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When people ask me about my past, I tell them I was raised by wolves. In a cave.

That usually gets a laugh, and deflects attention from the fact that I didn't answer the question. Truth is, I'm from the poor side of a major Texas city, and no, I don't go back to visit. Why? Because the people who were supposed to nurture and protect me hurt me badly, and I may never fully recover. You see, my folks were sadistic perverts - actually, make that perverted sadists. They enjoyed some pretty sick things, but simply causing pain was what defined them most.

I was born in 1974 to the tail-end of the Woodstock generation. My egg donor was a high school dropout; the sperm was supplied by a boy with hair longer than hers, who missed the draft for Vietnam by a month. They got married when she was 16 and a half and he was barely 19, and over the next 25 years they had a total of nine children. It took me years to figure out why.

I don't have many memories of growing up. I've blocked most of them out, apparently- I have trouble telling what year a particular event occurred, and some years are a total blank. I do remember this feeling at the back of my neck, however; that waiting for the ax to fall, for the other shoe to drop, for the s*t to hit the fan. It was like walking on eggshells all the time, bracing for the next nuclear event.

I won't bore you with details; I suggest you watch 'Sybil' and read 'A Child Called It'. I finally got up the courage to expose myself to those narratives a few years ago and kept thinking, "Wow. There are other people out there who would understand." The folks never tried to gas us with bleach and ammonia, and I don't remember a button-hook specifically, but there were enough parallels to make me physically sick for a day or two.

I have flashbacks in the form of dreams now. I wake up in sweat-soaked sheets, yelling. That wasn't a story I read in a book, or a nightmare I thought I had. It's a memory. No children's book would have had a story like that - and some of those bad dreams had a little too much information. Sometimes I'm not sure if I'd prefer my memories to just stay gone.

I could cope, though, with everything they did to me. What I can't stand is that they did it to my baby sibs, too.

We didn't go to school. We didn't make friends. We didn't have TV, radio, immunizations or much outside contact with the world at all. They very cleverly insulated us against society to an extent that we really didn't catch on that something was abnormal

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