GIVING: A weekly look at those who help : Getting Past the Pain : Ex-foster youth like Lidia Cabrera grieve for their lost childhoods and for the relatives who abused them. A county transition program gives them hope for a better life.

Where once there was fear, then sorrow, there is a place in Lidia Cabrera’s heart that is empty. The mother she once feared is now dead, and for that she blames herself. She is left with a 13-year-old brother and waves of despair that sometimes pull her under. Then there is the matter of forgiveness, which she fears will never find its way to her.

At times, she aches for it. Earlier this month, she traveled to Guatemala, where her mother’s ashes are kept. She wanted to cry but not in front of her relatives, most of whom she was meeting for the first time.

She wanted to sit alone on the ground and whisper to the ashes, “Please forgive me,” but it didn’t feel right with others around. So, instead, she walked away, her emptiness lingering like the cold, dark hours before dawn, when it seems the sun is gone forever.

She returned home to the Margarita Mendez Apartments, a transitional housing program in East Los Angeles for foster youths who, upon being released from the Los Angeles County system at age 18, are at risk of becoming homeless. The residents build foundations by learning life skills--how to open a checking account, how to prepare a resume--as they prepare to set out on their own. About half of the 14 residents enter college or a technical school, the remainder work full-time jobs.

Rafael Angulo, the lone social worker at the eight-unit complex, stresses the importance of goals, hard work, discipline and hope. But primarily, he says, he tries to give back something taken away from these residents in childhood, when they were abandoned or abused and told they were destined for nowhere.

“My task,” he says, “is to bring back that dignity that they once had as children, putting it in front of them and saying, ‘You’re more than what you were told you were.’ ”

In moving forward, the young adults are creating distance from painful pasts that can return to hold them back and, in some cases, devour them, Angulo says.

“A lot of them carry demons inside,” he says. “If you have been in multiple placements, 10, 15 foster homes, group homes, been abandoned, severely abused by your parents, there’s a lot of baggage that many of them still carry. . . . The pervading issue is loss, and with loss comes depression and apathy. Loss is something they have gone through more than any other part of the population I can think of.”

It is a matter of healing old wounds. Living upstairs is a single mother who saw her sister stabbed by their mother. Leticia Morfin recalls a childhood of fear and anger, lonely moments spent in the Ramona Gardens housing project looking into the nighttime sky, searching for stars.

Alisha Burch was 5 when she received the first of 14 foster placements. Prior to placement, to remove herself from neglect at home, she would hide in cabinets, run to the park.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I would go to somebody’s backyard that I didn’t even know and play with rocks or something.”

For 20-year-old Lidia Cabrera, the wounds are hidden. Out of habit, she wears long pants even in summer because they cover marks on her legs left by her mother’s whippings with extension cords and clothes hangers when she was a child.

But they do not cover the wounds on her heart.

Photo Reminder of Somber Youth

On the wall of her apartment is a black-and-white photograph of her mother, Maria Soto, as a young woman. Another picture shows Lidia at age 12 next to her brother, then 5. Her expression is somber, and her eyes are pools of dark secrets.

She was 7 when her brother was born. For two weeks following his birth, Soto stopped drinking and wouldn’t let Lidia touch the baby. But when Soto started drinking again, Lidia inherited parental responsibilities. She became the baby’s primary caregiver, preparing his bottles, changing his diapers, fretting over him when he was sick.

When he took his first steps, he walked to Lidia and no one else.

“I felt that he trusted me,” she says. “He knew that if he was going to fall that I would catch him.”

When there was nothing to eat, she would wait until Soto had passed out from drinking. Then she would steal money from her purse to get food.

On Sundays, she would dress her brother and take him to church, and sometimes when her mother or her stepfather were in violent moods, she would sit all night in a wobbly wooden chair holding the baby in her arms to comfort him and ensure his safety.

“Please, God,” she would pray. “Help my mother stop drinking. Protect her from my stepfather. Please, God, protect me and my brother.”

Her stepfather’s drug use and his mother’s drinking were a volatile brew that easily ignited into violence. When that happened, Lidia often would scoop her brother up and take him out of their studio apartment until things calmed down.

Afraid they would be taken from their home and that her mother would be arrested, Lidia told no one except close friends about her problems, which at times seemed too much to bear. Once she ran to the top of her four-story apartment building and was ready to leap, once she grabbed a knife. Both times, friends intervened.

“In a way I wanted to die,” she says, “but in a way I didn’t. My brother needed me, and that would stop me. I kept thinking about my brother and how he was counting on me.”

Many of the values she learned in life came from unlikely places: Strangers who came to her door and invited her to church, street gang members who refused to allow her into their ranks.

“Don’t be like us,” they told her. “There’s something better for you.”

It would anger her at times, when others would be welcomed into the gang and she would not, as if they were more valued, more loved. But even then, she sensed they were right. There was something better.

She did well in school, turned in assignments on time, showed great promise. After school, she would return home and help her brother with his homework. Then she would sit in the hallway of her apartment building near MacArthur Park and study.

Sometimes when her mother was drinking, she would tell Lidia she loved her and would describe her meager and abusive beginnings in Guatemala. She also told her haunting stories, one of them about a rock near a river in her homeland. At a certain time each day, the story went, it would turn into a horse carrying a headless rider.

Her mother and stepfather were like the rock, turning fearsome with little warning. Four or five times a week, Lidia says, she was beaten.

One day when she was 14, she spent the day at her great-uncle’s house. Upon returning home, her mother was passed out from drinking, and her stepfather was looking at Lidia in a way that scared her. He had tried to kiss her before, and she sensed something terrible was about to happen.

She called her great-uncle and told him she was scared. He sent his son to pick her up and through the courts gained custody of the two children. Without them in the home, Lidia’s mother and stepfather no longer received Aid to Families With Dependent Children, and without the checks they could not afford the apartment.

Soto pleaded with Lidia to return home, saying they would find an apartment where she could have her own room. But a room was not what Lidia wanted or needed. She refused to return, and her mother and stepfather drifted to the streets.

Siblings Move to Foster Care

A year after the children moved in with their great-uncle, he told them he could no longer take care of them and they would be better off in a foster home. Lidia’s only request was that she and her brother stay together.

At Franklin High School, Lidia earned high marks and praise from her teachers, who encouraged her and helped her believe in herself.

“During a teacher’s career, there are five or 10 students who stand out above the others that a teacher will always remember and keep in touch with,” says Eftihia Danellis, Lidia’s English teacher. “For me, Lidia is one of them. She was tenacious and persistent in overcoming a lot of hardship, and she had a genuine desire to learn.”

In 1995, her junior year, Lidia received word that her mother was gravely ill in the hospital. Lidia arrived at her bedside, leaned over and told her that her brother would be there soon, to wait for him.

Soto was weak and could not speak. Her appearance had changed dramatically during her two years in the streets. To Lidia, her face seemed tired and swollen. She seemed older than her 35 years.

When Lidia’s brother arrived, Soto reached out with one hand to both of them, then died a short time later.

“I used to feel that I hated her, and I’d feel sorry for everything she was going through,” Lidia says, “but when she passed away, I knew that I did love her more than anything, that God gave me the best mom I could have had.”

She believes that had she not left home, her mother would not have ended up in the streets, would not have died so young. That is what haunts her now. It is not the beatings that she and her mother endured. It is not her stepfather’s stares or the fear of a headless rider. It is guilt.

“That feeling will never go away,” she says, “because I will never hear my mother’s voice say, ‘I forgive you.’ ”

Her stepfather died last summer. In recent years, Lidia has spent more time with her biological father, who lives in Sacramento. She was very young when her parents divorced and has few memories of him.

Her only true family, she says, is her brother, who remains in foster care. He sometimes spends weekends with Lidia and always asks when they will live together again.

Lidia has completed two years at Cal State Los Angeles, where she is studying to be a social worker. This month she began another Cal State program to become a legal interpreter. When she completes this program and finds full-time work, she says, her life will be stable enough to take custody of her brother and resume her studies for a college degree.

In December, she must leave the residence, where she has lived for the last 21 months. Usually residents are allowed to stay only 18 months, but Lidia was granted an extension to help in her quest to gain custody of her brother.

She is looking for clerical work while she attends school so she can rent an apartment. As she prepares to leave transitional housing, she is confident and scared.

“I feel sure of myself and what I want to do and what I want to accomplish,” she says, “but sometimes I get afraid that I might fail. I can’t fail, because if I fail, I’m failing my brother. He’s counting on me. I can’t fail.”

It helps to know that she is not alone. The transitional housing program includes a six-month follow-up component to offer support. Her former boyfriend’s mother, Bertha Lopez, has become like a second mother to her. She helps Lidia move forward in life, focusing on education, remembering the words of teachers and social workers and her friends in the gang: There’s something better.

At some point, she would like to return to Guatemala, to learn more about her relatives, to climb the mango trees her mother climbed, to sit alone with ashes and fill empty spaces in her heart.

Duane Noriyuki can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].