.

Maeietta's a religious woman, a member of the same church, Prayer Tower Church of God in Christ, for 41 years. She attends Sunday school at 10:30 a.m. and church at 11.

She used to fill her spare time reading the Bible, studying her Sunday school lesson, writing letters. She can't do any of those things anymore. She gets a headache when she tries to make out the tiny print. Her eyesight isn't what it used to be.

She has limited her driving to daytime hours.

She hasn't told her children it's gotten so bad. "What are they going to do about it?" she asked as she shot forward on the black leather sofa in the TV room. "I'm not going to lose my sight. God's a healer. God is good to me. I go by faith and talk to the Lord about it. It's worked so far."

As much as the noise helps her cope with boredom and loneliness, it also helps her forget some other things: She's losing her sense of independence. And maybe the lifelong giver is in need of some reciprocity.

* * *

Maeietta's thinking about selling the house, maybe even retiring. Her children have been nudging her for years to stop working.

She stops herself as soon as she brings up the possibility.

Stop caring for the last person she has left to care for?

Time for her afternoon nap. Time to push that thought out of her mind for now.

Rodney Thrash can be reached at (727) 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 29, 2007, 18:16:02]