I just learned something of myself today that surprised me.
I was at a baby shower with a bunch of women talking about kids and discipline — a somewhat awkward place for me any day. Pink and blue balloons, diaper jokes, the whole thing makes me gag. It is not what children are about. Children are holy creatures, to me.
They talked about how they disciplined their kids, the things their kids tried to get away with (or did get away with), the physical and verbal interactions between them and the children both small and teenage, the back and forth of deception. The screaming and yelling and spankings with hands or spoons, the bargaining.
They talked about their own childhoods and their own parents’ discipline with punishment which was feared, but disregarded, abused, feared again, endured again, and so on and so forth. They spoke of a back and forth and give and take and trust and boundary situation that is probably healthy and common to most parent child relationships. How a mother knows when a child is lying, how they sometimes let each other lie, how a child knows when a parent is lying, how they play both sides of a table.
I realized somewhat blankly, sitting quietly with the rest of them chattering away, that I had had nothing like that.
I was always alone. And my parents treated me as if I were to be their equal on many levels, at least on that disciplinary level. I remember a few spankings very early on, and then only verbal threats, all of which terrified me to the bone. I learned that I had no give and take with my parents. There was no love when they were angry. There was nothing behind the anger of the moment but more anger. There was only tired, bitter disgust at having to deal with me — not because they actually hated me, but because they were already at their wits’ ends. I was just the camel’s last straw. And so, I was never to misbehave.
This created a situation of distrust wherein I was a dissident under an alien government. I had to plan my escape (which I did, in great detail, for years.). I had to lie without ever being caught, and be sure that no one ever suspected any misdeeds. And I did that. I was as false to them as I was to all the children I disliked. I was taught to be a smiling, proper, quiet child, and that’s what I became. Anything I did that crossed a boundary was done all alone, sure of my procedures, carefully and cleanly, leaving no traces, smiling all the while, insuspect.
When I left at 17, my life in the free world began and I was lost, but happy, without them. And fortunately I did skirt a lot of the dangers of the world just by having arbitrarily obeyed them.
But now, when I sit among these people, I realize how much I lost out on. How I would have loved to have had a sense that punnishment was truly chiding out of love and concern. How I would have loved knowing that I could play cat and mouse with my parents and they would know and play too. How I would have loved to have had siblings and made trouble with right along with them and share being grounded with them. Cohorts! The sound of it is enticing as smelling dinner cooking. I long for it now.
I didn’t ever intend to be the good girl who had to go bad to be herself.
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