”But Daddy I didn’t try to!” I remember my tiny voice crying desperately.
”Well you didn’t try not to!” my father roared, before diving in to pour out his wrath on me.
Or sometimes,
”But Daddy I forgot that I wasn’t allowed to do that!” I screamed in total sincerity.
“Well this will help you remember!” he roared again, seething like a wild animal.
Most of my early memories of my father are coupled with sheer terror, and if he wasn’t threatening me with hell then he was threatening me with immediate violence. I could recount a lot of individual instances of him being physically abusive, unable to contain his anger, but I mention the two above because I remember them happening the most often. My dad used to scream at my little sister and me, and then he looked downright proud when we ran out of the room and didn’t come back for hours. He never, ever checked on us; he liked it when we were out of sight and out of mind. I used to check on my sister, and always found her crying. I never offered comfort because I didn’t know that it would have been appropriate. Nobody checked on me.
The odd thing is that my parents felt strongly that they didn’t spank as much or as harshly as the church wanted them to. They insist to this day that they made a huge social sacrifice by not spanking us as often or as early as the other church members did. (I feel like I mentioned in some other entry that their pastor spanked his child before they even left the labor and delivery ward.) This feels unfair to me on multiple levels.
First, my parents went out of their way to make the friends that they did. They found a place to live that was about halfway between their church and my dad’s job because being able to go to a Reformed Baptist church was that important to them. This meant that my dad had a long commute to work in a very snowy part of the country which often left him even more enraged at the snow-loving little kids who were my siblings and me. We also drove 45 minutes on poor-quality roads until we reached Absolute Total Nowhere, where our church was located. It’s not like they were just friends with the most convenient people available. They chose them. They went out of their way to find people who they knew were breaking the law, and they taught me as a tiny child the HSLDA guidelines that children should distrust the police and try not to scream too loudly when being spanked for fear that “the social workers” would come take us away. Making a social sacrifice to not break the law as badly as the other proud law-breakers is a far cry from being liberal.
Second, the passages from the book that were cited by the Friendly Atheist described my parents to a T. However, my parents claim that they went easy on us. Making this claim allows them to maintain the moral high ground, but it’s a lie. They were no less horrible than the parents described in the video. I still assume that if I cry in pain, it will make those around me feel victory instead of empathy, which makes it rather hard to express my feelings.
So where are my parents now? Oh, my dad is known for being a big ol’ teddy bear. He believes that his cat didn’t inherit a sin nature from the Garden of Eden incident, so he gushes over his cat. He pretty much ignores his grandchildren entirely. Me being terrified constantly as a child? It was a “me” issue. I was genetically predestined to believe that whatever my parents did to me was evil. Harsh spanking didn’t happen. I made it all up. You can ask my siblings, who definitely don’t have Stockholm Syndrome.
They always told me that I would understand when I grew up. But I’m a grown-up now and although I don’t have any kids of my own, I’ve taught elementary school and at no point ever did I think that my students would have behaved better if I’d been allowed to behave violently toward them. Hitting a kid has never felt like a good idea. When I had to do something that made tears well in their little eyes (such as withhold a sticker), it shattered my heart. The idea of it making me feel powerful is repulsive.
And yet, to this day, when I look back on my own childhood, it doesn’t feel like abuse. I would never do it to another kid, but maybe I was the only kid ever born who deserved it. Almost all my memories are of looking back at myself, rarely or never do I remember the world through my own eyes. I feel strongly like that little girl I look back at wasn’t me. What happened to her couldn’t possibly affect me. I was never a little girl, never valuable in any way. Never deserving of a public education. When Mom wouldn’t let us out of the basement that she claimed was “partially finished,” it doesn’t feel like it was abuse because it didn’t happen to a real person. Sure, the place was crawling with spiders (including massive wolf spiders) and a baby mouse once dropped from the ceiling right beside my siblings and me, but it wasn’t that bad. Mom painted murals on the cement walls and put an indoor/outdoor area rug on the cement floor and got a TV and a cheap futon. Granted, I still don’t know how to use a TV because I haven’t operated one since the mid-90s because I was permanently required to be “doing school.” I can never relax because 100% of the time, I feel like I’m procrastinating on something because that’s how it was when I was a kid. (Now that my primary job is to read books, it feels exactly like being homeschooled again. There’s no schedule, no timeline, no certain amount that I can do and be done for the day. Just I’m always not doing enough.) But there was technically a TV down there, and my sister knew how to use it and sometimes we watched Quincy or something. We were only allowed to watch TV Land or Animal Planet unless Mom was supervising.
But aside from my basement TV rambles, “spanking” feels like a children’s word, like “boo-boo” or “sleepy.” The fact that my parents insist that “spank” is the only word that describes their behavior makes it impossible for me to take myself seriously when describing it to a therapist, and I dismiss out of hand that it could have been abuse.
The Friendly Atheist did more for me in this video than he will ever know. I’ve always started sentences with “I’m not a parent but…” or “I know spanking is normal but…”. Validating that I don’t have to be a parent to call something abusive is a big deal. Validating that I don’t have to use the word “spanking” is a big deal.
If you look up HSLDA.org, it looks like a family-centered Utopia. But I could have literally died and been buried in that basement and nobody would have ever noticed or come to look for me. Homeschooling was my mom’s excuse to avoid any and all mandated reporters. If she actually took us to the doctor, which happened a lot less than once a year, she oozed charm and charisma. The doctor told her that I was underweight and even I believed her that I was going to be fed more, until we got out to the car and she laughed at the idea. The doctor never followed up. He either didn’t know or didn’t care that he was the only individual who could have intervened to save me.
As for the church I grew up in, it apparently is still there according to the websites I could find (https://farese.com/) and (http://www.reformedreader.org/rbchurches.htm). I still look it up sometimes out of the repetition compulsion I mentioned the other day. But even if it were gone, the damage has been done. And the remaining tasks are to heal myself and then make my story known to the world so more children are not harmed by the physical abuse and victim blaming practice known as spanking.
Reference
Friendly Atheist. (2021, September 28). If You Spank Your Kids, You’re a Horrible Parent [YouTube video]. Retrieved September 30, 2021 from https://youtu.be/yjD0nZgiNFo
