The Creek
When I was small I would go outside and play like any other kid so mom would tell me don’t go out of the yard. Now you have to understand that I lived on a little hill and there was a field that my dad would put a garden in and a creek that ran through the lower portion of the yard. So of course being a kid I decided one day to kick my brand new beach ball down the hill and of course I had to go get it I couldn’t let it get away! So I kicked it a bit and let it roll and I did it again and again until guess what? It was in the creek! The one place I was told absolutely not to go. I was playing in a bit of water and all of the sudden I heard my ENTIRE name DEBORAH ANNETTE BERTELSMANN!! Oh Boy did I know I was in trouble! I tried to get up the bank of the creek before my mom got to me but it didn’t work – she met me at the top of the creek with a paddle in her hand….It wasn’t an ordinary paddle it was a metal paint stirrer with holes in it! (ouch) She spanked me with that paddle through the field, up 22 steps into the house and turned me across her knee and wailed some more. Then she put me down and cried harder than I had ever seen her cry before. Believe me the spanking HURT!
When my dad came home for lunch as he did everyday my mom told him what I had done and of course I thought he would have sympathy for me and baby me but my little heart was broken when he turned to me and said “you got what you deserved” and turned around and kept eating his lunch.
Years later I understood why my mom had spanked me. She feared for my life as I was playing in a creek that had snakes in it. I didn’t realize it as I was only 4. That was the one and only spanking I got in my entire life. I may have been mouthy as a teen but never to the point of deserving a spanking any shape or form. The threat was more than enough!
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WOW! What a wonderful story and lesson. I like the part where she yelled out your ENTIRE name. Mine was shouted more than a few times and I can feel the paddle when I think of it. Great story. Well written.
I was a little harder headed than she was . It took more than one spanking for me . Of course I thought they were beatings at the time . I wish parents wrere allowed and would do that sort of punishment now days .
A well-described tale of a well-deserved spanking. Too bad parents are afraid (of the law) to do that today. My Mother was Scotch-Irish and had a temper to match. Explosive, intense, and, fortunately, short-lived. A few times when I caused her to show that S/I temper before it cooled she used the wire handle of a fly swatter to "tan" my behind. When she "whipped" me w/o the "passion" she sometimes told me to go outside to our Weeping Willow Tree and cut a "switch" for her to use on me. (That's like digging your own grave before execution.) I escaped the Willow switch one time when I slyly cut a notch along about the middle. When she drew back to start her downswing toward my butt the upper part of that switch folded backwards right where I'd "notched" it. It struck her funnybone somehow. She started laughing and set me free. She "whipped" a lot (I needed it.) My dad "whipped" me with his leather belt only one time and that was with his leather belt.
That must have been where my Mama got the idea for the fly swater .Those wire handles hurt . Then my Mama would say " DON'T TELL THE NEIGHBORS ABOUT IT "
I'd love to hear more of the creative ways parents punished their kids back then, even if sometimes it bordered if not was abuse. Bill Cosby's " The belt will wail tonight!!!" story described my experience to the letter. I never got the switch or the wire. That sounds really painful and would've got my attention!
