It REALLY Hurts More

Daddy played his part in disciplining his children, too; it wasn't all left to Mommy. Although parents always say, "This hurts me more than it hurts you,"I could never believe it. Especially when Daddy spanked! It HURT!

My sister and I were bickering one day (proof of our siblingry--ha!) and Daddy told us to stop it. We did. Until he was out of the room. Then we claimed our sibling rights again. Until Daddy came back and told us I told you to cut it out. When he left, of course we started up again. This time, when Daddy returned, he was holding our dreaded enemy, THE PADDLE.

"Now I told you to stop fighting, but if you really want to hurt each other, you can," he said. I didn't like the tone of his voice.

"Okay, you lean over that bed," he said to my sister--he handed me the paddle--"and you give your sister a spanking."

What? She was crying and begging me not to hurt her. I didn't mean to hurt her, not really! But Daddy was insistent. Paddle her, he said. So I tapped her...softly. No, harder. No, harder. Each time he said it, I was crying out, "I don't want to! I don't want to!" And with tears streaming down my face, I gave her a real spanking. It felt awful to see my sister screaming and crying, and then....

"All right. Change places."

No! She'll KILL me, I thought, after I'd hit her so hard!

What I didn't realize while kicking and screaming was that she was still crying too, with each command to hit me harder.

The cause of our argument? Who knows? But after that spanking, if Mommy or Daddy said, "This hurts me more than it hurts you," we understood!

Funny we kids never realized it was the grown-ups who took out the trash; many times we tried to throw away the Formidable Foe and wondered how the paddle found its way back up on the wall again. (This has been a lesson to me: we never hated Mommy or Daddy who administered the spankings; it was the paddle we feared!)