Wait no I don’t think I was right, I was just saying that’s how I always thought it was spelled. I think if anything both would be acceptable but…I’m not sure myself. “Whale” is definitely acceptable. Not “wail” though.
I wouldn’t recommend watching it if it could possibly trigger something. I was crying before it ended myself and I’m not a the crying type.
Oh good grief I wish I hadn’t said anything at all.
well…yes and no. My mom did beat on us (my three brothers and me) with various weaponry. She probably started out with just her hand, but what I recall most clearly is when she graduated to using a hairbrush, a belt and finally a leather strap, which seemed to be clearly designed to have no other purpose than beating recalcitrant children.
That strap was wicked and put some hurt on you. She used that for quite a while, until my older brother somehow managed to take possession of it and hid it in the bedsprings of his bed. She then had to regress back to the hairbrush or belt, either of which was far more tolerable, painwise.
But…no, because beatings with that strap were never accompanied with the verbal abuse, cursing and hateful invective that is shown in that tape. She was simply a mom who lost all patience with her constantly squabbling children and would snap and just start whaling about indiscriminately with her strap.
And it did not continue into adolescence because she died when I was 13. I’m pretty sure that even then I would have preferred to have her around even if it meant more beatings…because most of the time she was just a good mom…
I’m pretty sure that all of us were far more traumatized by her absence than we ever were by her beatings…
(My dad, on the other hand, I don’t recall ever laying a hand on us no matter what the transgression - and yet we feared his displeasure far more than we ever feared the strap. Each of us feared our father’s anger more than our mother’s even though he never laid a hand on us - go figure!)
Now I’m sitting here thinking about how lucky I am. Damn.
My dad had what I liked to call the “Dad Look”. He’s a big guy – 6.3 – and when he’s pissed off about something, he just gets this LOOK on his face. It’s a really scary look, and I’d usually just stop misbehaving. I mean, I know he wasn’t going to hit me, but I hated that Look. Some people just look scary, without meaning to, you know?
So, what’s wrong with that ?
Oh, nothing. I’m just musing. I feel a wee guilty, though, to think of how good I had it compared to others. You know what I mean?
Ya, maybe you should call up dad and tell him what a great father he is.
I’ll tell him in the morning – I don’t think he’d like to be woken up right now.
If he hadn’t beaten the crap out of her on a regular basis, there’d have been no video to release. He deserves every name he’s been called and every dirty look.
And like Guin, this thread and others like it make me want to hug my parents and tell them they’re the best.
And I saw an angry man, but, and this is in no way any attempt to play the meaningless game of who had it worse, but I didn’t see that same crazy look in his eyes of the possible killer. At least it wasn’t there in this clip. It could very well have been there on other times.
Writing these 35 years after the worst had past, it will always be the eyes which will be the last memory to go. The hate. The blind, completely 100% our of control fury in my father’s eyes and he looked around the room for his next target.
Words fail to adequately express emotions. When you are six and frozen with terror as your father’s eyes change into those of a mad man, when there is no escape, no place to run or hid, when your beaten mother is down, prone on the ground moaning, your sisters’ shrieks of panic ringing in your ears while your older brother is throwing you to the wolves so that you, and not he will be attack next, and you know that you will be next, the only question is if you will survive or not.
You brace yourself for the assault, for the kicks, the punches, for being picked up by your hair, shaken and tossed against a wall, and repeated until the grown man tires himself out with your body. And so you lie there in a broken heap on the floor, not daring to move. And you can’t help but look into those eyes because those eyes may give you a hint if this is going to be your last day on this earth.
And all this because someone moved the magazine he was reading. It really would be a sick joke, someone dying over a misplaced issue of Reader’s Digest.
But that wasn’t the really bad stuff. My fingers still refuse to type those.
You would accept the word of such a monster? In any case, this SOB’s life deserves to be ruined no matter how much time has passed, especially since he’s a judge deciding the fate of juveniles.
Incidentally, for anyone thinking the (pattern) beating is nothing exceptional based on the edited version of the video, watch the unedited version on the Daily Mail site here. It’s at the bottom of the story. No login or password required.
I remember when my father slapped the ever-lasting shit out of my sister for screaming too loud when I stole one of her doritos. He barreled down the stairs with an almost goofy expression on his face, and I thought he was smiling. I thought…well…I was eight years old. I thought he was going to ask what we were doing and then laugh. Even though this would have been out of character, that’s what I thought we were in store for.
A fragment of that moment is floating around somewhere in the universe. His face morphing into a monster’s. His eyes turning into the eyes of a shark–lacking all consciousness. It replays all the time in my head. I remember more of it than my sister does because she didn’t see any of it coming. I did. I saw everything. I saw the blood splattering everywhere, on the floor and on him and on her. And then I saw him go right back up the stairs as she crumpled to the bloody floor.
A hole was ripped into the fabric of space and time. And my innocence and some of my love for my father dropped right into it.
I guess we kids in the family are assholes because none of us have ever forgotten it. We bring it up every single time we get together and revel in the story-telling in front of our father. Who vehemently denies ever doing such an awful thing. We’re always making stuff up, he says accusingly. It’s a dance we play and I hate him more each time. I don’t care if he honestly doesn’t remember doing it. He knows good and well he had it in him to do it and much much more. But when he brings up his flaws as a father, the physical violence and the anger never is mentioned.
He was a principal. Elementary school. If we had dared to video tape him during his rages, his professional life would have ruined.
We got “The Belt”, often after having to wait for our dad to come home from work to mete out mom’s prescribed punishment. We had to voluntarily lay down in his lap to be repeatedly lashed. I remember being so terrified I peed my pants. I’m pretty sure this caused some of my issues.
Mom preferred “The Paddle”, one of those wooden paddles with the stretchy string and ball removed and the handle taped for ease of use. The only beating I remember the reason for was when one of my siblings took The Paddle and beat the crap out of the tree in the front yard with it and then my other sibling hid it. Man did we ever get it for that.
Damn, I hadn’t even thought about that. I don’t have any personal experience with that level of violence (and I’m going to hug my Mom the next time I see her), but I think you’re right. At least in that video, he’s allowing himself to be out of control - he could have stopped if a police officer walked in. He did stop when his wife walked in. I’m not sure if that makes him better or worse in my eyes - he’s not as crazy evil as he could be, but on the other hand, he doesn’t have an insanity defense. Ugh. I’m so glad the daughter is at least out of his physical reach now (and that you’re out of your dad’s reach too).
(Aside: Am I the only one who has a semantic problem with calling that a “beating”? In my world, that’s a “whipping.” A “beating” would be with closed fists.)
I only got a couple of whippings as a kid. Once when I was nine, I got an open handed spanking from my father. Deserved. My father did not spank me while he was still angry over the incident in question, but waited a few days.
I did not and do not consider this a beating or child abuse.
The only other incident I remember is getting a switch across my legs from my grandmother. I didn’t think that one was deserved, but I still don’t regard it as child abuse, nor was I traumatized by it.
I don’t have any children, but would eschew corporal punishment if I did. At the same time, the culture in which I was raised (in the rural South) was very accepting of corporal punishment, and I do not automatically equate corporal punishment with “child abuse.”
(Aside: Nope, in Alabama we were threatened with and subsequently discusssed being “beat with a belt”.)
Since the Pit thread has derailed I need to say that I didn’t want to watch the video, fearing some sort of PTSD reaction, but since I’ve followed all these threads I felt I had to. From the descriptions I was expecting something worse. It is a disturbing revelation that I am not as horrified by it as I should be.
Yes, I was imagining something much worse, too. Don’t get me wrong: the guy was out of control, and clearly letting his temper get the best of him. But if he had stopped at three or four swats, and tempered the verbal abuse, I would have thought, “Well, pretty standard whipping where I grew up.” He crossed the line in three ways in my book: he dished out corporal punishment while he was angry, he carried it on far too long and not in a structured way, and he combined it with some withering verbal abuse (which to my mind is often worse than physical punishment).
Again, as a personal choice, I would eschew physical punishment, but I am not among those who automatically find physical punishment shocking.
My parents never laid a hand on me so I can’t even fathom what the girl in the video was feeling. It looks horrible to me because I’ve never been in those shoes and worried about taking a beating as a young child. Well, once my mom sort of swatted at me when I was 4 because I said the F word and I think she was totally and completely blindsided by her little blonde angel saying such a thing, and it was a visceral reaction. However no other time did they use their hands or anything else on me as punishment.
I now have a 7-year old son and 9-month old son, and my husband and I have never resorted to physical punishment. There have been many times I’ve had to leave the room and take a few deep breaths when the 7-year old has really, REALLY gotten under my skin so it’s almost easy to see how a weaker person might not have the ability to use their self-control wisely and resort to hitting/beating.
I’m the most ardent supporter of corporal punishment. I wish it was still in the schools. That being said, what was on that video was not discipline. It was an out of control asshole pretending to be a parent and using his daughter as the outlet for his own rage. It should be aggravated battery.