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SPARE THE ROD, SPOIL THE CHILD
Petropolis, Brazil, 1993
From the end of the spanking line, I could see the paddle in Uncle Zephaniah’s hand. The oldest kids, the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, stood at the front. At five, I was the youngest and would take my punishment last. This was the worst—not only did you have the longest wait, but you endured it alone. Just you, an adult, and a paddle.
We stood single file in the center of our dorm, a room full of rough-hewn bunk beds stacked three levels high, yellowed sheets covering thin pieces of foam pretending to be mattresses, bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. I felt the familiar fear creep over me. Don’t make a sound. Don’t look up. Don’t let anyone see you shaking.
Then it started. I kept my eyes on the floor but I could still hear the smacking sound so loud, the thick, unbending slab of wood striking the skin of bare bottoms. We all knew not to cry because that would earn us more swats, so we kept our pain silent, our whimpers as tiny as possible. The older kids were better at controlling their tears; usually, the crying didn’t start until the younger children’s turns.
Suddenly, a high-pitched screech bounced off the tile and filled every crevice. Who’s doing that? I wondered. They needed to stop. Somebody needed to make them stop. Everybody knows you aren’t allowed to cry like that.
The other kids started turning around in line.
Everyone looked at me.
My friend Virginia lifted her finger to her lips, her eyes dire with warning. But I couldn’t stop. The sounds burned my throat, hurt my ears. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t understand why. The injustice of it all bubbled up inside me. This isn’t fair, flashed through my mind, a thought that I knew if spoken out loud would earn me an even worse punishment.
Through my sobs, I remembered the fear I felt when I had woken up a few minutes earlier from a sound sleep on my trundle bed. My frizzy, dirty-blond hair had come loose from my braid and I didn’t want to be chastised by the Aunties for messiness.
Nap time could be dangerous. All twenty-two of us kids were expected to maintain perfect silence, either sleeping or studying the Prophet’s words, for the entire two-hour time period, always enforced by an Auntie-in-charge. If someone talked or asked to go pee, or did anything else that wasn’t allowed, we all got punished.
Sometimes it was hard to know why we were getting punished. One thing might make the Aunties mad one day, and the next day they might not even notice. Some things made some of the Uncles mad, but not others. I tried so hard, but it was impossible to keep track.
I had heard the raised voices and loud stomping feet entering the dorm as the other kids frantically tried to get in position. I felt so relieved when I saw my mother that I forgot to fall in line like I should have, like I had been trained. I should have known better, but I ran to her to comfort me. The older kids, already in formation, tried to catch me to prevent a harsher punishment, but I flew past them, eyes only on Mom.
“Daniella, what are you doing?” she barked. “Get back in line. Everybody is in trouble. I’ve had it up to here with all of your horseplay during quiet time.”
I looked up at her, confused. She was a different mother than the mother she could be when no one was looking. There was no warmth or friendliness in her eyes, her mouth drawn into a single thin line. It didn’t make sense. I had been asleep, doing nothing wrong. I was doing what I was supposed to. I was being a good girl.
As older kids’ hands shepherded me back to the line, I understood. Mom would insist I get spanked, whether I was guilty or not. My mother, at that moment, was no longer Mom. She had become Auntie Kristy, the adult in charge of all of us. She couldn’t treat me differently. If she played favorites, she might get punished too. I didn’t know exactly how adults got punished, but I knew that sometimes they disappeared, got sent away to different communes, in different countries, because they needed to be humbled. Sometimes kids did, too.
The Uncle holding the paddle, Uncle Zephaniah, was my new stepfather, but I knew that wouldn’t change my punishment. He said the same things all the adults always did: “If you aren’t guilty this time, this is for all the times you were guilty and didn’t get caught.”
I struggled to get my sobs under control, trying to catch my breath. I could be quiet. I could be good.
The line got smaller and smaller as the other kids received their swats and returned to their bunks. It was up to whoever was swinging the paddle to determine the extent of the punishment to be doled out. In the system we kids had for ranking the Uncles’ punishments, Uncle Zephaniah was one of the better ones. In a big group, he usually refrained from repeated swats. Probably because it took a lot of energy to spank more than twenty kids, and he had bad asthma.
As I counted the loud smacks reverberating throughout the room, I felt a kind of stillness. Thinking about the spanks as numbers made them less scary. Numbers were just ideas. Ideas couldn’t hurt me. One. Two. Three. Next child. One. Two. Three. Next child. One. Two. Three. Next child. One. Two. Three.
Only three swats. What a relief! Some of the other Uncles gave ten or even twenty swats no matter the size of the offense. There were some, like Uncle Jerry, who we all knew enjoyed hitting us and calling it discipline for God. No matter who was doing the spanking, they always told us that it hurt them more than it hurt us. What a lie.
My stomach clenched and I tried to make myself tiny and invisible as it became my turn. Uncle Zephaniah was my new dad. Maybe he would go easy on me when he saw just how small and scared I was.
I stepped up all alone. From where I stood, he looked giant, his red hair and prickly beard standing on end—he’d probably been woken up from his own nap for this. He was breathing heavily and moving the paddle back and forth between his hands.
“For crying and running out of line, you will receive nine swats, instead of three,” he pronounced.
Copyright © 2022 by Daniella Mestyanek Young
