There is an old saying that has more or less vanished from the vocabulary of the modern parent. The saying is, "This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you." Do you remember your mother or father saying that to you every time they felt obliged to administer a licking? I enquired of my father on one occasion, in all seriousness I might add, if he didn't have that saying backwards. "This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me," made good sense and I would have believed him, but no, father assured me he would suffer terribly as he administered the stick. My dad had a psychological approach to whipping. You see, he never snapped his belt out of his trouser loops and let fly. He would always simply dig into his pocket, and would then hand me a small, pearl-handled jack knife. He’d look at me and say, "Go out to the back of the lot and cut a switch." (Can you imagine today's father sending his child out to lop a branch off one of his pet shrubs?) The trip to the small clump of willows at the rear of the yard was only about 50 feet, but it took me a good half hour to get there, select the branch I thought the least sturdy, and get back into the house. Really, it wasn't the switching that bothered me, it was a horrible anticipation. After I had returned with the branch, father would always deliver that line. "This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you." All I can say is, there must have been many occasions when my father suffered the greatest of agony.
No comments:
Post a Comment