Finding Meaning In My Childhood Chanclazos

Most of my friends were always amazed by the way I acted around my mother. I never drank around her and nor did she ever see me drunk.  I never smoked around her.  I hid every sign of moral deviance and I hid it well.  I think it had to do with the fact that I was raised to fear the almighty chancla and her cruel sister of fate, otherwise known as corporal punishment. My mother did not spare it when she felt I got out of line.  Of course, as a child, I tried to find a way around the common rule.

I used to think that she was so unfair, but if you were to ask me now, I would have to say that I deserved every backhand that I got. My mom was not shy about hitting her kids in public. Whenever my sister and I would misbehave, she would raise us with an arm pinch and move us into her trajectory – and then she would start tanning our hides. The discipline was always delivered with an open hand, although I know there were times when she was fighting back the urge to swing a fist.

There were a couple of words we could not get away with — so we tried to be original about it by substituting them with other flowery proper nouns and adjectives. The funny part was even though they only made sense to my sister and I, my mother would still get irate. For example, the following list of words could not be uttered in her presence unless you wanted the taste slapped out of your mouth.

• “Mother-Father”
• “Son of a Fish”
• “Cah te mit”
• “Estooped”

My sister and I would go to great futile lengths to tell her that these words were gibberish, but she would not have it.

In addition, our discipline always had some basic rules. Although she would hit us on the mouth for swearing, she would never slap our faces or hit us on the head. Secondly, she would only hit us until we reached a point where we would start crying. Some parents were crazy. They would hit their kids to the point of tears, and then they would stop and then start hitting them all over again because the kid was crying. My mother would always take the opportunity to point that out and ask me if I wanted to get hit like that.

I do not think that the lesson behind the discipline was to hurt us. The truth of the matter was that they would be badges of honor.  Our social groups, whether in school or social settings, would band together and laugh at the ones who cried the loudest during their beatings. We could not understand the kids who never got spanked. In our warped minds, we figured their parents never loved them enough to notice them – so we wrote them off as some kind of Mexican hippie experiment not meant to be tried or understood.

The rest of us kids, who received beatings, would poke fun at the others who would get beat for the most frivolous reasons, like spilling milk on the kitchen counter or spending their mother’s grocery change on video games. I was guilty of that one a couple of times — I just could not resist Hulk Hogan’s pleas to insert coin for more power. I took my beatings and the older I got, the less they hurt. Then one day, I reached a point where they no longer hurt at all.

I think that day saddened my mother the most, simply because she realized she was in need of a bigger chancla.