The Switch Bush and the Damage Done

I haven't written about my mom very often. This is not because she falls short in the funny/crazy stories department. It's because I'm not sure just how well she would take the jokes. She's not really much of a yuckster, but tends to giggle at my insanity so I'll give it a shot. Hopefully, I still get invited to Thanksgiving.

I don't really spank my kids. It's not that I'm against it on a moral level, it's that it makes me feel horrible. If my kids have done something spanking-worthy odds are I'm already pretty heated, so why would I want to add to my own negative mood. Plus, there's a time and a place, from a developmental perspective, where spanking is quite effective and necessary. However, I find that to be a very small time period. I can usually get more effective behavior correction out of forcing my oldest to stand in one spot, completely still, while we discuss what he did wrong and how to correct it. Honestly, if I had to listen to me go on and on about appropriate behavior, I'd do anything to avoid future conferences too. Jackson's the same way. My long-winded lessons are torture. For him, mind games and control have worked much better than physical punishment.

My mom, on the other hand, was a strong proponent for spankings. Of course, as wild as I was who can blame her. I imagine her and my dad having traumatic conversations, after I went to bed, about whether or not I would live to see adulthood.

Mom: Dale, what are we going to do?

Dad: I have no idea. Hell, some nights I'm afraid to go to sleep. I have these reoccurring nightmares where he sets the house on fire by shoving stuff in the light sockets.

Mom: I know. If we can just make it till he turns 18 we'll be alright. But, I do feel awful about turning him loose on society.

Dad: Well, do you have a plan on how to make it that far?

Mom: I think we're just going to have to use a combination of fear and pain.

Dad: Probably so....

Before I go any further let me clear up one thing, my parents were in no way abusive. It probably wouldn't have hurt if they were, but they weren't. In fact, I can count, on one hand, how many times my dad spanked me. For mom, I'd need a few hundred more hands. But it was much more than the spankings. In reality, they didn't really work that well anyway. By the time I knew what was going on, I'd weighed out the risk and decided that the prize was probably worth a spanking anyway.

What bothered me more was the fear. It was incredibly effective. Let me be a little more descriptive.

As I've stated before, if the church doors were open, we were there. We attended FBC Purvis, MS. Our tiny town had a TON of baptist churches, but FBC was definitely the largest of the bunch. On a normal Sunday morning, we'd probably have between 300-350 people in service. This made me very excited because I would have the chance to talk to each and every one of them. I was a chatty Kathy, so a large gathering of people suited me just fine. The young people would congregate in the first six rows right smack-dab in the middle of the sanctuary. As you can expect, I was a perfect angel during the music portion of the service. However, I struggled mightily during the sermon. Once the pastor started using words like "self-righteous" and "condemnation" I would zone out. I was more worried about what it would take to get some type of positive response out of anything wearing a skirt. This always led to trouble.

Mom sang soprano in the church choir. They would stay in the choir loft, behind the preacher, for the entire service. This gave her a front row view of my misdeeds. But somehow my hormones would take over and I would completely forget that she existed, or that my chattering and joking around would aggravate her. But when I crossed the line, when I'd simply gone too far, it didn't take long for me to realize the error of my ways. It was then that she would break out the glare. Now I know what you're saying. "Is he really writing a blog about how scary his mom's glare was? He must be running out of ideas!" Do me a favor and tell your inner-monologue to shut it's mouth. You have NO idea what you're talking about. Your feeble attempts at imagining this glare without the appropriate level of imagery from me is embarrassing. When I say it was a look that would kill, I'm not kidding. To illustrate my point I'll simply say that it was rare that I noticed the look without being alerted to it by someone sitting around me. By that time, the damage was done. Her eyebrows would come to a sharp point, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and her lips pursed together as a marker that she was angrily grinding her teeth.

Invariably someone would tap me on the shoulder and point toward the choir loft. That's when I saw it. But, it wasn't the glare that really made my knees knock. It was the frantic look of concern that those around her gave me. Their knowing eyes were screaming "for God's sake Jamey, please shut up. Don't you see her? Don't you know what that look means?" I did, and so did everyone else. That's why the glare was so effective. It meant something. It had something behind it. It meant that there was no question about whether or not I was visiting the switch bush as soon as we got home. And once the look was given, there was no turning back. The die was cast. I would now have to pretend to listen to the rest of the sermon in an effort to turn this ship around. But alas, I would fail.

Once service ended, I knew to just go to the car and wait. Conversation on the ride home was sparse. It would be an exercise in futility to try and change her mind, so why try.

The switch was mom's weapon of choice. But just like everything else, there would need to be a big production to the spanking. We would wait until after lunch. She would take a seat in the living room and instruct me to venture to the bush and retrieve my own switch. This was no small task. Identifying which switch took great skill. If I chose one too small, I would have to repeat the entire evolution. Too big, and she would shave it down in front of me with a small paring knife. The whole thing was very dramatic and tension-filled. Then came the deed. It was over in seconds and rarely painful. The key was the anticipation. But in my hard-headed fashion, the next week would no doubt be a repeat of the last. Another glare, more terrified looks from my fellow baptists, and another switch.

As an adult, I can only imagine how my mom felt. For her, she was pulling out the biggest guns in her arsenal, but I just kept on coming. How frustrating. That's really been the script for most of my life. I seemingly enjoy using my forehead to open doors rather than simply turning the door knob. C.S. Lewis once described experience as "that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." It has taken years of teachable moments for me to change some of my more childish ways. Therefore, I would like to apologize to my mom for the countless glares and switches that seemingly had no effect. But mostly I would like to apologize to all those who were inadvertently affected by the glare. Poor, poor innocent bystanders....