By Nancy Westlund
Catholic Herald staff
October 4, 2003
Lenore Mullarkey sits in a comfortable lounge chair, eyes sparkling and a smile that animates her entire face.
The room she sits in is filled with photographs of newborn babies — on the door, on the walls, on every conceivable flat surface available.
While each one of these babies holds a special place in her heart, it is their mothers who are her children.
For more than 10 years, Mullarkey, who is director of the Bishop Gallegos Maternity Home in Sacramento, has been quietly guiding women who are both giving birth to a child and rebuilding their lives.
“These are women hurt, hurt to the core,” said Mullarkey during an interview with The Herald at the maternity home in south Sacramento. “I may be as close to a mom as they’ve seen, and mom is what I do best.”
Since Mullarkey arrived at the home in 1992, more than 400 women have come and gone, most still healing but no longer alone.
A pro-life activist since 1974, Mullarkey said her personal awakening came when she was living in Westfield, Mass., the mother of 10 children. A year earlier the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision had made abortion legal, a decision which didn’t immediately get Mullarkey’s full attention.
“I thought, oh no, a mother could never kill her own child, so I didn’t do a thing for one year,” she said.
Then the Knights of Columbus at her parish sponsored a slide presentation on issues related to abortion.
“When I saw the pictures of abortion, it tore my heart and still does,” she said.
Her pro-life activities in the following years included joining Massachusetts Citizens for Life, an affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, starting pro-life groups in several communities, and making presentations everywhere she could find an audience, including manning a booth at the Massachusetts State Fair.
“When God puts it in your heart, you have to do something,” Mullarkey noted.
A few years passed and all except four of her children had left home. Mullarkey’s husband had abandoned her, leaving behind “a huge house and empty beds.” So when a co-worker at a nursing home, who was a foster mom, enlightened Mullarkey about foster parenting, she quit her job and became licensed for foster care.
Over the next 10 years, Mullarkey was a day care provider for 150 children waiting for foster care placement or to be returned to their mothers.
Then in 1992, her sister, June Schott, an activist in the pro-life movement in Sacramento, told her that the Bishop Gallegos Maternity Home was looking for a director. Mullarkey closed out her life in Massachusetts and moved to Sacramento, in part to be near her 84-year-old mother who was in ill health, but also to direct the maternity home.
“It was as if God just took me and presented this job to me,” she recalled.
She remembered one of her first clients was a 22-year-old homeless woman, eight months pregnant, whom she found sleeping under a bridge.
“About 80 percent of our women come from the streets — people sleeping on the steps of St. Francis Church, from St. John Shelter, or are sleeping in a car,” Mullarkey said.
She makes it clear that the women who come to the home will be making a U-turn back out if they don’t follow the rules.
“You have to be clean and sober and you have to want to get on with your life,” Mullarkey said. “The biggest thing I teach is self control.”
Sharrie, who requested her last name be withheld, is employed five days a week as Mullarkey’s assistant at the home. She remembered the day she first arrived there. Pregnant with her now four-year-old daughter Jennifer, Sharrie was homeless and sleeping in her car.
“When I first walked in the door, all I had was a backpack,” she said. “Right away it felt like I was home.”
Having lost her own mother who died when she was 16, Sharrie, who is now living in an apartment and supporting her six children, found with Mullarkey the grounding she needed to put her life together again.
Currently there are 11 women at the home who plan and cook the meals, clean up the kitchen and keep the rest of the house tidy. One is Crystal, 19, who is expecting her first baby in November. She said the home is not so much about being told what to do as having “a best friend” like Mullarkey to help her make wise choices in her life.
Women at the maternity home are also given assistance on financial budgeting and keep their own savings account book during their three-month stay. Upon leaving, they are typically referred on to various social services for assistance during the transition to financial independence.
Another one of the home’s current residents, Camille Harper, 29, held close her 20-day old infant daughter Prayyrr. She had arrived at Bishop Gallegos a single mom facing a financial crisis and the possibility of giving birth to her baby in a shelter.
“I had been praying, praying, praying,” said Harper, a college student who is working with her parents to regain custody of her seven-year-old son. “Coming here has been a blessing.”
Like many women, Harper has found the home a precious “stepping stone,” a place to mend and then go forward.
Mullarkey admits there was a time a few years ago when she was tempted to call it quits. The women living at the maternity home at the time were at odds with her about just about everything — from the type of food they ate to the minimal rent they paid, even expressing their complaints to the media.
“It took time to work through that and get my compassion back,” she said, “but God worked it out.”