Growing Up in an Unstable Home My mother had nine children with five different fathers and was only married to two of them. Life was chaotic and unstable from the very beginning. My stepfather was an alcoholic whose rage turned our home into a battlefield. He routinely unleashed physical and verbal abuse on my mother, me, and my two older half-brothers. The neighbors would often call the police to intervene in those awful domestic violence episodes. Eventually, my mother fo