The haircut

Shortly after we arrived in California my parents secured a flat in a housing project that had originally been built as Navy housing during WWII and was now being used for veterans housing. The buildings were one-story triplexes with a two bedroom flat at each end and a three-bedroom flat in the middle between them.

Government housing for veterans circa 1950

 We lived there until the middle of my first-grade year when we moved about four blocks away into an Eichler-style bungalow with no proper sewage disposal, situated on a dirt road. This was my mother’s idea of “moving up” as she and Dad were buying the house with the cesspool that backed up into the bathtub during high tides rather than paying rent to the US government for a flimsy apartment that at least had proper sewage and paved roads.

I still have numerous clear memories of living in that apartment, of the short walk to school, the neighbour girl I used to play with, the peeling pea-green lead paint on the buildings… I remember we got our first TV while living there, and that there were only three channels, one of which was broadcast from the other side of the Mexican border. I remember the black and white test pattern that my little brother, Petey, would watch, mesmerized, while waiting for the morning offering of cartoons and child-oriented serials.

I remember many of my favourite serials and Saturday morning TV shows, none of which were cartoons, but at this point in time—between 1950 and 1952—the pickings were slim and my favourite of that period was Hopalong Cassidy and his fabulous white horse, Topper. My mother liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings, so my father would get up early and go to his Saturday job at a local garage where he was a part-time mechanic and my brother and I would be left on our own: even if my mother was up when Dad left for work, the minute he drove away, she was back in bed, asleep, while Petey and I were to entertain ourselves until she was ready to get up.

I do not remember exactly what prompted it, but one Saturday morning it came to me that Petey needed a haircut. Even at age five (Petey was three) I knew better than to do anything without my mother’s permission so, during a commercial break I tiptoed into her bedroom to ask. I recall that Petey and I had matching Hopalong Cassidy shirts, mine with a dark green background, his with dark blue, the pattern being a repeat of Hoppy’s smiling face beneath his trademark ten-gallon hat, a piece of rope in the shape of a lariat encircling. I always wore that shirt on Saturday mornings when his show came on as my personal tribute.

My mother was a heavy sleeper so once she went back to bed after Dad had gone to work, you could have set off fireworks in the living room and she would have slept right through them. If you did manage to wake her, she would be in a sleep-walking kind of state, and could talk to you and answer questions and then go back to sleep without ever remembering it. As a young child, however, I was unaware of that fact but I was acutely aware that to do anything except watch TV or read a book until she go up would be a punishable offense and that was something to be avoided at all costs.

I also was acutely aware that my mother was very focussed on money. The absolute worst sin you could commit in our house was one that cost her money. Breaking something, tearing or staining your clothes, ruining your shoes by walking in puddles—worst sins ever because it would cost her money to replace them. I was too young at that time to make value judgments about her spending money on herself but not on us—it was one of those things I simply accepted as a child: parents had the money, the decided how to spend it, and their decisions were right. Always. So having to spend money on kids was a bad thing.

I don’t recall what I was watching on TV that gave me the notion but I got the bright idea that I could save my mother some money (always a good thing)) if I cut Petey’s hair rather than her taking him to the barber. I ran to the kitchen junk drawer and found the scissors, then crept into my parents’ bedroom to get my mother’s permission. She struggled up to a half sitting position at stared at me with bleary eyes as I asked if I could give Petey a haircut. She blinked a couple of times, said “Sure,” they flopped back onto the bed and mumbled something about being careful before falling back to sleep.

Delighted, I came out to the living room to tell Petey that Mommy said I could give him a haircut. Eyes glued to the moving images on the screen, he didn’t respond. One of the things people always remarked about my brother was that he seemed incapable of sitting still. Despite his unassailable position as the Golden Child, our mother would snap and snarl at him when the family was watching TV: “Stop fidgeting!” she would bark at him. “Petey, for Chrissake if you don’t sit still I am going to pop you one!” “Sit still and stop fidgeting, goddammit!” Watching TV on Saturday mornings was an exercise in avoiding his restless flinging of arms, legs, and wriggling torso, and trying to cut his hair this particular morning was an exercise in futility.

I was convinced that if he just sat still I could run the scissors parallel to his skull and give him an even haircut, a “butch” haircut that was all the rage with young and old alike. Essentially a buzz cut with the hair the same length all over the head, it looked very simply to achieve. It was, with electric clippers, but not so easy with a pair of questionably sharp scissors wielded by an inept five-year-old on the head of a perpetual motion three-year-old.

Petey frustrated me because he wouldn’t sit still. Every time I tried to make a cut some part of him undulated or jerked, moving his head and causing my cut to go awry. I hissed at him to be still and he just reached up and tried to bat my hands away. I was getting upset because Mommy was going to wake up soon and I needed him to sit still to finish—and fix—the haircut and he was having no part of it. Eventually I gave up—his hair had chunks cut out here, shingled layers there, original lengths elsewhere, and my beloved Hopalong Cassidy shirt was covered with hair. I went into the bathroom to brush it off into the toilet and, focussed on my task, I didn’t hear the bedroom door open. Concentrating on getting the little hairs off my shirt, I jumped a foot when I heard my mother bellow from the living room: “VIOLET!”

She was mad because of the hair all over the floor, I was certain. I came running out of the bathroom babbling “I’ll clean it up. Lemme get the dustpan…”

She stopped me in my tracks with a glare. “What the hell is this?” she demanded, gesturing to Petey, the scissors and the clumps of hair on the floor.

“I’ll clean it up,” I repeated, heading again for the kitchen.”

“No you don’t!” she said. “Get your ass back in here. What the hell is this all about?”

I didn’t understand. She had given me permission to cut his hair, why was she pretending she didn’t know what this was all about.

“I gave Petey a haircut?” I ventured, not sure what she wanted me to say.

“Why in god’s name would you do that?” she demanded. “Look at the mess you made!”

“I’ll clean it up,” I said again, trying to get to the kitchen and the dustpan.

“Are you going to clean up his hair?” she bellowed. “Jesus Christ on a goddamned crutch, what is the matter with you? I can’t even take a little nap without you screwing something up and costing me money I don’t have!”

And I started to cry because instead of saving her money I was costing her money and now she was mad and yelling at me. And that just made matters worse.

“Do not start with the water works, missy!” she levelled at me. “If you want to cry I have more than enough reason to give you plenty to cry about!”

Stifling tears makes you sniffle. I was not allowed to leave the living room to go get a tissue, if she saw snot running out of my nose she would be furious, if I sniffled it would make her furious because she hated that sound. I was caught—to cry would get me a spanking, to force myself to stop crying would make my nose run and I didn’t have permission to leave the room to get a tissue which means I would sniffle and she would likely backhand me for it. I sniffed, she glared, I pointed towards the bathroom with one hand, my nose with the other and she gave me a grudging nod.

I clearly remember Petey being annoyed at us because he couldn’t hear his cartoons. He turned the TV up so loud that my mother turned it off, which made him mad at me. She send us both outside to play and he stayed mad at me the whole day because he had been deprived of his morning fix of Popeye and Oswald the Rabbit. When my father got home I heard my mother haranguing him in the kitchen and a few minutes later he came out, scooped up Petey and the two of them drove off in his car. When they came back Petey had a proper butch haircut. Nobody said anything more to me about it—I remember my father’s face as he and Petey got into the car, a look of suppressed mirth—so I suspect he told my mother to let it go and she did.

What I learned from this was that I couldn’t trust my mother. Nobody told me not to trust what she said when she was asleep, in fact, nobody said anything at all about it. All I knew was that I asked permission, got permission, and got in trouble for it anyway. I remember feeling kind of hopeless at the realization that I could do everything exactly by the rules and still come out in a heap of trouble. It was many years later, after my parents were divorced, that I discovered that unless my mother was sitting up in the bed with both of her feet on the floor, you could not trust a thing she said because she was still asleep and she refused to be responsible for anything she said in that condition…I was in trouble for asking because I “should know” her brain was still asleep.

It would have been nice if somebody had bothered to tell me about that much earlier on.

Correction or Punishment? How to stop the guilt

Were you corrected as a child? Or were you punished? Did you know there is a world of difference between the two?

My mother punished. No matter what the issue was, her reaction was to punish and she seldom corrected. My father, on the other hand, corrected and only rarely punished. Was it any surprise that I preferred him over her?

It can be difficult to tell one from the other sometimes…and to further complicate matters, some people mask punishing, critical behaviour as correction. If your mother says “The fork goes on the left, dear,” in a tone of voice that is merely informative, she is correcting; when she says “How many times have I told you that the fork goes on the left? What is the matter with you that you can’t seem to remember that one simple fact?” she is being punitive.

As we grow up, we internalize the things we learn from our parents. This is a normal process. We absorb their values, often their viewpoints, and frequently their beliefs and attitudes. Depending on who your parents are, what they are like, and how they view you, this can be a good thing…and it can also be devastatingly unhealthy. As children, however, we seldom have the acumen to determine what of our parents’ legacy is healthy and what is not and, all too often, we just absorb it all.

Interestingly, we may have a conscious awareness of one or both of our parents being emotionally unhealthy and consciously reject their values. “I’ll never treat my kids that way!” or “I do the opposite of what my mother did!” are things I read regularly, always said with pride and confidence that they have broken the cycle and are providing their children with a healthier legacy. But have they broken they cycle or have they just put their own spin on it? Are they providing their children with a healthier legacy or are they simply providing a differently dysfunctional life?

First of all, it you choose to do something that is the opposite of what someone else is doing and you make that choice because it is the opposite of the other person, you are not taking the independent stand you think you are. That other person is controlling you just as surely as if she browbeat you into following her lead. To make a truly independent choice you must analyse the behaviour you wish to avoid as well as the behaviour you are contemplating as a substitute and come up with an honest assessment of both, then choose the healthiest option or combination of options. If your mother maintained rigid control over your time, your activities, your comings and goings and you decide, as a mother, your children will be given complete freedom, you are being controlled by your mother just as surely as if you were duplicating her household rules. Why? Because your decision wasn’t made on the basis of what is best for your children, what each of them need individually, and the knowledge that children need limits and boundaries, it is based on you and your feelings about your mother. A decision to be like your mother or unlike her is still based on her and her behaviour, not on you and who and what you want to make of your life.

This an important thing to bear in mind because, as we internalize our parents’ values, they become a part of our own values and beliefs. Guilt comes about when we believe we have done something wrong. If we accept the values of other people rather than do the emotional and intellectual work of creating our own, then we do something that is contrary to the values of those other people, we feel guilty even if we really have done nothing wrong. Guilt is a punishment we give ourselves for doing something we have been taught to believe is wrong, even if the behaviour we feel guilty about is, objectively speaking, not wrong at all and may be, in fact, a good, healthy behaviour.

I seldom feel guilt. That may sound like a very narcissistic thing to say because narcissists are notorious for not feeling guilt, but they manage that by rationalizing or justifying their behaviour, by blaming others, by not taking responsibility for their misdeeds. I seldom feel guilt because I have spent a lot of time thinking about and sorting out the many mixed messages I got from the Ns in my life and comparing them to healthier attitudes from other sources and then choosing my beliefs. Along the way I gave up religion and embraced humanism, I gave up believing other people should behave according to my values and began to open myself to the idea that others have the same right of choice and self-determination that I embraced, even if their outcome is anathema to me.

Along the way to this, I discovered something: when not paying attention to my thoughts, I can make scathingly negative judgments of other people…something I absorbed from my mother. And most of the time these judgments are very shallow…based on a person’s looks or dress, for example. I believe it is wrong of me to engage in these judgments, and so when I catch myself doing it…

Do I punish myself with guilt? Absolutely not. Guilt is unequivocally unproductive. It doesn’t stop me from doing it again, it doesn’t teach me anything, it has no positive value in my life whatsoever. What do I do? I do not punish myself, I correct myself. I did it this morning, as I stepped into the shower. I had been reading an article about Kesha, who had recently had a lawsuit decided against her and in favour of a man who she claims raped and coerced her with respect to a recording contract. My initial reaction to this was to think something unkind, based on how she presents herself professionally (“slut chic”). But before the thought was fully formed my conscious mind stepped in with “That’s an unkind thought about someone you don’t know. You’ve decided you aren’t going to do that anymore.”

Did I feel ashamed of myself? Nope. I know where this comes from…I learned it from my mother. I also know that I am taking steps to fix it: each time I catch myself doing it, I stop myself and remind myself that this is not the person I want to be. Rather than be ashamed of my occasional relapses, I feel a sense of pride in my achievements, in my ability to stop myself from cruelly judging the character of a person by their physical appearance, and the fact that I am catching myself earlier and earlier in the “train-of-ugly-thought” each time.

The important thing to take away from this is that when I punished myself with guilt, I did not improve. I did something bad, I punished myself, it was over. Correction, by contrast, requires more than that: it requires action that leads to improvement. I catch myself doing something I believe is wrong, I stop myself. I remind myself to not do this thing, it doesn’t lead to who I want to be. If it has gone so far that I have actually hurt someone with my behaviour or words, I make a sincere apology and part of my amends is the self-correction…the on-going effort to rid myself of the behaviour. Guilt does nothing but punish and once you feel sufficiently punished, you are free to re-offend. Correction demands a change in attitude, in belief, and in behaviour.

So how do you bring an end to your guilt? It is important to realize there are two kinds of guilt: warranted and unwarranted. The second type comes from adopting the beliefs of other people and it leads to feelings of guilt even when you have done nothing wrong. You stop this kind of guilt by taking the time and making the effort to analyse your feeling of guilt and tracing it back to the source. When you find the source is a belief that someone gave you rather than a belief you have freely chosen for yourself, then you choose a new belief to substitute for the old one. If you later find yourself feeling guilty over the same issue, then you correct yourself “I no longer believe that I am a bad daughter because I do not drop everything and run when my mother calls. I know now that as an independent adult I have the right to choose when I see my mother and she has no rights over me or my time. She is the person in the wrong, not me.”

The first type of guilt, warranted, comes when you have violated you own values and ethics. Depending on what you have done, it may require an apology to another person, and making that apology, whether it is accepted or not, will help relieve your guilt. But to be free of it, you must correct yourself…especially if guilt is refusing to depart…reminding yourself that guilt is unproductive, that only by taking corrective action can you change yourself so that such an event does not occur again.

Kesha has no idea that I was thinking unkind thoughts about her this morning but I know I was and I won’t be doing it again. I know I might catch myself thinking unkind things about someone in the supermarket based on her hair or the shortness of her skirt or the tightness of her pants…but I know that today I catch myself only a few seconds into the thought and a couple of years ago I wouldn’t even realize I was doing it until I contemplated saying something to my husband and realized his response would be “Meow!”

So I am proud of my progress and look forward to the day that such thoughts are rejected by my mind before they even reach my consciousness. Correction ultimately fixes things. Punishment by guilt does not.