1 post tagged “childhood punishments”

How were you punished as a child?

Was I punished as a child? Continuously, we all were punished some of us all the time. It was thought shared by communities at one time that an adult had the right to correct someone else's child even on the streets. It was more like adult arrest as opposed to citizen arrest. There are some people that still have it in their minds that they can beat someone else's wife and child. And, some people are of the opinion that they can keep a child like a slave with well maintained spankings and rules.
Go to your Room! would be a most wonderful form of execution. In one's room, irregardless of where it is placed and no matter how small one can imagine all sorts of wonderful things without food or air. I was arrested once in LA and sent into solidary confinement. I don't know what the arrest was about. I was in the middle of The King and I and June Virginia Wigle had to rush in from Canada to fill in the spot as the wife of the King of Siam. June can sing quite well but she has only one version of her own voice. Myself, I have dozens of characters to choose from and each character has her own voice and personality. Thus, when the wife of Siam sings, for just a moment, June has this quality of her voice that is impatient and it pops up in the song. She is singing something like how patient a wife should be and how giving a wife should be...blah...blah...blah and I am so tired of it and she rolls her eyes slightly.
June Virginia Wigle had Cherokee soft skin olive tone and brown eyes. She was short...only about five foot 2 and a half. The same size as Debbie Reynolds. Short but don't push her. Like me she hits back but unlike me she hits on the first smack. I try to be patient and do the "what can I do to help this person see that this is not the right road to everlasting life" and after several years of being beaten and shot at I will finally conclude, "John, when I come into town you had better be on vacation."
June was surprising. I would sit speechless with both hands under my bum when interrogated by a look by Theodore Melbourne Wigle. June would chase him with a broom...then run for her life...and hide for weeks. June explained it once when I asked her how she could be so bold and she merely answered, "you don't remember him. I remember what he was like before the change."
 April Louise Wigle always spoke up to defend herself quietly and with dignity. She was never spared the spanking but she always argued it out first. Robert Rae Wigle was never punished. He never gave reason. He was a mute.
Psychiatrists had met with teachers in Grade one to determine why I was not speaking.
Go to your room on Springarten Road was to go to the mattress up in the attic. Elders had called on Mel. He really must work on this fathering thing and parents must have rules. Mel was living on Springarten and Elsie in Windsor...somewhere. I was terrified of the dark. I never use to be terrified. Perhaps, it is part of growing. Mel would stand at the bottom of the stairs with the belt. I would try to crawl down. I was more terrified of the dark then Mel. I was sure that there was a demon in the loft. I couldn't see him but I  had terrible nightmares that he might grab me and throw a sack over my head.
Sometimes adults can get into trouble for sending children to bed without supper and confine them with the words, "and don't come out".
I had awaken to open my eyes to two red eyes. I think they were red. Maybe they were yellow. But, when I first saw them maybe they were red in my imagination...red...being danger. I jumped up screaming backing towards the low attic window with such a force that my body literally broke the window and I fell down to the ground.
When I opened my eyes my face was being bathed by Linda's mother. Strange I know the name like the back of my hand but it just isn't there. They lived across the street from the Wigle home on Springarten Road and Linda's father was just returning home around twelve o'clock midnight he was telling the police.
"I thought someone was breaking in the house so I took a look and found Iris unconscious on the ground."
How long was I asleep? They fed me and I was just fine. Was there really a ghost? Did it follow me from Jerry Lee's barn? Or worse still from Buckingham Palace. One should never tell a ghost to "bugger off."
Robert and April had no desire to sleep in the house without an adult and went for a sleepover at friends without realizing no one at home with me. We could have added to the police that this was normal. That Mel was never home for days but then they might tell him he had to stay home which would have been an inconvenience to say the least - to us.
Around the same time though I was awakened by screams. April was sitting up in bed with this wild eyed look downstairs. We had been by ourselves for days. It didn't make sense. It was very frightening.
"April! April! April! What's wrong?"
Was she having a seizure of some sort? I waved my hand in front of her eyes. She did not blink. She just screamed. She screamed for about an hour. June Virginia came by taxi from Windsor several miles away. She was working in a laundry place. June didn't bother dressing April. She just took her out to the taxi in her pyjama's with her screaming the whole way. Except now she was kicking and screaming. Was she lost somewhere? Was she having a fight in her mind with a monster? She even knocked off June's glasses. June rarely cried but she was crying and trying to hold her arms and legs down as best she could without hurting her. I sat in the front seat crying beside the taxi man. It would only be after a sedative that April would stop screaming. She just laid on the hospital bed without blinking. It was Marnie time...April was outside of the red room. April was waiting for the quiet. She was waiting for Jesus to let her out  of the white room when she felt it was safe to come  home.
We were questioned by the hospital staff and by detectives. There was no answer. Robert and I sat outside the room waiting. "Did your father ever beat you?"
I shake my head slowly, no.
There were worse places to go to live than the Wigle farm on Springarten Road.
Once for no reason, I felt as terrified as April in 1998. I got in my car and drove all the way up to Quebec into the bush where there were no more roads. I didn't take any clothes, no money, nothing. I just was in the car and kept on driving until I couldn't drive anymore. I held onto the steering wheel for a few minutes before pulling out the keys. That night a bear with her cub brushed against the side of the car before venturing off to turn over rocks looking for grubs on a rock hill filled with lose rocks. There! I was safe. No one would hurt me  here. I stayed for three weeks before my car stalled down an embankment. A French police officer insisted that I go back into town with him.
"You can't stay here. I've called a garage to tow your car back."
A French man and his wife passing stopped to listen and were eager to do the kind thing and offered to drive me.
"I noticed that you have a Watchtower...are you one of Jehovah's witnesses."
"No!" Today, I was not one Jehovah's witnesses. Why not? I don't know. I feel all this anger and don't know where the well is at nor who dug it.
He had gentle eyes. He asked me to come into the police station by a certain date. "That way I can keep track of you. We don't want you to go missing." He gave me the address of a woman's shelter if I needed a place to go. I didn't go there. I camped instead. "I have a boat and I am in a race on Sunday. You should come down to the beach. Everyone will be there. My girlfriend will be there." He had a very nice girlfriend who he is thinking of marrying. "I might want to be a Jehovah's witness one day." I said nothing.
There was no explanation for my mood. I had no answers. Only anger...very extreme argumentive anger. It reminds me of the movie Another Woman. Mrs. Temple is married, her husband is divorcing her. Mrs. Temple is not a nice person...she is very angry. She is in an accident and loses her memory. She revives as Lisa? Temple a very pleasant person to be around. "I don't remember the other woman. If I was mean to you I regret it. But, this is me now." Then, her memory comes back, she grabs a key, enters the lock room to find out why it is locked and it is filled with baby toys and crib. And, she is angry all over again. But, the baby in the back of my mind did not die in a car accident. It was murdered by nursery school invaders and was axed along with several other missing babies. Seven babies abducted...two missing...a boy and a girl.
I sit and write. I sit and read my Bible. My car is fixed. It was fixed as soon as I left with the French couple. "Strange? There was nothing wrong with the car. We pulled it up and it started right up. It may have been the incline. You'll have to pay the towing charges."
I found a quiet place in the middle of the northern bush surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of trees off the main highway. I had driven all the way up to tundra until there was no more roads. The trees had grown smaller and smaller until they were only bushes. I still had not called my family nor my employer. I was mute and mutes don't speak, do they? I watch. I watch the trees sway back and forth. I listen. I listen and drive until I don't hear the sound of any voice or machine. And, I don't know why? It was like one day I am a very nice person and then there is like this bounce and I feel like I am in the middle of a war and want to shake the monkey right out of the tree with a cigar in one hand and a gun in the other.
I was told that my memory might come back gradually. There was no reason for the memory loss. "But people don't lose memory for no reason doctor. People don't forget nouns." Not a whole dictionary of nouns. I was nounless from about 1981-1982 to 1998. I had to practice remembering. I would feel a sweater, "what is this called again?" I would tell my friends, "it isn't like the Hollywood amnesia. I don't  have any horrible memory to escape from nor a husband that doesn't want me. I was sure of it. I just couldn't remember nouns. And, I couldn't carry on a conversation. I would forget what I was saying as I started the conversation so I would always make sure I had a non stopping verbal friend with me to cover and make up for my quietness. I forgot nouns and I forgot to hate.
"Do you think it was because we went to the Red Lobster (in North Bay and had a fish platter with) mussels?"
But, Brian didn't go to the Red Lobster. Marian's husband Brian had switched my plate with his when I had complained about the smell. Brian was so ill they had to take him to a physician or hospital in North Bay.
"My mother broke five thermometers and poured them into your coffee," her daughter confided as I laid in the back of the van unable to lift my head. Dennis had walked up to the car to tell her that we were cutting our trip short. "Why would she do that?" I asked Dr. Young, "could mercury poisoning cause this?"
Marion pop her head in to say goodbye with a warm smile. "Marion what did you put on the beef?" I couldn't keep my head up.
"Sweater."
"Sweater"...I said it out loud over and over again. I had explained to Dr. Young, the neurologist at the Old Victoria London hospital in London, Ontario. I was fine. My husband and I went on vacation (Dennis was with me in his office) we went up to Balsam Creek, the trailer fell off, I used the phone a friends, I was invited for supper and woke up at the campground with a severe migriane that was so bad that I couldn't lift up my head for six months. It was better at three months and I could get up and walk around. "I knew my children were my children. I just didn't know their names." Nor the names of people I had worked with at the time. I had to quit driving school bus.
1982
"Marion? The gravey has a strange smell to it (and so did the beef)". .. If there is one thing to say about me. I know good meat by smell. It comes from growing up without a refrigerator the rule being that one can eat meat out of a fridge for two days, possibly three, never four..."you're not playing a prank on me are you?"
1967
Marion and Erin Brocovich who had pushed her way into living with Marion in our apartment played pranks that were downright nasty. Erin would encourage Marion to come into my bedroom which I slept in while she and her friends slept on the livingroom floor. She would not leave. She would tell them to take a razor blade and just push it gently onto my nose. She would arrange the plates for supper in order. Mine would be the last and smallest portion. They would add things into the salt and sugar and I didn't know what it was nor why they were doing it. They would lock me into the bathroom where Erin had secured a lock for misdemeanors broken house rules she had established as mother hen. It wasn't her apartment. I had gone to the elders with the complaints because now they were finding reasons to hit me.
"Kick her with your foot for using your pen without your permission," Erin would order. And, did not Roberta Kinoshita kick me very hard to the point of a very wide bruise? We had always shared everything. They were using my dishes and I didn't complain.
"She asked us which part of your body we wanted," confided Qwen Kinoshita.
"And what did you say?"
"Everyone wanted a part but I told them I didn't want a part. We were asked if you should live and die with about a dozen other Jehovah's witnesses, that is, if we should ever find you guilty of something in a court...if that was ever to happen...I didn't want to vote. Everyone said yes they wanted you to die. I said no."
I was not guilty of any sin.
"She said we were just playing."
And, Erin did the hypnosis thing, "you are to listen to my voice."
I would not let her hypnotise me. It is a disfellowshiping offense.
"I want her out of my apartment," I explained to the elders. They disagreed. It would be "unkind" of you.
"Send her somewhere else."
She had moved out of Bethel New York and came to our apartment with a friend. Two married women out on their own why?
1968 LA
They always come at the end of a movie...abductors, beaters, people that throw knives and carry hatchets. The rule being that if an actress breaks her leg or her neck someone has to fill in the spot and even if it is just for the last scene...she has saved the film and deserves all the money as the understudy. It was a theme in Dancing in the Rain 1953. Oh no you don't. I called in June Wigle to finish the project. June didn't want to act at all. She did not want to come down into LA nor the USA. She preferred as she put it "to be on my own ground. I know that the cops here, the politicians, the judges, the reporters the hospitals." June was very political and well known in Ontario. Every voting season she would put on her NDP badge and go out to win votes for Bob Rae. I was a liberal. When little sister was arrested or beaten she would always fly in to rescue me and to finish the films.
I am in solitary confinement. Oh, did they expect me to scream. I am in a locked room. "Oh God bless you!" I was so tired of being chased down streets by storm troopers posing as fans, tired of ducking this and that and explosions and bridges falling and rocks hitting me. I turned my back to the camera, pulled my arms out of the straight jacket and went into a blissful sleep. It was just what the doctor had ordered but whose doctor...not mine...not June's nor my mother's nor fathers. It is so easy to abduct an actress.
One can assume that Jerry Lewis (not Jerry Lee Lewis) was high on drugs and taken to a hospital which aired his so called addiction. Was I the only person that thought this was out of character? That hospital physicians don't do The Young and The Restless live on tv to ruin the reputation of an actor? But, Jerry Lewis is one of my employees. He is the head of some very important charities and runs monies between here and there for many people and businesses. I can't afford to lose him as a friend or possible friend.
"Get him out of there!" I am not buying it. If Jerry had taken it to court it would have been at a cost. There would be charges, fines, lawyers to pay, clothes and food to buy for friends just ask the dead Portuguese nun that had only a $36.00 fine for jay walking which turned into a river to $36,000 into the ?
1953-1954
"Did April say anything to you Iris?"
"Nothing."
"Did you notice anything out of place?"
"I was sleeping."
April had another seizure. She was sitting between myself and Robert and I turned. She was asleep. We were not allowed to sleep during religious meetings nor swing our feet or play and fidget. I nudged her roughly. So did Robert. Her body fell forward. April was unconscious in sort of in a coma. There was no explanations. Everything had been normal.
"Can you think of anything at all Iris?"
I really couldn't. Kids had been beating us up at school. We were taught by Mel never to hit first for any reason. Grandfather Jeffrey had said the same. Christians were to turn the cheek but Boxer Jeffrey didn't buy that concept completely nor did Mel. There was also an issue about the lunches. They were wanting. Robert and I had given April the bread sandwiches for lunch because April was so small and more fragile. Elsie Dolittle Brown-Jeffrey Brown had described me as "punching holes into the ground every time I ran". April never did run. Running was not for ladies. She rarely wore slacks unless she had to do so and her nails were always cleaned and polished. Robert and I took more fruit for a snack, cheese and crackers. The female principal was not pleased. "Again!" The punishment for a lunch wanting in value was to be beaten with a thick black strap on both hands several times. And, if we didn't cry even longer. We couldn't cry. We must not cry. It is not in Mel's protocal.
Was she a substitute? Did she come from New York City with a host of friends? Did someone take Elsie's home away from her for fines accumulated in the USA?
1967
Elders told a lot of falsehoods. They explained in Montreal to Mel that I had climbed up brick to break into a balconyless apartment to bite the penis of a male artist from The Watchtower Bethel and that the Bible says that a man should beat with a "rod". They handed him a bat. And, he used it. Marion asked, "why would your father do that? Mine would never have used a bat on me." I didn't answer. I could have said because Mel is probably going to kill an elder or two.
"Why did you go fishing with the artists and their friends from Bethel?"
I had put the question to him after the bat program. He smiled just slightly without looking at me. Everyone enjoyed it and they may have actually regretted their nasty lies. They had never been fishing before. "Where did he take you?"
"Oh, it was really far into the bush."
Right. I confronted Mel. "If you murder anyone I will tell on you."
To which he replied, "I told them, if you die, I will kill all the elders involved." All, like what four thousand? Did Erin Brocovich brag that four thousand people were involved in the Zodiac. The Zodiac being, not one, but many spokes to an organization that I simply will call The Club. Is it a club of actors and business people all over the continent? Have they mastered the way of discarding a body by placing a spoonful or two in a thousand bags? How many bags would it take to take out an actor or seamstress of a two hundred pounds?
I was arrested and I can't remember what happened...beaten...something. And the reporters on the street that were staged to be reporters were interviewing the fans that had watched "the movie."
They liked it but "I didn't like the ending." Does The Club legally murder people in the guise of a movie? That was me and it wasn't a movie...not without my consent. I have done movies albeit security cameras. I did that in Bird on a Wire. I caught several CIA men on studio grounds, home grounds, friends ground and Mel Gibson and I were being chased all over and  shot at.
"What did you do?"
"I don't know. I just flew in from Canada."
"Hey?" I shouted as I stood up, "do you fellas want to make a movie with me?" More shots. "But, all this security film?" What a waste? A CIA man was walking down a street and LA and stopped to look at a billboard advertising Bird on a Wire, "hey that's me." Well, you wanted to play. I went to the CIA building and confronted a director. "Why are your men firing at me." I didn't even have a gun.
It was all a mistake it seems. It wasn't mistaken identity. They had a file on me...with a lot of false accusations I might add. I was never a prostitute. I wasn't a negro light coloured slave from the south that was never set free by her owners. My mother Elsie Wigle never remarried....NEVER. She never dated. She went to church. And, she prayed. And, she worked at the Windsor police station until retirement turning over detective files as she dusted. And, they watched her turning over the files as she dusted. Elsie, you see, really wanted to go to Heaven....a full time job.
All the policemen knew Elsie. "She looks a little like Queen Elizabeth...you can't miss her."
And the recruits were all warned, "don't buy cars from little old ladies. We have an old gal here and you wouldn't believe the miles she has on her car."
Elsie told me all about the recruits. I stopped chewing my afternoon scone at tea time and played with the crumbs so she couldn't see my eyes. Well, there was the time I went down and someone needed a car to play in The Car Race or Mad Race with Ethel Merman. "How could you get my mother's car in an accident. You moron!!" It was a red convertible picked out be Frank Wigle as a proper car for his mother to drive.
The detectives worked over time in Windsor to try and figure out how Elsie was in possession of a car not belonging to her. She is just that honest. I had to call the studios. "What did you do to my mother's car?"
"Well, we figured that it was a right off. So, we bought another just like it. We didn't think you would notice."
"Well, I did!" I sneered between my mouth.
"Oh mother, how did that car thing work out?"
She was so upset. I can't even pick out anyone in Hollywood to play my mother. She is just that sweet in a simple way and she relishes being simple. "You wouldn't want to be a royal. There is all that dusting."
She dabs a white pressed starched hankie to her brow and nose, "and you will give everything you have to the poor who aren't working and they'll end up throwing rocks at your carriage."
Not The Dutchess of York she would throw rocks and hang and behead. "There is so much to do," wailed the Dutchess, "and I have to do it all myself." She glared, her chin went up a tad higher, not like your Mrs. Dolittle...she does nothing."
"My mother mame, works very hard." She dug the ground for fruit trees and she produce fruit trees. She washed her diapers by hand without maid and without help from Buckingham Palace.
The closest to the aura of Elsie was Bridget Jone's mother. Except Elsie never sinned not even undeliberately. She had her King James Bible with her at all times even if it was just in her head.
"What did you do with the fifty dollars April sent to you?"
"I sent it to the Prison missionaries for them to purchase Bibles."
"Mother? How many Bibles do you think they really need in the prisons?"
"Never enough! Could you take these clothes down to the Salvation Army?"
"They have price tags on them?"
"They were such a good deal that I just couldn't help buying them. Some poor soul could use them. They are not fancy mind you but they are new."
Yes, they were new.
She was as cold emotionally at times as Marnie's mother and as warm to strangers that she had never met as one could be when one wanted to calm those sorely tried. I was as she had said many a time, "healthy as a horse." So, was Elvis. But...what type of argument is that one may ask?