I (wish I didn’t) Remember Mama: Here’s to the Good Times

Someone beat me and I thought he was wonderful. Yikes, a normal person might exclaim, get this chick some help. The problem was that the “someone” was my father and I was a child who didn’t know that all children don’t suffer corporal punishment. I am always surprised when a fellow baby-boomer tells me that he or she never got hit, and think the parents must have been “rare exceptions”—maybe they were beatniks (or anti-beat-niks). Isn’t this country built on legendary tales of “trips to the woodshed”?

In my mind, people who punished their children with spankings, “lickings,” or beatings in the fifties and sixties were “normal” parents, just as I believe parents who hit their kids in the new millennium are criminal abusers. Unfortunately for my children and much to my shame, the combination of my experience, ignorance, and entering parenthood in my teens resulted in the continuation of this family tradition. (In my twenties, I impulsively decided to go back to school, and in a child psychology class an Eskimo ended those practices for good. Our textbook included a quote from an Eskimo father who asked “Why would I hit my child?,” and went on to explain he didn’t hit other people who made him angry. That man ended corporal punishment in my home—if only he could have terminated mental disorders, as well.)

In many ways, I am like my father. Perhaps that’s because the only thing I remember about my mother is the many faces of her anger—an example I could not emulate since anger was not acceptable (it’s so much better to turn it inward and let it fester into depression). Good memories of my childhood are mostly about my father, my Uncle B., and my Aunt M. who sometimes treated me like the most wonderful child ever born (and other times refused to speak to me because I was her sister’s child). I idolized my father, and other relatives would say, “Your father is a saint.” I didn’t realize at the time that they—being on Fleas’ side of the family—were referring to his tolerance of Fleas’ behavior (if you missed the last installment, “Fleas” is/was my mother—the name chosen [by me] because of its similarity to her name. For whatever deep, dark psychological reason, it is easier for me to refer to her as  “Fleas” than as “Mother” or “Mom”).

My father was a font of advice that I took to heart, most of which is still etched on my psyche: “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” (or how to brainwash your child into being a perfectionist who won’t try to do anything for fear it won’t be done exactly right) and “If you want a job done right, do it yourself” (or, “never ask for help”). Note to parents: to successfully neuroticize your children, such phrases must be repeated daily, beginning when they are toddlers; it’s especially effective to use them several times a day.

You never know where your keyboard is going to take you. I started this installment intending to recall good memories of life with my parents to dispel the notion that it was all Dickensian. I am trying to dredge up big, happy events like birthdays or holidays, but I fail (it must not be a job worth doing). Instead, good memories involve adult-less moments, times spent with adults who were not my parents, times with my parents and lots of witnesses, or the times I was with my father only.

My father was home on weekends, and I’d often hang out with him while he did construction projects or repairs, washed the car, went to the corner tavern, or ran (actually drove) to the store or dry cleaners on various errands (every year I got to cast numerous votes for my choice in the “Miss Rheingold” contest—casting a vote or two each time we stopped at the liquor store). I know he took me fishing once (I dutifully caught a sunny), and to a baseball game (which I always remembered as the Brooklyn Dodgers but was probably the Yankees). When I was in the lower grades, we went to the library together. Those were the good times.

There wasn’t much conversation; aside from telling us kids we were stupid when we made mistakes or “acted up,” my father didn’t speak much (in our house, it was a good philosophy—be quiet and [if possible] invisible). “Children should be seen and not heard,” was Fleas’ mantra, but even I knew she meant “Children should be seen but not had.”