Man - somebody needed to be given a smart slap about a decade prior.
I only say that because if I had said, "My mom is a f**king b***h" and "I hate her" or the same with my dad, ya'll would have never even heard of me. Wouldn't even be here, my peoples!
One story I can relate from my childhood is me, in front of all my cousins and relatives, complaining about some present I didn't get, grumbling and being pissy. For about a minute.
I was told, in a stentorian, Darth Vader tone, to go wait downstairs and await my whooping. I begged, I pleaded, but I had to go.
The great guru of the 1990's -- Steven Seagal -- once said through film that "Anticipation of death is worse than death itself." I am absolutely sure that my dad sat around the kitchen table with the other older aunt, uncle, and granny, smoking a cigarette and chuckling about how my butt needed to be "lit up." I must have waited 10 minutes for that whooping, and that is THE WORST. I doubt my dad had seen Above the Law or Hard to Kill or whichever movie that line had been used in, but he knew that fact implicitly. I think he must have learned it through direct experience.
So when I hear the footsteps, I am bouncing off the walls, trying to negotiate, to stop what cannot be stopped. Parents, I hear, often say things like "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you," but my parents never wasted time with such obvious and utter bullshit. On the handful of times in my life when I was bare-butt spanked and for a good long time, it hurt like a mofo and remained in my memory forever.
Yes, I had learned the error of my ways as soon as the command to go downstairs was received, and that feeling doubled as my dad's footsteps creaked down the stairs. But they say the best learning happens in an emotional context, and I think fear works just as well as any emotion.
Not only did I truly, madly, and deeply come to understand the "sound of one hand slapping," the command to "Now, go back upstairs!" was even worse. That humiliating walk back up the creaky stairs and the deafening silence that roared from the lips of all my cousins and relatives watching -- wow.
You know that twitch you get after crying really hard? That weird artifact of hyperventilation that developed as part of mammalian evolution on land? Where your whole side spasm rhythmically about once every 4 seconds? Man, that shit is loud when you're sitting around all your folks, who are kinda thinking, "Man, that was a pretty stupid thing to pull on Christmas Day. Now, lookatchoo." Hehe.
That straightened my shit RIGHT out.
And surely, any of the younger cousins were thinking, "There, but for the grace of God-given common sense and the desire for boodie self-preservation, go I." My spanking had surely served the additional purpose of being that first hostage in the bank that you make an example of just to make sure everyone knows you're "serious." I think my forced return was a message to the other kids, just as much of a message to me. Dang those sneaky adults!
And I don't even remember being spanked more than once by my father, although tales of other spankings existed, but I don't seem to remember them, as in when I had a fascination with electrical outslets or something.
I also remember my mom spanking me after I spent an hour at a movie theater gleefully hiding and crawling under the seats (they seemed so big then!) and the game seeming to get even more fun even as it became more real, as several ushers had been dispatched to find me. I knew my goose (and my ass!) was going to be cooked once my mom caught me. Man -- even *I* was mad at me for getting into this situation. I remember that one well, grasshopper. I never knew my mom had ninja skills, but she flipped OUT when I got home.
Moms be fast, 'cause she caught me as I was running around the dining room table. They say that one of the first steps of response to an inevitable doom or terminal illness is "negotiation;" I think it's true. I quickly learned to just accept the inevitable. What -- am I going to dodge my mom forever? I learned to just get it over with. But even when you do, you kinda regret it if the spanking really hurts.
Anyway, I am just very, very glad my father wasn't like, "Oh, I'll buy you another little red fire engine, then, Mikey!" and wasn't to offer some other indulging placation of brattiness. I am glad that I had parents who drew the line and stuck to it, because looking at this video, this looks like a girl with a long history of getting what she wants and walking all over her elders.
As I get older and think about having kids, I think I will end up keeping my family's way of allowing a lot of leeway and room to explore between set boundaries, but once a boundary has been violated, the retribution is veritably nuclear. Once you learn that being a punk means reaping the whirlwind, and you know WHY being a punk is not to be tolerated as you learn the sound of one hand slapping, I think that does a lot.
And it seems to be ingrained in me. The sight of random kids running around the restaurant while their mothers chit-chat, or spoiled little boys throw a tantrum over not getting ice cream first or whatever while their well-trained young mom goes, "알았어, 알았어. 아이스크림 줄께!" and then rushed over to get them some -- oooooooooh. I can't even concentrate.
Strangely enough, I find myself possessed of a powerful urge to go over there and teach that kid "the sound of one hand slapping."
