If you had a child who had done something very wrong, such as stealing, how would you punish them?

In going through my 300 question writing prompt book, this question took me back to a time when my son was 6 years of age.

I had promised myself that I would write more this year, to write at least something, whether it be on my WIP, or something of a journalistic nature, I would write and so, you poor buggers are the ones who are having to suffer through reading the drivel (if you so choose).

I was raised old school, I had a military Dad and a mother who was born in the 50's. They were married in 73', with my Dad in his combat fatigues and my mother all pregnant with me. She wore a mini skirt of all things.

Discipline in our household was being strapped with a leather belt, car v-belts, or fan belts or something else. So I learned real fast to not mouth my Dad off, nor get caught if I was going to be bad.

I turned out okay, albeit a bit of damaged self esteem. This of course caused me to go 180 degrees the opposite direction from 'beat your kid styles of discipline', I aimed to reason, use logic, teach, guide. Yet, nothing quite prepared me for the time when the store clerk of the Macs' who I knew quite well had told me my son had pinched a chocolate bar.

Well that next day, I marched his little 6 year old keester back to that store, and had him apologize for stealing, and pay the money back for the bar. I remember his cloudy little face, and I thought, man I got this parenting thing down pat. I didn't spank, I didn't keep nagging, I simply used logic, reason and guidance.

Well fast forward, this boy is now a teenager. He's still half good, not all that bad. I think I can see glimpses of the young man he will come to be and I'm proud. Until I find $20 missing from my wallet. My last $20, the only money we have for the remainder of the month, and its gone. I know he's taken it. So while he sleeps on the couch, I go through his wallet, and I find my $20 in it.

Well I slapped that little fecker right on the damn forehead. All the guidance, all the logic and the teaching I had hoped to do just went right out that window. He woke up, tried to say he hadn't took it, and I nearly smacked him again I was so ticked. Reason had returned, and he ended up confessing, that yes, he had in fact took it. I was so disappointed, because had he asked, I would have told him I couldn't give it.

However, it was the sneaky, underhanded way he went about getting it that really annoyed me.

Fast forward to his late teens, just a few days before his 18th birthday. I get a call from the Remand Centre, he had been thrown in jail as an accomplice to an armed robbery, and I wondered for that brief second if that I had whooped his ass like my Dad had mine, whether we'd even be having this conversation.

The crown wanted 4 years on a first offense, but I didn't think he was that far gone, I thought that a lot of his involvement with this was due to a misplaced sense of loyalty and so we found a decent lawyer, he confessed his part of the involvement instead of having it go to trial and was sentenced 2 years less a day in medium security prison. It wasn't perfect, but at least it wasn't 4 years. I have always been a firm believer that if you're gonna do the crime, you will also do the time.

He served his 2 years, and I watched this boy become a man in jail, molded by the horrors he heard and saw behind those bars. I feared that at one point we may lose him to an evil version of who he could have been. It was like watching a petty car thief go in and learn how to become a murderer. I visited, often driving in the wee hours of the morning for nearly 5 hours to go and see him for maybe an hour.

I was scared, he was scared, and yet he couldn't show it because of the place he was in. On the day I finally picked him up, I think there was a collective sigh of relief in the car we had all piled into, his sisters, myself, driving back from what had been 2 long years of hell for all of us.

He suffered in ways that I couldn't begin to imagine, and PTSD became his new way of life. I still wonder at times, if I had been more heavy handed if we could have avoided this more brutal life lesson.

It reminds me of this quote:

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” ― C.S. Lewis

It's been several years since my son was released from prison, yet he hasn't gone back. That's got to count for something right?

We've moved on from that time, but some of us still remain in that prison and I think that's a worse punishment than I could have ever thought to mete out.