There But For the Grace

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Someone asked me the other day why the hell I would call what they were doing to their kid, child abuse, and warn them that if they kept doing it they would likely be charged and they would likely need someone like me to defend them. All I’m doing is spanking him, they said, spanking him with a belt, and he needs spanking, believe me.

It reminded me of someone else I used to know.

Barbara was 25 when I first met her. She was a good-looking woman, well-formed, easy to talk to. She was the mother of three. At least, she told me she was the mother of three. There were only two children left when I met her. To Barbara, there were still three.

Lisa — her second child — was born to Barbara after she worked a year at Mustang Ranch in Nevada. We’re not talking cowboys and cattle: most people probably know Mustang is a brothel, the first licensed in that interesting state. Lisa was a trick baby; her father was a man without a name or face who passed this baby on for a few bucks.

Barbara worked there two more years before moving back home.

Two years after that, four-year-old Lisa was dead, literally by Barbara’s hand.

There were periods when she spanked Lisa as hard as she could for as long as she could. Lisa wouldn’t obey; she refused at times to eat; what hurt Barbara most, the child refused to talk to her mother.

Barbara started with spankings, but began to lose more and more control. She began to beat the child. She still called the beatings spankings, but they were hard spankings on her legs and buttocks, hard enough to hurt Barbara’s hand, and long enough that Barbara was exhausted after the spanking.

The whole time, the mother would cry, cry with the child, both of them in different kinds of pain. Barbara said that her own pain was that she had never been loved, not by her parents, not by the relatives to whom she had been shuttled back and forth during a childhood of both physical but even greater emotional abuse, not by the men who gave her three children. Certainly not by the john who gave her Lisa.

And not, she felt, by Lisa. A couple of times Lisa had told her she hated her. She asked her child why. Lisa said she didn’t know. It really hurt Barbara, so she hurt Lisa back. Sometimes with her hands, sometimes with an electric cord.

She discovered there was another person who didn’t love Barbara.

Barbara.

What it really kind of boiled down to, Barbara told me, was that Lisa was the spitting image of Barbara, and she didn’t want her to grow up and be like her. She would look at her child, and see things in herself that she didn’t like. She hated herself. After a year in prison, she told me, I still do.

Barbara would spank the child to try to get the devil out of her, she said, the devil she saw in herself.

She actually saw the beatings as a reward to herself, because afterward Lisa would make up with her mother and tell her that she loved her. Barbara pleaded with the girl, why do I have to spank you to get you to talk to me, is this what I have to do to you to get you to talk to me.

Just before Christmas was the last time Lisa talked to her mother. Barbara yanked the girl out of the street after a car screeched to a stop near Lisa. Barbara shook her, hard. I just shook her, she told me, I shook her, I don’t know how long.

That night, Barbara put her little girl to bed, tucked her in. She checked on her later to find Lisa making what she called real groggy sounds. She thought it was the flu; she would call the doctor in the morning.

In the morning, about 5:30 that morning, she went into the room, turned on the light. She noticed the covers were half off Lisa. She did what she always did, put the covers back on her.

Barbara’s hand brushed her child’s chin and it was cold, only cold, and she shook Lisa to wake her and shook her and shook her and screamed for the man who was with her that night and put her mouth on Lisa’s and tried to breathe the life back into her but it was no good and Lisa, the baby she needed to love and love her back, was gone.

Police reports showed that Barbara was hysterical when they arrived, and when the child was pronounced dead Barbara passed out.

Cause of death was a bruise on the brain. Barbara was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

She was in prison when I met her, years after Lisa was dead. She hadn’t forgotten her daughter; in a way, she told me, Lisa still lived with her. Barbara still talked to Lisa, still longed for a reply.

She was working with parents like the one who asked me the other day why the hell I would suggest that spanking a child with a belt might be charged as child abuse. Because what happened to Barbara, what happened to Lisa, is happening right now to hundred of thousands of children and parents. In all of us is the potential to lose control. That spanking we give our child: how close to, and how far away from, we are to child abuse.

How close to, and how far away from, we are to Barbara.