| Subject: Re: Was every childhood problem solved with the bottom?LOL |
Author:
Lacey
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Date Posted: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 12:15: am
In reply to:
Summer
's message, "Was every childhood problem solved with the bottom?LOL" on Monday, March 07, 2011, 08:23: am
Like others here, I am also a child of the '60s and '70s, and Summer's observation rings true with me as well. It's strange--we have little problem today with adolescent and even pre-adolescent girls' wearing sweat pants with slogans embossed right on the derriere, or low-cut jeans that reveal far too much when they kneel down or bend over, yet we view the kind of exposure of the bottom, in private, for medical procedures or family discipline, that was once routinely accepted as part of growing up as taboo. The world in which I was raised was altogether different. At home, when we were sick, rectal temps were the norm through the age of 8-9, and well into high school, if we were running a high fever, or if my mother was simply skeptical of the reading on the oral thermometer, we were not thought too old to have our temperatures checked or double-checked in our bottoms. Nor, as far as I can recall, was the attitude in my pediatrician's office all that different. I was 13 the last time my temperature was taken rectally at the doctor's. The reason? I was running a fever of around 102--high perhaps, but not dangerously so--and was very sluggish. Today, that would be thought insane, but in the early '70s, at least in the South, it wasn't. The same goes for shots in the bottom. Again, when I was growing up, if you were diagnosed with strep throat, you were initially prescribed an oral dose of penicillin, but at the first sign of relapse it was straight to a shot in your rear end, no questions asked. I remember the first time my eight-year-old daughter had a case of strep that didn't respond to an oral antibiotic (this was around fifteen years ago), her pediatrician called to tell me the result of the second test. I said something like, "Oh, poor Abby, she's not going to like it when I tell what has to happen now," and there was this pause on the phone. "I'm sorry?" the doctor said, and I stammered in response, "Well, um, I just thought--I mean, when I was young, whenever we had a relapse of strep, it was a shot in the you know where," and then he laughed a bit, and replied, "Ah, OK, I get it, but, no, that's rarely done anymore, we'll just give another oral antibiotic a try." As for spankings, these were far from a commonplace in my house growing up--and my parents, unlike the folks of some of my friends, did not believe in hitting us with implements of any kind. But through our teen years, each of us--my two younger sisters and me--could expect more than just a grounding if we misbehaved egregiously. I was 16 the last time I felt the awful sting of my mother's spanking hand on my bare bottom. I had gone with friends to a party at the house of a friend whose parents were away after being warned never to do such a thing. My parents found out through back channels that I had disobeyed them and were, predictably, livid. My mother told me to go to my room, and that she would be up in a few minutes to "deal" with me, and deal with me she did, by taking me over her lap, pulling down both my pajama pants and panties, and giving me the hardest spanking of my life. I was terribly ashamed, of course, but by no means astounded, because, again, it wasn't considered abusive in my world for a mother to punish her teenage daughter in this way, so long as it was done sparingly and privately--and it was. But it was only when I turned 18 and went to college that I knew my spanking days were behind me.
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