Discipline

When I was 3 and 4 years old my mother would get so mad she would whip me with a belt; hard and for a long time.  I have no memory of what, if anything, I did to incite such wrath; probably just trying to get some kind of attention.  I remember trying to talk to her and she’d keep walking away.  At one point I said, “ Mom, I'm trying to talk to you.  Please stop walking away.”  She said I could talk to her but that I would have to follow her around; she had no time to stop.  The beatings were so bad that my father had to take a break from working late to make her stop.  Many years later I got a letter from him saying, “I didn’t think your mother would do that.”

At times both my brothers and both my parents would be yelling at me all at once about how awful, unreasonable, and irresponsible I was.  I’d have to tell them it was completely unfair for all of them to yell at me at once and that if they were going to yell at me they could only do it one at a time.  It was the only point I ever successfully got across.

I do remember wondering why suddenly the beatings stopped and things improved for me at home.  From then on I was more polite and forever more subdued.