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evening I decided to take my feathered friend to bed with me, and we snuggled down together.
    When I awoke the next morning I found a lifeless little bird next to me, and I ran to my dad to share the news. Bless Dad for knowing the right thing to do for me at that time in my life—Dad took Rockadoodle and told me he would fix him. After what seemed like hours of waiting Dad told me Rockadoodle had made a full recovery but had decided to live in a big tree outside, rather than in a cage inside the house. Dad then took me to a window where we both looked out. Then he pointed to a large tree and told me that was where Rockadoodle now lived.
    I now know that I probably rolled over in my sleep and squashed my little friend, but Dad never let me know that. While it might have been a wonderful “teachable moment” for another child, I had already suffered the loss of so many people whom I loved that Dad knew I didn’t need to hear that about Rockadoodle.
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    At about this same time, with the departure of yet another nanny whose name I don’t remember, I found that two new people had come into in my life. “Ginny” was our new nanny. And a man I’ll call Nathan soon became a friend of my dad’s. Nathan was a balding older man who became a sort of sensei to my dad. In addition to being a kind of spiritual teacher and a regular fixture in our household, Nathan also had a charismatic personality.
    Ginny found us when she answered one of Dad’s ads. She was a very nice, pretty girl who had a two-year-old son I’ll call Andy.The thing I remember most about Andy was that he was a really big kid for his age. The addition of Andy to our household was very exciting to me. Until this time, whatever configuration we had of family in our house, I was always the youngest. I was Baby Lyssa. That’s why any person younger than I was a source of extreme interest and fascination.
    Ginny didn’t last long in her role as nanny before she was “upgraded” to dad’s girlfriend. And from the beginning, Dad and Ginny’s relationship was passionate, both physically and emotionally. As the weeks and months passed after Ginny was hired, Dad became less frequent and less present in our lives.
    During this time Dad and I took a ride in his car and he began smoking a crack pipe like it was a cigarette. Dad has since said that, at the time, he had no idea what crack was. That maybe explains why when Dad first started smoking crack (from my perspective) he never tried to hide it. He thought it was the coolest, hippest thing in the world. It wasn’t too long, however, before his new habit came to the attention of a few people who didn’t think it was quite so cool.
    One day during a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) class at school the teacher showed Tucker’s class pictures of some drug paraphernalia. When the photo of a crack pipe came up, Tucker shouted out something to the effect of, “Hey, my dad uses one of those.”
    Twenty-four hours later, as the school day ended and I was standing on the second-floor balcony waiting for Dad to pick meup, several school officials came to escort me to a nearby room, where they told me I was not going home with Dad that day. Out the window, I watched my dad storm up the front stairs of the school, absolutely furious. Even from the second floor I could hear him yelling, but the result was that I was put into a car with strangers and taken to a Child Protective Services (CPS) office to a small room with a few books, waiting for I didn’t know what.
    You can imagine my fear and confusion. Here I was, an eight-year-old little girl, and all I knew was that I was being taken from my family. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know why I had to be checked for bruises and such, or where we were going. Terror formed an icy ball deep inside me.
    After everyone was done looking at me, I was again loaded into the car. Now I was told that we were going to a Taco Bell and then we’d drive all the way to the