1112 Waking Thought

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Look away! It's an even numbered day and I'm not supposed to be here! I wanted to write this down while it's fresh, because by tomorrow it will be "well, yeah, duh."

I don't usually have to get up at any particular hour, so no alarm clock, so I awaken slowly. I like that, because I often have thoughts as I'm waking up and I like to follow them.

This morning I woke with an amazing thought. Not an amazing idea - it's something I've known for like forever, but I'd never brought it to the top and put it into my own words before. Right now it's in my mind in big blazing red letters.

I woke up slowly, thinking disjointedly and concurrently about the group discussion about the astronaut, and about other similar cases, and about my wanting to kill my father, and finally I got stuck on about how some people punish their mates by withholding love (nothing to do with the other topics - my mind wanders), women who withhold sex, or men who stop talking, to punish. "I'm mad at you, so there!" I mulled that a while, because I don't understand it.

I don't understand it because

You don't punish someone you love. Ever.

Not even your children. Children do need discipline. They need to know that there are things you do and things you don't do, and if you do things you shouldn't do then there are consequences. But consequences are different from punishment. Punishment has an element of turning your face away. Consequences involve working together to define a problem and fix it.

Same in an adult relationship. If there's a problem with someone you love, you work together to solve it. If you turn away, if you punish, if you threaten withdrawal of love, then I question your love.

I guess this is why I don't like to think of prisons as a place for punishment. I knew that the "callous" woman of entry 1110 was a nurse; what I didn't know is that she had worked in a prison, the very one, in fact, that Amy Fisher had been in. In a later post, she defended her lack of compassion, but later in that same post she mentioned that many of the inmates had been physically and emotionally abused as children. She has been calloused.

I don't like the idea of punishing people for reacting to what had been done to them when they were defenseless.

On the subject of my planning to kill my father, I think now that maybe Dr. K. was right. I suspect that faced with the actual act, I'd have diverted. I desperately wanted to love my parents. I think no matter what our parents do to us, we still need to love them. (And I'm still having trouble with that.)

I suspect that I would have actually pointed a gun at him if it came to it, but instead of the bullet between the eyes, I would have shot him in the left shoulder, then called the cops and the ambulance, and held him off at gunpoint until the authorities arrived.

He'd have been in such a state in the emergency room that there'd have been a psychiatric consult. And finally, someone would realize that this was serious. Someone would finally really listen to us kids, instead of just shrugging and brushing us off with "Just don't make him mad." Mad had nothing to do with it. The violence was random, unprovoked. Sometimes he set traps for us so he could claim justification. Next younger brother and I tried to tell people, but no one would believe us.

Maybe, just maybe, with a bullet in his shoulder, even he would finally realize that beating his wife and children has consequences.

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