This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You

and other lies our parents told us

TW: child abuse

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This hurts me more than it hurts you. Some friends who were spanked as children tell me that their parents seemed grieved as they hit their small children. The parents would say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” as if the child was supposed to feel bad for the person hitting them. The parent might cry, inviting sympathy from the child they had just abused.

My parents never bothered with that. Perhaps they didn’t enjoy beating their children, but they seemed to perform their discipline without compunction. Our church’s pastor preached from Hebrews 12 that God's love for us is expressed through chastening. “Every legitimate son is chastened as an expression of God's love for us,” he said, ensuring that parents viewed their abusive behavior as an act of love.

I have to spank you because I love you. That was the phrase common in our household. Love meant breaking the will of a vulnerable child. Love meant impossible expectations, physical abuse, and gaslighting. 

There was no escape, even when I pleaded with a bystander, “Please, I don’t want to go back home. Please keep me here. They have too many rules.” I have no memory of this cry for help, but the woman recalls it vividly. How many people did I beg for help, only to be ignored? How many people watched when I was dragged out of the church service to Pastor Mike Tomford’s office for “correction”?

The bystander confessed decades later, “You and your brother were spanked what seemed like every few minutes. I had never seen anything like it.” I wanted to shake her. Why didn’t you help? Why didn’t you speak up for me? Why did you stand by and let our parents beat us again and again and again?”

The door to Mike Tomford’s office; my mother’s favorite place to spank us.

Growing up, our house overflowed with musical instruments—piano, guitar, cello, the odd assortment of tambourines, maracas, and drumsticks. 

Drumsticks, but no drums. 

Those drumsticks never lay down a beat for music. The only beat they set was a sharp 3/4 time signature on our bodies.

The drumsticks sat on the sofa arm during church practice. Our parents wanted us to perform exuberant worship in church and they didn’t leave that to chance. Training was required. As our senior pastor’s wife recommended on a podcast two decades later:

“One thing to train [children] in is how to enter the church, how to be orderly and respect the church and love the church and think about the church building itself and then the people that you're going to meet there and just learning how to love that.”

Training for church meant that we might put on a worship tape or sing acapella under my mother’s watchful eye. Singing was generally easy because it was participatory; learning to sit still during sermons was harder. Either way, failure to perform adequate enthusiasm for church meant the drumstick came into play. 

I wonder if church visitors would have stayed if they knew that the children raising their hands and worshiping passionately had simply learned to perform under threat of physical violence. Our performance lured new church members who wanted to know the secret to making their children worship God wholeheartedly. 

The secret was pain.