Just a dream some of us had?

KDPierre, you raise some interesting points and pose some interesting questions. My father was indeed in a tough situation--made all the more difficult because a relative of my mother told me I didn't have to obey him. I didn't want to obey him anyway and the fact that an adult told me I didn't have to obey him made matters worse--for everyone involved, me included. That relative wasn't totally together, my father had no people sense, and I was stubborn. So I'm not surprised that the situation devolved. The situation was so bad given the interference that I think that even if my father had all the people sense in the world, a successful outcome was still far from guaranteed. I would like to point out that when my mother spanked me, I was much younger. I was a teenager when this episode occurred with my father. I recognize he was desperate. I can tell you though that things he did didn't make our relationship any easier. He had a chip on his shoulder--not just with me but with people in general. He thought the entire world was against him. And this feeling persisted after I left home. He would spend hours telling you how people wronged him. His chip on his shoulder rubbed me the wrong way. I should have just ignored it; instead, I reacted in a sub-optimal way to it and my reaction exacerbated our already bad relationship.

Had he not tried to gain control would my behavior have improved? With no other solution, the answer is "No." Yet he was the adult and he was in a position to defuse the situation--or to prevent the situation from escalating to the point where it was. But he didn't. So, as Alef said, he put the future of the family on the shoulders of a kid. That is absurd.

You asked if the day were to be lived over, what should have happened instead. Given his limited social skill set and given my immaturity at the time, I think the outcome was inevitable. If he didn't have a chip on his shoulder--which made him think I was just one more person--among a long list of people--who disliked him, he might have been able to look at this more clearly and try to extricate himself from the immediate crisis without threatening to tear the family apart. Now, even paranoid people may have real enemies. And there is no question that that relative of my mother had it in for him and was doing everything he could to drive a wedge between me and my father, which would have made a successful outcome problematic even if my father had it all together.

It seems to me that your mother bore some responsibility too, if a relative of hers was deliberately undercutting your father's parental authority over you, yet she apparently didn't confront him over his destructive meddling within her nuclear family.

If the situation were a Library fantasy, your mother likely would've thrashed her relative's bare behind, in front of yourself and your father, after you'd been paternally strapped. In the real world, she could have at least informed the guy, likewise in front of you and your father, that he was expected to apologize for interfering with her immediate family's child-rearing matters, agree to avoid doing so again and reverse his assertion about your father having no authority over you. (If that relative had refused your mother's demands, arguably all contact with him--by yourself and her--should've been withdrawn, at least as much as possible.)

In this situation, there was obviously plenty of blame to go around. Given your father's lack of social-interaction ability, perhaps your mother should have continued to be your primary disciplinarian during your teenage years, but she'd seemingly stopped performing that role, even though you clearly still needed more externally-imposed structure in your life.

Of course, dealing with a stubborn teenager can be quite challenging--possibly your mother was afraid of ruining her maternal relationship with you by imposing discipline, so she tried being empathetic and "reasonable" instead.

It's certainly true that, contrary to what occurs in much of spanking-oriented literature, many teenagers would (and do) feel angry and resentful at being parentally punished (corporally or otherwise), at least while it's happening to them, whether they truly deserve it or not... --C.K.

My mother's relative--who was in fact her own father--had made her life miserable and tried to break up her marriage to my father. Apparently, from what I was told, my grandfather was very controlling of her before she ever married my father in the first place. My mother and father did not have a harmonious marriage and much of the discord had nothing to do with me. My mother stayed with my father because he provided some degree of security as far as I could tell. I don't remember her--nor can I imagine her--ever confronting her father to the point of giving him an ultimatum that he either stops interfering or his contact with us is severed. I do remember arguments over the telephone but I only heard one side of the conversation--that of my mother. Given my grandfather's volatile personality, I can't imagine he would ever have apologized.