(Continued)

I brought Bruce home to Mom in Boca. She thoroughly approved, so we got married and started living the high life. Bruce became an associate, then a partner, in Boca’s leading law firm, representing pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, and the tobacco industry against people who claimed they’d suffered injury or loss of a loved one due to the corporations’ negligence or malfeasance. Was it lucrative? Hell yes. Moral? I didn’t want to go there. I was too busy spending the money. Every time a little voice of conscience started nagging at me, I’d suppress it by going on a shopping spree with my friends.

While I was shopping, Bruce was working and hanging with Boca’s power brokers, fueling his energy and ego with cocaine. And as his blow use increased, so did his blowups and put-downs. In his eyes I’d gone from being a brainy babe to a babbling bimbo. Pretty soon the shoving, slapping, hitting, and kicking started. But while he was addicted to the coke, I was addicted to the money and the image it bought. So for ten years I put up with his verbal and physical abuse to “Keep Up Appearances.”

My road to liberation started when my personal trainer suggested I take up the Israeli martial art Krav Maga to get my ass in shape. In the process of toning my backside, something else happened. I began to grow a backbone. As my self-defense skills increased, I started to ask myself: Did I really need to be a punching bag in order to keep the McMansion, the Mercedes, the manicures, the whole shebang? For that matter, did I really need the McMansion, the Mercedes, the manicures, and the whole shebang in the first place?

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