Speaking with Children

I have thought before of writing about the topic of this entry. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it in the past because, well, it’s a topic that’s not pleasant to discuss. But I find now that I have to write about it, or cry. I am choosing to write.

I saw it happen once before, in Stephanie’s apartment. We were eating lunch, me, Sandra, Jorge, Stephanie, her boyfriend Fernando and his 4-year-old son Xahil. Xahil was fussing and didn’t want to eat. Fernando, seemingly personally offended that his son was being troublesome, started speaking low and forcefully. “You will eat that food, Xahil,” he growled. Xahil squirmed in his seat and emitted a meow-like sound, something that sounded too much like “no.” “Yes, you will!” Fernando responded raising his voice, rapidly pulling his wide leather belt out of his pants and laying it across his lap.

This immediately brought Xahil to tears.

And so ensued a half-hour battle in which Xahil wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks, while Fernando forked food into his gaping mouth and flapped the doubled-over belt with raised arm at his son when the food threatened to fall out of his mouth.

Meanwhile, the first appearance of Fernando’s belt also upset me. At first I just stared at it. Then I made wide eyes at Sandra, who was sitting across the table from me. She stopped talking, but didn’t make wide eyes back. I looked up at Stephanie who was still cooking, and she was pretending like nothing was happening. Or like she saw this every time Fernando brought Xahil over to her apartment. I didn’t even look at Jorge, who is Fernando’s best friend. I prepared for the worst. Was I going to have to witness a child be beaten in front of me, in my best friend’s house no less? I steeled myself. If that happened, I would walk out, I told myself. Maybe Stephanie allows that from her boyfriend, with his son, in her apartment, but I am not about to watch it. I kept my eyes on the belt. I expected, hoped, that Xahil would start choking or vomiting from distress. About five minutes later, the rest of us aside from Fernando and Xahil still silent, Stephanie asked, “How come nobody’s talking?” “I’m just enjoying the music,” chirped Sandra cheerily. I had forgotten there was music playing. I said loudly, “I don’t know about Xahil, but that belt sure scared me.” There, I had said it. Everyone looked at me but Fernando. “That belt makes me nervous,” I repeated, Fernando still not looking at me. No one else said anything about it, and somehow conversation returned to normal as Fernando and Xahil battled it out on one corner of the table. When Fernando had finally finished force-feeding his son, he said triumphantly to no one in particular, “Look at that, Xahil finished all of his food before everyone else.” I looked up from my plate. “The belt ate that food,” I said darkly. “It worked, didn’t it?” he rejoined curtly. Jorge said something in an attempt to reply, something that came out like a joke about belts and wasn’t accusatory toward Fernando and that I didn’t find funny.

This scene repeated itself tonight, but this time it was at my dinner table.

Fernando and Xahil came over at the end of my weekly evening English lesson with Stephanie and Sandra. We weren’t hungry enough to eat dinner since we had been snacking all through the lesson on cheese and plantain chips. So Fernando heated some milk for Xahil, who had never asked for milk, and the rest of us ate a coffee cake that I baked for the first time here last night, a new victory now that I have inherited Lauren’s gas oven/stove since she got a job at the bilingual school in Tegucigalpa. Anyhow, the power went out and we all continued munching and chatting by candlelight. Well, Sandra and I were chatting. Xahil started complaining that he couldn’t drink his milk because it was too hot. Both Fernando and Stephanie started into him. Fernando made the usual threats. “You will drink that milk, Xahil, even if I have to stuff it down your ears. You hear me?” “No stuffing anything down ears in this house!” I exclaimed lightly. “That’s only allowed outside,” I pointed out the window. “No problem,” replied Fernando, “we’ll take it outside if necessary.” “You drank milk last night, Xahil, why won’t you drink it tonight?” chimed in Stephanie, exasperated by something that I didn’t see as all that exasperating. “You’re such a clown, Xahil,” she continued. “Those dramatic faces you make are worthy of the circus.” Xahil looked hurt, not amused. Sandra defended him, “He doesn’t want to drink it because he says that someone hit him on the lip today in school and his lip hurts, isn’t that what you said earlier, Xahil?” she coaxed. He nodded. “Poooor thing,” cooed Stephanie, suddenly theatrically sarcastic. “There’s always something that hurts, isn’t there? ‘My hair hurts,’” she intoned in a high, Xahil-like voice, trying to get the rest of us adults to laugh at him by reminding us of the time when Xahil had said that, under less duress. Xahil mumbled something non sequitir about cornflakes. Already feeling jumpy from all the verbal aggression and trying to steer toward a more benign conversation, I asked, “Do you like cornflakes, Xahil?” He nodded. Stephanie pounced. “Oh, so now you need cornflakes with your milk. Just drink it!”

And so Fernando started in again with the threats. Xahil said the milk was too sour. Fernando added sugar. Xahil still wouldn’t drink it. When I say he wouldn’t drink it, I mean that he wouldn’t pick up his mug and chug it. Maybe he would have sipped it slowly, bit by bit, if we had all paid more attention to our own food and not as much attention to him. I’m really not sure what Fernando and Stephanie were expecting from him. But out came Fernando’s belt again. I noticed him slip it out of its loops and onto his lap, even though he tried to be more subtle than the last time at Stephanie’s house when I had been so obviously disapproving. But what Fernando hadn’t noticed was that my vocal disapproval masked my silent profound distress at seeing someone else, particularly a child, be threatened with physical violence. He didn’t know that once I saw the belt, I could no longer hear anything going on around me and that every muscle of my body became strung with fear.

So tonight I slowly, deliberately, shook my head at him from across the table, not saying anything so as not to disturb Sandra’s and Stephanie’s conversation going on between us. Fernando shook his head back. “Yes, Suzanne,” he said forcefully. I looked at him directly. “The belt scares me.” Lowering his head, still shaking it but no longer looking at me, he replied, “Me, too,” all the while sliding his hands up and down the belt. I saw that he was not going to have anyone tell him how or how not to discipline his child. My voice shaking ineffectually, I wobbled, “Maybe in your house, or in Stephanie’s, but not here.” All conversation had stopped. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I didn’t want to have anything else to say. In fact, I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone for the rest of the night. I stood up and abruptly cleared the empty plates from the table and walked to the sink. Fernando took the hint, but he preferred to walk out over being kicked out. He dragged Xahil out the door so fast I didn’t even see them leave before I returned to the table to clear the rest of the dishes. “Goodnight,” I called after them, my voice steady once again. Stephanie called after Fernando to wait for her, she was leaving too. She and Sandra quickly helped me clear the table of empty glasses, including the mug of unfinished milk, and we all said goodbye with the usual kisses on the cheek. I told Stephanie I was sorry. But I was only sorry to have turned our friendship into a potential source of friction between her and Fernando. I was not sorry that Fernando had left, nor sorry that I had expressed how upset I was. I felt like I was going to lose all the cheese and chips and coffee cake we had been eating for the past two hours. I felt like crying. I cried.

In our moments of anger against children, do we lack patience? Do we resent their attempts at manipulation? Do we think that our children are making fools of us and of our ability to be adults? Of our ability to control them? To control even the littlest things of this world? How can we expect our children to speak their needs and desires clearly and respectfully to us if we do not teach them by being just as expressive and respectful?