Proverbs 22, Verse 15
"A youngster's heart is filled with rebellion,
but punishment will drive it out of him."
---
CHIPPED WISDOM:
I have to imagine that, just considering probability and my smart mouth, I was at least occasionally punished as a child. If I was, though, I don't remember it, and it's not because I was concussed by my father's closed fist. No, that never happened in our house. There was awful blue carpeting on the stairs and the word "fuck" was said with greater frequency than the word "salt" or "and", but there was never any hitting.
At least, not of me.
He gave my sister a few good smacks, though, though he claims, conveniently, to not remember. We tell these stories, laughing, in the living room. He laughs too, which, (I guess?) is good. There was the time where we were all placing our ice cream orders and he asked her what she wanted and she answered, "Vanilla". He said, "What?" And she made the mistake of uttering, "I said 'vanilla', what are you, deaf?" That earned her a thick Israeli palm straight across her face. Another time, he threw a full cup of water ice in her face, though I don't know what crass remark of hers prompted that frozen projectile. Maybe I would have gotten smacked around if I had been more into cold desserts.
There was a decent amount of verbal "abuse", if you want to call it that. Of course, I'm sure any child born to an Israeli father could claim at least the same, if not far worse. He screamed at us as if we were privates in his regiment. Eating our Cinnamon Toast Crunch too loudly the breakfast table on Sunday received an emphatic, "JEEE-SUS CHRIST! ENOUGH WITH DA FACKING CRUNCHING, ALREADY!" I never fully considered the irony until this moment of a man whose native tongue is Hebrew using "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation. Classic. Breaking something on the kitchen floor-- a plate or what have you-- resulted in him asking, rhetorically, I learned, "WHAT ARE YOU, FACKING KEE-DEEING ME?" Making fun of him and his accent, we quickly learned, was enough to make the man almost completely implode. One day he took us on an ill-fated trip to visit the Pepperidge Farm factory. He got hopelessly lost. He stopped by the side of the road at some movie set-looking old gas station where the pumps still said "Esso" and asked some toothless hump in a pair of overalls, "Excuse me-- how do I get to, uh-- Pappen-dridge Farm?" The farmer cocked his head and stared at him. My sister and I almost passed out in the back seat of the Buick from holding in our piss as we exploded in a torrent of laughter. He turned to us with a virulence I had never seen before and screamed, "SHAT DEE FUCK UP, YOU TWO ASSHOLES! I AM TRYING TO DO SOMETHING FACKIN' NICE FOR YOU FUCKS!"
This, of course, made us laugh harder until my neck almost burst. He drove us home in silence and said nothing to either of us for two days.
In spite of all this, and more, I don't ever recall being sent to my room-- I always ended up running there myself before anyone could send me there. He yelled and screamed at me, but I don't ever remember an explicit "punishment" per say. Once he poked me in the stomach with his index finger, I don't remember what the hell that was about. And I remember crying and, you know, running to my room. Fortunately, I liked my room. I think I even liked crying in it. I am relieved, of course, that it was just yelling. His father used to chase him around the house and, once he caught him, he'd beat the shit out of my father with his shoe. And you know how they made shoes back then.
My mother, of course, was a different story. Once I did something bad-- who the hell knows what it was now-- and she told me she was disappointed in me, and I considered wearing black for a year. Maybe it was the time that I took an axe to the basement wall-- that one's still kind of hard to explain, even now, with almost four years' experience in psych. I told my parents, when they asked why I'd done it, that I was bored. They came down a lot harder on my sister, who was supposed to be babysitting me but who was watching "The Hard Way" (James Woods, Michael J. Fox-- great flick) in the basement at full volume and I could have been building an atomic bomb on the sofa next to her and she'd never have known. I don't know what her punishment was, if anything, but at least she didn't get a frozen custard or something slammed into her face. Was I punished? No. Would a normal parent have taken money out of my allowance until I was 27 to pay for the damage I did to the wall? Yes. I guess they're not normal.
Remember how I told you earlier that I liked my room? Well, once I called my mother a "witch" and she chased me around the house, which was quite an athletic feat for a woman like her. I was stunned that she was up to it, and that scared me. She almost got ahold of my arm but I broke free and I was terrified about what she was capable of doing to me if she'd caught me-- I'd never seen her like that. I ran into my room and I slammed the door shut, and shoved my bureau up against it.
"DON'T TOUCH ME!" I screamed, "I KNOW THE NUMBER!!!!"
There was silence on the other side of the door.
"What number?" she asked breathlessly from the hallway.
"THE CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE! I KNOW THE NUMBER!"
Truthfully, I didn't know the number. I did, however, know the slogan "In case of child abuse: know the number" courtesy of the commercials that played endlessly during episodes of "Rescue: 911" that any child psychologist worth his salt would have known I shouldn't have been watching. I also, not that it mattered, didn't have a phone in my bedroom.
I don't know if I'm going to punish my children. I didn't really know what grounding was, other than ordering an airplane to land, until I was in high school, though I'd heard it said enough on "Diff'rent Strokes". I don't know that not getting punished spoiled me, I think it just made me weird and fucked up, and I suppose that's punishment enough. Still, all things being equal, I'm learning to be okay with it.
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