Toni Stone
401 Buck Hollow Rd.
Fairfax, VT 05454
Strict Parents October 23, 1999
people talk about parents who were permissive and parents who were strict. my Mother and Dad were strict. i didn’t like it much, as a child when the kids around me could stay out till any time and i had to be home by dark. i didn’t like it when everyone i knew was wearing loafers and loafing. i had to wear tie-leather shoes and be bound by all kinds of rules about getting homework done, getting A’s on all my papers and volunteering at the local Elderly Help Center. i didn’t like having to eat nutritional food instead of corn curls and chocolate bars like my friends did. . .sometimes i would yearn for mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwiches instead of tuna with carrot sticks and celery. i thought my life was a little hard in the domain of discipline.
my Father was like a grade A marine sargent with me.
he was demanding, on purpose and relentless. today i can be grateful when i see men and women close to fifty years old who cannot hold their focus on a task to finish it. . .when i see women in their thirties
who do not know what escarole is. ..when i have clients who have never really sat around a table to eat with their families for a holiday, or cooked a meal that didn’t come prepackaged.
often it was a struggle to deal with hearing my Father tell me how many times he had corrected me for the same violation. it wasn’t fun spending an evening in bed early on the weekend because i deceitfully did it my way again when Dad told me how he wanted it done. ti was not a pleasure to learn that i had to be managed, to learn skills.. and, to submit to that mentoring and doing it over and over until i achieved mastery. getting trained is a rigorous ordeal. training someone is no great prize either. i see this now.
how my Mom and Dad kept on standing for what was good, true and demanded. You couldn’t lie, you couldn’t change the requirement.
you couldn’t almost do it. there was no sweet patting understanding.. there was no looking to be liked. . .there was no excuse. we did what was expected of us.
we got trained. we learned how to work, to work hard and to work to completion of a task. we did not need efficiency experts cleaning up the messes we were forty years later. we learned at four, at seven, at twelve and at sixteen how to really not hold back from hardwork.
i know grownups today who do not even have handwriting that can be read because they never had to express themselves so someone could read what they said. they had people making it up for them because they didn’t have the guts to discipline and suffer not being liked a while afterwards. thank God.
i thank God daily for courageous parents who knew how to suffer through the moods of minors.
people wonder how i can do all the work that gets done and i know without doubt it was my training to not try to reserve myself from working hard. the world has its share of little play bunnies and helpless people wishing for work someday one day. .or, NOT knowing what their job in life could possibly be.
