Spare the thappad… and you spoil the child

I was born the year Stalin died.

And my father was convinced I had inherited his soul.


So, whereas this was presumably good news for Stalin’s soul, it was bad news for my kids. No, I did not send them to the Gulag, however tempting it was at times. (It’s their parents who are doing hard labor to afford the tuition for law school and grad school).


Now prior to motherhood, I seemed to be the apple of my father’s eye. I could do no wrong. He beamed when he saw me, bragged about me when he didn’t, (Indian parents are not known to praise kids within earshot)… and then I became a mother... or Dictator Incarnate (as he saw it). No! No! No! is all he heard me shouting at the kids. Every visit to our house just underscored his sentiment that I had turned into a tyrant, imposing absolute rule and raising them with too much discipline.


Show me an Indian American mother (IAM for short) who has not called her offspring ‘eediot’ (or ‘stoopid fool’) and has not placed a well-deserved smack on his/her derrière, and I will show you someone who has the common sense to lie about it and do it behind closed doors.


Oh, we IAMs are smart!!! Give us some credit. Of course, we are not going to give them a good thappad in plain sight of someone who would use their iPhone to take a picture and then call Social Services. When the brats scream and throw a tantrum in {insert store}, we take them by the hand firmly and tell them in {insert Indian language} that if they didn’t stop it right that instant, thaher ja! they were they were going to get a tight smack when we got home. The smile on our faces while we are enacting this charade routinely brings nods of approval from bystanders, who imagine an ideal world, in which all parents have the same patience as these immigrant mothers.


Both my kids insist that ‘thappad’ was the first Gujarati word they learned. (It may have been ‘jhapad’ actually). On a visit to India, my son mistakenly asked his grandmother for a thappad, instead of a pappad. The shocked look on my mother-in-law’s face prompted me to play innocent. It was laughed off and attributed to her approaching loss of hearing. 


I must admit, however, that vacationing in India gives one plenty of opportunities to dole out the occasional thappad. The annual two-week vacations in the motherland turned them into wild junglees, negating all the years of positive conditioning, and leading me to implement severe behavior modifications upon our return (can you tell I work in Special Ed?). Between the grandparents and a horde of doting relatives, both the kids were also given free reign of the apartment, the servants, a car and driver and a carte blanche to do what they wished…but best of all, the phone number of Smokin’ Joes Pizza and Baskin Robbins (would you believe they deliver?). It was their idea of Utopia, made especially enjoyable, because their mother left them (almost every day) to go shop like a maniac, lunch at Swatis and dine at the club with her friends.


We had a No Lying policy in our house – which was not restricted to the kids. I would therefore, be upfront and tell my son, who was in throes of the Terrible Twos that I was, in fact, totally lying when I said we were going to the park. Sobbing up a storm, he would insist on the truth and I would shout (à la Jack Nicholson) “You can’t handle the truth!” (I leave it to the reader to choose what was worse: the insanity mother or the inanity of the son).


I never did any of that “Wait till your father gets home!” business. In fact, it was preferable to punish them before their father came home, who often fell in with the opposing counsel on the Stalin theory. For every No! that I barked out, they would just come back with: I will go ask Papa, he will say Yes.


And what’s with the “Go to your room!” punishment? So they can watch TV, play PSP, use the computer or text on their phone?? I don’t think so! When they got too old for the thappad, I had to think fast of an alternate, appropriate punishment. That’s when the ingenious The Wall idea was born. It was our very own personal Wailing Wall, for the many tears that were shed facing it. The idea is fairly simple. Just make the kid stand and stare at the wall. And do nothing. You may think this is not so bad. I urge all mothers, IAMs or not, to try it. It drives the kid absolutely crazy. Five minutes of staring at a white wall (a painted one if you have been following too much HGTV) and the kid starts to fidget, stand on one foot and then the next, twitch restlessly, cry, and then swear never to do anything bad…until they forget and it’s back to the wall.


So, I implore you, do not spare the thappads and spoil the child. And maybe you will be spared of interrupting your daily program to visit your offspring in Juvi Hall.


And…a message for the soul of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin: you are in good company. My father also referred to my sisters as Hitler and Mussolini.


Glossary:
thappad: smack
jhapad: smack (a little stronger)
thaher ja! just your wait!
pappad: thin, crispy flatbread (also called pappadum)
junglee: wild (from 'jungle' - duh!)