On Their Own

System kids. That is what they call themselves.

After living through sexual abuse, abandonment, neglect and mental illness, they are yanked from their homes and tossed from one foster placement to another. And as they stumble through a system set up to protect them, their childhoods are full of confusion and loneliness.

To avoid being lost in the system, some listen to music, draw or write poetry. Others join gangs, drink and do drugs. And at age 18, they are forced out of foster care and left to fend for themselves. Michelle Evans and Jonathan Doyle, both 19, are former foster children struggling to make their way on their own in Ventura County.

Evans said she entered the foster care system at age 13, after being physically abused by her mother and stepfather over several years. During the time she was in foster homes she lived in 14 placements, and ran away 50 times.

“Ultimately, being in the system was almost worse than being at home,” Evans said.

At home, she was beaten. In foster care, she was lost. She lived with more than 300 people, but didn’t trust any of them. So she got high.

And she wrote dozens of poems.

“From within an obstructed tomb of turmoil and ominous memories, very delicate and brittle hands claw at the suffocating inside walls, grasping desperately . . . to extinguish the flames of internal screaming,” she wrote.

Wearing a nose ring and big silver hoop earrings, Evans played with her slick black hair as she talked. Tattoos decorate her body: a bat on her chest, a band around her left arm, a symbol for eternal life on her neck and the goddess of compassion on her right shoulder.

For years she dreamed about turning 18 and starting her “real life.” But as her birthday neared, she grew more and more scared of leaving foster care.

“Being in that system for six years, you become dependent on the structure,” she said. “They tell you when to eat, when to sleep and when not to.”

So when her 18th birthday--emancipation day--arrived she didn’t know what to do. She moved back in with her grandmother and started working as a stripper for a private escort-stripping service that employed teenage girls, and she began doing drugs again. During that time, she said, she felt really alone.

“I was scared of the reality of my life,” she said. “I almost felt like I was living in a dream world and that I had escaped reality.”

After a short time, Evans decided she couldn’t live like that. She moved in with her boyfriend and his mother, and began work as a waitress in a chain restaurant. Then she worked as a bank teller, and now holds a full-time job at a marketing research company. She and her boyfriend live in an apartment in Ventura, decorated with dried flowers, an American flag, astrology charts and their only two baby pictures.

“I have gone through so much, just to keep this apartment and eat,” Evans said. “It’s hard to accept that good things are happening. I really like where I am.”

Doyle became a “system kid” when he was 5 years old. He said his mother and stepfather hurt and abused him, and for a while he thought it was normal. At the age of 7, he said, he took on an “I don’t care” attitude.

“I felt like who cared about Jonathan Doyle but Jonathan Doyle?” he said.

The sturdy, freckled teen wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt said he started hanging out with gang members when he was 12.

“I was a mess,” he said. “I was a lost kid looking for an identity, so I turned to gangs. Then I turned to drugs. But I didn’t find the answer.”

When he wasn’t stealing and smoking marijuana, he said, he was listening to reggae music and reading books on philosophy. He bounced in and out of schools, treatment centers, group homes, and sometimes returned home to live with his mother or grandmother.

As he saw other teens turn 18 and “age out” of the system, leaving with sometimes no more than a suitcase, he began to worry about where he would go.

Then someone from Interface Children Family Services told him about transitional housing, a program that would allow him to live in a paid-for apartment. His comings and goings were supervised, but he had a lot more freedom than in the group homes.

While he was living in transitional housing, he met his girlfriend. And he moved in with her and her three children in Simi Valley when he was emancipated. He takes the children on trips to amusement parks and sporting events, and said he will do whatever it takes to prevent them from becoming system kids.

Doyle has never met his father. Yet he both despises and idolizes him. Doyle recounted a story told to him by his mother. Before he was born, his parents ran from the police and rode a motorcycle across the country, stealing and getting high along the way.

“They were like Bonnie and Clyde and I thought that was awesome,” Doyle said. “Not the robbing, but the rush.”

All he knows about his father now is that he is in prison for murder.

He rubbed his forehead and fiddled with his red bandanna.

“But it scares me. I don’t want to end up like my dad,” he said. “The only door to my salvation is my dream.”

That dream is to save enough money to buy a Harley-Davidson and ride across the country with only a guitar and a writing journal.

He said he feels 300 years old. “I feel like I’ve lived so many years. But I won’t be another system kid lost in society. I won’t settle for that.”