chapter eight - trying to get it right
I learned very early on that having a positive interaction with my parents was an iffy prospect at best. It wasn’t that positive interactions with them did not occur, and they certainly did, but their regularity and frequency were unpredictable. One never knew what one was going to get with them.
We had a children’s blackboard in the basement play area of our house in the suburbs. My half-sister and step-sister had their bedroom down there as well, off to the side. One day someone started a word game on the board by writing a few strokes and curves with the chalk. It lasted several days, and at some point I realized that the intended word was “shit”. I was around seven or eight years old, but I was familiar with the word and I placed a line or two on the board myself. Once the game had wrapped, my step-mother noticed it on one of her trips to the basement to do laundry. None of us would fess up, and immediately we were all grounded until such time as someone did. In reality no one single person had written it, a fact to which I could attest. The days wore on and I was tired of being grounded, and wanted to think that they would understand if I told them what had transpired. They called me a liar, said I had done it, and promptly washed my mouth out with soap. None of my siblings spoke up in my defense, and instead let me take the blame, and suffer the consequences.
Speaking of shit, at age nine or ten my parents sent us to summer day camp for a day, something that was supposed to broaden our horizons as we had never before spent time in the country. (That was where I encountered those scary horses and other wild animals.) While there I had to use the bathroom. I couldn’t find it on my own and was too shy to ask where it was. The attendees were separated by grades so my siblings were nowhere around. I couldn’t bring myself to address any of these strangers with whom I was surrounded, youth or adults, to find out where the bathroom was, and ended up spending the rest of the day fighting to hold it in.
I did whatever my child’s brain could think of to do to try to hold it in and keep from defecating in my pants. Needless to say, I was ultimately unsuccessful. The failure of my efforts was not something that I could easily conceal upon arriving at home, and my parents quickly discovered what had occurred. Rather than explore the reasons why I was so paralyzed by social anxiety that I could not manage a simple enquiry regarding the whereabouts of the restroom, they made me strip naked and wash out my underwear in the toilet, with the bathroom door open, humiliating me in front of my brothers and sisters.
My parents wasted years trying to find the perfect formula for physical punishment that would ensure that we would never again transgress against them or one another. They experimented with various regimens and went through various phases. At one point they informed us that our basic disciplinary needs would be met by my father pulling our pants down in front of the rest of the family while he paddled our behinds with his bare hand. It was all eerily ritualistic. My father would sit down on the couch. We approached him in a gesture of self-sacrifice. He would pull down our pants and we would lay across his lap, after which he would administer the predetermined number of blows, methodically and rhythmically, until he was done. We then stood up, pulled up our pants, and went back to whatever we had been doing.
Much later they would force us to apologize to one another, should the necessity arise, by shaking the hand and kissing the cheek the offended sibling. Since we were not a physically affectionate bunch by any means, this was anathema to us. They continued struggling to arrive at the perfect disciplinary regimen, though they never managed to do so, and we continued misbehaving, at least from their perspective. They were abjectly incapable of humanely addressing the psychological component of anything we did or said.
Why couldn’t we manage their simple demands that we exhibit unfailingly impeccable behavior and uninterrupted pleasant emotional states? These demands got harder and harder to meet the older we got. Another memorable moment, which we joke about amongst ourselves to this day, was my step-mother screaming at us one Christmas morning, “You kids are going to be happy if I have to beat it into you!” We were such failures as children.
