God knows she could not speak of her alcoholism, because even she did not know or understand it herself, not then anyway. God knows she did not tell them of the violence done to her in her childhood or the violence done to my sister, my brother and me. Why didnвЂ™t that prompt those adults to look into my home life? Maybe someone did talk to my mom, and maybe she told them a different version of things. That got me three complimentary visits to a child psychiatrist, in which I somehow realized I should not have said what I did and that it was not acceptable to want to die, and so I shut up. In third grade, I kept telling my teacher that I wanted to die. Like many people raised in that kind of environment, I also married a man who treated me with the disrespect and violence that I had been accustomed to. I have no recollection of a teacher, counselor or social worker who entered our home or pulled me out of class to ask questions about my life. I would find out many years later that there were people who suspected or knew things about our family, but either they did not try to help us or could not do anything to help us. Our family did not have any adult on the sidelines who could penetrate the chaos inside our home. I saw on television how other families lived, but our house did not look like вЂњThe Brady Bunch.вЂќ There was no Alice on the sidelines helping my mom get through a bad day or a crisis. I never learned the script for a different kind of life. I grew up in a home very much like A.J.вЂ™s. He was allegedly beaten and killed by his parents. On the first Wednesday of Easter, 5-year-old Andrew Freund, known as A.J., was found lying in a shallow grave.

And maybe remind the few if ill