CHAPTER EIGHT
Phillip
“Damn it,” she says.
“Why are you being like this?” I ask. “Just a second ago, you agreed and now—” I stop when she holds up a hand.
“Daddy, I’m not being rebellious right now,” she says.
“Then what was the damn it for, little girl?”
She looks a little embarrassed and says, “You spanking me really turns me on. I don’t think it would be a good punishment. I… The damn it was because I really want the spanking but if I’m really going to do this, I need to be honest with you.”
“So, you said that because you want a spanking and you’re not going to get it?” She nods and I look at her for a moment and then say, “I’m proud of you.”
She looks a little bashful as she says, “Thank you, Daddy.”
“But now we’re going to have to figure out a punishment that will work for you. I mean, if you still agree it’s a good idea for you.”
“I do agree, Daddy,” she says. “But I don’t know. What should it be?”
“Tell me something you’ve been punished with before that you hated.”
She thinks for a moment and then says, “God… In school I always had to write sentences. I hated that.”
“Did it work?”
She shakes her head. “No.” I sigh and then she says, “Well, sometimes. I mean, it depended on what I was supposed to write. Like, in elementary school some teacher made me write I will sit quietly in class fifty times. It didn’t so anything. I must have written that a thousand times that year. The next year, though, a teacher changed it up.”
“Oh? Did you have to do it differently?”
“No, it was still lines but different words.”
“What were they.”
She says, “When I’m loud in class I make it harder for my friends to learn what they need to succeed.”
I know the answer I want when I ask, “Why do you think that worked?”
She says, “Because it wasn’t just telling me what to do. It was…” She thinks and I resist the urge to just say it. She gets to it without that, though. “It was telling me why my behavior wasn’t good. It was telling me why what I did was a bad choice.”
“Okay,” I say, “Are you willing to let me punish you when appropriate by making you write lines?”
She looks at me and for a moment I think she’ll refuse. Instead, she says, “I really don’t want to do lines, Daddy, so I think they’ll be a good way for me to learn a lesson.” I’m about to give her an assignment of lines and she adds, “And it’s like you were talking about. It’s you helping me to do the things I want to do better, to be the person I want to be and to be better at it. I won’t like it but I think I’ll like the results.”
“God,” I say. “I’m so proud of you, little girl.”
She smiles mischievously, “Proud enough that I don’t really need to write any lines right now, right?”
“Go get a notebook and a pen little girl.”
She slumps in an exaggerated way and says grumpily, “Yes, Daddy.”
She comes back with the materials and sits down. We talk for a while and settle on I’ll never hide my feelings from Daddy again because when I hide my feelings he can’t help me work through them, which hurts him and hurts me. She’s not happy about the length of the sentence and she’s not happy that she’ll be writing it one-hundred and fifty times. When I tell her to get started, though, she does.
The lines take her almost two hours, and when she’s done, she comes to me, looking ashamed. I can see tears on her cheeks. I reach forward and brush them away with my thumbs. “Little girl?”
“Oh, Daddy!” she says. “I’m so sorry. I was… just because I didn’t talk about how I felt, I almost lost you…”