E-mail a friendAndrew Bridge
airdate April 29, 2008
Andrew Bridge is an advocate for foster care children. He spent 11 years in the system before earning a scholarship to Wesleyan, becoming a Fulbright Scholar and graduating from Harvard Law School. He began his legal career representing children and went on to become exec director of L.A.'s Alliance for Children's Rights. His efforts led to the founding of the city's New Village Charter School—one of the first to focus on the needs of foster care children. Bridge's memoir, Hope's Boy, is a New York Times best seller.
"Hope's Boy" author shares the emotional story of his mother's battle with schizophrenia and his experience in foster care. Full interview. (12:11)
Andrew Bridge
Tavis: Andrew Bridge was seven years old when he was placed in foster care, where he would spend the next 11 years of his life. Despite his difficult childhood, he went on to college and eventually to Harvard law. He also became a Fulbright scholar. Details of his remarkable journey are told in "The New York Times" bestseller "Hope's Boy: A Memoir." Andrew, an honor to meet you and glad to have you on the program.
Andrew Bridge: Thank you very much.
Tavis: It is quite a story, man.
Bridge: Thank you.
Tavis: This is quite a story. The title, "Hope's Boy," Hope, your mother.
Bridge: Hope was my mother's name, yeah, yeah.
Tavis: Tell me about your mother. Tell me about Hope. What a name, too.
Bridge: Yeah, no, my mom was a beautiful young woman. She grew up poor outside Pike's Peak in Colorado Springs. She met a man when she was 16 years old. She married him when she was 17, and by her 18th birthday, they'd had me. They went to prison together for writing bad checks. They decided to take a tour of the western half of the United States and when they ran out of the money, that's how they did it.
Tavis: Kind of like Bonnie and Clyde.
Bridge: Kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tavis: Minus all the shoot-'em-up.
Bridge: Yeah, exactly. And I was sent to live with my grandmother. She went to prison and then she got out and asked for me back. And my grandmother very reluctantly sent - put me on a plane. I still remember the day when she did that. And for the next two years in Los Angeles, my mom did her very best. My father abandoned us, and my mom, without a high school degree, she enrolled in beauty school, and then with her little boy at her side, she descended into schizophrenia.
I saw her slowly fall apart and we went through apartment after apartment, and I watched her fight and negotiate with these voices. These voices of men that in an odd way turned out to be true. These voices said someone was going to take me from her, and I think that may have been partly because she had grown up in foster care herself or spent part of her own childhood in foster care.
But then also she knew this threat, and -
Tavis: So some of these voices that she's hearing and struggling with are voices telling her that somebody's going to take you from her.
Bridge: That someone's going to take her little boy from her, yeah, yeah. I used to - I remember sitting in the dark at a very - I must have been six and a half years old, and the landlord would - they cut the electricity first and then they cut the water. And sitting there and listening to her when she thought I was asleep, arguing with darkness.
And to this day, still feeling, honestly, a little bit of guilt that I never got up and said, "It's only you and me, Mom, in this room. There's no one else here."
Tavis: So as a six-and-a-half-year-old, seven-year-old boy, how do you, since you remember so vividly, how do you - how does a kid navigate having to deal with that, to hear that, to witness that?
Bridge: Well, I think you become - you'd be surprised. You become real good at it real fast, and I see this with the kids that I help today. When very young children are surrounded by real trauma and real danger, they become very vigilant, very much aware of their surroundings, very careful. And in many ways, with my mom, I became fiercely protective of her. And you grow up real fast.
Tavis: So your mom starts hearing these voices, you're six and a half, around seven. How do you end up in foster care?
Bridge: Well, it was a long road, those two years. We ended up finally in a flophouse of a motel on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, California, and one day, one early morning she sent me out with a little note asking for cigarettes. And we'd lived in this neighborhood now, in and out of different homes and stuff and on the street, for two years.
And I went down to the corner drug store to get the cigarettes, and the first time the guy said no. He accused me of smoking them myself. And anyway, I walked out and a police car - clearly someone had been in and talked to him before - a police car began following me and finally pulled up alongside me.
And what my mom had always said, happened, and I expected it in some way. Looked at me and said, "Are you Andy?" And I very obediently said, "Yes," and I got into the back of the car, we drove a couple more blocks back to the motel where my mom and I were staying, and looking out the window I saw my mom, barefoot, in her bra, arguing with this very well-dressed woman with this incredible ferocity.
And getting in this woman's face, and the policeman jumped out of the car, dashed over to protect the social worker, pushed my mom back, and then my mom came back at it, at him and at her, and at that moment, I describe in the book, it's the only moment that I remember really defending her. I jumped out of that car and I ran to her.
And I will never forget that tightness of that embrace and in so many ways, it was a goodbye. Because at that moment I did something that I still struggle with a bit, and that was just ever so gently, I pulled away from her. And I think a lot of that had to do with just at that point a basic survival mechanism that kicked in.
Tavis: You go to foster care.
Bridge: That's right.
Tavis: What happens to your mother then?
Bridge: Well, my mom had never been violent. Whenever I talk about it, I think it's real important that people know that people with schizophrenia and mental illness are rarely violent. My mom was always very gentle. The only person she was ever abusive to was herself.
But when I went into foster care, she was limited to seeing me once a month for an hour. If she couldn't make a visit, then we just missed that month and we went on to the next month. She was allowed to talk to me for 15 minutes once a week. And then those visits stopped. She did something irresponsible and dumb. She came by the house in the middle of the night.
Not intending to steal me, but doing what a young woman with emotional problems might do, and just wanting to see her kid. And from that point on, she wasn't allowed to see me. So from 11 to 18, I never saw her, and nobody told me what happened to her.
She became this big, unspoken topic in the room, as if she simply disappeared and -
Tavis: And at 18, what did you learn, if anything, about your mother?
Bridge: Well, what happened, it was the strangest thing. I was - I describe in the book, the greatest fear was that I would be moved, and some of that had to do with school, because I had these great teachers that had very little to do with my foster family, to be honest.
But the other thing was, it was the last place that my mom had seen me, and that was the place where in my heart of hearts I knew if she wanted to find me or she needed to find me, she could. And so I stuck it out in that place, and I guess it must have been about three weeks before I was about to go off to college in Connecticut she eloped, she escaped from - ran away from the psychiatric facility she was in, in Arizona, hitchhiked her way all the way back to Los Angeles, got picked up, was at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, and I was told that she wanted to see me.
And so I took the bus all the way out from the San Fernando Valley to Norwalk, took most of the day, and saw her for the first time. And saw - saw what her life had been like in those seven years. She wasn't the woman - that young, vivacious, beautiful woman. She was weak and had been torn apart, and just wasn't the same, so.
Tavis: The remarkable part of this story for me - it brings tears to your eyes, and I know the story. But what's remarkable about this is how you navigated your way to being such a brilliant student. As I sit here and look at you, and as I went through the text, you were not ever supposed to go to college. You know that.
Bridge: No. No, I was not.
Tavis: You were not supposed to go to Harvard law, especially.
Bridge: No.
Tavis: And you were not supposed to be a Fulbright scholar.
Bridge: No.
Tavis: That wasn't supposed to happen.
Bridge: No, it was not.
Tavis: But it did.
Bridge: Yeah.
Tavis: And how did it?
Bridge: Well, I was a lucky kid, and it's funny that you say that I wasn't supposed to go. I actually, when I told my social worker - and she didn't mean any ill in this - when I told her where I was applying to school, I'll never forget, she - this was the last social worker, I don't know how many that I'd had - she looked at me and she said, "Why are you applying to all those fancy, expensive New England schools?" And she said, "You ought to apply to - " and she recommended an unaccredited junior college that was a few miles away.
And I almost took her up on it, but I didn't. The truth of it was is that I just happened to have a set of skills and a set of attributes within myself that just fit real well with another bureaucracy called the LAUSD - the Los Angeles Unified School District. And as a very little boy, I liked the feeling of teachers praising me, I liked when I did well on tests. Maybe part of it all had to do with the fact when I started sort of to stabilize as a kid after I'd been taken from her, one of my first teachers looked like my mom.
And so I hung at her side, and she took an interest in me. And even though I tested right out of McLaren Hall, tested as being borderline mentally retarded, she insisted that I be retested. And I was, and it got me into different classes and on a different track, and these folks, these teachers, they never knew. I never told them I grew up in foster care.
They weren't rescuing some foster child. They just cared enough to do their job, and they did it so wonderfully. They came to school and they taught what they taught, and sure, some of them didn't like teaching, but they did what they were supposed to, and that was a rare thing for me.
Tavis: And now, and I'm skipping past a whole lot of good stuff in this book, and now you dedicate your life to working with kids.
Bridge: Yeah. I love kids, yeah. It's the most wonderful thing. A few weeks ago I was sitting down with a group of kids in New York City who'd actually - were foster children and actually ran away and then came back into the system runaways - it's a big problem. And I don't tell them that I grew up in foster care, and it's just the - inside of me it's the most wonderful feeling of having that connection after 15 minutes and knowing that there's something between us that we just trust one another. And it means the world to me.
Tavis: You live where now?
Bridge: I live in Manhattan.
Tavis: You live in Manhattan.
Bridge: Yeah, yeah.
Tavis: But he referenced Lankershim and the little motel that he lived in where the cops picked him up. Lankershim literally is, like, around the corner, essentially, from where this studio is.
Bridge: Yeah, it's very close.
Tavis: So you live in Manhattan now. So have you driven by Lankershim since you've been in town?
Bridge: Not since I've been on this trip. I was head of a group out here (unintelligible) for a while, and every now and then, not often, maybe once every couple of years, I drive by.
Tavis: And what do you think when you drive by there?
Bridge: I think, to be honest with you, I've turned out okay. I think of my mom.
Tavis: I'll say, yeah. Rather well adjusted, yeah.
Bridge: No, I think of my mom. I think of that woman who - that young, beautiful woman who lost everything. She lost her only child, she lost her freedom, she lost what I think most of us would call a meaningful life, and how much I miss her.
Tavis: I know that you're at home right now just knowing that I'm about to ask what happened to his mother. I'm not going to ask that, so you can go buy the book.
Bridge: (Laughs) I appreciate it.
Tavis: I know I'm supposed to ask, but I'm not. The book is called "Hope's Boy: A Memoir," written by Andrew Bridge. And if you want to know what happened to his mom, go get the book. Andrew, nice to have you on the program, and I'm glad to have you - honored to have you here.
Bridge: Thank you very much.
Tavis: Thank you so much. Powerful story.
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