For those of you who don’t read Greek mythology, the story of Damocles Sword tells the tale of a man named Damocles who was invited to the feast of a king. The seat assigned to Damocles was one positioned under a sword suspended from the ceiling by a single hair. At any moment, the weight of the sword could have snapped the hair; causing injury or even death. On a single nail above my bed, in my adoptive parents’ house, hung a two-foot paddle fashioned out of plywood. The same basic psychological principle applied.
A lot of times when I was being punished in such a fashion, I never fully understood what I had done. Sometimes it was for a small infraction and sometimes for seemingly nothing at all. Most importantly though, my adoptive father felt it important enough to have the paddle there as a constant threat. It not only sent a message to me but to anyone of my friends who came to visit. None of them had such a thing in their rooms and when they saw it, they saw me differently and knew what liberties they could take. Childhood friendships for me rarely went beyond a certain point.
Also, having the paddle close by made it an easy and convenient first-option “tool”. The frequent hitting was bad enough but the way in which he would administer it was in the most humiliating way possible. I’ll let you the reader figure the details.
Reflection
If you would ask my adoptive father about this today, he would outright deny it. His second wife did not like corporal punishment, and so instantaneously he boldly stated that, “you should never hit a child”. I felt my fists clench as he smugly said this right in front of me as an adult. The one word that popped into my head was “HYPOCRITE”.
All of those horrible punishments as a child which traumatized me and even caused permanent damage in some cases were for what? I also find it funny that those same behaviors that my adoptive parents thought it so important to confront by beating me, were the same ones that they engaged in. They were no better and, in some cases, worse.
My strong moral sense came through early salvation and studying The Bible. All the hitting and violence taught no good lesson because there wasn’t any good example being set. If it was their goal to raise me to be a moral person, all they had to do was to simply talk and explain. When I started reading my bible, I began to question what had been done to me. Not that what I was reading didn’t include statements about “sparing the rod and spoiling the child”, but what the duties of a good parent were. So much of what I had seen and experienced, just didn’t correlate to what I was reading. Where I found deviations and confusion were through my adoptive parents’ behavior and opinions. For them, morality was a huge gray area and subject to their brand of moral relativism; a convenient stance to take so as not to be held morally accountable. This only put me at greater odds with them, if I dared to challenge. After all, who was I? Someone who was just lucky to have a roof over his head. Narrative written, never to change. At least they were absolute on one thing.