Anecdote time. I was spanked as a kid. Well, “spanked” was the word my mother and her sister used for it. Sounds like I was being lightly hit on the bottom by my mother’s hand, doesn’t it?
What my mother actually hit me with was a thick leather belt cut into strips. She called it her cat-o-nine-tails. And she hit hard enough to leave welts on my back and my ass that lasted for a week. If she was in an especially mean mood–which happened a couple of times–she walloped me with the buckle end. The buckle was huge and outsized with sharp edges and had a long tongue that left gouges. If I got cut or gouged during the spanking, I was not supposed to bandage the wounds or to ask my aunt to bandage them. I found that out after asking my aunt for such help once because I didn’t want my clothes sticking to the wounds. My mother threw a shit fit that is perhaps better left to the imagination. Truthfully, I don’t remember what she said; I only recall her unholy rage and her conviction that I deserved it.
That was the norm when I was a kid. Every kid that I knew–boys and girls–was hit. Few parents of my friends “spanked” with hands. I can recall several mothers sitting in the kitchen of a friend’s family and boasting over coffee about how many yardsticks they had broken against their daughters’ backs or legs. Fathers talked openly, even proudly, about “belting” their sons with actual belts.
This wasn’t seen as abuse, although every kid I knew hated being hit and hated their parents for hitting them. Some of us begged our parents not to. Others tried to run away. Still others had anxiety attacks whenever their parents got angry. None of it mattered.The euphemistic “spanking” was continually presented to us as good, if strict, parenting. And after all, weren’t there days that kids were completely unreasonable and nothing else would work? And you couldn’t really expect adults to talk to kids as if they were people, could you? That, we were told,would be a waste of time. The best thing to do was simply to admit you deserved it and accept the spanking. And not to cry afterward, because crying was for babies. (My mother’s policy was that if a blow from her belt made me cry, she would hit me even harder until I admitted that there was nothing to cry about and stopped.)
I stole the belt belt one summer day when I was ten. I wrapped it around the inside of a garbage can and concealed it behind three heavy bags of trash. My mother put it out for the garbage men the following morning and never knew it. She spent months looking for it; I saw the signs when she searched my room. But it never occurred to her that she herself had thrown it away, and since she assumed that she’d get it back eventually, she never bothered to replace it. And I, of course, never told her; by that time, I felt that I was justified in doing whatever I had to to survive her silences and rages.
“Spanking” didn’t teach me or my friends to behave, or to be better disciplined, though for years I believed both because thinking of it as normalized physical abuse was unbearable. It taught us that adults were irrational and untrustworthy, and that even the best of them wouldn’t step in to prevent cruelty or injustice. It taught us to repress our tears and to believe that we deserved to be beaten (the word we used among ourselves to describe spankings). We learned to conceal our words and thoughts and actions from people who were supposed to love us purely for our own safety. We found out that our parents were, in many respects, no different than the bullies our own age that we loathed.
I don’t believe that those lessons benefited my generation one bit.
And I think now what I thought as a child–there has to be a better way of disciplining or punishing a child than hitting them.
