A Pilgrim’s Digression

Growing up in a family where my mother was not afraid to whip me, sometimes with a belt, one of my concerns has always been how do I discipline my son without resorting to the same techniques as my Mom. I can remember quite a few times that she whipped me in a fit of anger, and other times when she would let a transgression go unpunished immediately, except for a sour look or a threat, and much later–when we got home from a store, for example–only then would I get the whipping.

However, despite my generally mild-mannered demeanor and my attempt not to emulate the worst aspects of how I was parented, I do have anger issues. I tend to suppress it, which probably isn’t good either because it tends to come out either in a fit of unexpected rage, or in a slow trickle of bitter, sarcastic, and hurtful comments.

Anyway, I am getting to my point. Which is, as usual, an anecdote.

As my readers know, about a month ago we adopted our first puppy. For me, this is my first dog since I went away to college. For my son, it is his first pet ever. We have a cat, but the cat was already five years old and unsociable when Brendan was born. It doesn’t really count as “his” pet.

Some days, it seems like all I do is yell at my son for his treatment of the dog. He doesn’t mistreat her; he loves her very much. But that love is sometimes, literally, choking. He picks her up and carries her around too much, for my taste. If she is lying on the couch next to him, that is not close enough; he feels he needs to hold her on his lap. And sometimes when playing, I feel he gets too rough, pulling her tail or fur, grabbing her by the collar, squeezing her too tightly.

“Be gentle,” seems to be my constant refrain, in greater or lesser degrees of panic depending on what I perceive to be the desperate straits of the dog.

That word “perceive” is important. I’ve come to realize how much my reaction, either anger (yelling) or fear (a panicked plea for him to let the dog go), is conditioned by my own experiences growing up, rather than whether Brendan is actually doing anything wrong.

Last Sunday, my Mom was visiting and Brendan was in a particularly rambunctious mood, showing off for his grandma. The dog was chasing him around the living room, growling and barking and snapping playfully at his heels. He was screaming and laughing and having a good time. This should have been an enjoyable moment.

But much the same thing had been going on ever since Mom arrived, and I was on edge from all the noise and fearful that the puppy was going to end up hurt. I was afraid Brendan would fall on her, basically. I kept telling Brendan to “be careful” and to “be gentle” and to “settle down,” so I was feeling mostly a vague fear at this point.

And finally, Brendan did fall on the dog, and she started yelping frightfully. I was in the kitchen at the time; Brendan was in the living room. I ran into the living room when I heard the dog, and what I saw was Mom holding the dog, saying something about her leg being broken, and Brendan sitting on the floor still laughing. Lynn was standing nearby, watching. The dog’s leg was not broken, as it turned out, but the way she was yelping it could well have been.

I don’t know why Brendan was laughing. Probably it was residual laughter from his playing with the dog, or maybe the reality of the situation had not dawned on him. It was the laughter that triggered what happened next, though. What I perceived was, “He thinks it’s funny that he hurt the dog.”

Immediately, I just felt this wave of blind anger come over me. I don’t even remember what I said or did properly. I believe I yelled something like, “Stop laughing!” and, with an open hand, I whacked him on the back of the head.

I hit him hard enough that he stopped laughing, started crying, and stood up, whereupon I gave him a spank on his bottom, too, and sent him to his room crying. Unexpectedly, the slap on the back of the head set my wife off. She was very angry at me, mostly for the slap, but also for the general overreaction; and while Brendan cried in his room, she and I had a bit of a row right there in front of my Mom.

Lynn was upset because, first of all, she had never seen me so angry before–and over a dog–and she had certainly never seen me hit Brendan like that. In fact, I had never hit him like that before in my life. I had just “went into a rage,” she said. Lynn told me, or rather yelled at me, that when she was a kid, her mother had hit her on the head and about the face many times, sometimes leaving bruises. And here I was, doing the same thing to our son!

I tried to downplay it (”I didn’t hit him hard”), or make excuses (”If he hadn’t laughed, I wouldn’t have hit him!”). I said, lamely, “I am not going to have a son that thinks it’s funny to mistreat animals!”

It was a big fight, one of the biggest we’ve had, and it ended with me apologizing both to her and then going into Brendan’s bedroom and apologizing to him (Brendan did not know that I was apologizing essentially because of his mother, though; that would have pretty much undermined any authority I have with him). But I told him that I had misunderstood his laughter, and I was sorry for hitting him like that.

Why did I lash out so angrily? It really was as ugly a scene as Lynn made it out to be. Brendan actually had a red hand print on the back of his neck where I slapped him.

I’ve thought a lot about it since it happened. As I told Lynn, though she did not accept this as an excuse, it was his laughter (or rather my misinterpretation of it) that really pushed me over the edge. Ever since I was a kid, the one thing that pushes my emotional buttons more than just about anything is cruelty to animals. That’s not to say that I have always been a squishy-hearted, animal-loving Vegan. In fact, my attitude has been shaped by my own past instances of animal cruelty.

For example, when I was perhaps Brendan’s age or a little younger, I found a toad while playing outside one summer evening, and I put it in a mason jar and screwed the lid on, intending to keep it. Then I got the idea–who knows what dark place it came from, as if putting a toad in a mason jar weren’t cruel enough–to bury it alive. And I did bury it in our yard.

Then I went off to play. I don’t know how much time passed. In my memory, I started feeling guilty and went back almost immediately to dig it up again, only to be unable to find where I had buried it. In truth, more than a few hours might have passed. Maybe days passed. I really don’t know if my memory is correct. But I do know I felt tremendous guilt because of that act of cruelty and my inability to rectify it.

I was also cruel to the first dog I had, as a child. It was not too long after the toad incident that we got our first dog. I was a typical kid. Much the same as Brendan, I didn’t know how to treat an animal. It was just another toy to me, and my Dad was constantly yelling at me because of the way I treated the dog. Finally, one day I went too far, and hurt the dog in some way. When I tell the story to Brendan, I always say I was kicking the dog, but I really don’t remember what I did, and my Dad whipped me and sent me to my room.

Later, he came in to talk to me, and the way he explained why my behavior was wrong is what I have tried to impart to Brendan in telling him this story. I was wrong to be cruel to the dog because the dog was much smaller and weaker than me. Also, it was a creature that loved me unconditionally, and to illustrate the fact, Dad brought the dog in and put it on the bed with me where it licked my face–despite my having just been mistreating it. It’s wrong to mistreat inferior creatures, and wrong to scorn love by hurting the one who loves us. It’s bullying, evil behavior.

More than what Dad said, I always remembered how that dog licked me in the face after I had so mistreated it, and I have told the story to Brendan, with various embellishments, in order to get him to be gentler with the dog. I think my Dad was essentially right, in that often we do mistreat others who are inferior to us. But I would go further and say that we do so–whether it is an act of animal cruelty, or an act of human cruelty–out of our own sense of inferiority.

I doubt my Dad would have seen a link between my mistreatment of the dog, and Mom’s whipping me for various, seemingly arbitrary offenses such as asking for candy from a gumball machine at a store. But I can see the link.

Bullying behavior is the key, there. The bully acts as he does, quite often, because he himself has been bullied and he takes it out on the weaker creature. As an example, I think of the female bully in The Bridge to Terabithia, whose father beats her at night, and so she goes to school the next day and abuses the smaller children. That’s a simplistic answer to a complex psychological problem, but it is essentially correct, I think.

So I have to ask, how have I unfortunately replicated this pattern with my son, made him feel so powerless and bullied that he takes it out on the dog?

Or is my perception all wrong, and he really isn’t doing anything wrong?

I think it’s a combination of the two. I have seen him kick the puppy maliciously, or pull her fur until she yelps. On the other hand, the puppy plays very rough, for such a small dog. Her puppy teeth are like needles, and when she is chasing me in play, I feel like a large piranha is nipping chunks of flesh from my calves. She chases Brendan in the same way.

Brendan was doing nothing wrong the day I hit him. He and the dog were rough-housing, and she got hurt. And once she was over it, she came back for more. She always comes back for more, whether because dogs have bad short-term memory or because she really loves him and loves how they play together.

At the same time, I really do want him to come around to my point of view that pets are deserving of respect and love and a certain degree of freedom. It irks me to see him constantly picking her up and holding her. It irks me more if I see him hurt her more in some way, either by kicking her or pulling her fur. I wish he could learn what I learned long ago: that a dog’s love is so strong it will keep loving you, even when you hurt it. That is some powerful love, right there. I can distinctly remember thinking as a teenager, at a time when I was put upon by all the trials and horrors of adolescence, that dogs have humans beat hands down in the love department.

I could have the worst day at school–my math teacher was a bully, and then I had to deal with other kids who were also bullies, and then there were my parents who were always on my case about my lack of friends and non-participation in social activities at school and outside of school–but I could come home and go into my room and shut the door on all of them, and my dog would be there to lay on my bed with me and listen to me talk about my worst day ever.

There was a time when I absolutely hated humanity. But I loved my dog, and he loved me. It sometimes felt like he was the only one who did love me.

That’s why I cannot bear to see a dog, or any animal really, mistreated. I’ve always felt rather suspicious of human love; it’s flighty, inconstant, sometimes brutal. The love of a good dog is faithful and true, however.

Maybe I get that from my grandpa. One more anecdote before I close:

Grandpa’s jokes and stories are a matter of family lore, now. One that gets passed down, but which is usually not laughed at by the women in the family, is one dealing with a comparison between grandma and his dog. He probably regrets the joke, now that she is sick.

But the story goes like this. One day, grandma complained that grandpa loved his dog more than he loved her. “You show that dog more affection than you show me,” grandma said. Grandpa retorted, “When I get home from working the night shift tomorrow morning, you come out to the garage, jump up on me and lick me all over, and I’ll show you some affection, too.”