We all learn, too, quite early in life that we have something else bad inside us. This is anger and aggression. As a toddler we live in a world of giants who act in unpredictable ways, who continually put us in new and often frightening situations, who say things which we cannot understand, and who expect us to do things which we cannot do. Sometimes all of this overwhelms us and we can do nothing but fling ourselves down in despairing rage. If we are lucky the adults with us remember what it is like to be only two and they treat us kindly, but if we are unlucky (and many of us are) we get punished. We are hit, or locked up alone in a room. As well as frightening us, this puzzles us, for while the adult is saying, It is wicked to be angry’, the adult is angry, and while the adult is saying, ‘It is wicked to be violent’, the adult is violent.
Adults may believe that they are teaching small children to be clean, considerate of others, unaggressive, and not to be selfish, greedy, envious or angry, but what children are actually doing is drawing the conclusion, ‘I am not acceptable’. The child’s birthright of self-confidence has begun to dwindle.
Sometimes parents, seeing one of their children in need, fail to see the conclusion another of their children is drawing.
Rebecca said, ‘I have two brothers younger than me. I think my father valued Jimmy, the older of the two. He was like my father. My father never got along with my younger brother, Nick. He was an accident and he was ten days old when my father went to Vietnam for a year. They never seemed to bond and my father has never got along with him, but my mother has always defended him and paid a lot of attention to him, so I always felt that Jimmy was Dad’s favourite and Nick was Mother’s favourite, because he was persecuted, and that left me out, although I know that as I’m a girl my mother feels close to me, but I never felt like anyone’s favourite.’
One of the tasks of parents is to define aspects of the world for the child. They say, ‘Don’t eat that dirt.’ ‘That’s hot. Don’t touch it.’ ‘That dog might bite you.’ They also define aspects of each child, like, “You’re a boy.’ ‘That’s your bum.’ ‘As you get older you get taller.’ Often in this defining they go beyond factual information and add their own value judgements, like, ‘You’re a bad boy.’ ‘Be careful how you touch your bum. It’s dirty.’ ‘Big boys don’t cry.’ When, like Candida’s mother (pp. 38–9), they define the child in ways which the child finds do not fit with her own experience of herself, the child, unable to reject what a powerful parent says, feels inadequate and unacceptable, just as Candida did when she could not be the outgoing, centre-of-attention person her mother insisted she was.
Many children find themselves being defined by adults in negative, rejecting ways. Pat, like many girls, found herself being defined as ‘not valuable like a boy’. Dan found himself being defined as an object on which his father could take out his rage. Lisa and Jill found themselves being defined by their parents as being of less value than their grandfathers, and by their grandfathers as objects they could use to satisfy their sexual needs. Out of these experiences of humiliation the child draws the conclusion, ‘I am of little value’.
These conclusions, ‘I am not acceptable’ and ‘I am of little value’, prepare the way for the conclusion ‘I am bad’, which we drew when we found ourselves trapped in a dangerous situation from which there was no escape.
The dangerous situation was one where we were helpless and in the power of strong adults who were inflicting pain on us and on whom we depended.
Perhaps, like Dan, we were being beaten, or, like Lisa and Jill, we were being sexually abused, or perhaps, like Pat, we were neglected and used. For some of us the adults were deliberately inflicting pain and humiliation on us for their own ends, although for others the adults could do nothing else, for they were starving, or in mortal danger, as in a war, or they were ill, or overburdened with their own troubles. Or perhaps they had died, or left, and we needed them desperately and they did not come.
For those of us who were born to parents who loved us and wanted to do the best for us, the situations where we were helpless and in the power of adults who inflicted pain on us were those where our loving parents were beating us to make us good.
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