Yo, my siblings and I BOND over our discipline stories, though.
Literally, that’s how some of my family’s funniest convos are. My mom would tell me stories about when she’d cut up and her parents would kick her ass. I always make her tell the story about the time she tried to start her own church (our entire family is Muslim) because she was jealous that in Islam we don’t sing in the mosque.
So my mom and her siblings used to pass by the local church on the way home, and they’d peek in on them when they’d sing. Anyone who has been to a Nigerian church knows that place is JUMPIN’ all day. Service last like 8 hours. Anyway, because they didn’t know the words to the hymns and gospels, they just hummed the tune. My mom, being the ringleader, wanted to be the conductor.
Christ, it was hilarious the way she described it. Like they were really trying to emulate a church, and her dad (who was the bigger disciplinarian in the household) came in and was standing behind her when she was getting into it, and her whole “choir” got quiet. And she was trying to figure out why. And then her dad smacked her for perceived blasphemy. LOL
There’s more stories, like how my brother used to have the gall to TAUNT my mom when she’d threaten him with the koboko, and he had the GALL to run (you don’t ever run, or you’ll get it worse—the base is three raps per offense, multiply by two based on severity—the highest I got was 21 for missing the bus to school and trying to play hookey).
Anyway, my siblings and I can look back and bond over these memories. It’s apart of our culture, it’s not abuse to us, we’re not traumatized. I have been through abuse and molestation and rape. I know there is a very distinct difference, and I turned out fine.
In light of the conversations about this being reposted, I’ve been thinking about it too. Growing up in Trinidad, EVERYBODY got licks from their parents (different from getting beat; licks were to be expected, getting beat was cruelty). Once I was sick at school and my mother had to take a taxi out to the city to pick me up, and when we got home she chased me around the room and gave me licks with a metal belt.
At school — and I was a VERY good student — I routinely got licks with a wooden ruler. That was how they taught us: twenty-question tests every day on different subjects, and once we marked them, the teacher would start at eighteen and count down (nineteen if she was in a foul mood), and the girls who got that score would have to go up and receive a proportionate amount of smacks on the hand with that ruler. My parents didn’t give a shit about this; my parents said we were lucky to get the ruler, because in their day they were sent out to cut the guava switch they’d then get licks with.
I didn’t like any of this, of course. My sister and I sometimes got so worked up before school we’d vomit in the taxi there. My mom broke a wooden pot spoon on me once, used a plastic hanger another time. It pissed me off as I got older and by the time the hanger happened (I was like 13, 14? and we were back in Canada), I took it away from her.
But in Trinidad, with Every. Other. Kid. going through the same thing or worse? Shit wasn’t anything. I don’t categorize it as abuse now that I’m grown, and I don’t consider myself traumatized either. My dad also tells stories about his childhood where getting whipped with a metal cable is the punchline. The context matters a lot; obviously, we interpret these kinds of experiences based heavily on what our current norms are, and our lasting emotional digestion of those experiences follows those norms.
