This is the beginning of my story. I have come so far now, that when I look back, I see a different person than the one in the mirror now. I am a changed human being and I ask that you save judgement, as I am no longer the person who's story I will share. I am sharing this with you in hope that something I have been through, and how I made it through will change the future for someone else. I have only pieces of my mother. The memories I have of her are as hazy and hard to focus on as dirty photographs. My favourite is of her face as beautiful as a song, looking down at me. She is standing in the grass infront of the swing I am on. She is pushing me and we are laughing. She has silky gold hair that glistened in the sun that day. I had that hair once. My mother left when I was three years old, my dad still has the note she left us tucked in a box in his attic, that small blue box moved with us from house to house all through my life. The note said all sorts of pretty things about how we were the most beautiful children, she loved my father and that she'd come back some day. It has been twenty two years and I've given up hope. I was allowed my vision of her, radiant and happy, pushing me on a swing until I was seven when my dad confessed to me on the way to school, that my mother, my hero, was addicted to cocaine and that is why she left us. This drug that I wouldn't come to understand for many years, was the reason I had been left without a mother for over half my life. It was earth shattering. That day, driving to school I thought that this news meant the end. The end of my childhood the end of my innocence. Little did I know my childhood would soon be ripped away from me with whirlwind force. This was not the end by any stretch. This was the beginning. Alice.