Helpless

As Felicia's mentor, I've rescued her from a meth jag and taken her calls after her abusive boyfriend beat her. But after five years, I'm not sure I've done any good.

By Martha Baer

Read more: Life

Dec. 17, 2005 | I should have advised her to plead no contest. Instead I said she should get a lawyer, which means she'll now wait for the court to appoint someone and come back here -- if she makes it -- to the courthouse a second time to file a plea. Now she'll have to remember the new arraignment date, remember the place, and get herself here on time.

I'm Felicia's mentor. That label is very specific and dense with meaning. In the world of social services, it refers to adult volunteers who act as guides, listeners and role models for kids with a variety of needs. There are some 5,000 mentoring programs in the United States today, the oldest and most proven among them being Big Brother/Big Sister. Children flow into such programs from many streams: Schools, relatives, social workers and juvenile justice systems all place kids in programs peopled by screened, grown-up citizens with a small surplus of heart and time.

Mentors are often defined in negatives. They are not mothers or fathers. They are not aunts, uncles, teachers, foster parents, therapists, cops, guidance counselors or lawyers. But the term has declarative meanings as well. Mentors are good. They're safe and honest. I learned this one day early on when I was looking for Taeja, the other young woman for whom I serve as mentor. I went to the housing projects where she spent time, and I approached a threesome I saw outside. "Have you seen Taeja around today?" I asked. Two of the people refused to turn their heads to look at me. The other presented me with a poker face so vacant it was hostile. He said, "You her P.O.?" No, I told him, I wasn't her probation officer. "I'm her mentor." With that, the tone of the exchange switched. All three suddenly allowed me into an invisible human circle: "She been around here this morning," they said, and "She be back," and "We'll tell her we saw you." It was clear they would. "We seen your mentor. She looking for you," they would say. "You call her."

Today I sat in the courtroom as Felicia's mentor. I didn't expect her to show. How would she have known her court date if she had nowhere to get mail? I was there, though, and it was as if she didn't recognize me for a moment when she walked in. She sat up against me on the courthouse bench.

In recent years, mentor programs have become the intervention of choice among a growing number of social service professionals, youth-program funders, and even George Bush. He has been making money available through the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to fund start-up mentorship groups, particularly for the children of incarcerated parents. These groups send mentors into schools and neighborhoods to read aloud, hang around, shoot baskets, and see movies with young people.

There's a lot of logic to it. Out of widespread poverty come drugs, despondency and spotty parenting. Even though we know that public schools cannot offset a lack of attention at home, cannot compensate for crumbling families and restore kids to emotional health, we keep expecting the educational system to do it anyway. We keep blaming the schools or their lack of resources. But no team of educators, however well-funded, can fix the ruinous lack of parental support in kids' lives. So we call on mentors to fill the gap, to provide some version of the one-on-one, flexible, adult presence these kids lack. A category unto themselves, mentors are like parents but not a threatening replacement.

I met Felicia when she was 15. She was polite and cheerful and warm. "How about a hug for my new mentor?" she said, and spread her arms to embrace me. She came from a notorious family in Daly City, Calif., the neglected little neighbor of San Francisco. Her relatives were known around town as junkies and thugs and dying gay men. Her immediate family consisted of a tiny, high-voiced mother, who'd cleaned up her speed habit and hooked up with a security guard. She was completely devoted to him, and when her kids raged that he'd sexually molested Felicia, she refused to see them again. Felicia's oldest sibling, a tough and demanding young woman, would eventually lose patience with her kid sister. Felicia's brother was an angry boy with a head injury and several long stints in juvenile detention. The main point is that, despite a romantic belief that family sticks by you and Mexican blood is thicker than American blood which is thicker than water, no one was sticking by anyone else.

When I became Felicia's mentor in the fall of 2000, she had just lost her father to AIDS. Her mother had blown off the custody hearing over Felicia, who then ended up with her dad's grieving ex-boyfriend and his world-weary ex-ex. They'd contacted the mentorship program I'd joined, looking for a responsible woman she could confide in. I would be the listener that they couldn't be while she grieved and finished growing up. They hoped I'd advise her about sex. I hoped I'd fill in parts of those gaping spaces her parents had left, while keeping her focused on her studies enough so she could get a high school diploma.

The story of how two white, middle-aged gay men with AIDS, living as close to San Francisco's Castro district as their incomes could get them, took on a gorgeous, fleshy, olive-colored teen girl with bad grammar is a story in itself. There were curfews and tutors and awkward Christmases with her new family in the suburbs. Felicia fought and struggled to be on her best behavior, which to them was still 50 percent acting out. Today she is overcome with tears of regret whenever she acknowledges she ran away from them, not least because of the luscious sleigh bed with the crisp white comforter and overflow of pillows they had bought her. Or the two pugs that would get up there with her and nestle in. Back then, she had a key and a home and two people who expected to see her daily.

I didn't expect her to show up at court today, but I went anyway. Felicia has no phone number and no address, and only when she's feeling her most extreme stabs of loneliness does she call me collect. I could wait around for one of those phone calls. Or I could try showing up at the San Mateo County courthouse.

I'm glad I did. Even though her boyfriend Junior was there. A boy of 25 whose father is locked up for murder, Junior has done little for Felicia other than beat her and call her a "slut" and land her on the streets where she scams customers at gas stations, claiming she's run out of gas and could they give her a few bucks to buy a gallon. "He hangs out while I go to work," she tells me. Then says, grinning bashfully, "We call it 'work.'"

Next page: It's funny what can still make her scared after all she's been through