Every parent has their own form of punishment for when they believe a child has been bad. Some parents believe that just talking with their child is enough to let their children know that what they did was wrong. Others take the route where they ground the child to the house or room in hopes that a lack of freedom will teach him/her the lesson the parent wants he/she to learn. Others still think that the only way to drill a lesson into their kid's head is by beating it in.

My father is a built guy who spent the better portion of his life playing sports and building up his muscles. He was in the navy, played semi-pro football for the Gwam Bulldogs, softball for the Eau Claire Hooligans, was a high school health teacher, and was a bouncer for a night club. All that happened before I was born so I was never actually able to experience any of these things that he did. All I’ve ever known him to do was work 26 years for Phillip Morris as a sales representative and spend over half of his free time playing golf and drinking.

I was completely different from my father and I believe that this is one reason why we were never close, and why I spent a lot of time being punished for things that I did. Some of the time, I pretty much deserved to have some sort of punishment, but most of them took the word “punishment” and turned it into “cruel and unusual punishment”.

He always told me his father beat the heck out of him as a child and punished him for things that he had done wrong and, as the saying goes, “like father, like son”. I would get grounded for a week sometimes just for not having cleaned the house on a specific date. I would have to sit at a table for hours after school doing nothing but studying, if my grades weren’t all that great. I once spent over a month sitting in the house doing nothing over my summer vacation because I had told a teacher I had done my homework when I hadn’t.

These kinds of groundings were normal to me. I would sometimes get grounded for saying something stupid, or for not agreeing with him on something that he said. But, these were just little punishments and not even close to what he was capable of doing. Sometimes during one of his lectures, if I didn’t agree with something he said, his big, hard hand would find itself slapped across my face or wrapped around my neck.. There was no telling what was going to anger him, so I said as little as possible.

This didn’t help our relationship any and most of the time I would just agree with him, or do what he said, while silently hate the man. As I grew older and wiser, just submitting to him didn’t seem to be something that should be done, and one day, I broke with tradition.

Like almost any teenage guy, my world consisted of two things: fun and women. Also, like almost every teenage guy, my room was filled with posters of sports stars, cartoon characters, pennants, and of course female models in swimsuits and sometimes even less than that. I had them everywhere: on the four walls, on my door, below the window, and on the ceiling. I marveled at its manliness every time I walked in. It seemed like the perfect teenage room. To everyone but my father that is.

One Tuesday afternoon after school, l I was laying on my king-sized bed trying to catch up on the sleep I’d lost the night before and daydreaming about what a good life would be like. My father walked in the room, clad in a pair of red sweats and a Marlboro T-shirt, and stated that he didn’t like some of the posters on my walls. He said that he didn’t want his friends to see them and that he didn’t think it was appropriate for me to have them, and he wanted them taken down.

This was the last straw for me. I told him that it was my room, that he didn’t have to see them if he didn’t want to, and that I didn’t want to take them down. His face turned red and his eyes flashed with anger and frustration. “No it’s my room, and you’re right, I don’t have to look at them”, he roared as he reached up to my Jenny McCarthy poster and ripped it off the ceiling. I just stood there dumbfounded and quiet at how unfair and mean he was being. Like many times before, I couldn’t believe he couldn’t see this from my point of view, while at the same time knowing that he couldn’t see it the way I did because he wasn’t a teenager anymore.

I walked out of my room at that time. I don’t really know whether it was because he told me to, or just because I was sick and tired of being in his presence. The next thing I knew I was down the hallway on my way to the kitchen when I heard him say, “Now let’s see what else I can tear down”.

“Please don’t tear down anything”, I shouted down the hallway into my room, pleading with him to leave my room alone and not to do any more damage to it. I continued my walk to the kitchen when suddenly I heard him exit my room. I turned around and saw him start charging at me.

“What did you just say”, he screamed at me as his footsteps pounded the bleached hardwood floor and echoed off the walls.

“I said please don’t take tear anything else down.” I was scared at that point of what he was going to do to me. I could see it in his face, and his eyes, that he was madder then hell, and the thought of whether he was going to get physical with me entered my mind. That thought alone made my voice come out like one of a child of five instead of a boy of fifteen.

“No, you didn’t say please”, he shrieked at me, coming closer. When he was about five feet away from me, I still didn’t know what he was planning to do until I felt his hand on my throat and my body being sent hard to the floor.

I landed in a heap on the hard wood, but he wasn’t done. His hand never left my throat, and when I finally realized that I had my eyes closed, I opened them and saw him kneeling next to me with his face as red as a beet and his teeth clenched and showing. I managed to tell him that I had in fact said please, but he persisted that I hadn’t and rammed my head into the floor a couple of times, each time telling me I hadn’t. “I did too”, I managed to choke out weakly, and finally, after a couple of more drills into the floor, he let go of me and stood up.

I wanted to lay there and not get up. I wanted him to leave so I could cry all by myself at what had just happened to me. I wished that I could just sink into the floor and not be seen by anyone ever again. I thought that after what he had just done to me, he would give me that little bit of decency, especially since this whole situation came about by him not thinking I said “the magic word”, when I had in fact done so. I wanted him to go away, I wanted him to die, and I wanted him to apologize. He didn’t do any of those. He never ever did. Instead of going away and going back to whatever it was he was doing previously, he told me to get my ass off the floor and back into my room.

Once there, he made me take down more of my posters while he stood there and watched. My face burned with humiliation, anger, and hurt. My head hurt from hitting the hardwood so many times, and my eyes were watery from all the tears that were still flowing freely as I did nothing to try and prevent them from coming. It was my hope to show him a little bit of what I was feeling, and I wished that he would realize what he had just done to his only son. If he did realize anything, or if he did see something, he never let it show. After a little while of just standing there, he finally left me alone, and I fell onto my bed. I can’t remember anymore whether I cried, fell asleep, or just replayed the event in my head trying to see where I had gone wrong. I’m not sure I even want to remember.

My father stated many times after that day that he didn’t care if I hated him for the things that he’d done to me. He would always tell me that it was his job as a father to get me ready for life and that that was what he was going to do. In his mind, what he did to me that day was a perfectly logical “fatherly” thing to do. If it was his goal to sacrifice his relationship with his son so he would become a “proper” adult, then he succeeded like no one else on the planet.

That day, my father put the final wedge between us, and showed me how not to be a father to my children. I realized that day that I would never be able to talk to him; that I would never be able to stand being around him. That I would never be able to think of him or love him as a father. That’s not how a father/son relationship should be, but it’s the way he made it. I also realized that day, at that time, I would have to depend on myself only, and was launched into adulthood before it was my time. I haven’t been able to be a kid since.