"Yeah, like in an AA meeting . . . my name is Tina and I'm an alcoholic," said Tina Slavey-Hahn.  She leaned forward, spoke, leaned back. She ran her fingers through her short, tousled, brown hair.  Her ankle with its tattoo of red flowers swung to-and-fro.
     Tina was full of motion, full of energy. She wore cut-off blue jeans, a white T-shirt and strappy brown sandals on her bare feet. Her lively brown eyes and sunny smile made it difficult to believe that in her early life she had been a neglected child and later a victim of domestic abuse. That she had given her first child up for adoption and lost custody of two more.
     As a teenager, Tina was a wandering, homeless hippie, a user of drugs, and an unwed mother. Today, in her late forties, she is an AIDS's activist and a recovering alcoholic who fights for abused women.
     "When I was young," said Tina, "I knew only that if I loved someone I'd lose the person."  Her siblings came and went and she watched the men pass through her mother's life.
      "I think Mother married my father, who was her second husband, out of necessity to care for the four children from her first marriage," said Tina. "But she got back into the same type of relationship.  The first husband was alcoholic and an abuser. Our father was a wino and an abuser.  Ernie and I were born of this second marriage."
      "I remember when I was five," she said. "Mother ran out of the house into the sagebrush to hide from my father.  He was drunk and throwing rocks at her.  It was dark and very cold.  We kids trailed after Mother, shivering, huddling together to keep warm."
     When Tina was six, her mother became involved with another man and divorced her father.
     "I'm going back to Kentucky," her father said when he came to her first grade class to say good-bye.  "There's no reason to stay here. Your mother's new husband won't let me see you and Ernie." 
     Tina didn't see her father again for ten years but her life didn't change much with him gone.  Her mother's third husband was also an abuser. 
     "Once my Mother walked for miles late at night down a dark country road, trying to get away from him," Tina said. "It was bitterly cold.  Mother was bleeding. Cecil, Ernie and I were running along behind. We were terrified, crying, hanging on to each other."