This Hurts Me More Than You
My mom would say, after one of my childhood transgressions.
"Just wait til your dad comes home. He will show you who is right and who is wrong. You will get the spanking
of your life. Cut a switch off that tree. You'll be sorry you back-talked me."
Or on his arrival, she would list my misdemeanors, and he would remove his belt and lay it sideways across a living room chair.
"This hurts me more than it does you," he'd argue in quiet rage.
But I never believed him. He had to talk himself into a righteous fury to really hit me. I guess I didn't believe him because he never had bruises or welts on the backs of his legs. And instead of crying as I did, he would quote the Bible, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," he said, sounding like a southern Baptist radio preacher.
He could suddenly become angry and threatening. "I am gonna make you wish you had never been born," he might erupt. But instead I wished he had never been born, or that he had simply been born kinder. I wanted to tell my parents that there was no logic in spanking me to make me a better person, that they could not make me better by hitting me-but, of course, that was more "back talking".
Once when my older brother (who had joined the Air Force after high school) returned home for a visit in the middle of one of these confrontational family dramas, and my father had removed his belt, my brother grabbed his arm and shouted, "If you ever hit her again, you will be a dead man. I can't watch this any more."
Funny, it was a hard lesson for my father, and I would say, finally that he was right. It really did hurt him more than me. He never did take off his belt again to punish me. Or maybe he simply outgrew his old logic.
Eleven years later, I would leave for college and get a job so that I could take classes in philosophy and logic. By that time, my father was shrinking into his old-man self, losing his hair, no longer getting his way with shouts and rage. With time, we forgave each other and buried the hatchets of our past. After ten years of therapy and my father's death, I could finally say I love you in an imaginary conversation with him and mean it.
It only takes one generation to stop the cycle of abuse. When I listened while others argued about the benefits of spanking children, I turned a deaf ear. "You cannot fix what you cannot admit", I would tell my daughter, in a rare conversation about my father.
"You raised me differently," she says. "Thank you."
Rita Ayral
3-5-18