To wonder why my parents are denying they ever smacked me?

[LilMagpie]

I’m so confused. My parents are fairly stereotypical boomers and so I had a typical 80s/90s upbringing where we (my brother and I) were smacked if we were ever out of line. I’m not talking daily beatings but I have very vivid memories of it. I can recall at least 4 or 5 specific occasions but if I had to guess I’d say it happened once or twice a month between the ages of 4-10. I certainly lived in fear of it. The phrase “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” was thrown around a lot in our house. I know this paints my parents in a bad light, but I am still close to them in spite of this and have a good relationship with them as in other ways they were and are very wonderful and I do understand it was a different time and they thought they were doing the right thing at the time.

I was talking with them the other day and the topic came up and they said
“oh, you were such a well-behaved child, we never once had to smack you…”
and I was like… huh??? What do you mean? You definitely did! And they both seemed genuinely confused and started backing each other up saying “no! We had to occasionally smack your brother but never you!” And I kept saying “but I remember it! I can still remember the sting on the back of my legs at the supermarket one time!” And both are absolutely adamant that they didn’t, to the point they were both getting annoyed that I was accusing them that they did.

So do they just genuinely not remember? Or are they gaslighting me? But why would they admit to hitting my brother and not me??
I just felt frustrated by the whole conversation, it felt like it really invalidated a big part of my childhood where I lived in fear of misbehaving. I left it at “well I can’t understand why anyone would hit their kids, the thought of hurting mine makes me feels physically sick” and dropped the conversation but it was awkward for a while after.

Weird then that you now happily leave your children in sole care of people like this.

Oh and given you think they’re lying…. Aren’t you worried about what they lie to you about when your children are under their care?

I am literally living this right now with two 5 year olds and yes, it is incredibly hard and there have been parenting moments I have not been proud of. I do understand my parents more and hold no resentment towards them but I can wholeheartedly say that I have never - not even once - come close to hitting my kids. That is something I simply cannot wrap my head around even though logically I understand it was a different time and they were just trying to raise me to be a decent adult.

It probably is related.

My mother maintained throughout her life that smacking me never did me any harm. Shes one who the 1 smack on the legs per word she spoke. - it did harm me the. and it has and I’m now 53. She’s dead having had a terrible last few years. Reap what you sow

I also don’t let my parents look after my children. They only see them when I, my DH or my siblings (who remember the same childhood) are there.

@redskydelight It can be tricky as there’s a couple of things that DD (20) has said that I handled a certain way which upset her- and I genuinely recall them differently!

But, we’ve talked and I’ve said that I’m sorry if I mishandled those situations and that I certainly didn’t mean to upset her in any way.

Parents muck things up all the time even when we don’t mean to. I can see some of my friends doing it and I’m sure they think the same about my parenting sometimes.

I smacked my older children, on the back of the hand, never hard or leaving a mark. But when I had my youngest over 10 years after them, I never smacked him at all.

Changes in social attitudes had a massive effect; we all like to think that we're morally upstanding and would always do "the right thing", but that can shift along with what society deems right and wrong shifts.

How do I reconcile the fact that I smacked my older children and didn't smack my youngest? I did what was acceptable at the time, and my motivation was never to harm them (and they weren't harmed). If i had harmed them, then I do think I should have to answer to that.

Can’t believe you ever see them tbh let alone with your children

But surely the harm is often psychological?

I think perhaps they genuinely don’t remember as it wasn’t a big deal them at the time.

I know exactly what you mean though. My mum seems utterly amazed sometimes when I mention a childhood memory, and will often respond with “you don’t remember that” even though I’ve just described it in detail. I think it’s because she doesn’t remember the details, then she thinks it’s not possible for someone who was a child at the time to remember 🤷🏼‍♀️ It’s really annoying sometime though. Especially when she says that couldn’t possibly have happened!

It’s also possible for people to have genuinely different memories of the same event. The Mandela effect is an example of this.

My DM doesn’t deny that she smacked my siblings and me when we were growing up. But she acts like it was a very rare thing and that we were really no trouble. I end up wondering why, if that was true, was I smacked as often as I was? And it was a lot more than twice a month.

The other thing she does is focus on the fact that our F smacked us too hard and that she told him so. I don’t recall her ever saying this to him then. (He was abusive in much worse ways than this; just maybe if she had stood up to him about the smacking, my DSis and I might have said something to her about what else was going on.)

I don’t challenge her as she blames herself for not protecting us from our F. She also accepts that the smacking was wrong, so that part can stay in the past as far as I’m concerned.

It is easy to forget over the years.
I was smacked 80's DC, not often but enough to accept that the threat was real.
My parents, now dead, wouldn't have seen themselves as awful, they would use their childhood as a comparison, they were beaten at home and in school, by older relatives too, when we were smacked it was learned behaviour from them, we could always see they were sad for doing it. No hard feelings from me.

Stop trying to minimise the beatings, hair-pullings, slapped faces, bruised, objects thrown at us when mum was watching crossroads and was too lazy to get up. Oh, and the incessant wooden spoon. And we were bloody good kids

And like PP have said: blaming us for the brief shame you felt when we cried "or I'll give you something to cry about"

And don't excuse it by being tired or poor either. Or trying to pretend it's ok because you excelled at other aspects of your parenting.

It happened. You might have put it from your mind, but we were there. There's nothing incorrect about our memories

It’s odd, I recently had a conversation with my Dad and Step-mum as they were selling the house they have lived in since they got married when I was 12. My step-mum made a comment about how they had such lovely memories of family time in the house. All I was thinking was that she had a very different experience to me who spent most of my teenage years hiding in my bedroom.
its like they conveniently forget unpalatable memories.

As they admit smacking your brother they probably genuinely don't remember. I don't remember ever telling off my eldest, I just remember him being such a perfectly behaved child from birth. I do remember telling off the second who had some huge tantrums as a toddler. I am sure I must have told my eldest off, there must be times it happened when he was a toddler as they all push boundaries but I don't remember doing it.

I think all memory is inaccurate. They might be embarrassed and have tried to put it out of their minds so hard that they've totally succeeded; equally, it may well be that you weren't smacked as often as you remember. We magnify certain things and diminish others. There's no way of getting to the truth of things, so I'd just accept that everyone remembers it differently and almost certainly none of you have it right.

"The past is still the past, the bridge to nowhere."

@QuantumPanic I don’t think this is helpful. The OP knows she was hit as a child, she doesn’t need to start doubting the validity of her memories. It’s important to understand the past to understand ourselves, without this history tends to repeat.

My mum has such rose tinted glasses about the past. I don’t think it’s gas lighting. I think she genuinely believes her version of events.

It’s for lots of things that don’t make her look bad. For example, her much younger cousin has young children and she asked my mum what she did when me and my sister fought. My mum replied that we never fought. My mum’s cousin can probably remember me and my sister fighting but she never said anything 😂
There’s not much you can do. It’s frustrating sometimes but that’s how some people are. We probably all misremember to some degree.

I reckon they are gaslighting you. They think you're more likely to do things for them in old age than your brother. You're easier to manipulate. I have a horrible dm though who would absolutely do this.

Mine deny it too.
They definitely did.
My brother and I remember the hitting and the awful arguments.
I don’t know what the solution is.
I love them but don’t see a great deal of my parents.

@Plastictreees Idk, I think it is helpful to consider that we're not arbiters of the truth and that therefore someone disagreeing with us isn't denying 'the truth'. I was belted/beaten regularly as a child, but how regularly is a question that's impossible to answer. Chances are it was probably a lot less often than I think.

The OP knows she was hit. The frequency doesn’t really matter, I agree that it’s not helpful to try to pin this down as she may never know. But I think it’s important to be able to trust and validate your own feelings, as often parents won’t do this. Sorry to hear about what you went through.

I did mean "harm" as both psychological or physical harm.

They honestly truly forgot (not saying it was right!). As a little girl I told my mom, ‘you are my best friend’ She turned around and said, “I a Not your friend, I am your mother”. When I told her years later after I was an adult she couldn’t believe it! Then she felt really bad about it. I think some things were normalized back then but then they learned that wasn’t the way and ‘forget’ because it’s too painful to remember for them.

Ah, I see - I misunderstood what you were getting at. I agree with you about trusting your own feelings and it wasn't my intention to minimise OPs.