The Broken Chain essays

The Broken Chain essays There has been more talk than usual lately about the abuse and angry beating of helpless people, mostly children and many women. I think about it. I have never been beaten, so empathy is my only weapon against the ugliness I know vicariously. On the radio someone talks about a chain of violence. When is it broken? He asks. How? When I was growing up, I was occasionally spanked and always by my father. I often had to go upstairs with him when he came home from the News for lunch, and pull down my panties and lay myself obediently across his long bony knees, and then steel my emotions against the ritualistic whack of five or eight or even ten sharp taps from a wooden hairbrush. They were counted by my age, and by nine or ten he began to use his hand, in an expert upward slap that stung more than the hairbrush. I often cried a little, to prove that I had learned my lesson. I knew that Rex disliked this duty very much, but that it was part of being Father. Mother could not or would not punish us. Instead, she always said, by agreement with him and only when she felt that things were serious enough to drag him into it, that she would have to speak with him about the ugly matter when he came home at noon. This always left me a cooling-off period of thought and regret and conditioned dread, even though I knew that I had been the cause, through my own stupidity, of involving both my parents in the plot. Maybe it was a good idea. I always felt terrible that it was dragged out. I wished that Mother would whack me or something and get it over with. And as I grew older I resented having to take several undeserved blows because I was the order child and was solemnly expected to be a model to my younger sister, Anne. She was a comparatively sickly child, and spoiled and much clever than I, and often made it bitterly clear to me that I was an utter fool to take punishment for her own small jaunty misdoings. I continued to do this, far...