Discipline

So last Thursday, my son acted out a bit, and I called him on it. I had made a new dish for supper – slow cooked beans and vegetables in a tomato sauce with breadcrumbs, finished with garlicky shrimp – and I knew he’d be reluctant about it. He doesn’t like stews, and this was, admittedly, dangerously close to a bean stew with shrimp on top. But when he came home from school, he said the house smelled delicious, and I was optimistic.

He tried the shrimp and said they were delicious, and then he tried the beans and made a gagging noise and did that thing kids do where he faux threw up a bit of it back onto his plate. And I called him on it.

“That’s bullshit. And you know what I mean.”

“You mean you think I’m lying?”

“No, I think you’re just bullshitting. The food is good, but you decided before you tried it that you were going to play up not liking it.”

Cue blubbing face, accusations of not being a good dad, of wanting to see Mom.

“No, you’re bullshitting, and I’m calling you on it. Go to your room, no dinner, no electronics, no radio. I’m calling you on this and you are now officially punished.”

He ran upstairs, pounding his feet, and cursing me along the way. This isn’t normal – maybe happens every few months, although in fairness to him I can’t remember it happening since the spring, and he is eleven, and is normally a great kid. But for some reason this bothered me. I spend a lot of time cooking for him, and cleaning after him, and for some reason having him pretend-vomit what was, if I may say so, a really delicious meal, triggered a need for me to simply punish him. To discipline him.

But after he stormed up to his room, it occurred to me that I was also releasing some negative energy of my own. I’m not particularly happy these days. Work is a bit of a drag and, just last week, had a bit of a crisis that the principals I work with made me wear the public pain more than was justified. And it’s December in Maine: short dark days, a lot of clouds and rain and wind, the sun – when it appears – too weak to do anything more than illuminate the naked trees and the cold glimmer of puddles in the woods, inspire the kind of low-level, non-clinical depression that makes Mainers and Atlantic Canadians fodder for bad jokes about grumpiness and casual profanity. I have not had any romantic prospects in years and, if I’m honest, I’m romance kryptonite – single dad, unexplainable income and career, tendency to think overmuch about ethics and morality and politics, and a healthy love of gin.

This is not the right mood from which to unleash discipline on an eleven year old, I was thinking to myself, although immediately after that thought, the memory of him fake puking good food made me quite comfortable in the decision to punish; the question became one of degree. And “go to your room without supper” seemed about right.

So I finished my food, gave the dog a quick walk in the pitch black night where she could barely see her way across the street to relieve herself on the neighbor’s lawn, headed back inside, and waited for a few minutes, and then headed up to the boy’s room.

“You get why you’re in trouble, right?”

“Why did you swear at me?”

“I didn’t swear at you. I used a swear to refer to your behaviour, ‘bullshit’. Do you understand why I did that?

And he said yes, he did, although he added several swears of his own which indicated what he thought of me, and my punishment, and what I could do to myself having punished him. He’s eleven, so his voice was repeatedly breaking as he screamed at me, which made it much easier to not get angry because it was so absurdly funny to hear him, in effect, say “yes, Dad, I know exactly why I was punished, but I still hate it”. I told him I loved him, which is why I occasionally punish him, because the love of a parent requires me to push back when he behaves badly; exercising his expletive vocabulary further, he described exactly what he thought of my definition of love. He was screaming, and at one point I asked him why he was screaming, because I was pretty sure I had never raised my voice; he admitted I hadn’t, and that calmed him down slightly. But I let him get on with it, rambling out his frustration, and then reminded him no electronics and lights out at 9pm, and told him to get a good night’s sleep and I’d see him in the morning, and reminded him that he needed to clean up his room because he was heading to his Mom’s the next day. And I said that I loved him. He didn’t say he loved me.

No harm no foul there: one doesn’t become a parent to be loved back, you become a parent (hopefully) out of the love you feel for the person you join in becoming parents, and for the hope that you can create love in the world in the future – and if it’s not for you, well, so be it, as long as love is created. My son does love the world, I can see that: I’m doing well. If, on a random Thursday night, he feels only spite for me, I can live with that.

My son doesn’t realise yet that discipline – when done correctly – is harder than anything. You take the risk that the object of discipline will not get the lesson, not get the joke, and will build up some store of anger or hatred that not only prevents the lesson from being learned, but is a negative lesson. You take a real risk as the disciplinarian but, if you don’t take that risk, you also know you condemn the subject to not moving forward. You could patiently explain why what they are doing is wrong, but you also – as a human being – know that only someone who already wants to learn will be converted by the patient lesson. The child – or employee, or adult – who truly doesn’t care about a lesson needs to be shocked into awareness. But that is never fun, or easy, and it always runs the risk that you, as disciplinarian, gets a rush from the sheer assertion of power. Human beings like being in control, and being in a position of disciplining is a pure moment of such control – but the existential truth of being human is that we are never, truly, in control. So within discipline lies both a need – to make sure another person who is committing a moral error is shocked back into reality – and a vicious danger – that you fool yourself into the error thinking you can control a situation and “make it better” by your sole will.

Punishment won’t make my son better, or make him less likely to bullshit me: all it can do is shock him into awareness that I don’t like being bullshitted. Only love will make my son better – well, love, and some timeout time where he isn’t playing Animal Island or Roblox or whatever the hell he’d be likely to do; indeed, the curative power of maybe just some time staring at the ceiling or reading a Hardy Boys mystery is probably the best hope he has.

The outcome of discipline should be careful reflection for both the person disciplined, but even more so, for the disciplinarian.

The rest of the night for me was painful, but probably for the good. I’m not doubting the actions I took, but I did reflect a lot on what I should do in the morning, and what my own state of mind is, and what I need to do better in any situation, and what I need to think about when the days are long and dark and seemingly bleak.

He got up in the morning and was fine – he even cleaned up his room, in fact did a surprisingly good job. I gave him a hug on his way out the door to catch the bus. He hugged me back, but he didn’t respond when I told him I loved him as he walked down the driveway. But he wasn’t unhappy, and he waved at me as he crossed the street.