David Ambroz

David’s childhood was marked by hardship and a system that failed him. Yet, he defied the odds, achieving remarkable success and using his experience to fight for a better future for vulnerable youth.

Tune into this special episode to hear David’s inspiring story and his powerful message about investing in our children early on before they fall victim to a broken system.

Content warning: This episode contains mentions of death, as well as discussions of substance use. If you or someone you know is struggling with a mental health or substance use disorder, please contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at (800) 662-4357. These programs provide free, confidential support 24/7. You are not alone.

Episode transcript

Elizabeth Vargas:

David Ambroz, welcome to Heart of the Matter.

David Ambroz:

Thank you. Good morning.

Elizabeth Vargas:

It’s good to have you here. And I just have to say congratulations on this memoir, A Place Called Home. I couldn’t put it down. It’s really extraordinary and I think it’s really changed the way I think and see people on the street who are homeless, which I am guessing is exactly what you wanted to do. Is that why you wrote the book?

David Ambroz:

100%. And I think we should just end it right there because you’ve just communicated everything I wanted to accomplish, which is to humanize people that have been looked down upon at best, if not completely ignored, like my family. There’s too many of us, and I wanted to share our story to humanize a population, to hopefully move people from empathy to action to do something, especially when they meet my mom and they meet my brother and they meet my sister, as we just struggle to survive.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You, your mother and brother and sister were homeless until you were 12 years old. You were living on the street and you spent a good portion of the first part of the book describing what that’s like, going from bus station to homeless shelter. You would spend days in libraries or fast food restaurants. You described what it was like to take what you called a Wendy’s bath, which was when you would go and, can you describe that?

David Ambroz:

Yeah, so I don’t think people realize that homeless people exist from their knees to their neck. My earliest memory learning about my mom, one of them was to make my mom a tampon out of toilet paper and paper towel in public restrooms. In my family, we call them twigs. Women had no dignity, my mom had no dignity, and we would have to figure out how to, at a base level, just survive. And there comes a point even for homeless people where you have to wash the clothes and you have to wash yourself. And I learned with my mom and my brother and sister how long we had in a public restroom before a customer would notify the manager, and what to do when that happened. We would take our laundry out of our bodega bag, dump it in a sink and use that god awful pearlescent pink soap to clean the heck out of these things, and then quite often put them on because that’s all we had, that’s what we were wearing.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Still wet?

David Ambroz:

Still wet, because we just needed a little bit cleaner than we had. And people are angry, people are mad, and we didn’t know what else to do, there was no other options. We didn’t have money for a laundry machine. So a Wendy’s bath for my family was clothes in our cells. And I remember sometimes I would take a paper towel and I would wash down my face or my arm and I’d look down, and you don’t realize how dark you become with filth, or how smelly you are until people pointed out with their looks, or they’re avoiding you. And so it was a really cruel lesson really in my life about survival.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Why were you and your mother and your brother and sister homeless?

David Ambroz:

My mom, if she had cancer, we would have a march and a color, but my mom suffered from a collection of mental health challenges and issues.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You know what they were?

David Ambroz:

Yeah, I think today we call them schizoaffective disorder, but I would also say sociopathy as well as depression. I think they changed over time, and without access to treatment or diagnosis on an ongoing basis, it probably ranged between them. I think some of it was both biologic, but also some of it was situational. When you’re in a perpetual state of stress, other mental health issues become more acute or emerge.

So my mom was one of the many people who on the streets or all across America in settings, we ignore. If she had cancer, we’d have a march, but she has a scarlet A, which is mental health. And because of it, we look away, we look away. My mom had three children and we turned the other way, and even if she was by herself, we still would’ve turned away. How many of us look at a homeless person in crisis and just shake our head and say, “I can’t, because …” That’s why we were homeless, is because society forgot that we can send a person to the moon. We can do better than stepping over homeless people or ignoring their distress, especially for those suffering from mental health issues who don’t have the faculties to lift themselves up.

Elizabeth Vargas:

I think when people see a homeless, mentally ill adult, you’re right, people do move away, it makes people feel uncomfortable. It makes people feel frightened to be honest. But I guess what really strikes me in this book is that this homeless mentally ill adult has three little kids in tow, three small children. And what’s really shocking in your story is how many people don’t seem to see you, a little kid who is 7, 8, 9 years old, homeless, dirty, hungry, and that nobody helped.

For example, a passage in your book when you’re talking about panhandling in Grand Central, which is a big train station in New York City, and you write, “Sir, ma’am, please excuse me, can I just … I try to address the countless faces that surge passed, but I’m invisible to these people, like all the homeless are across the city, just annoyances to be moved out of the way or cleaned up. I understand. We are not part of their reality. My family and our ilk are a nuisance for these people, if they’ve even considered our existence. They want to pretend we don’t exist.” I mean, there you are alone on that packed concourse and all those grownups walking around you and nobody helping you.

David Ambroz:

Children as terrible as that is to be ignored, are with adults, and we need healthy support for these people so that they can take care of their children.

I remember that day very specifically, because it was this jolt, it was an epiphany where the universe reached out and hit me across the face and said, “Wake up.” I was begging in the morning, and we begged in the morning. I begged at the Metro North, which serves Westchester, a wealthier county north of the city, and I was assigned that, and I was very good at it. And we begged in the morning because people are more generous before they’ve had a bad day. And so we would go out in our different areas, all of us assigned to different areas, and we’d beg. And that morning in particular, I remember because everyone ignored me. And the thing that I don’t write in there was I would’ve ignored me too. I had uncontrolled face sores, I had lice. I don’t remember the last time I had showered, and I was Pigpen from Peanuts, but much worse. And why would you want to look at me?

Elizabeth Vargas:

How old were you?

David Ambroz:

I was probably four. I was probably four. I didn’t have capacity or capability to trace my age through kind of milestones.

Elizabeth Vargas:

And all those adults are walking past this filthy four-year-old and nobody pulls you aside, nobody calls the police?

David Ambroz:

If anything, the police would not be helpful. They would’ve, as they did in the first chapter, cleaned us out of Grand Central on raids that they would do. So no, we walk by this issue. And here’s the revelation. So I learned that from the universe, and you know what I thought? I thought, “Gosh, I’m unplugged for the matrix.” That’s what I would’ve said if I had that language as a four-year-old. I’m outside the rules of society and if I want to survive, I cannot play by those rules because they will kill me. People’s apathy will kill me. I can’t rely on this stuff, I have to find my own way. I have to write my own matrix code. And so I learned to do that.

Elizabeth Vargas:

What would you eat? You described scenes of going into fast food restaurants and collecting creamers, little containers of creamers, and packets of sugar.

David Ambroz:

The inventiveness when you’re confronted with true hunger, true starvation, is unlimited. Yeah, we would make, water, we would add sugar and lemon and my mom would call it lemonade, and we would use cream packets. And you used to get free refills of coffee, which they stopped doing, but we would just keep drinking coffee and adding cream and sugar. And my family, my brother, sister and I got quite good at scoping out places like pizza joints. So I still don’t understand why people do not like crust. I love crust, I love pizza crust. And so people would eat the pizza and then throw out the crust, and if you have done that before, you sometimes leave those little triangles of cheese between your semi-circular bite, and my brother would guard or my sister would guard, and we’d raid the trash outside of restaurants.

I would steal all the time, food. And I tell this story in the book, if folks are familiar, there’s a buffet restaurant where you pay on the way in called Ponderosa. And like any buffet, you pay at the front end, you go get what you want, you sit down, you can have whatever you want. Well, my brother, sister and I would pretend to be the children of other patrons, and as soon as they got up to leave, we would sit at the table and then just start going up to the buffet.

We found endless ways, and by the way, many people gave us money when we begged. Many people. And those dollars would make the difference, sometimes whether or not we ate that day. So it was a combination of just trying to survive in one of the wealthiest most important city in North America.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You do write very movingly in the book about flashes of kindness. For example, at one point in Ponderosa, the hostess clearly knows what you guys are doing, and just says, “Go get some more.” And then another time you write, “They remind me of the Sicilian grandmother who runs a bakery and sandwich shop called Carousels that’s around the corner from the United Methodist. She’s four feet tall in heels. There mom runs a “tab” and the proprietress lets us order and pick our Italian sandwiches stuffed with meat and shredded lettuce and plenty of condiments, and for dessert, we have Napoleons.” “I’ll pay you back”, my mother always says. “We got you, Mary”, the woman answers, instinctively knowing how important it is to my mother to maintain her dignity. There is a message in these kindnesses that tells me there’s the possibility of a better life. You matter, we care, you are worthy.”

What would you have done without those people like that Sicilian grandmother, or that hostess at that Ponderosa restaurant, who unlike 99% of humanity, saw you and saw that you were homeless and needed food, and you were starving and needed help?

David Ambroz:

I call those moments of grace where the true human nature I believe our country and our people comes out. You see it after a disaster when we all want to do something. And some people are just more in tune with that all the time. What would we have done? We would not have survived. And it wasn’t just physical in terms of calories or shelter that day, it was emotional. To have invisibility thrust upon you as a child for so long, it’s so tiring, so emotionally exhausting. And then you’re surrounded in these environments where it is long moments where you’re just afraid that something is going to hurt you, and then it’s punctuated with that violence and then you have to figure out how to recover. That’s your day-to-day.

These are moments where someone shows a kindness, a dollar here or a free sandwich. You look at that person, and I’ll tell you a story where I was at school one time, very rarely, but I was there, and I had such bad lice that they were jumping off of my head, and the teacher sent me to the nurse’s office. And I had been beaten by my mom and I was very bruised and I was very afraid someone would see it. And the school nurse, this is a nurse in an urban school, very poor, had dealt with lice, and she leaned me back into this makeshift sink and she started washing my hair. And she took my hand before she did, and she held it under the water and she said, “Is this too hot?” And she caressed my cheek, and I remember crying because I was afraid she’d see the bruises.

I remember crying because no one had ever touched me, not in violence or perversion, and here’s this person just spending the time with me. And I’ll tell you, I don’t know if anyone listening has ever had lice, but that shampoo is awful, and that pit is awful. And it was one of the most important intimate moments of my young adult life where someone in that moment of, gosh, found a way to provide a moment of grace and kindness and compassion.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Someone took care of you.

David Ambroz:

Someone took care. And even to be seen and to be valued in such a casual way for other people, I’m telling the story 40 years later.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah. You also write in the book about the stress of having to negotiate when homeless, just the bureaucracy of the help. You’re going to an office to get food stamps and a little bit of support, but you have to sit there for hours and wait to meet with somebody and then prove your case. And you write, “Right now, our survival hangs on the razor’s edge of Vanessa,” the woman at the office, the social service office. “Right now where survival hangs on the razor’s edge of Vanessa’s own mood. Did she get enough sleep last night? Did she have a fight with a loved one? Was her boss mean to her? What if she feels sick and just wants to be done with us? The subjective nature of this process is our crucible.”

In other words, it all hinges on her being in a good mood, being in the mood to say yes, being in the mood to show compassion and mercy, being in the mood, not to be annoyed by your mother, who I’ve got to be honest as I read this book, she says to everybody, “Did I say thank you?” all the time. And that drove me crazy as I’m sure it did you because that’s why you put it in the book.

David Ambroz:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:

The point is, your mother is not an easy person to deal with. I’m talking about from the outside world, for you and your brother and sister, she was terribly abusive. But your entire survival hinges on her being able to convince this woman to give you food stamps.

David Ambroz:

There’s so many moments where we weren’t necessarily going to make it, and poverty, which in our country is women’s work because of the way that we raise children and the sexism inherent in our society still, poverty is one long line. It is a time tax where you are told to pull your kids out of school and come sit here to prove that you have children. You are told to have an address to apply for food stamps and rental assistance. When you’re homeless, you don’t have either of those things. And then you’re a mentally ill woman told to fill out countless reductive and repetitive paperwork. How many of us have gone to a medical office and filled out our damn social security number six times and been frustrated by it? Now layer in mental health, layer in the stress of living in a violent homelessness situation. And my mom was told to do that all the time and it was absurd.

Poverty in our country is, I always think about poverty thusly. It’s like you’re a person drowning and a lifeboat pulls up with a bunch of people in a lifeboat, and the first person pulls you out of the water and you go, “huuuuh”, and you take this breath and you’re like, “Thank God.” And then they drop you back in the water and they go, “Don’t worry, there’s another program right behind me.” Nobody ever pulls you out of the water. You are given breaths, which is enough to string together survival, but it’s never enough to arrest the poverty. And that’s the problem. We look at people and we’re like, “Why aren’t you better? Why aren’t you easier to deal with?”

And then we incentivize people like Vanessa not to give out benefits necessarily, they’re not bad people, but are we incentivizing anyone in the system to help people like my mom? They’re not bad people, we are the system. We need to change it to embrace the messy condition of people like my family, because no human is disposable. That’s not who we are as a country. I don’t believe it and I think we need a better system than the lifeboat approach to poverty.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Your mom’s mental illness led her to be extremely abusive of all three of you kids. She beat you, she hit you, she would push you downstairs. You were, all three of you, covered in bruises and cuts all the time. You went to the DARE officer, which is the don’t use drugs officer in school, and told them what was happening to you. Nothing happens. They interview you in front of your mother where of course you can’t say what’s really happening. It is painful how long it takes for someone to finally take the three of you away from her. Why did it take so long?

David Ambroz:

I think that’s what we spoke about a little bit earlier. We are all busy people. We’re overwhelmed with what we need to do for our families, with our lives. We’re struggling ourselves, all of us with different issues, and then we look out and we see something and we think, “I can’t. I can’t, because …” And the because is a million things. I’m tired, I’m poor. That person scares me, someone else will do this. And that’s where we end it. I’m always reminded that that 10 years before I was born we sent a person to the moon, and we did it as a country. We didn’t outsource it, we did it and we didn’t have computers. And then 10 years later, and then throughout my life, I don’t know what happened to that spirit. I refuse to let it disappear completely. We need to look at these situations and realize that we need a moonshot for poverty.

Not since 1999 has the phrase child poverty been uttered at a presidential debate. We talk about coal mining, and we should, but what about the 8.4 million kids like me? We have decided collectively to look away and do the bare minimum, and then we hack away at public schools that have become health clinics, family engagement, afterschool care, ESL classes. We hack away at them. We overwhelm people like my sister who’s a social worker with too many cases and not enough pay. And then we’re shocked when kids perpetuate the cycles of poverty and violence. And what do we do? We add more rules so Vanessa can’t help us, and we look away further, and then we denigrate government. And what do we get? We get this.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah, you make the argument, which has been made in other scenarios as well, it’s like penny wise pound foolish, that if we just spend a little bit now on these children and on foster care, that we will save ourselves the considerably bigger expenses later of what happens to those people when they grow up with mental health issues, substance abuse issues, and they’re homeless and living on the street, and it costs much more at that point to take care of the problem instead of spending a little bit less to make sure the problem doesn’t happen.

David Ambroz:

Yeah. Yeah, I think you’ve nailed the cause. I think the other cause that we don’t consider nearly enough is the moral cost. This is not who we are. We can make a different decision. Other than the laws of physics, everything else is a choice. Everything else. We can make a different choice. So yes, the economics, of course, it doesn’t make sense to do what we’re doing. No sense at all.

You are going to pay for that young man. I think 60 something percent of young men leaving foster care will go to jail. It is so much more expensive to send them to jail than to help them with some rent when they emancipate out of foster care. 70 plus percent of the girls will have a baby. Are we okay? They’re going to be perpetuating that violence and poverty cycle, not because they’re bad people, but because that’s what we’ve set them up for. When you leave foster care, you’re more likely to be sex trafficked, die, or anything else than go to community college. Are we okay with that? It is the economic cost, absolutely, you cannot argue with that. Those are just the facts.

Elizabeth Vargas:

And you went into foster care when you were 12?

David Ambroz:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Your caseworker said you were the only child she’d ever seen who was excited to be placed into foster care. You were that happy to finally be off the streets and out of that. You were convinced your mother, as much as you loved her, was going to kill you.

David Ambroz:

Yeah. And she had tried. And I was so excited, I was so ecstatic. I pictured a government and a family that would take care of kids like me. And I was in such a bad place with my mom in terms of the violence, that I thought she was really close to killing me. And I went into foster care and I remember so specifically when the social worker took me to my first placement, we passed this row of fencing with barbed wire, and then she pulled over and she said, “You don’t belong here. I’ll get you out.” And I had no idea what she was talking about. And what it was was a young adult offender facility where I did not belong, I was much younger.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You weren’t an offender.

David Ambroz:

There wasn’t enough placements, and I was also diagnosed as queer. And I was not therefore safe to be placed in most placements. It was an illness and a dangerous one. And then I had a parade of awful foster placements with the exception of one amazing foster home that brought me in eventually. But it was so damaging and I had hundreds of foster siblings that I know did not make it out of the system, they are the statistics that break my heart. But I did make it out. Most foster kids when they leave at 18 or 21, they become homeless.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Because you get out of foster care and you have, what happens?

David Ambroz:

Nothing.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Nothing?

David Ambroz:

Nothing. So there is some assistance that states get to opt into provide, so states can extend foster care to 21 and the federal government will pay for it, for the most part. A lot of states haven’t done it. And even at 21, even at 21, if parents are listening, is your child truly independent at 21? Imagine that child with a decades of violence, decades of trauma, and we expect them to what? They don’t have first and last month rent. They’ve not had models of what it means to go to work every day. They don’t have a college degree or a vocational certificate, and what do we expect them to do? They perpetuate what they know, and that is the communities where they’re from and the violence that we’ve wrought in these places.

Elizabeth Vargas:

This whole attitude of help yourself, go get a job. How do you get a job if you don’t have a home to live in? How do you get a college education if you don’t have a place? Even if you’re able to work and put yourself through college, you need a place to live while you’re doing that, or a way to pay those bills. College is not free in this country.

David Ambroz:

Absolutely. Yeah, 50% of the homeless in our states were former foster kids. Over 50% today. We are emancipating generations of our children, the state’s kids, to the street. And when you said that cost earlier, this is the moral cost that we are agreeing to pay by our inaction and apathy, and I don’t think that’s who we are. And that’s why I shared this story.

Foster youth are twice as likely to have PTSD than American veterans. What happens to young people who first of all experience violence and poverty and some measure both, and then go into a system that we have denigrated and broken up and not supported? What happens is you get people that are deeply traumatized coming out of the system or even through it that need quality access to mental health care, and we don’t get it. And we don’t get it as young people and we don’t get it certainly as adults in our society, and we’re told to be ashamed of it. So then we don’t deal with our stuff. We just try and move forward, we try to anesthetize ourselves with drugs or we try and ignore it to the detriment of our future spouses and families and loved ones.

Until I was 37, between 12 and 37, that first violent foster placement, I did not cry one time. I didn’t cry because I thought these people in the system would kill me if I showed weakness. And they gave me every evidence to that case. When I was 37, I realized that a deepest part of me was numb, that I had created this thick crust to myself and full feeling in order to protect myself from all of the things that were going on to me. And I was 37 and my coping mechanism fell apart, and I had to learn with the mental health provider and my loved ones, how to rebuild myself to be a full feeling human that was not living a life of just numbness and trauma, but accepting emotions, crying, loving, and being a full feeling human, when I was 37. When I was 37. What about the kids that don’t have access to that? We can do better.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah, you wrote about that moment, and very movingly. I had highlighted in your book you were at that facility for youthful offenders, the first placement before you then went on to another abusive foster family. But you write, “I take the pain and squeeze it into a tight square, then I pack it in a box and place it on a shelf next to another box. I know where it is and maybe one day I can take it down and feel again, but right now feeling is a luxury I can’t afford, not if I’m going to survive. Whatever is coming, I need to be bulletproof and numb. I’ll wear a mask. I don’t know this yet, but I won’t shed a tear again for 23 years.”

David Ambroz:

I’m going to cry right now. But this is what we put kids through. And this is what I don’t understand, this is what I refuse to accept, which is this is what we put kids through. We look at children, even those boys that did these things to me, they’re not disposable. How dare we treat them… to create a person that would do these crimes as a young person, what had to have happened to them? And we just throw them away. And then people like me cycle through that in different ways. What are we doing?

People are very agitated right now, right, left, right, red, blue. And I sometimes think to myself like, if you close your eyes, I could not see your political party. I can’t see who you voted for. Can we just agree that kids deserve better? Can we start there, and however that manifests, can we just say that kids should not be homeless? I think we can agree. Can we say that kids should not be starving. I think we can come to agreement.

Elizabeth Vargas:

And by the way, these are kids through no choice of their own, through no fault of their own. They didn’t ask to be born into poverty, they didn’t ask to be the child of a person who was unable or unwilling to work and can’t figure out a way to live in a proper way. I have to ask you, because it’s become such an enormous political issue in cities across the country, not just New York and LA, we see this in Phoenix, Arizona and Seattle and Portland. The homeless crisis has really reached a boiling point. Here in very liberal New York City, there’s great debate. They’re now starting to sweep up clearly mentally ill homeless people and place them in mental hospitals, not always with their permission. And there’s been an enormous debate about whether that’s fair, whether that’s legal, whether that’s moral to do that.

As you watch all this play out, Phoenix, just under court order, cleaned out literally almost a square mile of a homeless encampment. It’s the biggest homeless encampment I think, in the country. And a court ordered it removed because so many people were so upset. Businesses, mom and pop businesses who had toiled away and worked forever trying to make it work were now arriving to work and finding homeless people passed out on the front stoop and defecating on their front stoop, and that sort of thing. In other words, it’s become untenable in so many parts of the country. And I’m curious what your reaction is to that, having grown up as a homeless child.

David Ambroz:

First, remember they’re people. Remember they’re people. It sounds so simple, but we don’t. And I listen to the conversation, I listen to the bait. And people say, clean it up. My family was the it. My family was the it. We’re not an it. People are not its. Very few people choose to live that way. What are the systems that we have created as a people that are leading all of these people to live this way? We are responsible for that. We are responsible for denying development in California so that no one can build enough to house people, so prices go through the roof. We’re not arming foster youth for a future, so they’re becoming homeless. People are one paycheck away because they don’t have enough quality income to survive a missed paycheck or a broken car, and they become homeless.

We are responsible for the streams that are joining to become this mighty river that’s washing over the country. And if we think by cleaning up the encampment at the tail end of that process, that that is going to address all the issues that’ll lead to yet another, you can’t take a thimbleful out of the ocean, expect it to stay open, it is going to backfill. We need to go upstream, and upstream the ultimate person responsible, what do I think? It’s us. We have to do better. We have ripped apart the social welfare safety net. We don’t rehabilitate people in prison, we throw foster kids out on the street at 18 or 21. People like my mom devolve on the street with no access to mental healthcare. What do we expect?

So we can, all we want, clean up this spot, it’s whack-a-mole. We will not address these issues until we go upstream and deal with the issues that are leading to these symptoms. The symptoms is homelessness. Homelessness is not the cause, it’s the end point of a process and processes that we’ve created. And I think we can un-create them for the most part. And just to say something, California passed something called CARE Court, which is a version of what you mentioned with regards to New York. I fully support it. I fully support this idea that homeless people who don’t have full control or faculties to exercise their civil rights and decisional authority should not have it.

My mom should not have had it for decades. And it took a grumpy son who’s a lawyer to fight for years to get her stabilized, and forcibly against her will, medicated so that she’s stable and in housing now with assisted living, I had to fight. And if she hadn’t had a grumpy son that became a lawyer, she would not have made it. I love that California passed it. It is not one and done, we have to constantly poke at it, make sure it’s working, change it, tweak it. But what do I think? I think we deinstitutionalized people in the eighties with a promise of community-based mental healthcare and we never fulfilled that promise. And what happened? The tsunami we live with. I’m all for it.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You do support making mentally ill homeless people take medication, receive treatment, be hospitalized against their will?

David Ambroz:

What I saw with my mom when I found her homeless again, was a person in a deep psychosis with incredible problems with her body, health issues. And do I think she had the capacity to make this authority and decisions? Absolutely not. She would be dead. So what do I think? I don’t think my mom should have had that authority. I think her very rational son who could go through a court process to make sure I’m not a problem and make sure she had advice and counsel, could get her treatment. I absolutely support it. This is not the 19 whatever’s where we’re going to have Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, especially in places like California. We’re going to have to have oversight, we’re going to have to have constant changing of the policy.

I did not want my mom to die. And thankfully she had an advocate who fought for her. Hundreds of people die every day in California, they’re homeless. I’m not okay with that. I’m not okay with it. I’d rather them get the treatment that they deserve and need, as long as there’s proper oversight. We need to tweak it, we need to constantly monitor it. We need to make sure these people are humanely treated, but absolutely, I support it, unqualified.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You write very movingly in your memoir about that tension between how much you loved your mom. Even as a tiny child you were the youngest of the three kids, and your job as you saw, was to keep her stable, to do whatever you could to make her okay. The roles were reversed. Even as a tiny child, you were the one taking care of your mom as she marched you through homeless shelters and up and down streets, and looking for bus stops or benches that you could sleep on, and packets of sugar that you could eat. And yet you also reported her. You were the one who went to the police not once, but several times, and said, “This is happening to me. She’s going to kill me.”

Can you just talk about that right there? You obviously made a choice at some point, “I’ve got to survive, I need to live, and the only way that’s going to happen is if I get away from you, the person I love most.”

David Ambroz:

Yeah. I opened the book, it’s dedicated to my mom, and I say to my mom who taught me to forgive and to conquer one impossible thing at a time. And I dedicate it to my mom because that is probably the most important lesson I’ve ever had. I had to forgive her. I had to forgive these parents that hurt me. I had to forgive society for not caring. And through that, I found a way forward to become who I am. I think if I had all the anger and righteous justification for that anger, I would not have made it to this side where I’m at today. And so my mom was my earliest teacher in so many ways, and she is my most important teacher. I’m still one of her guardians that takes care of her today.

I have to forgive my mom all the time. I have to remind myself of my decision that this person can’t control herself. And if she had had a cancer, these other things, we wouldn’t be mad at her for losing her hair and chemo. But my mom can’t control what happened. And so I’ve decided, and it’s a decision I have to renew, that I’m going to love this person because she’s sick and I am her son. And I hope one day if I ever needed it, that society or somebody in my life would care enough to do the same for me. And it’s made me a better person, it’s helped me survive some really terrible things, because she taught me from the youngest age to care for someone who sometimes couldn’t care for me.

Elizabeth Vargas:

How are your brother and sister and how did the three of you survive? I mean, it’s pretty extraordinary. None of you are homeless and on the street and all of you are successful with wonderful lives.

David Ambroz:

There’s all the kids and the spouses. Everyone’s married with beautiful children. There’s my foster son.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Aren’t you guys really the exception?

David Ambroz:

Yeah, and we shouldn’t be. We could make a decision collectively that we should be the norm. My brother, sister and I, the most thing we had in common was our mother. And even when we were homeless, my mom would say things like, “David, you are going to be a Supreme Court Chief Justice.” And I love that she aimed high and then the highest level within that high. And I always kind of laugh because we weren’t even in school.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Not just a judge, a Supreme Court Justice.

David Ambroz:

I mean, aim high, right? And she’d say, “Jessica, I give you the moon, Alex the sun, David the stars.” My mom gave me the universe even as we were homeless and hungry, and she taught us to read. And we spent time at libraries and she inculcated this value of education, she demanded of us a belief that there’s something better out there. And that lit a flame, it is the thing that we have in common is my mother, and the three of us have advanced degrees from prestigious universities, successful careers. And we are the exception.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Say them. I want our audience to know that these three kids who grew up sleeping on benches in Grand Central achieved what?

David Ambroz:

My brother joined the Army and eventually graduated from Duke with his MBA. I went to Vassar College and then ultimately UCLA School of Law. And my sister, after graduating from a prestigious school in Boston, went on to go to USC, University of Southern California for a Master’s Degree in social work. And everyone’s in their career using those. I’m not using my law degree, I’m the only exception directly, but everyone’s doing great. And the thing we have in common is my mom, this imperfect person.

Elizabeth Vargas:

And the thing you have in common is you were three little kids who everybody drew back from or walked past, and thought, “Oh God, I can’t help them” if they even saw you. In other words, the three kids so dismissed by society ended up doing extraordinary things. So the next time you see a child on the street, that child could be the next kid that serves in the Army, the next kid that goes to Vassar, the next kid that becomes a social worker after getting a college degree, people who give back.

David Ambroz:

A hundred percent. Yeah, and I open up afterwards the list of famous foster youth because folks don’t realize that Coco Chanel, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Eddie Murphy, Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, on and on, our former foster youth. Steve Jobs was adopted, but I’m going to claim him. There are so many. John Lennon. I mean, come on, who doesn’t love John Lennon? We are out there and even if the best we become is what we want to be, which is a skilled vocation of beautiful as well, we are endless potential. We are your children and we need folks to wake up to that and own it and take care of us, not just foster kids, but kids in general.

I am a relentless optimist, but I also put the work in, and I believe we should center children in our politics, and we’re not. And I think we could, and I want us to do that. I want us to be the beloved country we are, and I try and work on that every day. And that’s why I wrote this damn thing. I wanted to pull back the curtain, I wanted it to come out with all of it, pun intended, and just own my story and inspire people to do something. Just act.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Well, the book is called A Place Called Home. It’s an extraordinary memoir. You have done so much to advocate for kids in foster care, and at a time when we’re having such a crisis with the homeless and mentally ill in this country, you’re an important voice. And David, I just thank you so much for being on Heart of the Matter. It’s really, really been a pleasure talking to you.

David Ambroz:

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.