Kristy Kelly: My kids broke everything... including my will to be the better person
My eldest son and I were talking about spanking the other day, a conversation that came with its own form of punishment—memories of my parenting mistakes. We discussed the various aspects of discipline and intent. This is a hard conversation for me to have because I wasn’t always the best parent.
Since he was four, he was raised by a single mother. I learned as I went with my kids and have plenty of regrets, specifically in the area of physical discipline, so I attempted to explain to him that parents often feel various forms of guilt and regret when they have to punish a child. I told him I regretted every time I ever spanked him or his siblings.
His response? A smirk and a shrug. "Mom, as the child who was spanked the most, I guarantee, every single time you spanked one of your kids, they deserved it."
While I admit I laughed, my face must have shown a firm grip on latent parental guilt. He shared with me one of his childhood memories. I’m still trying to decide if he was traumatized or initiated into a fan club.
When my sons were about eight and nine, they were a lot to handle. I mean a lot. If it was off the ground, they had to jump off it. If it slanted in any capacity, it was a ramp. These wild little heathens would go adventuring in the woods for hours. I never knew where they were or what they were doing, but they came home before it got dark. While my own childhood was much the same, it’s insane to me now that they had so much freedom.
As an introvert, I didn't know how to ask for advice, so I relied on parenting books from the library. I’m a quick study of many things… parenting wasn’t one of them. If a book said to do it, I did it. Nothing worked. They had decent table manners, told me they loved me, but spent every waking moment eating, fighting, or breaking something.
Long before Google, I was scouring the internet for DIY toilet repair. My kids had decided to test the tensile strength of a shower curtain. AltaVista and Netscape Navigator gave me truly awful advice, mostly from people who believed MySpace would let geeks rule the world.
On one particularly harrowing afternoon, I’d reached the end of my sanity, patience, and quite honestly, my will to be the better person. I picked up the phone, called my dad, and said, "I can’t take it anymore." He listened as I cried, expressing my frustration at how rotten my kids were.
"Do they know they made their mother cry?" he asked.
"No," I admitted. "I’m hiding in my closet so they don’t see me like this."
That was clearly not the right thing to say because he immediately responded, "I’ll be there in ten minutes."
My father walked in, exactly ten minutes later, and as soon as someone began to greet him, he held his hand up. He pointed to both sons and said, "Get in the truck." And off they went.
He took them to a lumber store where they each picked out a piece of wood. Then, he took them to his woodshop, where they drew, cut, sanded, and stained their own paddle—one he spanked them with as soon as it was dry.
To me, this was a father rescuing his daughter from hellions. To my father, it was a traumatizing moment—the day he had to discipline his grandchildren. But to my sons? They thought their grandfather was the coolest person on the planet because he let them build things in his woodshop.
The spanking did not result in obedient children, but it’s a hilarious anecdote that we openly talk about over the holidays.
No parent escapes raising children without guilt and regret. But so many of the things I regret, my children don’t even remember as bad. Instead, they tell me stories of adventure, mischief, and love. And I’m left wondering—why was I the only one who thought it was all bad all the time?
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