My Old Man's Techniques

Earlier today, I was having one of those conversations I usually have with myself every now and then and today's conversation was about my dad.

_{Photo by Ante Hamersmit}

I had earlier seen a tiktok where a kid was being disrespectful to their parents and she only got grounded, that was when I asked myself what my dad would do to me or my siblings if he was the one we were being disrespectful to. You see, my dad has stages to his punishments.

If your mess up isn't that huge, he would do this crazy thing where he asks you to go get the cane yourself and while you're bringing it to him, he starts singing this particular native song that has really nice melody. If you weren't about to be punished, you most likely would had sang along.

And then just as you hand the cane over to him, he would continue singing while giving you strict instructions inbetween, instructions like "stretch your hand!" "If I miss it again, you will smell pepper!" and before you know it, you've received more than seven strokes of the cane, depending on how serious your offence was.

Now he mainly uses this technique back in the day for the junior boys (myself and my little brother), while for the bigger boys, he had a more dangerous method. Whenever my brother went out to places they weren't suppose to go to or stayed out late or did something they weren't suppose to do, my dad would say nothing to them and act like all is well.

He would wait until about 2am in the morning before sneaking into our room and then war world 3. My dad would flog the living hell out of them while they jump up and down all over the place, their only source of light coming from the torchlight in my dad's hand. I wonder how none of them ever got injured because having to wake up with that much force always leaves you confuse and you can't even tell where the door is.

And the crazy thing is that my dad never locks the door, he just closes it. So it's as if he's giving you the opportunity to run, you just have to locate the door first. Whenever this is happening, I and my little brother always have a safe spot where we always roll to avoid getting stumped or getting hit by a stray bullet(cane).

Thinking about all that and I just can't help but laugh even though none of it was funny back then. But one thing was for sure though, those techniques did work as many of the rubbish we were doing stopped immediately, and some of us (myself and my kid bro) didn't even try to do something stupid because of fear of graduating to the night beating class.

So my dad did achieve his aim, even though he was strict with his methods. But trust me when I say that now that I think of it, I don't really think that's a bad method, as long as it brings results.

And if you're wondering what my mom does during all of this, well there are days where she pleads with my dad on our behalf and then there are days where she just let her man show us why he's a man because she knows that she gave birth to men and they all need to be set straight every now and then.