A headline in Friday's paper could very easily have been about me.
"Mother who smacked son, 8, with hairbrush in 'moment of madness' is forced to give him up to social services," it read. My eyes went saucer-wide. The story continued: "A mother had her eight-year-old son taken into care after she smacked him with a hairbrush for refusing to get ready for school. The 42-year-old ... was holding a hairbrush at the time and when her son refused to dress after a bath, she struck him with it twice on the shoulder to hurry him up. A teacher later spotted the boy in pain and informed child protection officers. He was taken into emergency foster care and the mother was ordered to appear before magistrates charged with assault. She is allowed to see her son for only two hours a week after pleading guilty to assault by beating."
This very same scenario played out in my life. I was not the mother. I was the child.
I too was hit with a hairbrush by my parent -- not my mother but my father. (But it was my mother's hairbrush.) I was not eight but ten. He hit me on my upper arm, which was bare as I was wearing a sleeveless summer top. He did it without warning, like a reflex. And he did it not because I had refused to dress after a bath but because I had mimicked a word he had just said. The word was "gunk."
The biggest difference, which in fact is a mega-Gigantor-sized difference, is that my hairbrush incident happened not this year but nearly forty years ago. It was a clear plastic hairbrush, about two inches across on the bristly part. He hadn't been brushing his own hair at the time. Outraged, he sought whatever came quickly to hand. Voila, the brush.
It's a mega-Gigantor-sized difference because my dad was not charged with assault. And even had I displayed the red mark on my skin to some other adult, I doubt that -- back then -- Dad would have been reported to the authorities.
Not that his hitting me was a good thing. It was traumatic. I still cringe slightly at the sound of hard plastic whizzing through the air and at what looks like a hand moving too fast for safety toward me.
But does some plausible, workable, instructional, healing solution lie somewhere between what happened in the recent case, which was the mother's arrest and the child's removal to foster care, and what happened in my case, which was nothing: no regrets on Dad's part, no "Omigod, what have I done?" or "Sorry, honey, Daddy didn't mean it"?
Also in last week's news, an Australian man was sentenced to twelve months' probation for having hit his nine-year-old son with a strap because the boy refused "to wear a seatbelt and failed to go to a swimming lesson."
Speaking as the child in a hairbrush incident, I don't think my life would have been bettered by the sudden wrenching of my father from it. Nor by my stark removal into foster care -- or even just into my mother's care, in my father's absence. My father's putative arrest, trial and punishment would have caused a trauma for me which surpassed (and wouldn't have softened) my trauma from the hairbrush incident. I would have felt enormous guilt, watching Dad suffer and knowing, with a child's wobbly sense of logic, that I had caused it. My ten-year-old mind would have struggled to weigh crime and punishment. What, I would have wondered, equals what?
