Home of Hopes : 3 Women Give Abandoned Teens the Mothering They Never Had, and Futures They Never Dreamed Of

Rakesha Brown’s mother never complained that her skirt was too short, never said she was smart enough to go to college, never bought her electric curlers for her birthday, never chided her for coming home late, never drove her to drill team practice, never gave her a diary, never took her to the mall.

But somebody does all those things and more for Rakesha these days in the unlikeliest of havens: a group foster home where six distrustful and disruptive teenage girls, abandoned by their families, have found solace with a trio of women who are more like mothers than anyone they have ever known.

The ample two-story Mid-City house on 11th Avenue, with white carpet in the living room and roses and oleander in the yard, is the first place 17-year-old Rakesha has ever lived where people asked her how she felt, talked to her in civil tones, kept their promises and made rules, but forgave her if she messed up.

“You come here trapped up in not trusting,” she said. “But these are down-to-earth people, up front with you, nothing like my family. I know they wouldn’t tell me just any ol’ thing to get me to go away. And even when I was going AWOL, disrespecting the staff, causing a whole bunch of madness, they were there for me, saying ‘Rakesha, I’m not giving up on you . . . not you.’ ”

This surrogate mothering comes from Marie St. Paul, owner of three group foster homes; Adrienne Thomas, an obstetrical social worker at Kaiser Permanente who moonlights at the homes, and Yolanda Scott, who works the 3-to-11 night shift at 11th Avenue, commuting 136 miles a day and earning $17,000 a year to supervise and nurture girls deemed incorrigible by everyone else who has ever cared for them.

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The girls (all identified by pseudonyms in this story because the county Department of Children and Family Services insists on confidentiality for its clients) are the foster cases of last resort.

Their parents are dead, incarcerated or have disappeared in the nether world of drugs. They have exhausted the shifting casts of grandmothers and aunts available to care for them. And they are too old or unstable for individual foster homes.

The girls are hard as glass and just as quick to shatter. Their stories are harrowing. Ahira Curtis is here because her father shot her mother to death, in front of the five children. Donesha Greene is sick of bouncing between abusive foster homes, more than a dozen that she can recall, and an addicted 37-year-old mother who has given birth to nine children she doesn’t know how to take care of.

Donesha, 16, is the only girl in the house who does not have a relative or other adult who visits or takes her on outings. Almost against her better judgment, she has bonded with foster home supervisor Scott.

“I wasn’t planning to be tight with these people,” Donesha says, her voice a tight growl. “You can’t really trust nobody that’s too nice.”

It is Scott, with three daughters of her own, who plays gin rummy with Donesha after school and asks what chapter she’s up to in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” And when Donesha got pregnant last year, despite a drumbeat of advice about sex and birth control from social worker Thomas, it was Scott who sat by her side during the abortion.

Donesha begs Scott to take her home to Rancho Cucamonga. The older woman could open a group home of her own and Donesha could be her assistant, the girl suggests. Her fear of abandonment is painfully close to the surface. When she overhears Scott on the telephone asking her boss for a private meeting, she panics.

“You didn’t take another job, did you?” Donesha asks.

Scott aches for the girl’s vulnerability.

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“She just has me,” the older woman says. “I wish I could take her away, hold her, tell her it will be OK. But then the others would say, ‘Why you take her and not me?’ So I tell her, ‘Someday you’ll find the answer. It’s out there for you. And when you find it, bingo!’ ”

Donesha and Rakesha share the bedroom that once belonged to Marie and Jean St. Paul, Haitian immigrants who raised two sons and a daughter in this house. It is the third group home the St. Pauls opened since 1992, housing a total of 18 teenage girls. Licensed by the state as a nonprofit corporation, the St. Pauls receive $3,245 a month for each girl, all of them wards of the county.

Conventional wisdom has it that group homes are Dickensian places. But complaints against the St. Pauls have been few and minor, never resulting in administrative action by the state. Their homes are well-appointed, tidy and disciplined, a vast improvement over some of the filthy, raucous places where they have previously lived, the girls said.

“To some of us, this is like magic,” Rakesha said, pointing to the white carpet in the living room, the collection of old encyclopedias and Readers Digest condensed books and the well-stocked refrigerator.

Some of the girls cannot take the regimen and run away or get kicked out. But St. Paul is generous with second chances, even moving girls from house to house until they find a comfortable fit with staff and other residents.

Rules are strict on 11th Avenue, codified like a summer camp as opposed to the ongoing negotiation that governs life between parents and children.

Up at 6, lights out at 10, a half-hour of phone time a day. Everyone has a household job and instructions for each task leave little to chance. The girl responsible for cleaning the living room is expected to dust with Pledge and stack the magazines; bathroom duty means cleaning the toilet and sink with a brush and cleanser, polishing the mirror with Windex and washing the bathmat weekly.

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But there are seat-of-the-pants moments, when Scott makes it up as she goes along, like any mother. She decides when the rap music is too loud, negotiates fights about who left the microwave open, reminds everybody to wash their hands before afternoon snacks and return each other’s shampoo. Sometimes, she lets the girls fix their own punishments, say for showing up late after school, rather than simply going by the book.

The girls get a $10-a-week allowance, delivered on Fridays by Jean St. Paul, an X-ray technician some of them call Daddy. There is extra money for special chores and fines for bad behavior, like cursing, smoking or ditching school.

Each week, the girls’ behavior is rated as grade 1, 2 or 3, and privileges are doled out accordingly, like solo trips to the mall.

At grade 3, at the age of 16 and with a C average, dating is permitted, under conditions set up by St. Paul and Thomas, mimicking what they expect of their own daughters: The young man can be no more than two years older and must present himself for inspection to either St. Paul, her husband or one of the other senior staffers. If the date involves a car, the boy must show a driver’s license and proof of insurance. And he can’t be a member of a gang, a provision the St. Pauls say is impossible to enforce but at least plants a germ of concern.

“If somebody really cares, they’ll go through the steps,” Marie St. Paul says. “But most of them don’t show up.”

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Sex is Thomas’ bailiwick and she runs weekly groups for the girls in all three houses. Often she brings her own daughter, Chanelle, a 10th-grader at the Immaculate Heart School, who somehow manages to do her homework and not wither with embarrassment while her mother answers a fusillade of explicit questions.

At least as preoccupying as sex are clothes. The girls talk of how grateful they are to go shopping at classy malls, like the Beverly Center and the South Bay Galleria, rather than being outfitted at PayLess, which might tip off classmates that they are kids from “the system,” a badge of shame.

“Then kids talk about you like a dog,” Rakesha says.

Rakesha has tangled with St. Paul about her penchant for skirts so short they leave nothing to the imagination. Rakesha is a big girl, early to develop and an easy target for older men, St. Paul fears.

The girl is touched by this maternal concern.

“It’s not about her being strict,” says Rakesha, who begged the St. Pauls to adopt her but swallowed her disappointment when they said no. “If it was a mother and daughter, she wouldn’t just send her out dressed any ol’ raggedy way.”

Rakesha is a bright girl, a gifted writer with a sweet singing voice. St. Paul, Thomas and Scott have high hopes for her and have persuaded her to take the Scholastic Assessment Test in June.

If Rakesha goes to college, the St. Pauls have promised her $500. They are urging her to apply to Howard University in Washington, where their 19-year-old daughter goes.

“Jessica would keep an eye on you, be your big sister,” St. Paul says.

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Last year, for the first time, one of the residents of the 11th Avenue house, La Tonya Jordan, was accepted to college, at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

On the day of La Tonya’s high school graduation, Scott gave her a corsage, Thomas bought her a watch and St. Paul a wallet. Later there would be a party with catered Chinese food. The three women saved seats at the commencement for the girl’s relatives. But nobody came.

“I know it was raining,” St. Paul said, “but still . . . “