Child rearin’ these days sure is a lot different than when I grew up. And when I say ‘rearin’ that’s where the biggest difference occurred… in the rear end.
A person these days would rightly be put in jail and have their children taken away if they were caught administering punishment the same way our parents did. For heaven’s sake, our ag teacher had a long paddle an inch thick that he used for swatting the bottoms of unruly students. I only felt the sting of the paddle once and that’s when he had everyone in the class grab their ankles so we’d feel the full force of his paddle.
There were degrees of punishment at our house. For a minor crime my mom would bend us over her knee and say, “This is going to hurt me more than it is you but it’s for your own good.” Then she’d spank our bottom several times with her bare hand. If the offense was a major misdemeanor, like stealing some change from her purse to buy a 50/50 bar from the ice cream man, she’d break one of her yardsticks walloping us a good one. And then she’d wonder where all her yardsticks went when she needed one for her dressmaking.
If we committed a felonious assault on a sibling she’d say, “You just wait until your father gets home.” My dad was a long haul trucker so he could be gone for several days and that meant we’d have to anticipate the spanking for a long time which made it that much worse. His favorite tool for committing child abuse was the belt and he was a very strong man. A kid might not be able to sit down for days after the rear attack.
The second worst whoopin’ I ever got was the time I was kicked out of school for three days for throwing an egg, which was a tradition at our school. The seniors lobbed eggs and water balloons at the freshmen almost daily and to the best of my knowledge, no one had ever been kicked out of school before, or since, for the offense. I missed high with the egg I threw so it hit a tree branch and the yolk dripped all over the vice principal’s daughter. I was ratted out, called to the office of the vice principal, who was also the football coach, given a tongue lashing and sent home for three days with a note.
Now here’s where it gets real interesting. The captain of the football team just happened to be the boyfriend of the dripped-on girl and he was the one who brought the egg to school and dared me to throw it! Of course nothing happened to him. Interestingly, when I ran on the school’s cross country team as a freshman I was crammed and locked inside a locker by two burly guys on the football team and stayed crumpled up for two hours! Of course they were never kicked out of school because the coach needed them on Friday night.
I’ve endured a lot of physical pain in my life but the most agonizing I’ve ever experienced was when I was ten years old and had to sit through an entire dance recital of my younger sister’s dance class. A person can only endure so much of watching 15 six-year-olds in tight tutus shuffling off to Buffalo.
After one such experience my sister’s picture appeared on the front page of our local paper and my mother was quite proud. My older perfect brother, the exalted one, took that newspaper my mom wanted to preserve for posterity and drew horns on my sister and a goatee with an ink pen so she looked like a fat devil. I thought it was quite a good likeness but my mom hit the roof and naturally thought I did it. And my perfect brother was more than happy to let me suffer the pain that only got worse when my father got home. I insisted between swats that I was not the culprit but that only made the blows harder. When I was 40 my brother finally admitted to my mom that he was the guilty party and everyone got a good laugh out of it. Ha, ha.
I’ve suffered from PTSD (post traumatic swatting disorder) ever since.
