Day 75 of 100

“You aren’t my father!”

My dad was a yeller. I know because I got yelled at a lot. I don’t think I was a particularly bad kid, but I certainly got into my fair share of trouble.

When I was in college, I sat down with my dad and walked through all the times I remembered getting spanked. Once I swore I got spanked for being in the bath for too long.

“Micah,” he explained, “when I came into the bathroom three hours after you were supposed to get out of the bath, you were stark naked and up to your elbows in the back of the toilet.”

“Huh. I’d have spanked me too.”

My sisters are seven and nine years younger than me. It meant when I was ten-ish I was old enough to babysit.

[side note, I am Gen X. All the memes on Tik Tok about Gen X are true. We were the generation that was left to our own devices, and left alone for long periods of time. There were no cell phones. There was no internet. There was just the neighborhood.]

One time when I was watching my sisters, I was yelling at my middle sister about something. She started to cry and screamed “You are not my father!”

I paused. I realized that I really didn’t like to be yelled at, and therefore I was never going to yell. And I stopped. From that moment forward I stopped raising my voice in anger.

I often think how hard it had to be to be my parents. My dad was 19 when I was born; my mom 21. By the time my dad was 30, there were three kids. When I was a kid my parent’s combined salary was $1,025 a month. I just can’t imagine building a family on that.

It doesn’t mean that I agree with how I was disciplined growing up. I just know I want to be different. I still get angry, because I do. I just try to speak with purpose and remember it is always better to understand than be understood.