Before giving birth to Ayla, I was well aware of some of the unpleasant aspects of parenthood—the explosive poops, the pre-dawn cries for milk, the tantrums and the impossibility of adult conversation in fragments longer than 90 seconds. But the violence—nobody mentioned that.
I’m not talking about being beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat. But violence is a spectrum. Yes, Ayla’s “violence” towards myself and others is mild in comparison to a stabbing. But even still, I was taken aback when my child began exploring her physical strength and the idea of cause-and-effect by hitting, biting and pinching. I know parents who have been punched by their child; a mom friend of mine had to endure months of painful hair-pulling before that phase finally passed.
The truth is most of us are unfamiliar with physical aggressiveness before having children. The closest I’ve come to violence in recent decades is an uncomfortable shove on the subway during my morning commute. Thankfully, I’ve never been mugged and or been in a physically abusive relationship.
That’s why I found myself so taken aback when Ayla looked me in the eye and bit down on my thumb as hard as she could. I remember tears springing to my eyes; I recall feeling emotionally wounded too, as though I had been wronged.
After the biting era came the pinching phase. Ayla loved to pinch every inch of my torso while nursing. I’ll never forget an evening when I endured 45 minutes of pinching before Ayla fell asleep. Afterwards, I hobbled over to the bathroom and found small bruises on my neck and arms, where Ayla’s fingers had mastered the pincer grip. But during all of these violent phases, I never had the inclination to bite or pinch Ayla in return.
But when the hitting era began, I surprised myself. Suddenly, I found my body acting out the Old Testament phrase, “An eye for an eye…”
A few months ago, I was kneeling on the floor clearing up what looked like a volcanic eruption of toys. I had my back turned to Ayla; I thought she was off dumping over bins of whatever I had just neatened up. Then, out of the blue, I felt a dull thud on my head. I turned around and found Ayla standing before me, wielding a plastic truck. “Ow!” I said. Then Ayla looked me in the eye and landed a hard blow just above my forehead.
I could feel my cheeks flush. But when I looked down, I saw that my hand was raised in the air, poised just so, ready to return the strike. I can’t remember the last time I raised my hand, or struck, another human being. Even more confusing was that I was ready to hit my own flesh-and-blood, my darling child. “Where did this response come from?” I wondered. It is merely a natural part of our evolution to hit and punch and bite? Is violence something to explore with our children or something to teach them to suppress? Is it possible to completely eradicate the desire to hit, or hit back, from human beings?
I have, on occasion, whacked Ayla back—usually gently, and with no intention to inflict harm. And not only does it feel wrong—it never works. Unless I put an end to it, we’re prone to re-enact an old Laurel and Hardy sketch whereby each man boinks each other on the head in endless succession, without any resolution.
As I gazed upon my trembling, upraised hand, I wanted an answer. I wanted to know if it was a symptom of suppressed anger in my life or the result of too many hours spent indoors, engaged in mental rather than physical labor. I wanted to know why Ayla hits me, and why I feel the need to hit her back.
A friend of mine recently recommended the book, The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. It was a page-turner and an eye-opener. I would be doing a tremendous injustice by trying to describe its insightful contents in a sentence or two. You should all just read the entire book. What I can safely say is that the book made me wonder whether post-modern society (cars, competition, man-made environments) are evoking aggression in parents and children.
The best answer I’ve come up with is that Ayla and I are enacting an ancient script in which we responded to threats to our survival with violence. But in so short a time, we humans have thrown away that script and replaced it with mass-scale slaughterhouses and gated communities. We can scarcely remember the time when we hunted without a gun—a time when we needed to rely on our physical strength and agility to bring home the bacon. How did we manage to shift from being afraid of so much to making everything so afraid of us?
Yesterday, Ayla picked up plastic farm animal and raised it above her head. Then she took a few menacing steps towards me. Instinctively, I closed my eyes and ducked, sure that I was about to be hit. But when I opened my eyes, Ayla’s arms were wrapped around me, and her toy penguin was safely nestled in crook of my arm. Perhaps she and I are both realizing that there is nothing to fear, and are now ready to lay down our arms.
Comments