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WilliamCoburn -> RE: The first chapter of The Spanking Room (5/9/2008 10:17:46 AM)
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One: Where Did My Mommy Go?
People often ask where you were when such-and-such an event happened. Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing, the Challenger disaster, 9/11.
In preparing to write this book I asked myself where I was the moment I realized that my world was unraveling.
I was in the Kingdom Hall, pressed between my mom and my older brother Joe, being bored out of my four-year-old mind and wondering if the Microphone would come anywhere near me tonight.
Children are fascinated by microphones. Those mysterious devices that make the voice come from everywhere at once and echo as if you were standing in a huge cavern are so cool in the eyes of the small that at least one toymaker has marketed a brightly colored toy mic for toddlers.
I was no exception to this, so I took great interest in the Microphone as it made the rounds of the Kingdom Hall during the Question and Answer period of each meeting. Handled by teenaged stewards, it was rushed to wherever member of the congregation raised a hand to answer one of the questions posed by the Elder at the front of the room.
As fate would have it, this night my own mother raised her hand to answer a question. I don't remember what the question was. Nor do I remember her answer. I only remember that I was riveted by the presence of the Microphone. I kept my eyes on it as she spoke into it, loving the way it made her voice all cool and echoey.
She finished her answer and started to send the Microphone back to the kid waiting for it in the aisle.
As passed in front of me, I was so thrilled to see it up close, that I smiled at it and said, "Bye, Microphone."
My voice come back softly through the loudspeakers sounding so BIG. Neat-o.
Let's take a survey. Put yourself there in that group of adults. How many of you think everybody smiled and thought, "Aw, how cute. He said 'bye' to the mic."
I hear you raising your hands, but you're wrong. There was no "awww." There was a collective gasp as the entire congregation reacted to my apparently shocking and wicked behavior. The next thing I knew I was airborne-Mom yanked me straight out of my seat by the hair.
It hurt. A lot. I grabbed her wrist with both hands, trying to keep my hair from being torn out by the roots and stop the pain, but she just dragged me all the way to the women's bathroom-shrieking like a banshee (me, not Mom).
This is a scene I happen to know looks pretty comical from the outside-like something out of the Three Stooges. Trust me-from the inside, it's not funny in the least.
Once we were in the women's room, my mom proceeded to beat the devil out of me for committing such a heinous crime. She made certain I understood that I had not only embarrassed her, but I had shown disrespect to Jehovah-God. I was a terrible child-an "awful, rotten child" to use her favorite catch-phrase. She punctuated each and every word of her litany with a blow to make darn sure I understood. (The next day, when I showed her the bruises on the backs of my thighs, she got angry all over again. "Those," she told me sharply, "are reminders from Jehovah that you shouldn't disrupt the meetings.")
When my tears had all run out we returned to the hall, where my brother, Joe, stared at us as if his eyes were going to bug out of his head. Needless to say, he didn't utter a peep. The other adults, meanwhile, looked on with obvious approval. Later some of them yelled at me, too, for disrupting their meeting. All for the innocent mistake of saying good-bye to the microphone.
I sat for the rest of the meeting trying to forget how much my butt and my scalp hurt. I felt as if I was like sitting on a hot griddle while someone stuck a thousand pins into my head. It was almost impossible to sit still, but I did. I was scared to death of what would happen if I didn't.
The biggest hurt was on the inside. You have to understand that, up to that point in my life my mother had never hit me, never said terrible things about me. I'd thought she loved me. Now, I wasn't sure.
Do you want to know the worst thing? The worst thing was that through it all I wanted nothing more than to crawl into her lap, to feel her arms around me, to have her stroke my hair and tell me, "It's all right, Billy" just like she always did when I was hurt and confused. But that was impossible now.
Now all I could do was sit in agony on that hard chair, looking with longing at this cold stranger wondering, "Where did my mommy go?"
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