It wasn’t so much of a punishment rather the reaction of seeing somebody hurt by my actions that was the actual punishment that has stayed with me throughout my life.
When I was around 3 years old, I remember being in a room with my mom. It was just before bed time, and my mom was sitting on the bed, she must have been 27 years old at the time, and she was folding clothes. My dad wasn’t home because he was on the nightshift at the GM plant, so it was just my mom looking after me. I didn’t want to go to bed, certainly not alone. I was clingy and afraid of the dark, even though my bedroom was literally beside my mom’s room, I didn’t want to be in there alone.
The way she tells it, I was creepily standing by the door, just watching her fold clothes, and it was already past my bedtime. She said, “Go to sleep now!” I just wanted to sleep in her room, but she was putting her foot down and trying to get me to sleep in my own room. “No!”, I said, and I moved from the doorway and closer to the front of the bed. She continued to fold clothes, picking up two socks and rolling them into a ball. Then she asked me again, “What did I tell you? Go to sleep now, in your own room!”, and I quickly said back in that whiny kid voice, “Noooo.” I realize now, from a parent’s perspective, having a kid who refuses to go to bed and just wants to sleep in your bed, can be incredibly frustrating. I can only imagine my mom being exhausted from working a full-time job, coming home to cook and do laundry, and on top of all that, deal with me, alone. I get why parents lose their tempers every once and awhile. This night, I lost my temper.
I was three years old, and I was annoyed. The thoughts in my head were “Why won’t my mom let me sleep in her bed? I’m tired! I want to sleep! Why won’t she let me sleep?” and every time she asked me to go to my room and sleep there was like a stab in the back, and a fiery rage was starting to burn inside me. Call it a mix of tiredness, frustration, and fear, I just knew that if she asked me one more time, I was going to lose it.
When you’re 3, you don’t know how to express yourself in ways that you do as an adult. I didn’t have the reasoning tools that I have now, so I had to reach into my ill equipped 3 year old reasoning tool bag and pull out something that I could have only seen on TV.
In the closet behind me, was a small plastic children’s folding chair. It was white with pops of color on the legs, and it had cartoon characters on the cushioned seat. My mom looked up and said, “Ip you don’t go to sleep in your room now, I’m going to tell Dad, and you’ll be in trouble!”….and that’s when I snapped.
I turned around and grabbed the cartoon cushioned folding chair with my tiny hands and lifted it above my head as if I was Hulk Hogan about to take a swing at Andre the Giant in a no-holds-barred wrestling match. I yelled, “No!” and stood there, nostrils flaring, eyes glaring, body shaking, threatening to hit my mom.
The look on her face said it all. It was mix of shock and surprise, combined with a little fear, but she didn’t react with anger, I just remember her reacting with incredible sadness. Sadness from the shock of seeing her baby boy ready to strike her with a folding chair. She started wiping tears from her eyes and those tears felll down on the newly folded clothes.
I slowly put the chair down and stood there not knowing what to do because this was the first time I was really scared about what was going to happen to me because I had never seen my mom react that way, and that image is burned into my memory. The next thing that happened was just as scary. She looked up and stared right into my eyes and said, “Wait til’ your dad comes home! You’re in trouble now!” and the fear of those words still haunt me to this very day.
They never beat me, but the threat of the beating was more than enough to start making changes in my life.
Oh, and they wouldn’t let me watch wrestling anymore.
