About the book

Welcome to RamonaPedron.com where ideas on life, learning and changing are the mainstay. I ask “can we change or are we hardwired?” because I have spent too much of my life anchored in what I think I’m supposed to be instead of what I expect myself to be.

A good friend, or so I thought bought me a refrigerator magnet while we were in New York City in March of 2001. I was so delighted that she bought me something that it took me a minute to realize what it said. The magnet read “Surprise everyone. Succeed!”

Now I’m sure that she meant that magnet in a very different way. I took it as she didn’t think I was a success. The more I thought about it the more it bothered me that I had done nothing with my life. I felt like I had been riding on the coat tails of others and that success was meant for them, not me.

In May of that year I left the city to come home to Florida and make something of my life on my own. On my own terms and without the help of anyone.

By 2003 I had purchased my own business and was so successful that a competitor tried to buy me out offering me three times what I paid for it.

In 2006 I saved enough money to take three months off work to write the book that I was reciting in my mind for years. I wrote the first thirteen chapters and put it down.  On the weekend of Christmas 2011, while on a writer’s retreat I finished the first draft of that book with the help of my good friends Gretchen and Sherry. Friends that believed in me when I was doubtful. Friends that were gentle with me while making me stronger.

Now that I am finished I would like to tell you about the book, and here it is.

A view into the raw living that occurs in households across the planet is displayed in this
personal memoir of an abuse survivor who is determined to collect the data required to sort out
reality, survive and most importantly tread the narrow path of life that forces you to choose
between following the blueprint set before you or to draw a new one.

Forty years after the storm of a dysfunctional family life, the victim finds herself in the position
of full time caretaker to her abuser. Now the shoe is on the other foot and the victim, armed with
vengeance has the power to pay forward all the evil that was due in order to level the playing
field. Not just for herself, but for her siblings and others who suffered at the hands of her sadistic
and mentally ill mother.

How do you decide between revenge and forgiveness? What is the determining factor?
It is human nature to avenge. We’re hardwired that way.

Ramona Pedron has been an observer her whole life. She had little choice in that role. It was
either observe what was happening, or absorb it. She chose to journal about the events exploding
around her as an outlet to her secrets.

This memoir is written from those journals.
This story is an intense and emotional read much like “Sybil” which sold 6 million copies and
“A child called it” which has sold 1.6 million. The story begins in the pre teen years of Ramona
and her siblings in the seventies, when authorities had no idea what was going on in the homes of
troubled teens.

“My stepfather made it through the threshold of my sister’s room before I began to feel
the warm thick liquid run down the front of my face. The room which seemed to be spinning a
second ago had come to a stop. It still hadn’t occurred to me what had happened until I reached
up to my head and brought my hand back where I could see it. My hand was covered in blood.
Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion as I struggled to put it all together.

My mother ran out of the room and my stepfather trailed behind her. My sister got up and handed me a dirty
towel off the floor. I just looked at her. She reached with the towel to cover my wound and then
hesitated. I grabbed the towel from her and pulled it tightly to my head with both hands. Luis
was still watching in disbelief through the sliding glass door.”

My name is Ramona Pedron and “Hardwired” is my story.