Summer blurred on into fall and my first of two totally academically lacking semesters in college. I flunked my way out, as a Theater major no less. Somewhere during the first semester I must have made a major change that some advisor forgot to tell me about to Recreational Pharmaceuticals and experimented there for a while. Not a truly good plan. Campuses are rife with good, cheap drugs, and I was matriculating next door to the Mushroom Capitol of the World, Kennett Square, PA. Let's just say they were not only famous for scrumptious edible 'shrooms but also the best pscilocybin variety as well. It was a complete and total waste of my parents' good money. Thank God I was attending a reasonably priced state school and not a private one.

So, by the summer of 1979 I was a burnt out college dropout with stretch marks. Somewhere towards the end of the summer, my mother caught me just before I began to enter one of the most horrific disorders: soap opera addiction. She told me it was time to get off my duff and call my uncle, who was an executive with a Philadelphia bank, and get a job. To my credit (she says) I did as I was told and got a job in the newly burgeoning field of automated teller technology.

It became the springboard to a successful career in the computer industry. This path eventually led me to Florida at age 23 and an excellent job opportunity with a bank data processing company in Orlando. It was there that I met my husband, Alan. I refuse to bore anyone with the grisly details of my marriage. I will sum it up by saying that I married (unintentionally, I think) a glue-sniffing, abusive alcoholic.

Additionally, he had been hit by lightning as a young teenager and there is no doubt in my mind that it did not leave him unscathed mentally. I'm certain it jarred a few wires loose in there. In short, he was a very screwed up individual and it was not far into our marriage that he became physically abusive. Despite that, we had two beautiful children, a daughter and a son, and I managed to stay afloat in my career, although his floundered abominably through diverse jobs and so-called "business ventures."

By 1992 I had had enough. I had him arrested twice for spousal abuse and after the second time, decided to stick to my guns (bad pun, as you'll see). I left him, residing temporarily in a battered women's shelter with my two children. We found a house in an area outside Melbourne, Florida (where we had lived since 1989) and I felt sure, at least for a while, that he did not know where we were. I filed for and received a protection injunction against him. However, as so many of us have often seen, these pieces of paper provide scant protection against obsessive people who are adamantly opposed to the idea of divorce or becoming, as Alan put it, "an every-other-weekend father." He also was adamantly opposed to paying any type of court-ordered child support, which left the children and me perilously close to food stamps for a while.

Then in March 1993, I found out through my baby-sitter and neighbor that my children had been relating tales of sexual abuse that occurred while visiting their father (a custody award one mentally lacking judge in Brevard County felt was Alan's right as a father — "he should be entitled to see his children at least every other weekend" — unsupervised). After careful investigation by our state HRS office at my official complaint, it was found that my husband had clearly been inappropriately touching our daughter. Fortunately, the touching was limited — no intercourse had occurred and my son was also apparently not touched (although he was witness to much of his sister's abuse — just as bad, in my book). But it happened. And I had to act.

Shortly after the investigation was initiated, a less-than-informed detective with our local police department notified my husband that he was under investigation for suspected sexual abuse. Now this was after I had alerted said detective that my husband was a bit, shall we say, unhinged by nature and capable of unpredictable bouts of violence.

What fragile semblance of sanity Alan had left snapped on April 6, 1993 when he broke into my home while I was out visiting a friend. It was two days before my thirty-third birthday. Upon my return from the friend's home, I put the kids to bed and went on to the bathroom to draw a bath. A subtle movement by the bathroom door caused me to turn and I thought that perhaps one of the kids needed a final trip to the bathroom. To my horror, I face my husband with a drawn .357 magnum. I screamed hysterically, which only made him hysterical. So I eventually calmed down, somehow figuring this would have the same effect on him. For a while it did. He was obviously drunk and I could tell he'd been sniffing glue. It would make him edgy, unpredictable, and hallucinatory. He rambled on and on about "what I was doing to him" and, if convicted of sexual abuse upon a child "what they'll do to me in prison." He repeated over and over that he would not "lose his freedom."

This siege continued for about two hours — him flailing his gun around, which I could see from the close proximity of its barrel had five cartridges in it, me sitting naked and shivering on the bathroom floor against the tub. I finally got him to allow me to wrap two towels around myself. Eventually, his thoughts turned to sex (another obsessive behavior problem with him). He had an incredibly active libido, but his manner was hurtful and uncomplimentary to women when making love. In fact, I would say it was more like making war with him than an act of love. He decided that he was going to have "one last fuck" and raped me.

Then, strangely enough, when we had both run out of cigarettes, he permitted me to go into my kitchen to make coffee, albeit with his nasty gun trained on my back. In retrospect, I know my mind reviewed and discarded a hundred possibilities of ways to get away from him. But I guess I was so paralyzed with fear and shock, I simply exercised every ounce of concentration I had in talking to him. Trying to get him away from his suicidal and murderous plans. He wanted to kill me, then kill himself, sending the children to my sitter's house three doors down before doing himself in. This was replayed over and over again as he seemed to consider it himself. I felt that if he was still weighing all these options, I might just have a chance of convincing him that NOT doing it at all was also an option. At one point he posed a hypothetical: "What would happen if I were to just leave now, walk away — what would you do? Would you call the police?" I responded that if it meant my life, I would never tell another breathing soul he had ever been in my house.

This seemed to, if not appease him, at least make him sit and think. And it was at this point that I, in a state of shock and total exhaustion, sitting next to my deranged and estranged husband (we were two weeks shy of a final divorce hearing) on the sofa, fell asleep or went into total shock around 5:10 a.m. At 5:20 a.m., I awoke to the feeling of someone or something punching my right jaw — hard. Oddly, it didn't really seem to hurt. I felt it in an objective sort of way — pressure more than pain. Following that, I heard a loud explosion that lifted me completely out of the fog and sat me upright with the realization that he had fired the gun. I never really looked at him (at least I don't remember doing so), but knew instinctively that he had shot himself and that I had been hit in the side of the face in the process.

Friends told me after the fact that I must have gone to my bathroom to survey the damage of the hit. They found evidence of bloody hand prints on bathroom faucets and door lintels. They also found my hand prints on the door lintels in my children's room where I hastily awakened them. I vaguely remember telling them that we had to get to Brenda's (my sitter) house and call 911 (my phone had been disconnected). I took them by the hand and remember passing the livingroom at a great rate of speed, where Alan lay gasping his last breath. My children have no recollection of actually seeing their father on the couch, thank God. It is enough that it happened. At one point in our recovery, I felt an urgent need to remember all the events leading up to that final shot. Did he say something meaningful? Admit his guilt, finally, in sexually abusing our children? Did he say I love you? Good-bye? Fuck you?

It was at the gentle urging of a great friend of mine and Vietnam veteran (who has since passed on) that I finally abandoned this idea. My friend would ask, "Why do you want to know? What good would it do? Live for your future. This asshole did you the biggest favor he possibly could have. He had nothing valuable to say to you." And I have finally let that go.

We made it to Brenda's house, where she exercised great presence of mind in getting me help and in keeping the children safe until my mother was notified and arrived. I remained pretty much conscious, albeit still in shock, and recall being told at the hospital that my husband (brought to the ER room next to mine) had died. I shed one single tear — it burned as it rolled down my good cheek — for all that could have been and the life that had been wasted.

The circle had been seriously bent.

With the help of good friends like Brenda and my mother, who once again slid on her woman-of-action uniform and came to my aid from Philadelphia, my children and I have fashioned a pretty nice life for one another. Social Security has stepped in where the reluctant Alan refused to pay child support and enabled me to provide for my children along with the work that I do and love.

I have no idea what I was looking for when I met and married Alan. I'm sure quite a bit of it was myself that I was still searching for.

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