If you ask my son if he gets spanked, he'll tell you yes. Then he'll giggle, turn his tush around toward you and probably embark on some sort of taunting butt wiggle.
He doesn't know the word to mean what it really means. We use it like a joke in this home.
My mother never spanked me. She never needed to. Not that I didn't screw up. She just had a way of getting enough out of my way for me to see how I'd gone wrong.
But every other authority figure in my life did. It was humiliating, infuriating, distancing. It left me feeling lonely, abandoned, helpless, - Did I mention alone? I never learned anything but who I couldn't trust. Maybe what I couldn't do, but never why I couldn't do it. To this day I blame them for every single spank.
How's that for my being taught a lesson? I never even really thought about it until now, but I feel zero responsibility for any infraction that ever lead to my getting hit. Looking back, I can recant dozens of stories in vivid detail and the "adult" is always in a bad mood, embarrassed over their own insecurities, stupid, lying, selfish, or just plain positively pathetic.
I'll never hit my kids. I've yelled, and I've regretted it, but that's as far as I'll go. And I'll probably lose it on anyone else who even yells at them. And they screw up. And they're not perfect. And that's ok. The boundless energy that goes into trying to control their environment, catch them being good, and exposing them as much as necessary to what they need to learn about the world, or about themselves, is worth it. It's worth knowing they'll trust me. Through me they'll trust the world first. We all love to preach that we create our own reality. And no matter what you believe, there's a ton of truth in that. This is the best I can do to help them create a world they can trust. I know people screw up, but to justify it? How? What reasoning leads anyone down a path that says hurt those you love the most?
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