Quiet, boy!
The easiest way to stop an overexcited child from burning down your house is to beat pain into him.
Everybody knows this. I know this. But as I look at this little boy tearing about the whole place like an incarnation of pure Freudian id, and anger surges through me until it gives me a headache, I pause and hold myself back. What if I hit him to make him still and actually end up slapping his cheekbone through his nose and into the eye on the other side of his head! …I could beat him and he would enter into a coma…
He runs by me smiling with all his teeth exposed and holding the TV remote, his sister chasing him. He climbs a cushion and jumps from it laughing, oblivious that he could break something in his tiny body; forgetful of the bump on his head that made him cry without end just this morning, a bump he had gotten from climbing and falling off of the same cushion. He runs into the children’s room, into the kitchen, back out into the parlor, his sister on his heels. He runs by me again. I snatch him up out of the air and hold him upside down in my armpit. He begins to squeal. Then he begins to cry.
Nobody likes to be the mean uncle who made the little boy cry.
I look at the little thing squirming under my arm, and rage just swells within me. This little shit wants to manipulate me with crocodile tears. A tinge of guilt cuts my rage now and then. What is the worst thing his little body can really spoil in this house?
I undress his buttocks and spank him three times.
You see? That place, the buttocks, is where you want to hit: soft, fatty, no damage done. I would know. I have been around good mothers.
At my spanking the boy goes silent, then slowly and climbing up to a crescendo he rends the air in a cry, struggling more than ever before to tear free from my hold. I hold tight, turning him right side up and hugging him to my chest. He fights on, this five year old beast. His mother turns off her running shower and calls out, “who is beating my son?”
She has to. It is a rite of passage. If she were not bathing she would come and carry him and quieten him on her chest. But she isn’t here, so I hug him as she would have done. His sister who has long gained the TV remote has now paused watching the cartoon she wanted, and is looking with pity at the boy bawling on my chest.
Slowly his struggles cease. He is panting heavily, sniffing back the mucus from running down his nose. I have said nothing, no word, not even one ‘sorry’ to him.
I hold him a bit out from my body and look him in the eyes. He stares back, head slightly bent and sulking at me, his enemy-friend. I hug him to my chest again, stroke his head gently. He spreads his hands upon my shoulders. He has given up. I carry him to the settee and sit him down between his siblings. He stays. Calm. Staring mindlessly at the cartoons on the TV.
A deep sigh lets itself out of me, from my spent emotions and tired body. But of course, everybody knows that this id sitting there watching cartoons is merely biding its time until it unleashes itself and begins tearing about the house again. In the meantime I return to my work and laptop at the table thinking to myself, how hasn’t his mother gone insane!
