Around the holiday season, one tends to think of one’s FOO, whether one wants to or not. It happens less and less as the years pass, but it still happens sometimes. In my case, I think I ruminate on all the bullshit that happened because I am reminding myself exactly WHY they are not in my life any longer.
One phrase I learned while shoveling through it all was this:
And so it was with this year.
My sister has four kids, two girls and two boys. The first boy was a handful. I happen to think a lot of what he pulled off was because he was smarter than her – or at least, more creative. The best one I know about was when he used the attic access in the boys’ bedroom to create a pot-smoking den in the attic. Freakin’ genius. The kid only got caught when one day he thought the house was empty, but one of my older brothers was visiting, and the uncle was still in the house and heard him overhead in the attic.
Anyway. So by the time he was a teen, my sister was at her wits’ end I suppose, but her proposed solution was that she wanted her husband to teach the kid a lesson – a physical lesson. I don’t know the exact details, as of course I heard all this second-hand. But she definitely wanted her husband to physically attack the boy in some way, in order to discipline him.
God, that is so cringey even to type out.
Well, my BIL wouldn’t do it.
So my sister’s next idea was to BRING IN HER TWO BROTHERS TO DO THE JOB.
Again, this is all second-hand, but I guess she was ready to have our two oldest brothers fly in for the express purpose of doing some kind of physical discipline to the kid.
I don’t know what else they might have tried before this idea showed up.
I do know that this idea is not going to work.
I have a suspicion that family therapy, or anything like that, even if they tried it, would not be too effective, because CLEARLY the problem here is the KID, and CERTAINLY NOT MY SISTER.
Just like when I went to therapists, some think that “proves” I was the problem, and everyone expected it to “fix” me. Which is often the case, that the people who need to do the changing don’t think they can possibly be the problem.
Well, my sister’s plan never came to fruition, AFAIK. I think my BIL found out about it and put the kibosh on it.
But in revisiting it this year, I realized that this story is another confirmation that my sister is my mother all over again.
Because remember how, when my dad used to be gone all week, traveling for work — my mother used to keep a tally of what the boys had done wrong all week, and when Dad got home on Friday he had to physically punish them?
No, actually, because I’ve only alluded to this a couple of times here and there, and never really spelled it out. Well, I can remember Mom doing this to the two younger boys, and I have no doubt she did it with the older ones too.
I can remember standing in my parents’ bedroom, near the closet, watching the proceedings. I probably had to be in the room because I was certainly no more than 5, if my mom was still there, and presumably I was not to be left alone in another room. (Which doesn’t make a lot of sense coming from a parent who let me sit outside on the sidewalk for hours, and sent me to walk to school by myself, so maybe I just wanted to be near my Dad when he returned from being gone all week. Or maybe Dad was the one who realized I should not be left unsupervised. I don’t know. But I do know I was in the room.)
The punishing involved both parents: Mom reading from her scribbled list on the back of an envelope, or something, and Dad swatting the boys on the behind with a belt as they lay on the bed.
This is straight authoritarian parenting, the “strict father” family model.
I now wonder if maybe Mom was angry at Dad because he DIDN’T PLAY HIS ROLE PROPERLY. He was supposed to be the head of the household and make all the decisions (and therefore take all the blame). With him gone all week (to earn the money, but that apparently isn’t a good enough excuse) — those responsibilities fell on her and she couldn’t deal with them.
Further, since she had to do HIS job, maybe she decided, consciously or unconsciously, therefore she wouldn’t do HER job — which was to cook and clean and launder and maybe even nurture. She passed most of THOSE responsibilities to her oldest daughter.
Who in turn, years later, decided that physical punishment from a man (preferably a relative of some kind, after all this is FAMILY) was the thing that had to be done to a kid. Like mother, like daughter.
Ugh.