Walking on Eggshells: Discovering Strength and Courage Amid Chaos Read Free

as if they were bowling pins. Again, I am not sure why they were together, but it was essentially a bar fight. By the time they began pulling each other’s hair out, I had become hysterical.This violent behavior from the two women who were supposed to take care of me was terrible to witness. From them I learned that the way to solve problems was through disrespectful name-calling and, if that failed, physical violence.
    Today I am twenty-five, and understand that, as a young child, I was given little guidance. I don’t mean to say that my parents didn’t love me. I know they did, even though when I was small I wasn’t always sure of it.
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    In the fall of 1992, when I was five, I started kindergarten and quickly came to love everything about going to school. Everything. Tawny always walked us to school, and in previous years we would drop Barbara and Tucker off, then Tawny and I would walk home. This year, however, I got to stay!
    I loved meeting all the kids and making new friends, including my teacher, Mrs. Fox. Every day we had snack time, play time, and nap time, and I enjoyed the process of learning far more than you might imagine—especially for a girl with my particular family situation. For me, school was a safe place, an environment where I could be “normal,” and it was a place where no one knew of my troubles at home. I could even, for a few hours during the school day, forget about all the tension within my family.
    Even then I had a vague awareness that other parents thought about Dad and Tawny differently than they regarded parents ofmost of my classmates—Dad’s career, the way our family was configured, even how my dad looked made him unique. When I was young, Dad had long hair worn in a kind of flattop mullet and was clean-cut. He was thin and so handsome that many of the other moms whistled at him. Plus, his suave, charismatic personality, combined with a crisp white shirt and black vest, made him impossible not to notice. Even though he was not yet a celebrity, there was never a time when he was shy and retiring. He has always known how to fill a room, even if he’s the only one in it. That’s also one of the many things I love about him.
    I don’t know how blatant his drug use was at that time, but I do remember seeing drug paraphernalia around our home. I didn’t realize what it was or what the connotations could be—for me, it was just something else to wonder about, among all those other adult things that didn’t seem to have much to do with me.
    Because my mother left when I was so young I didn’t have any strong memories of her. To be honest, I didn’t even think about her much. Tawny was the first of half a dozen or more women Dad would eventually wind up having close relations with—women who each lived with us at one time or another. I wasn’t really aware of the concept of a biological mother, so I called each of those women “Mom.” It seemed natural, since to me “Mom” was simply any lady we lived with for a length of time and who took care of us.
    Sometimes Dad had two women he saw regularly at the same time. That became a big thing for me to wonder about. For example, for most of the time Dad was married to Tawny, hewas also pursuing other women, including Beth Smith, who later would become another of my stepmothers. Beth is Dad’s current wife and starred along with Dad, two of my brothers, and me in Dog the Bounty Hunter . Beth first came into Dad’s life when I was two, about the same time my biological mother left. When the divorce came through and Dad married Tawny, Beth was still an on-and-off presence.
    Dad initially met Beth when he bailed her out of jail for shoplifting and illegal possession of a firearm. Then Beth and Tawny became good friends. I remember several times when Beth came to our house when I was very young, including the Christmas after Dad and my mother separated. This was unusual, as other women rarely hung out at our house. Over the years