I grew up in a time of discipline. It was really not that long ago in terms of years, but a lifetime in mindsets. America has changed so much in such a short period of time that the idea of spanking your child now has a stigma of abuse rather than a reinforcing of boundaries.
My parents knew that such boundaries were important; not as the quick answer to general disobedience, but as a deterrent to mischievousness and the omnipresent answer to any aberrant behavior. As a child I knew of aberrant behavior. I was not especially disobedient, but from time to time I would choose to walk outside of the rules. When I did walk outside of the rules, my mother's discipline would fall harshly against my backside. "Choose the rule or choose the ruler." She would repeat with perfunctory precision; an echo, I suppose, from her own childhood. She was raised in a convent; a paid boarding school where the nuns ruled the roost in accordance to a genre of discipline thick with holy right.
Despite her love of the dictum, in the intervening years between habit and household, she had disposed of the ruler and adopted a paddle. It was flat, roundish at it's ends like a light-bulb in silhouette. The handle was lovingly carved, dark and polished with use. A thin pad of leather was stretched and tacked over each face of the paddle, although I never felt the impression of a pad as much as I did the old hickory that lay underneath.
The consequences for disobedience were always swift. My mother, in calm tones would point to her upstairs bedroom, the sanctum sanctorum, where I was to lower my pants, expose my backside and lay willingly across her lap. The paddle was raised to shoulder height and it fell with considerable weight. An audible slap lingered with each application. After ten of these she would stop, ask me to stand up and pull on my pants. She would then review the rule that had been broken, and it's consequence, and explain to me that discipline was an expression of love. She would hug me, look deep in my eyes, to make sure my spirit had not been compromised, and send me on my way.
It was a ritual of sorts that changed little over the years. The pointed direction to her room. The humiliating application of consequence, the review of the law, and the loving embrace. The paddle hung behind her door as an ever present reminder that love comes with responsibilities and expectations of obedience.
As the teen age years descended my advancing age precluded any more upstairs pilgrimages for spankings. However, the paddle continued to hang behind the door of her bedroom as a thinly veiled threat. On occasion as a teenager she would look at me with her stern loving eyes and within their reflection I would see the paddle. I could feel my naked form over her knees and watch the paddle creep up to level, hesitate, and then fall blistering fast against my white unmarked flesh. We would stand there speechless rehearsing a common play of discipline administered. My backside would itch with remembered humiliation, but an embarrassing new dimension was added to it. A dimension that grew long and hot and hard in my loins.
Would she still do it, could she? Would I stop her if my pants fell to the ground and revealed this secret new haunting of my fetid Freudian teenage dreams? I did not want to find out. I did not dare to.
Although it hung in place, the paddle's terrifying effects and heated teenage implications were felt and my behavior modified.
Once, on a trip home from college, I was asked to retrieve a box form my parent's bedroom closet and carry it to the garage for storage. On the way out of the bedroom I glimpsed the paddle hanging in position behind the door. A Pavlovian response answered the hidden cue as my backside immediately began to ache; the compounded years of training rising to the surface. A strange but familiar butterfly flip in my stomach spread this burning ember of memory elsewhere. It was like a taste of a secret forgotten drink. A ritual renewed. It was a moment of awakening and of understanding.
All those years in my parents room. The spankings, the sweat worn handle, the irrevocable position behind the door. The intervening years that had past unmeasured, uncounted by time or season. It had been a long time since I had felt the sting of the paddle or my mothers look of understanding and empathetic love that always followed. The times had changed ... for some. For my parents it was measured in consistency, like the dust that collected in boxes, on shelves and table tops in my parent's room, but never on the bright polished surface of the paddle that hung behind the door
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Submitted by:
nobeuddy
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