The Corner

    We all have memories from our childhood that shape who we are, but some of those memories carry more weight than others.  Today I want to talk about a spacific "punishment" my stepmother use to give me that stayed with me my entire life.

 

    On many days she would put me in the corner on my knees.  I was told to stay there until my dad got home, which often meant I was kneeling there all day long.  If the pain got to be too much and I tried to shift my weight to sit back on my heals for just a second of relief, she would swat me.

 

She always let me out of the corner the exact moment she saw my dads headlights pull it to the driveway.  Because she hid it so carefully, I don't think he ever knew it was happening.

 

    Even though I understood, on some level, that she was being unfair to me, my thoughts weren't focused on her cruelty.  Instead, I spent those hours desperately turning inward.  I would stare at the wall and wonder:  Why is she doing this to me?  What did I do wrong?  I wrestled with the heavy burden of trying to figure out how I had failed, when in reality, I hadn't done anything to deserve it.

 

As a child, you don't always realize how unfair a situation is while your're in it.  You just try to survive the hours, watching the wall, waiting for those headlights, and trying to process it all.

 

Although I grew up with the fear that everything I do is wrong,  and the fear of making a complete fool of myself in public.  Some good has come out of it too. Looking back now, I believe that those long, silent hours of processing are exactly what made me the deep thinker I am today.  It is where I learned to break every single thought, idea, and situation down into sections just to survive the times.  I also believe the corner is the reason I have such an incredible amount of patients today.

 

What was meant to be a punishment to break my spirit actually forced me to develop a quiet strength.  We don't get to choose what happens to us when we are young, but we do get choose how we carry ourselves forward.  I took the the secrecy and silence of that corner and turned it into depth, patience, and a mind that refuses to be broken.