Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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      Over the years I have met many people whose parents beat them to make them good, and many parents who believed that the only way to make children good was to beat them. The most vivid description I have ever come across of what it is like to be so beaten and the conclusions a child draws from such beatings is in Anna Mitgutsch’s book Punishment.¹⁸ She calls this book a novel, but she writes, it seems, from her own experience.

      A beating: it never meant a spontaneous burst of anger, which might be followed by awkwardness and reconciliation. It began with a look which transformed me into vermin. And then there was a silence in which nothing had been decided yet and which nevertheless was past escape. The offence was swallowed up by the silence; it was never discussed. There were no alibis, explanations, excuses. There stood the misdeed, whether it was a banana stain on a dress or food refused – unatonable – and suddenly the misdeed was only a symbol for such an enormous wickedness that no amount of punishment sufficed. ‘Get me the carpet beater,’ she commanded; ‘get me the cudgel.’ This was a wooden stick the thickness of an arm, which split in two in the course of my education. The broken cudgel was itself significant evidence of a culpability so great that it could never be punished fully. Had she been completely just, she would have had to beat me to death. I owed the fact that she continued to let me live to her sacrificial mother love, which, like the Grace of God, was not earned and could never be repaid.

      Even when I had learned that it was a senseless gesture, I threw myself down in front of her each time, my arms clasping her knees, begging, Please, please dear Mama, my dearest Mama, I’ll never do it again, I promise, I swear, you can take everything away from me, only please, don’t hit me.

      She never bent down to me; her face remained remote, as if she were carrying out the work of a higher power. I never dared disobey her command; I always went whimpering behind the curtain to the side of the stairs, where the cudgel and the carpet beater were hung from hand-crocheted loops; they had their special hooks. What happened when I handed her the instrument of chastisement I don’t remember; I only know that all hell broke loose. This is what hell must be like: pain and pain and pain in a rhythm that the body recognized almost instantly and against which it could not protect itself, neither by turning aside or by running off, because the pain simply struck another part each time.

      Blind, I never saw her or the cudgel during the beating, only the smacks of wood on flesh, of metal-reinforced rubber on flesh, could be heard. Could it really be heard? Do I believe now that I heard it? How could I have heard it when I screamed, screamed as loudly as I could, from the first blow to the last? For sooner or later there was a last blow. Why this or that blow should be the last, I could not guess. It was God’s will, it was her will: she didn’t beat me in anger, after all; she beat me for my own good and to drive out my abysmal wickedness. The last blow was a well-considered temporary end of an atonement that would never end.

      And then she would let herself fall to the floor, breathing heavily and stretching out full-length, exhausted as from the completion of hard labour, and I stood there terrified, with my heart racing and the pain suddenly gone numb. Was she about the die of exhaustion, had she fainted, all because of my guilt, the hard work I had caused her? She had told me so often that I would be the death of her. Take the cudgel away,’ she said weakly, almost gently, and her slack voice gave me hope that she would survive …

      My sense of my own worth depends on my defence of her honour. I cannot betray her, because if it should turn out that she never loved me, then I am a monster, something that should not be permitted to exist.

      Therefore I don’t say what I know and have known for a long time: that she is one of those who make our skin crawl and stop our imagination cold when we read about them in history books and documents, one of those who are expert in all branches of torture. She had the talent, though she was limited in scope; she had the tools, stored in an orderly fashion and always at hand; she had her mute sacrificial lamb, helpless and willing; and she had her secret, voluptuous pleasure, which released itself into a state of unconscious exhaustion after the execution of her task. She rarely allowed herself to be overcome by anger. She gave her victim notice – ‘Just wait until tonight’– but in the meantime I had to go to bed, where my fear would escalate into suicidal fantasies. Where did she learn that? What handbooks had she read? When the punishment began she expected self-control; crying and pleading just made it that much worse; self-humiliation set her off. Beating was a ritual surrounded by other rituals. Even her inspection of the red welts and bloodshot bruises, after the work was done, was part of it. Was she, in other words, one of those people whose careers are made in torture chambers and concentration camps? How shall I answer that question about her who was also my mother? The word Mama also meant the broad lap on which I was allowed to sit, the soft face you could kiss if you were good and brought home all A’s. Mama meant the pet names I never heard again in later life: ‘bunny rabbit’ and ‘sugarplum‘; it was the smell of Christmas cookies when I got home from school, out of darkness into the warm, bright living room in December. Mama meant safety and peril; she could protect me from just about everything except herself.

      Many of us had parents who would not think of beating us to make us good. Instead, the situations where we were helpless and in the power of adults who inflicted pain on us were when our parents gave us just a few sharp slaps, or were locking us up, or threatening never to love us again, or saying that we had caused them terrible pain or were making them ill, or were criticizing us in contemptuous and degrading terms.

      Whatever the circumstances of the situation, we were small, helpless, trapped and in pain.

      We may not have had the words to describe that situation but we knew that the meaning of the situation was, in essence:

      ‘I am being punished by my bad parent.’

      We were, for a while, angry with our bad parent, but then a most terrible realization dawned on us. We were little and weak and dependent upon the parent who was inflicting pain on us. We realized that we were in double jeopardy.

      What could we do?

      We could do what all people do when we cannot change what is happening. We redefine it.

      It is dangerous to suffer pain, but it is even more dangerous to be in the total power of someone who is bad. We could not stop the pain, but we could redefine our parent.

      Our parent was not bad, but good.

      Why do good parents inflict pain on their children?

      Because the child is bad.

      So we redefined the situation. It was not, ‘I am being punished by my bad parent’, but:

      ‘I am bad and being punished by my good parent.’

      (D 5) Now we were safe. We were still in pain, suffering, feeling guilty, but at least safe in the hands of a good parent. Just like Feiffer’s little girl,¹⁹

      Why did we feel we had to make this sacrifice of our sense of goodness and worth? What was there in that situation which threatened us so much?

Saving Our Self

      Whether we are an adult or a child, whenever СКАЧАТЬ