Behind the Smiling Portrait, a Model Family’s Secret Life of Pain : Spousal abuse: The Simpson case revives one woman’s nightmares of a storybook marriage broken by violence.

While it is O.J. Simpson who dominates the news, my thoughts dwell on his ex-wife, Nicole. As the terrible story of her murder unfolds, I find myself slammed to the wall by my own memories of years of terror at the hands of an abusive husband.

Nicole Simpson’s death is forcing my experience back upon me. The events that I hoped were long erased from my private history are resurfacing. Lying awake in the night, I unwillingly relive the emotions of a frightened and confused woman trying to preserve her family in the face of apparently inescapable domestic violence.

I am driven to dig out old photographs of me that I once thought flattering and beautiful. Now I see more than the tanned, fit figure, the long, shiny hair and the bright, perfect smile. I recognize the same unmistakably flat, hollow look that shows in Nicole’s eyes in her family photographs.

I, too, was young when I married. I hadn’t a clue who I was or what I could do beyond patterning my life after the apparently happy housewives and mothers who had surrounded me all my life. My bridegroom, a medical student from back East, spelled excitement and a move up from my safe, small-town California upbringing. But he and I scarcely knew each other, and I quickly learned about his temper and began to form the habit of keeping harmony in the household by whatever means it took.

Within six years we had four children and I was a model wife and mom. We had a good income and, by virtue of my husband’s profession, automatic status in our small community. We belonged. We were invited to functions and put on a pretty show as a family. Only the most insightful observers could have sensed the unnatural stress and tension, and probably worse, that we were dealing with.

I found then that it is not easy to get help for personal problems when those around you view your life as enviable and characterize you as special, infallible, charming. For all the signs and symptoms of something gone terribly wrong--the bruises, the mysterious cracked ribs, the too frequent failing to show up for events at the last minute--most people, including professional colleagues and law- enforcement personnel, refuse to believe that your situation is so serious that a little more “trying” won’t help.

I remember reading a short story in a women’s magazine titled, “One Day a Woman Went Crazy in the Supermarket.” I pressed it on my friends, desperate to hear that any of them identified with the character of a beleaguered, battered housewife. They looked upon it as fiction, and took no special interest. I wondered what I was doing wrong.

Whatever “I was doing wrong” was resulting in my beatings, his affairs, our damaged property and weapons being waved around the house. It included near daily emotional violence and was always, always, followed by my husband’s most convincing expressions of contrition. It wasn’t until I had endured 13 years of this insanity and made many fearful, false starts that I finally gathered the courage to rip the family apart and take the children hundreds of miles away.

The actual leaving was complete with restraining orders, last-minute hiding out at a stranger’s home and the indignity of public documentation that somehow never seemed meant for people like me. I truly believed, and believe to this day, that by leaving I literally saved my life and possibly my children’s lives. The sense of relief, once the ending was accomplished, was overwhelming.

The luckiest part of it all for me was that I was able to move so far away. I did not have to see my ex-husband on a regular basis, or pass our children back and forth like laundry. The children became the focus of my life. I was determined to repay them for the turmoil that had been such a part of their young years. If I erred on the side of devotion, it hasn’t hurt. They are accomplished, caring, independent adults who have come to develop their own loving, assertive relationships with their father as well as with me.

I lie awake reliving all this, the most horrendous years of my life, and then I dream about Nicole. I read her eyes and cry for us both.