The prompt would imply a request for some bittersweet memory from childhood, but as many on this site will attest to, not all memories are candy-coated. Sometimes hard reality burns a lesson into a person's psyche. No matter how tender future experiences might be, the initial impact of the searing moment stays with a person forever.

Such was the case the night my father cornered my naked fourteen- year-old sister in our bedroom. He was whipping her with his belt, leaving bloody welts down her back. I was just seven-years-old and I awoke to the sounds of my mother begging my father for mercy and my sister's cowering whimpers.

I knew enough to remain silent. Backing into a corner, I shoved the corner of a blanket into my mouth to try to arrest the cries that were gurgling up my throat. The feeling of being helpless was overwhelming. I'd taken my share of beatings for crimes my sister had committed. I freely admitted, taking the blame for the transgressions, knowing full-well that my punishment would not be as severe as hers. That night there was nothing I could do except watch in horror.

Eventually my father tired, returning to the kitchen to re-fuel his rage with liquid courage. My mother ran to my sister, cooing, urging her to get up. We all knew there would be an encore performance. This was only an intermission, a pause while my father stirred up the embers of anger that always seethed in his furnace.

Mother pulled a coat from the closet, ran for her purse, throwing it at her, and told my sister to run. Into the cold late-autumn night my teenage sister disappeared and I would never know, ever again, what it felt like to share a room or late night gossip with someone who was on my team---my sibling.

It was 1957, a time when domestic violence was kept behind closed doors and shelters were not available. There were no social programs or agencies where a victim could seek help. My sister was on her own---a teenage outcast. My mother's only solution to the problem was to get the girl out of the house.

What was the crime that so offended my father that he felt his violence was justified? She'd snuck out of the house to be with her friends. We were not allowed to be anywhere except at school or at the piano or ballet classes we took. Home did not offer any special appeal. The mood was always angry and meals random. We were prisoners of our father's rage and our mother's passive acceptance. When my sister tried to sneak into the house, she was caught, searched and stripped. They found twenty dollars in her pocket, evidence to my father that she'd stolen it from him.

No police were called. The house quieted and all I could hear were my father's snores. I snuck into my mother's room.

"Aren't we going to go look for her," I asked, still horribly upset by the events. "No," my mother said.

"Why do you let him beat you---us---why does he hit us?"

"He is a man. He thinks he is doing the right thing."

"Why don't you leave him?"

"We have nowhere to go. We have no money."

On that late autumn night I learned a valuable, but jaded life reality. Money is power. Those that have it make the rules. I vowed I'd never be in my mother's situation, would never allow any man to hit me and somehow I'd have my own money so that no one could ever control me like my father controlled his family.

And, what of my sister? The naked girl ran into the streets with eight-dollars in my mother's purse. She learned to make the streets her home and came to appreciate that her flesh could easily bankroll my mother's seed money into a wad of bills.

My mother eventually separated and then went on to marry two more times, always looking for a financial umbrella that would provide her with her modest needs.

And me? The financial lesson I learned that night made an indelible mark on my life. I have power over my life because I focused on my career, always saving, always having a get-away fund.

The silent lesson I learned has also shadowed me. My trust evaporated and I was always mindful that being too vulnerable could make me a victim. I've stayed alert, and yet the mistrust has stolen true intimacy. I recognized, categorized and played to other people's weaknesses and strengths to get what I needed, but even today, decades later, as my mother, father and sister lay buried, I'm not sure I've ever been myself, but rather a product of that night back in 1957 when I recognized and chose personal power as my talisman..