Things that got you in trouble as a Child

Well, I'm not at all surprised about that, you naughty, naughty boy!

I've told before when I was falsely accused and then lashed out at the mother accusing me. Many lessons re this, not easily grasped.

Well, to save myself from trying to search for a previous recount..



We were a girl group of sorts. I might have been ten, or nine.. There was a sudden effort, led by K, to attack her brother's car, I'm not sure how. I didn't even know the brother and was behind everybody else. I liked cars.

So out came the mother, who zero'd in on me. Osso! I'm surprised at you... (railing against me in the back, clueless in paradise).

Somehow she had me in her grip. What did I do, I ratted. I told her that K had broken Sister E's vase in the convent..

bitchy, I admit it. (but remember, I had no playmates - ever, or hardly ever - up until those times, very only child, this another big lesson)

The adults made me apologize. K is the one who had brother problems. But the adults were right, I shouldn't have finked - not that that was their point. That was what I tried to learn.

Growing up in a crazy religious cult meant I got in trouble for the weirdest (upon reflection now) things.... when I think about it it seems like an alien world that I almost forget I was part of. Funny thing is, I basically just started getting in trouble to the point where I was kicked out, so this is gonna be a long story.... I started writing about it and then went down on a trip down memory lane myself and started remembering more and more of it (not that this is some kind of repressed memory or pop psychology explanation du jour, it's just such a different world that it seems like a memory of a movie more than real life sometimes). So apologies in advance for such a long story about me, it's probably better suited for a personal journal but I haven't had one of those since, well since the notebook I'm about to tell you I got in trouble for.

The first thing I remember getting in big trouble for was trying to make a plastic airplane. The context was that I'd been into making paper airplanes and was old enough to understand that plastic was more durable. I was in the middle of this crazy prayer thing the adults would do for hours on their hands and knees, talking in tongues and all so I was bored as hell and went about trying to make an airplane out of a triangular plastic ruler I had found.
I wasn't strong enough to bend it so I started to try to fold it in half by sitting on it. Then it snapped right in the middle of the part where they were all being silent, trying to hear God, and I howled. That didn't go over too well and earned me my first exorcism. Which was remarkably like the prayer meeting anyway, with a bunch of adults talking in tongues but this time they all laid their hands on me, and I remember it being hot as hell to have all that body heat on me.

I got in trouble all the time, of course, we had a demerit system where if you got 6 demerits you'd get 6 swats with a paddle. They got creative with it and would have holes drilled in it (the better to minimize air resistance and swat you with) and they'd give me demerits for the craziest of things. I once came back from our "get out" (which was like our P.E. but we actually adored it because it was the highlight of our day) and bragged that I hadn't been caught once the whole time in tag and that earned me a double demerit! Damn, three of those in a whole week and you get the swats, that's an unbeatable game for me. You also missed your weekly movie, which was the only entertainment you got and you might be put on silence restriction as well, which meant you wore a sign saying God is teaching you to be silent and would add to your punishment if you got caught.
Any of you who know me at all must realize how well tailored such a system is to keep me in permanent trouble (yeah, try to put me on silence restriction for a week, see how well that works out) and I was incessantly in trouble for just being me. If I joked around too much I was being "foolish" and I'll be dammed if there isn't a frickin' verse in the Bible that says that only the rod of correction will drive foolishness from the heart of a child. If I wanted to be a writer or an artist I was being "worldly" (i.e. not culty enough). If I got caught reading outside books I'd be exorcised for "hitchiking spirits".

So I got in trouble all the ******* time. I got in trouble for global warming for heaven's sake. I was reading about the greenhouse effect in some news clippings (news is one of the few outside things we were allowed to read, as the leader was convinced the world was ending due to the whole "end times" and "wars and rumors of wars" bits of the Bible so that is where I got my early interest in geopolitics) and had asked about it and then I got a double demerit and my swats for "going on about his imaginary green house that can destroy the world" the demerit I got was for "foolishness" but they also had "bad attitude" which tended to work as a catch all for me.
When I was about eight I brought some serious heat down on me for formulating a plan to run away. Two other kids had tried it and were found miles away on bicycles so they were real jittery about our group and when they found my plans (I had a notebook with maps and all, and detailed plans about how we were going to make our way around Japan without really speaking Japanese or knowing where the hell we were) they went apeshit on me and brought down the big guns. I didn't know at the time but the cult's leader was actually living there nearby and our group was supposed to be the shining example of his crazy cult experiment so this kind of turmoil caused a big ruckus and marked the first time I got labeled a serious troublemaker and it came with all the perks of being in serious trouble. For me then the worst part was seeing my mom cry and ask me why I'd want to run away. I didn't really get it all, I was talking about running away more like a kid would about being a pirate. I wasn't that unhappy or anything but the previous two kids that took off on bikes must be what was making me catch all this flack.

Now you'd think I'd learn to lay low, but I was a pretty stubborn bastard. My troubles only escalated. As a young teen I stole a bunch of candy, and they then put me in what they called a "Victor Program" which basically meant a lot of manual labor (which was actually not that bad, I loved the part where I was buried in mud in a dam trying to clear it out, that was actually great fun and I got to find those pictures some day), permanent silence restriction, isolation from other peers, and forfeiture of all get out and movie nights. Plus I think we got extra large versions of the swats, after all we were the "Victors" in the "Victor Camp" so now just not being happy enough was to have a bad attitude. I remember one "Victor" getting smacked over and over and told to start smiling. That day I got in a bit of trouble for the distraction I served up and then some of us started getting in trouble for trying to stick up for each other and "talking back" to adults.

And from there things only got worse. I escalated my badness and moved on to what were, for us then, completely unthinkable things. I opened up the Bible, and pissed all over it and left it on the home leader's bed. That seemed to be the final straw and got my whole family in trouble (because of the verse "by their fruit ye shall know them" and I was obviously bad fruit and this got my whole family punished) and ultimately I was excommunicated from the cult and they all started praying that whatever demon had taken up residence in me would find it's way out somehow. It was scary as **** (I was told "your dad is dropping you off in America tomorrow, don't talk to anyone") because I was taught to be terrified of the outside world and I knew nothing about it, not to mention leaving my mom and brothers behind and knowing my dad was just going to try to find somewhere to drop me off and go back to Brazil (he had a round trip ticket to leave in 30 days). But that ended up being a good thing for me, I got that rough transition out of the way earlier than a lot of my peers who had to wait till they were 18 to get out.

But it was a very rough transition. And I was still in trouble but for different things. My first day in school I got in about three fights. I was an innocent respectful kid, compared to those brutes in school, who had never heard anyone say "**** you" in his life (remember, one movie a week and all pre-screened. Sometimes it was a Little House on the Prairie episode or Highway to Heaven). I knew of two singers, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley and didn't know which was which. This was a cartoonishly naive kid, whose favorite actor was Gene Kelley being dropped into the middle of American 7th grade. Hilarity (this many years later, at least) ensued. Things like the jokes about having sex with my mom did not go over well with me, so I had a line of kids to fight every day after school (I refused to fight in school, as I wanted to stay in school very badly). The first day was three, and I was so stupidly naive that I also insisted that each of them start the fight and gave each a square shot to my jaw. They were all right-handed so that bruised it pretty bad and I got in trouble for fighting.
I hit a girl (lightly in my defense, it was a tap on the mouth, but that's no defense) for the only time in my life during this phase. She's said something so god-awfully vulgar to me that I'd never heard involving auto-fellatio and the speculation about my possession of genitals that I had no response and when she insulted my mother I smacked her instinctively (hey, that was the pattern for me, kids insulted me I fought them after school because I was not armed with the vulgar weapons they were to insult back and quite frankly I missed mom and didn't think she was half the whore they thought she was). My uncle forced me to go apologize to her and her dad and told me I was lucky her dad didn't come kick my ass. That was embarrassing as hell, and is still embarrassing to me to this day to admit to (hitting a girl).

That went on for a bit, the ice cream man stopped trying to break up my after school fights (speaking of which, he had saved my ass in a couple of those instances where I'd just bitten off more fights than I could chew) and just started selling ice cream at the daily events. I started getting into fights because I'd won a fight, and was the new kid on the block with a chip on his shoulder that everyone thought was insanely weird but didn't know why ("you sound like you are cussing for the first time in your life!" "Nah, I'm ******* an old hand at this"). The principle called me in about it and got my uncle and aunt in and told me to stop acting like I had something to prove as the new kid in school (I joined after the school year had started and made up my educational history).
Then I got sent back to Brazil and after a while made my way back to the states. Now I started getting into trouble for different things. I was supposed to pay rent but couldn't easily get jobs as a minor and I started just ditching school and playing basketball a lot. I had a real attitude at this point, not just a catch all for being rambunctious but I was a pretty angry dude. So that place didn't work out for me, and I was kicked out again.
I moved to Texas and got in trouble for drugs, and all sorts of things. I got kicked out again and became homeless (again it was a "pack up you are leaving" thing) and I started getting in trouble with the law, because there was a curfew and I was out on the streets. The cops were assholes and didn't know what to do so they'd just try to drive me far away and leave me out of their jurisdiction. That kind of thing made me pretty pissed so one day when I was lying on the top of the school roof (I used to sleep in the baseball dugout as it was quiet and well sheltered but the cops started coming by every night to deport me to another county) with all my worldly possessions in my backpack which was a small gun, drugs, and my discman with my 2pac CDs. I was pissed, this asshole was using that spotlight on his squad car looking for me on the school benches and I lost it. I shot at his car from the roof (he was over a block away then, it was a senseless reaction that wasn't meant to cause harm) and he stopped.
I hadn't hit him or anything, he was too far away for me to do that if I tried, but he was calling all his buddies. And they all converged on the school while I pissed myself (later literally as I didn't dare move) as they began a search for me. I was up there for hours and hours and promised to God (still believed back then) that I'd turn my **** around and get my stuff together. I didn't really, I was homeless and it wasn't working out well for me but that was the end of my troubles. I went back to Brazil where I could make a living as a minor because they didn't care about such laws. I started a business and got my own apartment and haven't been "in trouble" ever since.

But from the day I was born, till that day where I'd finally never be kicked out of anywhere again, I was always in trouble and it seemed like I was in trouble for being me. Don't get me wrong, I can be me and deserve it, but most of the time it felt like I couldn't not be me anyway and that I'd incessantly be in trouble essentially for questioning authority, and being rambunctious.

No, you weren't in trouble for being you at all, Robert. You were constantly in trouble because of your parents' absolutely insane decision to expose you to that cult experience. Yeah I know, they may well have been sincere & all , but the experience amounted to child abuse, including no formal education, on top of the rest.

It just enrages me when I hear of what children in such situations must live through.

Oh I know that now, of course, but what I mean is that I was uniquely suited to get in a lot of trouble in this cult and I got in much more of it relative to my peers because of things I think are innocuous things inherent to my nature (hyperactivity, inquisitiveness and silliness). It was such a relief to rent my own place. I'm gonna go back and visit that this year, that should be my shrine to personal freedom.

When you pay the rent, then you are finally free.

Just think of what harm you would have done to yourself (in the long term) if you'd been a nice compliant child, Robert. Thank heavens (for you) that you responded as a "normal" child would to such insane constrictions.

Thank you for that.

(Sorry about my outburst, Robert. I just see red when I hear of the things that children are exposed to in situations like that.)

No worries, I spent a lot of my life seeing red about it and if the founder hadn't dropped dead on his own accord I'd probably still be looking for him now. The pursuit of justice against this group used to consume me, but now I am happy just to work in my leisure time on related projects (in regard to the cult, things like the xfamily.org encyclopedia I founded).

I've since found my peace and wanted to mention that one of the things that makes me happy now is that I helped to change it a bit and they went on to profoundly change their ways. They are still a weird freaky cult but I was one of the early ones from the second generation to leave, and at the part of the story above where I end I wrote them a very long letter about how incredibly difficult a time I had had since being kicked out. I quoted the Bible back to them about how they were turning their backs on their "sheep" and it had a big impact on them.

To their credit, they wrote me back and said that they had prayed about my letter for weeks and decided to change the rules that had caused me to have been kicked out the way I was. Previously if a member was excommunicated all others were forbidden to have contact with them. So I couldn't live with my family without excommunicating them all and that is why when they kicked me out it was such an abrupt thing where my dad was scrambling to find a place for me to stay or face breaking up my family (or having them all leave, but because of their religious delusions that was an unthinkable solution so in practice it was either go out on my own or take my dad away from the rest of my family).

After I wrote about how they were abandoning their own kids just because we took a different path in life, and cited the others who had it much worse (one kid was just dropped off in a foreign country with a couple hundred dollars and killed himself) they stopped this policy and afterwards the rest of my peers who started leaving in bulk were able to leave more "softly". It also didn't hurt that the founding leader had died and that the batshitinsane replacement only had a fraction of his crazy but things really did get better for them all on various fronts, none of the rest of which I have any involvement in or can take any credit for but for years it was a personally satisfying to me that I was one of the last to walk the more difficult exit route and that I helped make that route easier for my peers (most of whom are out and well adjusted by now too).

They also apologized for kicking me out in the first place and said they really wanted to hug me but at that point I thought being kicked out was the best thing that could happen to me and thought the hug would be creepy. But still, being able to have made it easier for my peers to leave made a world of a difference to me. When my brother left he could still live with my parents for a while, before moving in with me and his transition was much easier. I didn't get that letter till years later (I was homeless then I moved to Brazil so it followed me slowly) but when I did I was glad to hear that my particular experience played a small part in lessening the chances of that happening for others.

Anyway, enough about this on this thread already (any time I talk about it it feels like such a heavy downer) , I'm just trying to say that for this particular group things got a lot better for the kids, and while it isn't enough it's a hell of a lot and I am glad things got a lot better for them. Now most of my generation is doing very well and we even have some of us (several of whom are members here at a2k) running a non-profit foundation to help kids in such "high-demand communities" called the Safe Passage Foundation that aims to fight for human rights for children in other such groups.

Well can I just briefly say good on you & that I consider your work with the Safe Passage Foundation highly admirable, Robert? I've said more than enough already.

Oops, I am actually not personally involved in the foundation right now. I didn't mean to imply that, it's just a cool project from some of my peers that I support for obvious reasons but I can't take any credit for it and was only very lightly involved in the discussions surrounding its creation. I went the more informational route with xfamily.org to support the media and law enforcement efforts that others make and that I can't take any credit for.

OK. I see. Sorry to have embarrassed you.
But, apart from anything else, the fact that you are willing to talk openly about your experience publicly & support others in the same boat, is extremely valuable. Though, by your own admission, a depressing exercise.

i'll have you know i never considered them things

with which to play

I didn't have troubles at school - well, not a lot more than others, at least - since I have always been the same Walter

I remember that when I was 15, I got quite a few remarks in the regestry book , close to the point when you get the threat of a school expulsion.
So, one day the school secretary gave me a letter for my father. It took me (and my friends) some time to open it so that no-one would notice that. (Done in the chemistry's room) ... only to learn that it was a letter by my father inviting parents for a meeting of the school's curatorships (he was president of that and just to sign it) ...


A few years later, however, I really nearly got an expulsion - and had to avoid it by myself, since my father told me that I was old enough (16/17) to do so:
it was pre-68, and the German Emergency Acts were discussed. I tried to get (and "somehow" really got it) the 'blueprint of those laws. Which were thought to be secret.
The director of our school - friend of my parents, by the way - thought this to be a great offence, especially, since I not only organised school/pupil demonstrations about that topic but wrote letters to the editor in local papers, quoting from that blueprint .... which led the domestic secret service investigate at the school.
However, fortunately I could present the envelope of the letter, the official correspondence by the parliamentary's and ministries' offices as well as by the press office .... which I only did after I was 'invited' to the school conference.

Weeks later I was elected president of the pupil's council ...

That's hilarious . . . i'll bet you guys had a ball, i'll bet you were laughing yourselves sick . . .







. . . right up to the point at which an adult entered the room.

You know, in the midst of all the awfulness, those bits of your story have always made me think of the comment Noel Coward is alleged to have made to a companion during an overblown production of the Opera Aida.

It was so overblown that there were several elephants on stage....one of which shat copiously and loudly at an especially important moment.

Coward is said to have whispered: "Terrible manners of course, darling, but WHAT a critic!"

At home, when I was little, I always felt like I was in trouble for EVERYTHING....just for being me!

Of course, there must have been long patches when I wasn't, but I suppose being in trouble is kind of memorable, and I have countless memories of wrath descending on me, often from completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned.

A BIG one was my inability to fit in with my mother's concept of the daughter she wanted. I have no real idea of why she had this particular ideal as she and her 3 sisters and 1 brother had been nothing at all like that as kids! However, as I suppose was the 50's "thing", she wanted a nice little girl who could play in nice frocks and stay nice and clean.

Sadly, I was the sort of kid who had to explore EVERYTHING and ran a lot of the time with the local boys.

Lying on your tummy watching insects and animals go about their business, crawling through the big water pipe that went under the street, making mud and throwing it at passing cars, catching lizards and suchlike creatures, climbing trees, leading the local trap-door spider eradication gang (sixpence a spider as I recall...no wonder they line up to bite me now!) and generally getting up close and personal with all things that would stain, soil, tear, mess and destroy any dress drove my mother to near madness!

Every morning I would start with the best intentions about staying nice and clean and lady-like. This would be remembered until I found something to do that was interesting.

I can remember being screamed at and screamed at and smacked and hit with the yard-stick, the wooden spoon, a kind of length of flexible rubber hose stuff (until I hid THAT high up in a tree!), sent to my room and any manner of other consequences, all to no avail.

Of course, I admire that little kid now...but, at the time, I felt like SUCH a bad kid!

The other big thing was visiting my sister when she, or I, were sick.

Now, we were very close. She was two and a half years older, and was, in many ways, like a mother to me. She had a terminal illness, which (very differently from how things are done now) neither of us was told about. We were told that she "had pneumonia as a baby, and got sick easily".

Part of her illness was that minor coughs and colds for could be deadly for her... hence the drama about illness. Because we did not get why there was all this drama, we would get together at times we were supposed to be isolated from each other. Usually she was sick, and I was supposed to stay out of wherever she was, in case I had some germ , and I would sneak in to be with her, so I would be the offender. My poor mother would be frantic, and I would get this frantic punishment, with my sister pleading with mum to punish her instead.

Poor mum! What a catch 22.

I'd also REALLY get lots of physical and verbal punishment if I accidentally hurt my sister when we were playing. Of course, I was more vigorous and boisterous, so if anyone got hurt, it tended to be her! We'd both be terrified when that happened, as my mother would lose control of herself because of her fears for my sister. I recall one time getting hit so hard that I had a hand-shaped bruise for a couple of weeks on my thigh.

Because my mum's intense emotion made no sense to us, because we didn't understand what was going on, this sort of thing was quite traumatic.

Of course, as one or two of you may have noticed, I can be just a little challenging and emotional at times, and was often in trouble for that!

Oddly, at school, I was so terrified of getting into trouble that the only times I ever did I actually was wrongly accused, or had done something completely by accident!

It is.

I am very glad your parents did not punish you further about the fire. VERY sensible parents!

I am sorry you never had another party.


You know, with kids I am working with, we sometimes agree that the stuff the kid does isn't BAD, it's just being enormously imaginative and creative, but at the wrong time or place... thus the problem becomes not the kid's badness, but figuring our how to use their remarkable powers in ways that don't end up with them in trouble.

This is a perfect example of such a problem!

I have to speak of the Awful Episode of the Bad Egg.

Amongst my many animal related interests was eggs hatching.

I knew that eggs needed to be kept warm to hatch, and I decided I wanted to hatch out a chicken's egg.

Since, as I said above, a great many of my innocent (to me) activities resulted in parental wrath, I was too scared to ask if I could do it, because I assumed I would be told no.

So, not realizing the eggs were not hatchable, one night, I quietly took an egg from the fridge, and put it in a small cloth bag, which I tucked into my jamy top. By day, the egg went with me to school in its little bag, secreted in my singlet.

Amazingly, it lasted for a number of days before I cracked it. I attempted to get the egg out of the house and into the garbage bin, but my parents kept appearing and thwarting me, and I had to take it back to my room.

Eventually, I did it in my closet.

Well...we all know what happens next. The joyous smell of rotten egg began to permeate my room Like a deer in the headlights I stood frozen and terrified as my mother expertly ransacked the room. (Finding evidence of other forgotten sins as she did so.)

When my mother asked me what on earth I had been thinking of, I was too scared to tell her, and the hurricane just had to blow itself out. It was awful.

I suppose she went to her grave thinking that she had a daughter who just anted to have a rotten egg in her room for no reason!