I haven’t read any of the posts about spanking that have been recently published and given the mommy world a new thing to raise up arms about. Except that I read Maria’s – as usual, completely logical, soothing and grab a coke-like – response. And I saw some words exchanged on Twitter – for once not throwing myself into a battle, defending those who didn’t ask for it, or calling judges judgmental while judging them.
But I have thoughts.
I used to be one of those.
The “I will never slap, spank, or use any kind of physical form of discipline against my daughter” ones. Because of how I grew up, I could say with a clear (high-on-pedestal) conscience that using body parts to teach lessons was a method of castration, belittling and taught kids only that they weren’t respected. I firmly believed that because my dad couldn’t hold his shit together when I pissed him off – and so went leaps and bounds overboard – that meant that everyone did that, eventually.
I thought, on some level, while also respecting a lot of you as parents, that if you hit your kid, you were an asshole who just couldn’t deal.
Turns out that I’m the asshole.
Because, as commenters in Maria’s post said, words can be so much worse than a spank.
Sarcasm has been thrown these parts. Zoë understands it as 90% joke and 10% what I’d really like to say when I’m frustrated or just fucking tired of the constant chatter and battle of wills that constitutes 14 hours of my day. She’s heard me say that my brains will explode all over a wall and she’ll have to clean them up with a toothbrush. She laughed. I laughed. It was funny.
Or was it?
What was it about me, that made me think that since I wasn’t hitting, I wasn’t damaging? What made me feel a little bad about yelling, but still have more than an iota of self-acceptance about it. Who decided that I could rightfully think that my three-year old had it coming – my shrill voice, or face twisted in anger?
I’ve whined back to her with a level of snark that I didn’t waa-ant to give her a hug since she’d just kicked me. I’ve pushed her aside and said, “Just. Go.” I’ve made her little lip curl up with a kind of sadness that doesn’t happen when her dad leaves, or she falls down, or she can’t find her doggie.
I’ve scared her into silent acquiescence.
I don’t win any awards, because I did it without spanking her. In fact, it might make me more cruel because psychological damage is much longer lasting than a stinging ass is – I know this one, for a fact.
But then.
She was younger – old enough to be able to listen the first six times, but young enough that if she were a different kid, distraction tactics might’ve worked – and she was playing with the hot water tap in the bathroom. I was right there, telling her not to touch them, removing her hand, carrying her off of the stool she was standing on and transporting her in front of her toys in her bedroom.
“Leave them alone. You’ll burn your hand” became, “I said…“ until it threatened, by the 13th time of her putting her damn hand back on the damn tap and turning it on (the hot water tanks in my apartment building are set waaaaaay above scalding, which is why it was such a concern), to become “get your goddamn fucking hand off of the tap.”
I’ve never sworn in her direction and I don’t plan to, ever. So instead, I breathed and said calmly, “if you touch the tap again, I will slap your hand.”
I thought she would have been scared. But I should have known better, since she’s my child and her father’s child, and we’ve both almost always been about the grandiose, “oh yeah? Bring it, fuckers” our whole lives. She is, too.
She looked at me, didn’t even weigh it out, stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and turned the tap. And I slapped her (wet) hand. Not hard, but come on, it was a wet hand.
And then, she cried and looked at me like, how could you?! and something in me broke a little and my eyes got a tad glassy, and just as I was about to gather her up in my arms and whisk her into a room I’d fill with love, she recovered herself and turned on the tap, again.
Shock doesn’t explain it. Especially when I asked her if she wanted me to slap her hand again and she held it out for me. I decided then and there that even if I was okay with physical punishments, they wouldn’t work for this kid.
But then.
She got tall enough and smart enough and wily enough to be able to come into the living room during the early morning or on the rare occasion that I took a nap without me waking. She would stand on the coffee table (that I’ve since gotten rid of), climb onto the window ledge, and open the window. We live on the second floor and below my window – one of those waist-to-ceiling-height numbers that swings open, not slides up or anything – is concrete. The odds of her plummeting to her death, if not pretty harsh injury? Extremely great.
Every time, I woke up because she wasn’t quite sneaky enough and I would hear her fucking around with the window’s lever, the table could creak once her full weight was put on it, or climbing onto the ledge.
On. To. The. Window. Ledge. Of. Death.
The first time, I freaked the fuck out at a decibel level equal to the chorus from this song. Then she did it again within a few days. And pushed her into her room, angrily, threatening her that if her Daddy was here, he would spank her and I would let him.
Which of course is a cop out because: a) I wasn’t taking responsibility for wanting to smack her, myself, b) I’d always told him that if he ever did hit her, I’d remove his visitation, since we were so polarized on the spanking issue, and c) he’s a huge softy when it comes to her, so even if he talked the talk about spanking her, I dunno if he ever actually would.
Anyway, I threatened that he would and she took it seriously for all of two days – during which time she also figured out how to unlock a previously undiscovered, unused child-safe doorknob lock thingy – and then I woke up to her doing it again, but this time, the window was open all the way.
I dragged her off of that window ledge faster than I’ve ever done anything before and I carried her into her room and I stood her in front of the mirror and I spanked her once – hard enough to hurt, but not for more than a few seconds – and before she could look at me, I walked out and left her there to look in the mirror at herself, crying.
I smoked. I shook. I wanted nothing more than to beg for her forgiveness. I wanted to, I don’t know, tell the world what an abusive failure I was as a parent, but when CPS has already been called on you once because you’re crazed and too honest about post-partum and resentment, you don’t exactly jump to publicize that you just purposely hurt your child.
I didn’t do anything but walk back in her room when we were both calm and explain to her why I had hurt her and to listen to her when she told me why it made her sad, and then to tell her how sad it would make me if she had fallen out of the window and died and I would have never seen her again.
She cried more, then.
I’ve walked around with guilt over that scene since it happened, never quite feeling right about it, always feeling as if it was my failure to wake up, or child-proof the window better, or throw out the table sooner, or move, that should have been blamed – not my ridiculously stubborn child, who will do exactly as she pleases, despite the consequences, even when she fully understands them.
But we didn’t repeat that scene, either.
Probably mostly because I got rid of the table. Still.
But then.
After the sleepover before last, she refused to go to bed at home. Two hours of whining, alternating with screaming, shrieking, yelling, kicking, punching, pissing and pleadings for hugs, kisses, massages, water, books, animals and blanket-rearranging had me frayed, to put it mildly.
We’re surrounded by neighbours in a wood-frame building. In her room, I can hear the conversations at a party next door, and I know if the woman upstairs is wearing runners, sensible heels or fuck me boots. You hear everything. Which means that there’s a very real possibility that one day, someone will complain about my daughter’s banshee-like pipes and we will get a warning and then we will get kicked the fuck out. So I told her that. Without the fuck.
I pleaded.
I begged for her to be quieter. To just stop. I was crying, I was so frustrated, asking her what do you want?! What will make you just. stop. and gotosleep! And she wasn’t talking, or reasoning, or capable of hearing me over the sound of her own vocal chords.
By this point, we were both too far gone to be calm, I guess.
And I got to the finger-jabs-in-the-air punctuated.words.said.through.teeth. point of the evening. She was warned. She was appeased, even. I said I was losing my cool and that if she didn’t stop shrieking, it was going to be a bad scene. In my scary mom voice.
I said, gruffly, “Good. Night.” and I turned out the light, and I shut the door.
Before I could turn away from it, she was twice as loud as she’d been before and I snapped.
The door was thrown open and I grabbed her hand and I slapped it. Like, for real. It didn’t leave a mark, later, but it did for the time that it took me to look her in the eyes as her face crumbled in on itself, to shut the door and rush to the window, almost hyperventilating, almost puking.
I had just become my father.
I hadn’t hit her as a means to quiet her or teach a lesson. It had been because I just lost it and being hurtful was the thing that happened – there wasn’t even thought involved. I was out of control and I was and still am, more horrified with myself about that than I’ve ever been about anything or anyone in my life.
Within two minutes, I was at her bedside with my face pressed up close to hers, crying and telling her I was sorry. Pleading with her to forgive me. Kissing her little hand, pressed between my two shaky ones, over and over. For ten minutes, I told her how wrong I was, and how she was so much more important and deserved so much better than that. For ten minutes after that I rocked her in my lap and smoothed her hair away from her tear-streaked face, dripping my own into her eyes.
For all of the time since that happened, I can’t think about it without crying and feeling nauseous. Snot’s running down my face right now but I don’t dare sniffle because it might be the thing that sets the gag reflex to malfunction.
So.
I was never going to spank my child. Not because I thought it was de rigueur to make such a statement, but because I knew from my childhood and from experiences with ex-lovers how fast the sleeping dragon can be awakened. How easy it can be to go from moderately annoyed to not aware of what you’re doing. I figured, with my child, I would never open the door, to allow any negative form of touch to be okay – despite its intended lesson.
But I did. And then, I did. And then, even if it doesn’t have a lasting effect on Zoë, it always will on me.
So, when you’re thinking about how someone spanking their child is wrong, think of that person and the circumstances, not just the act – maybe their child is about to jump out of a window.
And when you’re thinking that you’ll never fill-in-the-blank, consider if you can really promise that to yourself or the Internet.
And really, when you’re judging someone specific or a group of people for slapping their child’s butt or hand or cheek or whatever, think that maybe, just maybe, their self-judgment is a thousand times worse than you could ever berate them with in some blog’s comments.
Let’s help each other grow and heal, okay?
