"Mom hits as often as she hugs, and I'd rather have neither than both," writes David Ambroz in his 2022 memoir, "A Place Called Home." Ambroz, a child welfare advocate, spent years of his youth homeless and in foster care. He describes walking unseen among New York City tourists "still warm from wherever they got their last hot chocolates," hunkering down with his mother and siblings "in the colorless crevices of the city [as] gray people fading to nothing."
Ambroz retells small kindnesses during those years — moments that communicated, "You matter. We care." But they were too small, too few, and too far between. He writes: "My family is a car accident on the side of the highway. Passersby slow down long enough to gape but do nothing or very little to provide life-saving aid. America watches its children suffer in poverty, shaking our heads in sadness, and driving onward thinking it's someone else's job to help those poor folks." He makes a convincing argument that it is not someone else's job.
