I'm a SurvivorI grew up the youngest in a family of five. My mother and father divorced when I was a few months old. My mother struggled to care for her five young children on her own. Because her parents died when she was little, she never considered giving us up for adoption or to relatives. My biological father never kept contact with us. He never helped my mother take care of us and so I never knew him and have no memories of him. My mother did her best for us to have a good family life by marrying twice after her divorce from my biological father, but neither man in her. life served as a model for my three older brothers. It was my brothers who suffered the most from the breakdown of my parents' marriage and my father's abandonment of his parental duties. All three ruined their lives due to drugs and crime. My older brother lives day to day without any hope and with a constant internal struggle with drug addiction, which he often loses. My second oldest brother has been in and out of state psychiatric institutions for over fifteen years. He is forty-two years old and schizophrenic. My third oldest brother lives somewhere in New York and he doesn't want to be found. He calls my mother from time to time to tell her he is alive. I talk about my brothers first because even though they had problems growing up, they managed to protect me and keep me away from their troubles. They made me believe in fairy tales and tried to protect me from the harsh reality of the world. It was because I lived a fairy tale life as a child that I later learned that fairy tales don't come true. I would learn to struggle, to suffer and to survive. When I was eighteen, my mother moved away and left me in New York with my friends to go to college. I guess my mother thought I would easily succeed and become the first college graduate in our family and easily learn to be responsible and independent. She must also have assumed that since I had never struggled for anything, everything would be fine and that I would undoubtedly succeed in becoming a lawyer...