The Spanking Machine

Sooo tired. These past weeks have been hell as z has been teething a lot. She usually wakes up at 2 in the morning and it takes at least an hour to get her back down until the Tylenol kicks in. She has such a low pain tolerance unlike m, whose like a little tank sometimes. On the plus of development, language continues to creep in. z can say the first half of words; (cheese is che) and m can say "ball" and "bubble" pretty clearly. Time to stop saying "fucking hell!" when near them.

Both kids have been acting a little "challenging" lately. They like to purposely walk over to somewhere I don't want them to be or do something that I don't like. But first, they look at you and check: "Is this going to piss you off?" If I look at them, that's when the bottle of poison goes in the mouth or they jump trough the stained glass window (did I mention I Live in a church that use to be a poison factory?) I thought that they wouldn't be acting like this until they were two. What happen to the terrible twos! I guess this is sorta a preview of the infamous teen years when they really lay on the spread. We have a whole room full of toys but they just want to climb up to the window, eat stuff off the carpet, climb over the guardrail or pet the rabid hyena, which is in their room for some reason. I know that if I ignore them, they'll eventually start doing stuff to get my attention; fast cars with boys/drugs/alcohol, yadda yadda... But perhaps I can circumvent their behavior by using reverse psychology. Make being good, naughty and they'll flock to it like sea gulls at a garbage dump. Maybe when they become surly teens, I'll leave porno magazines and drugs lying around and hide a bunch of textbooks in the attic and under my mattress: "Hey z! Look what I found! A Calculus book!" "Ooh! Check it a SAT prep kit."

When I was visiting my family across country, my big sister, C asked me if there was anything I was going to do differently with my girls than the way we were raised. I wasn’t sure if she was leading into a religious question or not. Like getting them confirmed into Catholicism. Unlike me, she still believes in the Catholic Church’s version of Christianity along with multiple Internet hoaxes. I have yet to convince her that Tommy Hilfiger is not a racist who wants to remove the words “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or Jesus will not get Bill Gates to give you money when ever you forward an e-mail. I told her the one thing I would NOT do would be to ever beat my kids. She looked at me as if my 10 years of living in Liberal Northern California had finally caught up with me. Like, Not only would I not beat my kids, but also I would let them have sex with their boyfriends in their rooms or smoke pot with us and call us by our first names. No, my objection to clobbering comes not so much from the couple of belt floggings by my dad but from the nuns at my grammar school. May those nuns all rot in hell. Yes, hell. I mean what kind of adult beats a child with a cane? This was the result of some kid opening the door to the classroom right when the girls were undressing for gym. For some reason, the boys would get dressed in the bathroom and the girls would get dressed in the classroom. Sister Magarette (or Margarita) had gotten foot surgery and hobbled with a cane for at least 3 months (not continuously hobbling or else she would have made it to Canada). Now, as cruel as the caning was, you think she’d beat just that peeping kid but Nooooo, she lined up all the boys in the hallway and one by one, hit our back thighs: WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! Dude? What the fuck? I didn’t even see anything and I get beat? Their flawed logic was; “The good must suffer with the bad” Meaning then, the good kids would keep the bad ones in line or in other words; sanctioned ass kicking.
Another time I was beat for talking in church. Oh I’m sure Jesus would agree with that one: “Blessed are the meek for they shall…Wait a minute! Who’s talking? You! Boy! Next to that goat! Come here you little bastard! How dare you talk during my eulogy! Let me show you how hard the right hand of God is! Another time we got beat by a woman who whacked you if you failed a test. Oh yeah, that’ll work. What the hell were these people’s problems? What kind of fucked up upbringing creates a nun that beats children? At what point did they choose Nun over Dominatrix or LA cop? The only thing I learned from getting beaten is; don’t ever do that again…In front of them! One nun wasn’t so much as a beater but a sarcastic douche bag. Once, I decided I wasn’t going to get bad grades anymore and I told her so and do you know how she responded? “We’ll see about that.” Wha-wha what? If she were Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman in some feel-good movie about grammar school she would have said: “That’s what I wanna hear solider!

When I use to watch the Ricky Lake/Jenny Jones/Jerry Springer lineup and the "Out of control/whatever/I do what I want" 13 year old girl comes out and causes her mom to shrink with every “bitch” she calls her, of course, like everyone in the audience, I want to cut the rope holding an anvil over her head. But now that THAT could be my kid. I can’t see beating them just because they talked in Pope Ratzinger’s church!
For Christ sake!

The beatings were such an ingrained form of discipline in Catholic school that there was a rumor of a spanking machine. That’s right, some kind of wheeled device with multiple, spiked ping-pong paddles on it that saves the hand of the punisher and administers swift justice to the arse of the offender. One time, I got in trouble for talking (as usual) and I got sent to the principal’s office. I can’t tell you how shitless I was, dead man walking down the hallway, imagining them oiling up ol' 'Betty’ or whatever nickname they had for the machine. When I arrived, they made me sort out a bunch of paperwork. That was it! No spanking machine! I was so relived but also a little disappointed, of course not at the prospect of being beaten bloody by a robot but the fact that something horrible that you believed in and wouldn’t put past the cruelty of the nuns, was only a rumor. This created a little break in their infallible teaching for me which would follow me trough the next 5 or 6 years of their instructions: Perhaps you won’t get pregnant even if you keep your underwear on, perhaps pre marital sex isn’t wrong if you never plan to get married and why is anal sex wrong if Gay people do it and yet I see so much of it in straight porn movies?
Years later, the final straw was them protecting the child molesting priest and ignoring the victim! Perhaps this is that ingrained sadistic center that can’t smack kids around anymore but they sure haven’t got the hang of that “love thy neighbor” thing, yet.

I have yet to find a church that doesn’t beat up on someone. The Dali Lama hates gays as much as the Catholics, Baptist and countless others. Other religions won’t even let women have clitoris or drive cars (perhaps there's a connection there), that it’s okay to blow people up or believe that women can get over Post Partum Depression with prayer. Ugh!

One day I’ll find a less fucked-up religion and maybe then you’ll drag my ass out of bed on a Sunday after a night of baby teething. Until then, Zzzzzzzzz.

That’s it
EM