“Please, don’t hurt her.

Don’t argue with them. You told me this would happen.

Leave her alone.”

This is what 7-year-old Andrew Bridge thought as the police took him from his mentally ill mother on a Saturday afternoon on the streets of Los Angeles. Torn between the desire to protect his beloved mother and the need to be safe, he was pulled away from her and into a life that proved only marginally more bearable than his harrowing existence with her. Andy was taken to MacLaren Hall, public orphanage, “death house of childhoods,” as he writes, and then placed with an emotionally and often physically abusive foster family in the San Fernando Valley, northwest of downtown where he stayed for 11 years.

And yet, “Hope’s Boy,” published last month and reaching No. 6 on The New York Times best-seller list, is not an abuse book. The man I sit talking with 38 years later radiates happiness, excitement, health. He carries a picture of his mom on his iPhone. Bridge looks boyish, although not at all like the boy sporting an odd, blank, half-smiling stare on the book’s cover. When he’s particularly thrilled with a topic, he literally hops up and down, even when seated. “This is not a book about me,” he insists. “It is a book about my mother.”

His mother, Hope, was beautiful and proud. “When my mother walked down the street,” the book begins, “men noticed.” Bridge was proud of her, in spite of the precarious life she led with him – full of dangerous men and angry landlords and bloody, botched attempts at suicide. Bridge describes his mother in the courtroom scene in which he officially was removed from her care. “My mother was twenty-four years old, descended from a line of impoverished women, educated to the tenth grade, abandoned by a husband, and plagued with fear. Standing at the judging bar, she must have recalled courtroom encounters from her own childhood. Now, a woman among her betters, she could do nothing more than be still and be judged.” Helping vulnerable people, especially children and women, would become his life’s work.

Punitive solution

Not only did Bridge survive, he triumphed over the odds. Despite the fact that only 2 percent of the nation’s 500,000-plus children in foster care get a college degree, he got a scholarship to Wesleyan University in Connecticut and then graduated from Harvard Law School. He got a Fulbright scholarship, studied in Germany and after a stint representing children on behalf of a national civil rights organization, took the job as executive director of the Alliance for Children’s Rights in Los Angeles, suing bureaucracies and institutions that fail to respect the rights of society’s most vulnerable citizens.

Andrew Bridge saw his mother twice in the 10 years after he was taken from her. It is his firm belief that too many children are taken from their parents prematurely, that more resources and creativity should be applied to helping fragile families recover and better care for their children.

He thinks that foster care in this country has become a punitive solution for these vulnerable families. Social workers get more praise and bureaucracies more compensation for “saving” children from potential abuse and keeping them in state care than for keeping families together. These social workers are, of course, concerned that if they leave a child in a precarious situation and something happens, they will be to blame. And families, meanwhile, are so terrified of their children being taken away that they do not rely on social workers when in dangerous situations. Bridge thinks much more can be done to help keep these families intact.

“For all our talk about family values,” he says, “we really only mean certain families.” Bridge saw firsthand what happens to vulnerable women in this or any city. “I saw my mother raped, slapped, disrespected in every way, in spite of her amazing power as a beautiful, intelligent woman. She made bad choices, yes, but there is a fundamental lack of respect for the mother-child bond in this country.”

Lasting effects

Bridge is keenly aware that most of the stories we hear about foster children are extreme (for example, the television show “Dexter,” about a psychopathic former foster child). “We demonize the mentally ill and vulnerable in this country. Rarely do we hear about the gifted and talented kids who beat the soul-deadening system, much less the quiet, lonely kids somewhere in the middle.”

Bridge is full of ideas for changing this, including a proposed set of federal incentives and rewards for kids in foster care who get good grades and for their foster parents. Under his leadership, the alliance established the Health Care Partnership for children, a consortium of Los Angeles hospitals working together to provide assistance to homeless children. He was a force behind the establishment of National Adoption Day; Los Angeles Appleseed, a public-interest law center; and the New Village Charter School, a Los Angeles college preparatory academy focusing on the needs of girls in the foster care system or in care of the state.

Bridge, who lives in New York City, has visited his mother several times in the Arizona facility where she lives. On a recent visit, he took his mother to a local drugstore to buy nail polish and lipstick. He was delighted when – after the cumulative effects of her illness, various drug treatments and neglect – some of her old vanity rekindled. She insisted not only on a certain shade of red but also that the lipstick and polish matched.

“My mother lost everything a human being can lose,” he says, telling me about one visit to his mother at a facility in which all of her teeth had been removed, probably to save money on further dental expenses. Bridge spent years not talking about his mother – “she was too special to me. I didn’t want people judging her.” But he was encouraged by co-workers and friends and by his editor for this book at Hyperion.

“I wanted to write it while she was still alive,” he says, although he does not think she will ever read it. “I love this woman more than anything,” he says, quoting a line in the book: “her arms challenge every subsequent embrace.”