Children are so small. So innocent. I often wonder how someone could raise their voice at them — raise a belt and claim it's "raising them right". The tradition of hitting your children is an ancient one, but if you do even the barest thinking, you can deduce for yourself that it's still wrong, numbskull. Just because you want to resolve an issue the fastest way possible doesn't mean you get to traumatize a child for the rest of their life.
I remember what I said to one of the other older victims of this practice. I was sixteen.
I regret what I said to this day, though years later I went back and apologized deeply. It was the standard "I was spanked as a kid, I turned out fine".
I was, in fact, not fine.
It wasn't just the spankings that traumatized me, sure, but it was a part of it, and even if it wasn't, that's no excuse for me to discredit someone else's experience. What a shitty thing to do, even for a sixteen year old. I later hoped with my entire chest that they were able to start some sort of healing from their troubles. When I apologized, they said they hoped the same for me.
I try not to blame my parents too much, yet still hold them accountable. Neither my sister nor I were expected children. My mother had been told by a doctor she'd likely never have more children after my sister, and my father had gotten a vasectomy, yet here I am.
We weren't planned.
But things still could have been better for us.
It shouldn't have mattered if I have ADHD.
I should have still felt loved when I was a child. And I didn't. I felt scared and alone.
They didn't coddle me or hug me or play with me — It was always the same. Go to your room, play with your toys. Watch TV. Play on the computer.
In retrospect, that's probably why childhood items mean so much to me. Why I'm near obsessed with the idea of kidcore and 2000s memorabilia. Why I adore toys. It feels like home to me. It was my comforting hug when nothing else was.
And that's okay. But sometimes I wonder who I could have been if I hadn't been so lonely in my youth.
