29 Is Not Enough: Couple's Concern for Kids Is More than a Family Affair
Each May is National Foster Care Month, but for Gene Balloun and Sheila Wombles, foster care has been celebrated nearly every day of their 26-year marriage. “David, of course, was our first. He came to us as an infant at 14 months old in 1987 and is 23 now. We were able to adopt David when he was 4,” Wombles explains, sitting in the living room of their four-bedroom home located off a quiet cul-de-sac in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.
Balloun is a commercial litigator at Shook, Hardy & Bacon; Wombles, a former Indiana elementary schoolteacher. The two have shared that home with David and 28 more foster children through the years.
Their efforts have created a legacy of changed lives in many ways. They have encouraged others in the legal profession to become foster parents. Balloun has used his legal skills to help many foster parents adopt. And in that process they created a scholarship fund for foster youths that has inspired those young people to break through the wall of poverty, crime and hopelessness blocking those who reach the age where state foster care funds run out.
Balloun and Wombles married when Balloun’s two biological children were in their 30s.
“After we married, I missed teaching, but mostly I missed the kids,” Wombles recalls. “A friend of ours who was a social worker suggested foster parenting.”
Balloun was long on cases and short on time, yet he shared Wombles’ desire to use their resources to help children.
“I didn’t set out to be a lawyer, and I didn’t set out to be a foster parent,” Balloun says, “but when I got involved in both, I knew I wouldn’t want to be any-thing else.”
Continue reading “29 Is Not Enough” online in the July ABA Journal.
