Fostering 21 children: All hearts on deck

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

In 1965, as a young, Catholic mother with four children – ages 5, 7, 9 and 11 – Janice Romig was at a pivot point in her life.

Janice and her husband Jerry, a program director at WDSU-TV, were aching to have more children, but tragically, in subsequent years they had lost two baby girls shortly after birth.

One daughter was born with a hole in her heart. The other carried the Rh factor, a mystifying blood complication that in those days often led to death.

“They didn’t have what they have now for Rh,” Janice recalled.

One morning during the week, Jerry called home from the office. He told his wife to turn on “Midday” with Terry Flettrich at noon on Channel 6, because the director of the New Orleans Children’s Bureau was going to be interviewed about foster parenting.

“We wanted a big family, and we had lost the two babies, and we loved babies,” Janice said. “And, I was really good with the newborns. So, when we saw this on TV, we said, ‘Let’s try it.’”

Janice and Jerry didn’t just dip their toes into shallow water as foster parents. Over the course of the next two decades, they fostered 21 infants, caring for them in their home for between two and nine months while adoptive parents could be found to provide a permanent home.

There were many miracles, the biggest coming in 1975 when Janice, the full-time mom and foster mom, became pregnant with her youngest daughter Ellen.

“We were able to exchange her blood three times, and she lived, which was a miracle,” Janice said. “In fact, Archbishop Hannan baptized Ellen in the living room of our house because she couldn’t go out.”

Janice and Jerry decided to take a five-year hiatus as foster parents after Ellen was born, but then when Ellen turned 5, they had a different idea. During their first stint as foster parents, Janice made sure to take plenty of pictures of the babies so that she could create an album as a treasured gift to the adoptive parents.

Also, like clockwork, two days before the adoption was scheduled to take place, Janice would drive downtown to Tippery’s to get an 8-by-10 studio portrait done – one for the new family and one to add to the wall of her home in St. Dominic Parish.

As the family’s photo gallery grew in Lakeview, young Ellen began showing off the pictures to neighborhood friends of her own age.

“Her little friends used to come into the house and ask, ‘Who are these babies?’” Janice said. “And, Ellen would say, ‘Those are my foster brothers and sisters, but I didn’t know them because I wasn’t born.’”

That’s when Janice and Jerry decided to resume fostering – taking in three more children over the next few years.

“We wanted Ellen to have that experience because the other children could carry babies around on their hips – the boys could change diapers, and they knew everything about babies,” Janice said. “The kids always say what good years those were. They realized the babies would be leaving.”

The toughest leave-taking was Michael’s. He stayed 9 1/2 months, and the Romig kids had taught him to walk.

“The boys would call him upstairs, and he would crawl up the steps, with one kid in front of him and one behind,” Janice said. “We really wanted to adopt him, but they said we had enough children.”

  One of the toughest blows of Janice’s life came after Katrina when she returned to her Lakeview home, with all those cherished photos and photo albums fused by the floodwaters into lumps of indistinguishable papier mâché.

“When you tried to open them up, they all tore apart,” Janice said. “I had some on the walls, but they all washed away.”

Janice knows that some of the pictures she took of her babies are still out there with the adoptive parents, who were always grateful not only for the photos but for her meticulous instructions on how she had cared for her special children.

“I was a picture person, and I would give them a little album from the time we brought the baby home from the hospital, and then at two weeks old, three months, four months, six months,” Janice said. “That way you weren’t just handing them a baby at five months old. I also gave them the baby’s schedule. One mother told me, ‘I didn’t know they came with instructions!’”

Janice is 90. Her late husband Jerry, the public address announcer at Saints’ home games for nearly 50 years (“First down … SAAAINTS!”), agreed that saving their small part of the world, one baby at a time, was a priceless gift not only to the infant but also to their family.

“Those babies meant everything to me,” Janice said. “I pray every day for them and also for the mothers to realize that they saved a life.”

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