At the time, I didn 't understand. I wanted to, but I couldn 't. I was too young, too naive, and too unsure of myself. My mother would just lay there on the couch, too tired to provide for me or treat me like her child. In my more adolescent stages, I was surrounded by people like my mother- itching for their next high, willing to do anything to achieve it. Addiction can be scary, especially for a child of eight or nine. I was constantly moved from school to school to school- sometimes, my mother just didn 't send me. She was too out of it to notice that I didn 't attend, and when my father called her to investigate she would give half-attempted excuses. So, considering the fact that my mother would sell anything of mine she could for that