My friend Jule lost her husband to a heart aneurysm quickly and unexpectedly almost two years ago. She recently started the most incredible blog in the world about him and how she met him and their relationship. I regularly weep with the rawness and honesty of it. You should definitely read it. She is the most amazing, well one of the most amazing writers I know.

She posts twice a week. I want more, but I don’t want it to end either - like all good stories do once you finish telling them. So I wait. And I read. And twice a week I weep. Today she wrote about Trent’s abuse from his parents and the last time his father beat him. It struck a chord inside me that is still reverberating. So I decided to write about what it woke in me here.

I was beaten regularly by both parents. They hit me with belts, with their fists, with their open palm, with electrical cords (I cannot look at a round black electrical cord without getting cold chills), switches, boards or whatever was handy. My father stopped making me strip so he could beat me when I was 10. He had just graduated from dental school and education was important to him. When he came into the room with the belt and told me to take my clothes off I felt angry. It wasn’t that I had done anything. I hadn’t.

But I was such a bad child, he said, I had probably done something and he just didn’t know about it - so he wasn’t taking any chances. He was going to beat me “just because” I probably deserved it. I don’t know why, but instead of taking my clothes off I said, “Let me write a paper about why you shouldn’t beat me. If it’s good you can’t hit me anymore.” He stopped. I think I saw one end of the belt fall out of his hand as he stood there and thought about what I was saying. He nodded and went and got his typewriter and I wrote a paper on why he should not beat me. I don’t remember what I wrote, but he did not beat me. I wrote a lot of papers over the next five or six years - “writing for my life” I say now. I wrote up until the last time my mother hit me.

I was 16. I don’t remember what I had done, but she came screaming down the hallway and into my room with a belt in her hand. I remember her screaming at me to bend over and my telling her I was too big for her to hit anymore. I was an athlete then - playing tennis four and six hours a day and running. She raised the belt and aimed for my head and my face. As she swung, so did I. I hit her squarely in the jaw with my fist, and I knocked her out with one blow. The leather bit my left cheek as she went down and crumpled up unconscious on my bedroom floor. I thought I had killed her. I stepped over her body and ran. I ran to my best friend’s house. I told her and her mother what happened. Her mother called mine and told her never to hit me ever again. And she didn’t. I don’t know if it was the fist or the call that convinced her.

I spent that night on my friend’s couch. “It will give everyone a chance to calm down,” she told my mother. I woke up at 3 a.m. and felt like Satan himself was in the room. I was paralyzed with fear. I shook and I prayed and finally I fell back to sleep. I learned 30 years later my friend, a room away, had woken up at the same time and felt the same presence. I remember thinking how angry Satan was and that my life had been snatched out of his reach that night. My friend had prayed too. In 17 years she said she had never felt such a presence ever. I thought, “I felt him regularly in my house.”

I moved out the next spring after graduation. I remember thinking, “I survived. I’m free.” I wouldn’t be free really, they still had my mind, but at the time it felt liberating.

When I read Jule’s blog entry today I remembered thinking that again. We do survive. The pain lives on inside us as the scars fade. I don’t think Trent made it up. No one makes that stuff up.