I grew up in the forties and fifties, when the news was local. We didn't know much about what was going on outside our town for two or three days. There was no multimedia, and today's front-page news was on page 20 the next day. But when a man beat his wife or if the wife beat her husband, it was the talk of the town; everybody knew it. It has always been considered a disgrace for a man to beat a woman. The shame abusing your wife or girlfriend is something that no one agrees with.

This is a story about me and the things that suffered through for much of my adult life. The very first time I hit a woman, I knew that it was wrong, and the guilt started to consume me right away. I found myself doing it again. I was slow to realize that I had started to decline mentally because I could not shake the enmity feeling. My life would go on a fifty-year cycle of shame, guilt, fear, and loneliness. I crawled into my shell and let no one know the pain that I felt.

There are a lot of people who feel the same way that I do, but they don't bother to reveal themselves. Women are just as ashamed as men are because most of the time, they feel that it is their fault they let us off the hook. My wife is my rock. She saved me.