By Rachel Louise Snyder, The New York Times, October 1, 2021
When I was a young teenager, I was uncontrollable, rebellious. My father believed in corporal punishment, sanctioned by the evangelical church. My mother, who was Jewish, died of cancer when I was 8, and I believe my father’s response to his grief was to double down on his faith: to interpret the Bible literally, to make himself the ultimate authority in our home and to try to create the world he wanted through sheer force. He cobbled together a new family — stepmother, stepsiblings and then two more children from the new marriage. Overwhelmed with change and with my own grief, I defied his every edict.
We were kerosene and matches. Once, he splintered my mother’s sorority paddle over me. Another time, he punched me up and down my thighs, leaving me bruised from knee to hip and limping for days. My response was to punch back. To kick, to scream. I pulled a fishing knife on him. I threw a heavy landline phone at him. I swore. I ran away.
Researchers would call my brand of violence “retaliatory,” my father’s “situational.” It was occasional and sporadic; it never contained the potential to turn deadly. Still, neither of us — though especially him as the adult — felt we had anywhere to go for assistance. It never occurred to me to call the police, and the church merely parroted the biblical imperative for children to obey their parents. We had nowhere to turn, no one to help us navigate our blistering rage. How might decades of conflict and estrangement have gone differently if he’d had someone to call, someone whom he could ask for help?
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