A Monstrous Eight Year Old Boy

Posted on August 4, 2003 in Book of Days Childhood PTSD Sorrow & Regret

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: If only….

If only he hadn’t hit me. Not just that day, but many times before that. If only he hadn’t hit my brother. I mark it as the last time I was unreasonably violent. My hands fluttered like trash in a dust devil, but many times more strong. I’d walked into the miniature whirl storms that appeared sometimes in dusty corners, felt the sting in my eye as the dust they carried got slapped against the thin film protecting my cornea. I hit my cousin Ann much harder than that, with all my strength as my father and my brother had hit me. I hit her because she’d broken something and to break something in my household demanded swift and hard punishment. I did to Ann, who was now the youngest — she’d come to live with us after the death of her mother — what they did to me, who had been the youngest.

She broke my brand new balsa airplane. A thing costing only a few cents but to me a treasure. The wings the palest of browns. Slightly etched by rings and ridges of the palest coffee. I put it together myself, set the weight and had flown it only seven times when she blundered after it like four year olds do and crushed it with a sneakered foot. My treasure, my prize was broken. My open hand came round. The palm smashed down against her ear. Her face turned as pink a frustration as I have ever seen. Shut up! Shut up! I whimpered. My father came out, saw her crying, saw the broken plane, and started hitting and kicking me. He wore hard leather shoes, not sneakers. He made a big scene of comforting Ann and finished the destruction of my plane with his foot.

I admit that after that I did not attack Ann or anyone else like that. Shallow people will say that it did me good, that I should celebrate the event. On that day, I began to resent my father. Had he, my brother, and my mother not taught me that hitting someone for breaking a thing you treasured was the right thing to do? I knew after that that it was not and I made the lesson my life. Even when kids picked fights with me, I tried to get out. I wasn’t afraid of getting hurt. I got hurt all the time in my house. I was afraid of hurting them, of seeing the tears and hearing the wail, of having my father come and, regardless of what they had done to deserve it, beating the violence out of me.

They tried to get me to fight back. They screamed at me, they yelled at me. I would not be lured to the way. I saw in every bully a potential Ann, who’d be turned into a blubbering fool if I landed a blow as I had landed it on Ann that day. I did not want to see bullies as I had seen Ann. I did not want to see myself in them and come to pity them.

What made me angry was that I continued to be hit for breaking things or for talking back or for not eating my dinner or what have you. It never let up though I lived the Gospel of nonviolence. Not perfectly, but I moved towards it. My mother used to say “Offer it up”. I did. I asked God to spread His message to those around me, to live nonviolently. It never got through their heads, not until I grew big enough that I could do serious damage to them.

My father never learned of his own hypocrisy. He taught Sunday school at our Catholic Church. He taught authoritarian Jesus, obey thy father and thy mother. In his religion, children could not question the parent’s failure to examine their conscience, to live by the word of Christ. My brother obliquely imitated him. “Suffer the little children” he used to taunt me. I endured a triad of abusers as I was growing up and I have often wondered why I never ended up in the 35 %.

I think it might have been Mrs. Sullivan, the math teacher. She once laughed about how her sister had sworn that she would never, ever use a certain kind of punishment when she grew up. Now that she was grown, Mrs. Sullivan beamed, she put her children through the same thing. I resolved that no matter what, I would prove Mrs. Sullivan wrong. I would not grow up to be like my father. The wicked queen of numbers would not add to my despair.

I have not had children, so I have never been put to that test. I have not, however, ever hit or threatened to hit my wife. So I count myself a partial success. My father died before he saw me married. It might have been a good thing for both of us because often, as I grew up, I dreamed of being strong enough to beat him about the head, to make his ears ring and make him call out for all the injustices he had made me suffer. Then I would have comforted the one person who deserved comforting, myself. If I had done this, though, I would have ended up in prison because those who beat adults were, in those days, treated quite differently from those who beat children. Children were free game, the act of hurting them with a stick or with your hand nothing more than “discipline”.

Not having my revenge has been a gift. I did not taste the addictive sweetness of violence, the drug that makes you return for satiation at the cost of another person’s dignity and health.

I have never resented Ann breaking out in tears or accepting my father’s comforts. I’d hurt her. It was her right to cry. At the end of the school year, my grandparents persuaded their father to rescue her and my cousin Jennifer from our home. I honestly believe that if they could have done so, they would also have rescued me from the three. I saw in their eyes sometimes the fact that they knew I hurt. The law that said that a child belonged to the father protected her from imprisonment in the house on 25th Street. It kept me manacled, however, well into my adult years. I would suffer the blows of three who thought themselves parents. I would grow to be a man who did not act like them.

If my father hadn’t hit me before that day, I would not have hit Ann. I might have cried, but I would not have swatted her like King Kong or Godzilla or a monstrous, angry eight-year old boy.

• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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