whippings **Triggers SA/PA***

[audacious]

***triggers PA, SA***
I originally titled this spankings, but really, they were whippings with a belt.
I used to think my mom wasn't so bad until I hit adolescence. Besides the neglect that allowed me to be SAd. Which I'm not trying to minimize. But, we got "spankings" alot. With our pants down and no underwear. When I think about that in the context of regular spanking (which I think is abusive in and of itself) and in the context of what I think is acceptable guidance for my own children; I think, "Wow, that was really messed up." I suppose that she was able to delay the gratification of her volatile anger knowing she would be whipping our naked, defenseless bodies with a belt. And she'd say that she didn't enjoy doing this. But she was always cool and calm about setting up the spanking. Controlled. My brother wouldn't hold still, he'd run screaming around the room and she would thrash his back. OH, I hated that so much. I tried so hard to keep him from getting in trouble. It didn't matter that he was running around the room. He still had to get every lashing earned from misbehaving. And he earned more and more for not submitting.
I think it's a form of SA. I know that it was somewhat common back in the day.

[learning]

Aucacious~

My heart hurts for those little children, running from the torment their monster mother was inflicting. Our histories are so very similar that I can see myself and my brother doing just what you and your brother were doing. It was heinous and diabolical.

*********Triggers PA, EA ***********

My mother was just as brutal as yours. Belts were her weapon of choice, but she could also use wooden spoons, metal rulers, hairbrushes, etc. if the belt wasn't readily available or she didn't feel like going up the stairs to get it.

One of the most insidious ways my mother "punished" us in this way was to make us go pick what she would use to "spank" us. We had to select between all of these weapons, and bring her our weapon of choice. Then, she would tell us how many lashes we were going to get. We had to count them out as she struck us. If we tried to run, cried out, or anything that prevented her from getting in a solid hit she would start the count over from the beginning.

I remember one particularly brutal day when my brother could not get through his count. I think it was supposed to be to 25, but he was crying and squirming. He was probably about five years old; I would have been about 6-1/2. My little self thought he was going to die. She must have started over 5 times, so he had already had well more than 25 lashings, but that wasn't good enough for her. He had to just "take his punishment" and get through the 25, counting properly.

I remember throwing myself on her arm, begging her to stop, begging her to let me do it for him. Her response? You want 25, too? Okay, you'll be right after him. So we both got it. I think she finally gave up on him getting through his count and then turned on me. I don't think either of us could sit or lay down on our backs for several days.

When I think back at that, a hatred wells up in me. Not a present-day hatred, as I've had to let it go, but just more of a universal kind of hatred at the idea that ANY mother would treat her children that way; it is repulsive and unnatural. She was a monster, and no one did anything about it.

When I think about the "why" of this, I think I know the answer. My father was a womanizing, partying, absentee husband. He would come home at all hours of the night, or even in the morning, reeking like alcohol and cheap perfume. I remember my mother once telling me that he had been cheating on her since she had been pregnant with me (just a few months after their wedding).

So, she had this incredible rage within her at being scorned and laughed at when she tried to call him on it. They had tremendous fights while we hid in our bedrooms. And this was one of the things she tried to use as an excuse when I confronted her on the abuse ... "I did the best I could under the circumstances."

But, the more I thought about that, the angrier I became. Why didn't she leave? Why didn't she go to her sister, brother, or parents for help to get her and her kids out of that nightmare? Because of the money. My father was an up and coming banking executive, and she enjoyed not having to work. She couldn't walk away from her life of plenty to save us.

So, she vented her rage on us, my father was fine with letting her vent it on someone other than him, and she played the executive's wife, and we played the well-behaved executive's kids, and the nightmare went on until my father left her for his secretary when I was in high school. Then, of course, the EA went on, but by then, I was already plotting my escape.

These women who are capable of this kind of brutality are unnatural with respect to motherhood. Animals, and even bugs, know to protect their young, but our mothers were the main threat. They go against every natural instinct a mother should have, and I believe that once they go there, once they override their instincts of protection and care and inflict that irreparable harm on their own children, they are forever corrupted.

How do you go back after beating innocent children with weapons? How do you ever become a fully formed person with the knowledge that you are capable of that kind of viciousness within you?

So, they pretend it was just "spankings" and "they did the best they could" and all other phrases of denial because facing the truth would be absolutely unbearable.

I'm so sorry for everyone who reads this, nodding in understanding and recognizing their own mothers in the images. There is no place for these people in a family, in a community, in a society that values people. They are like ghosts, really, there but not there. Their own natures have been so corrupted and diminished, that it's like they're just shadows of real people.

[audacious]

A ghost is a good way to describe them. It certainly applies to my mother. She was turned off for the most part, but when her rages started, it's the only time I really saw her alive.
Thanks for sharing, Learning. I still only get flashes of the "spankings" and remember my brother screaming. There was definitely that morbid ritual element to it, that you got however many lashings and if it was messed up, she just raged.
I do remember a few times attacking her when she was hurting my brother when we were older. I don't remember what happened after that, though. I'm sure it wasn't good. For me, that's the funny thing. There was structure to her rage when I was little (most of the time). Of course you never new what you would get in trouble for. When I got older, she was definitely less controlled and more explosive.
I get angry with her because in some ways, she had a better home when she was a little kid. She had a mom and dad until she was 6. I had her and her peadophile boyfriend. I know people don't know better when they are younger (she was 17 when she had me), but I have a lot of baggage and I don't do what she did to my kids. I don't know, we can intellectualize it anyway we want to, but the emotion is still there... I'm angry that she didn't try harder. I'm angry that I wasn't enough for her. I'm angry that as much as my children inspire me to do better and to learn what love is, I did not do that for her. But, I know intellectually that it wasn't my fault that she wasn't capable. My heart has a hard time with it though.
It's funny. For my birthday, she posted on my facebook, "You're the first person to teach me to love unconditionally." To which I thought, "I guess I didn't do a very good job." And what kind of a half a$% birthday wish is that, anyway? Am I so hard to love? No, she's just not capable.
And still. It perplexes me. I've emotionally neutralized myself when I am in her presence (maybe I'm just disassociating again?) trying to regard her with compassion but stand firmly to my boundaries. She just goes on with her life as if this last blow up we had never happened. We don't get too deep. I just don't understand how she can look at me, her child; and not want to embrace me and sooth my aching soul. I know it's a loop I will probably be stuck in until I get some real physical distance between us. As it stands, I usually only see her on grandkid birthdays and holidays, which isn't too bad for her living 5 minutes away. And she calls maybe once every 3 months if she's suddenly remembered that she has a family.
Sorry for the huge tangent.
Aud

[Sheep]

Audacious,

I remember the beatings too. I am the youngest of five. My second to oldest sister was 'passed over' and then my sister closest in age to me (almost 5 yrs older). But my dad used to 'flick her in the head'. It was very degrading...

Sheep

[Lilo]

Audacious , sheep, learning

I remember the beatings too. it's still hard for me to say the word out in 3d life.

Love
Lilo

[the husband]

I remember them too. Belts, some sort of supple leather sandal thing kept only for that purpose. There was a little pillow, perhaps to "protect" me from the rim of their waterbed? Kinda weird now that I think of it. As I got older there were back-hands across the face. He had this clever move where he's put his cigarette in his mouth and then his hand would catch me across the face before I even saw it coming. Sometimes I was sent flying.

***PA TRIGGERS***

The face slapping stopped one day after he hit me across the face for, I think, sighing. Maybe I was in my early teens...I was short and scrawny. I reeled back from the blow and turned to face him, looking him in the eyes. It was the moment where I thought I might just have had enough. I could feel the blood coming up in my nose. I calmly cupped my hand at about chest level, and after a moment the blood splattered, pooled, and overflowed onto the carpet. I just stood there, looking at him. He paled then and told me to go clean up. I had a thought of putting a bloody handprint on his shirt and then trailing blood down the wall on my way to the bathroom, but he seemed to have enough to occupy him with the carpet I guess. I don't know if it was the display of blood, or the look in my eyes that got to him. He should have been afraid of what could be read there. He's in his 70's now, and a little pathetic, but I still get a little shiver if he uses that old tone. Despite that, he wields no power over me anymore. My life is committed to helping others now, and I have good control, but I feel like I could invoke those old dangerous feelings if I had to - I feel it would be like grabbing a power line.

My mother knew, and I believe she made sure that he would hit us if she was mad at us.

[lonelylife]

Hi all,
***triggers PA***
I remember the beatings too, and the gun chases, and the fists drawn back, and the liquor bottles brandished over our heads. I remember I have always had a way of being able to anticipate a blow, even if it was never delivered. So when my father would draw back a fifth of Smirnoff at my sister, over her head, when I was still too young to be the direct object of his scorn, I could anticipate the blow and would cringe at its potential impact, even though he didn't actually wind up hitting with bottles and fists. It would have caused too much damage he wouldn't have been able to account for. It could have brought a premature end to his reign of teror, and besides, could have landed him in jail. He just displayed repeatedly that he wanted to hit with those things, that he'd have liked to and planned to, while instead he actually did hit with belts. And I seem to remember an extension cord once while I was still littler, and my mother telling him, no use belts if you just insist on "spanking", and don't hit everywhere, don't hit across their backs and near their heads. She never hit us really, but being married to a madman, I think she had some side that was glad he was hitting us. I also think the extension cord gave too sharp a cut into the skin--so another too-great risk to his being caught.

He had big thick belts that he would just whip through his pants for another beating by rapidly pulling from the buckle end really fast, and he always wore dress pants, which had no resistance to the belts being suddenly pulled, and plus he was white collar so he was in dress pants anyway, which reminds me of what Learning was saying. Gotta keep that income and status coming in at all costs because my mother is a black widow spider kind of b*tch. Even when sober, my father looked for stupid excuses to beat us--"if you climb that tree and fall out of it and get hurt, I'm going to beat your *ss". I remember one time my cousin helped me take apart a pair of my by then too-small roller skates to try to make a skateboard out of, and then my father found out I'd taken them apart, and he'd wanted to give them to charity (how nice, I guess it was to be for his redemption), so he told my cousin (the one who'd helped me) to go bring him a belt from the closet. And my cousin brought the biggest thickest belt he could find of all my father's belts, and cracked up as I was beaten. That cousin was always a b*stard though, like pretty much everyone else in my FOO except for my one sister.

I remember the raised welts on my arms, legs, sometimes my torso. I remember examining them early on, wondering how they looked like train tracks or something. I remember how they burned, and were uniformly raised, with 2 distinct edges but nothing raised along their centers. I remember the grabbings, lungeings, and quick rushes at me all the way up until I was 42. Long married, and yet still this psycho thought he should be trying to beat me.

[SparklingDawn]

It doesn't really matter to me whether they grew up having been beaten themselves. No excuse, in my book.

[learning]

Hey, everyone~

************Triggers PA, VA, EA **********

I hate that so many of us endured this, and, even though the details are slightly different, it really was all the same. Giant adults terrorizing and brutalizing small children. Even worse that we were their children, and most mammals know well enough to protect their young. sigh. How can there be so morally vacant and heinous adults who do this to their children?

Sparkling Dawn~ you are so spot on with the fact that our parents didn't care. And, yes, my mother even once tried to justify her behavior by saying that she, too, had had spankings when she was young, so that was all she knew. I didn't buy it then, and I REALLY don't buy it now. She's an absolutely vile human being, plain and simple.

And the whole dictating how we had to behave while being brutalized added just another layer of emotional abuse to the pa and va that was going on at the time. Like a big soup of trauma all served up into one episode, over and over.

In my case, after I recovered sufficiently from the beating enough to speak calmly, I had to go and apologize to her for "upsetting" her to the point that she "had" to "punish" me. What kind of psycho adds that dimension to the whole thing?!? And how many other people's parents used that ridiculous "I really don't want to do this" or "This hurts me more than it hurts you." I always wanted to grab hold of that strap and administer some of the same to her to see just how much it would hurt me to be beating the hell out of her, because I knew, even as a four year old, that she was full of it.

I hope there is a special layer of hell for these people.

[SparklingDawn]

Learning,

I couldn't agree with you more.

D