Gwyneth Paltrow
walks the walk
posted 2003-02-12 :: 11:58:20 PST
GoogleGroups fantasy-post
Mother had no sympathy for 'boys will be boys' type excuses
I was in grade school. That's what they called it back in those dark ages in our little one-horse town. Mother was the zealous one, the zero-tolerance rule-setter, and my dad was the tolerant, mellow fellow, indulgent and easy-going as far as my behavior. I believed mother's ideals, but something in me, free-spirited, chafed, none the less. I had to test the boundaries.
Associating with other boys of like-minded spirit, I was often cruising on the brink of confrontation with the authorities of home and school. Through force of will, my mother prevailed over time to pull me away from the more reckless element of neighborhood boys. It was good, considering the fact that as we grew older, some of those boys wound up in dramatic conflict with the Law.
My mother refused to let up. Though too cowardly to flirt with girls properly, I was not too shy to behave improperly. Little stuff, my dad felt, but my mother did not believe in "boys will be boys." She tried to get my dad to restrain me, tried to get him to spank me. "He'll outgrow it," my dad told her. But her attitude, expressed within my hearing, was, "Little things grow into big things!"
She told our neighbor, Miz Polly, "He needs to learn to respect women." And Miz Polly said, "That's right. You don't want to raise a rapist." Miz Polly had a leather sharpening belt used by barbers to hone razors to a fine edge. It had a wooden handle, and she offered it to my mother. My mother threatened that I would get it, but I never did.
The danger past, or so I thought, I continued my occasional provocation of the opposite sex. There was one girl, an attractive teenager named Gretchen who helped my mother with her Sunday School class. I had a crazy crush on Gretchen. To me she was almost a goddess, yet so distant and unobtainable, my love turned to hate, and I decided she was a stuck up, goody-two-shoes, her daintiness and feminity a shame, her sophistication and delicacy a tease.
With more daring that sense, I walked up behind her, unprovoked, shortly after church let out. I pulled on her hair and then ran away. Perhaps I thought she would chase me, fool that I was. But Gretchen was too much the good girl for that. She began crying. Immediately there were comforters on every side. Someone told my mother, and soon there were even adults offering her advice.
Mr. Baer either volunteered, or Mother asked him, but he wound up doing what Mother had wanted a man to do for quite some time. Somehow the three of us wound up in the basement, me bent over, and Mr. Baer using that special thoughtful "gift" from Miz Polly. I got twelve licks with that thing, and it left me stunned. I know it must have hurt, but the funny thing, I didn't cry.
Both Mr. Baer and Mother hugged me. Mother was crying, and I remember thinking "What are YOU crying for." Isn't it funny the things we remember. That afternoon remained etched in my memory. Unfortunately I gained a kind of unspoken notoreity -- too many people knew about it. The adults were too courteous to ever mention it, but there were a few kids who brought it up.
One boy, "Buddy" (a good friend in those days) couldn't understand that I didn't hate Mr. Baer. I said, "Aww, he aint all that bad." The truth was, I didn't recall the pain in my bottom. I know I must have been sufficiently reddened or welted, or whatever they say, but I must have been distracted. I knew all too well that I fully deserved it. Somehow the fact of that guilt weighed heavier on my consciousness than the fleeting physical pain, or the superficial marring of my epidermis.
I tended to be embarassed that adults would talk about me as if I were not there. My reaction would be to pretend I did not hear them. Before the euphemism "cautiously optimistic" made its rounds, my mother shared her own guarded satisfaction that the spanking had made me a quieter boy, less rambunctious, somewhat more compliant and less roudy. I didn't think I had changed THAT much.
There was another by-product of the basement show-down. The older girl, my "dream" girl, Gretchen, actually deigned to pay more attention to me. There was an unspoken bond between us, or so I imagined. She would speak to me, at church, or at school. I still was tongue tied as ever, could not tell her how pretty she was. But I would return her greetings, and otherwise ...... behave myself.
It was, in a strange almost inverted way, a positive thing, overall. She had forgiven me, and I knew I full well deserved it, it would have been wrong to hold a grudge. One girl at church asked me why I had DONE such a silly thing. She emphasized DONE, as if the whole thing was perfectly preposterous. I don't think it ever occurred to me how my stunt appeared to others, till that moment. I had no answer, but from this perspective it was simple boyish aggression, no more. Just a spur of the moment prank. I had not cared how many people witnessed it.
As to the difference between my dad and my mother in their philosophies, I still waiver as to which is better. Perhaps, as my dad believed, I would have outgrown my boyish rambunctiousness. But perhaps not. My mother had no sympathy for "boyish" bullying or aggression. She refused to condone assaultiveness against girls, or obscene looks, or "eyeball rape." She rejected the notion that "boys will be boys" -- a crusading feminist long before the days of feminists. Her radical feminism was right out of the ten commandments!
Maybe both my parents were right, each in their own way.