Editor’s note: This is part 21 of Marie’s story. It picks up where we left off in part 20.
Carl: Smaller? How old were you when your dad started hitting you?
Me: He said children are old enough to be spanked when they are around six months old—so I’m assuming that is when he started spanking all of us.
Carl: Six months!!?!?!!?!?? Children don’t even know right from wrong until age two!
Carl: So you were maybe 15 pounds (7 kg) when your dad started hitting you?
Carl: A 180-pound man and a 15-pound baby . . .
Me: I actually wrote something about this in a later paragraph. Do you want me to jump down to that paragraph?
Carl: Sure . . .
Carl: Do you know that holding a child’s arm while spanking her can break her arm?
Me: I imagine so . . .
Carl: Your dad had to hold her while he spanked her because she was not big enough to stay balanced . . .
“You explained that other people said kids that young couldn’t understand right from wrong and couldn’t understand punishment. But, you assured me they did. You said you had started spanking all of us as soon as we could make eye contact and become defiant, which was at about six months old, you said. You said that, if you spank a kid that young, they learn early to not misbehave because they understand pain as a consequence . . . you can’t talk to them, so you have to use pain. I believed you and I spewed that same gospel until I reached adulthood and started questioning what I had been taught about many things.
“When I peed my pants, when my legs buckled under me, did you not have even the briefest moment where you thought, ‘This is not right’? How could you not? I know for a fact you know what it is like to be in my shoes. In your childhood, you were beat by your own drunken father, you protected your mom and your younger siblings from him. I know you could not have forgotten what that was like. Did you think it was okay to do it to me because you weren’t drunk and out-of-control? But, you weren’t always in control, were you? Not when you slapped me in the face when I was 16.
I remember making a comment about that last sentence . . . that I had included it in the letter because I was feeling guilty about complaining so much—I had inserted that solitary sentence smack dab in the middle of my complaining to mitigate my guilt.
Then, I remember Carl saying something along the lines of, “You were her father! She wanted protection from you! You could have put your arms around her . . .” I don’t remember what else he was saying, but I remember being very focused on the words, “. . . put your arms around her . . .” At the same time, Carl happened to move around in his chair and stretch his legs out in front of him. His feet ended up a little bit closer than they had been to where I was sitting.
Logically, I knew Carl was not going to come anywhere near me. He has never touched me—he didn’t even shake my hand on the first day we met. We have had zero physical contact and I know he is making sure that remains the case for at least the foreseeable future. But, the silently screaming voice was not comforted by this logic—not one bit.
I sat frozen in a panic for about 30 seconds. Then, I talked myself into saying something as a way to re-establish a sense of safety . . . I interrupted Carl mid-thought (I wasn’t absorbing what he was saying, anyway, because I was staring at his feet) . . .