The Home for Naughty Children

At the poker table, the winner isn’t always the person with the best hand.  The winner is usually the one with the best cards, however, sometimes the player that comes out on top only does so because they made the others around the table BELIEVE they had the best hand.  That’s the art of the bluff. 

A bluff, at its core, is a deception, a lie.  But more importantly, it is a deception with purpose, making it a manipulation.  It’s not the kind of complex manipulation as was used on me in high school by girls I liked to get me to drive them the eight miles into the next town.  No, THAT kind of manipulation STILL confuses me, and there were at least two times I drove a girl into town without even a “thanks Steve”.   I still don’t understand what that was all about.  Those were more along the lines of an emotional confidence scheme.

Man, I’m going to have to talk some of that out with the counselor.  My apologies, we were talking about the art of the bluff.  It’s just, they were so cute, and I thought they really liked me.  They didn’t.

Bluffing works best when enough credibility is built up with the bluffer for those around them to trust that they have the goods.  That means, more often than not, the person had to have played legitimately good hands and made a show of it consistently for the rest of the table to believe the bluffer actually has the best possible hand. 

But most of all, if the bluffer is going to bluff, they have to BELIEVE they have the winning cards and have the guts to play the marginal cards they have like they are the nuts (poker term) they need.  If you’re going to pretend to have a winning hand, you need to be Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro or to a lesser extent, Cuba Gooding Jr.

It was this principle of bluffing that my mother Sharon Damm based her entire philosophy of discipline around, and she was very good at it.  Although there were many instances of my mother bluffing her way through discipline, here is one that stands out. 

I was a kid with ADHD.  It was undiagnosed, or what I would call fun-diagnosed, meaning I was just a rambunctious kid who had little self-control.  Medication for such an issue was a long way off and at the time, I don’t think it was an option.

For kids like me, structure and discipline were important.  Other kids don’t need it at all, only kids like me.  Okay, that first sentence of this paragraph was ridiculous and may highlight my sense of narcissism and entitlement.  I apologize, but it will definitely happen again. 

What I SHOULD have said is that if you don’t want your ADHD kid to end up in jail (or worse), structure and discipline are a necessity.  My mother, having zero training in raising a wild chimpanzee did the best she could to keep order.  Although spanking was used sparingly in our house, she did wield one heavy handed approach to scaring the crap out of me.

When I was between the ages of 4 and 7, I was deathly afraid of being sent to the home for naughty children. 

Sounds kind of anti-climactic doesn’t it?  Well, that’s my fault as a crumby writer, because the way my mother built this bluff was very real.

She started out by laying a foundation of faux honesty about how my sister Somer and I would be disciplined.  She stressed to us that she would carry out punishments and not load us up with empty threats.  She falsely chastised how other parents would make up bogus stories about monsters to keep  their kids in line, though this was always a false flag for us as she probably employed the best use of this tactic of all the parents. 

But where mother really sold it was in the theatricality of the home for naughty children.  It was a living, breathing institution, and the picture of it in our minds was always a work in progress.  The home for naughty children was ever present, even when my sister and I weren’t misbehaving.  References to the home were sprinkled in amongst conversations to keep the specter alive.

For instance, when the Roots miniseries was playing and my family was surrounding the television, watching in horror as Kunta Kinte was being whipped savagely while trying to retain the pride of his African name, my mother spoke up.

“Oh! I hate this scene!  You know, they still whip like this at the home for naughty children.  That’s just awful!” Mom said without moving her eyes from the screen.  The casualness of that lie, at a time when no misbehavior was present, told us that it wasn’t just an institution created at the heat of the moment when my mother wanted to show us discipline.  It gave the claim credibility.

But when either I or my sister pulled some terrible stunt and needed to be corrected, mom would try a few things first, like yelling, a swat to the butt or even waving the stealthily-flat candy spoon in a menacing way.  But when those things didn’t work and I pushed Mom over the edge, she would raise her voice, throw her hands up in the air as if the decision was now officially out of her control and say, “THAT’S IT!  I’m calling the home for naughty children!” and proceeded to storm toward the phone.

At that point the house might as well have burst into flames because it was a race to the phone with me immediately pleading to my mother for mercy.

“NO! MOTHER, NO! NOT THERE!  PLEASE!  I’LL BE GOOD, I PROMISE!” I would say sincerely.  I knew if my mother asked for one of the home’s express pickups, I would be doomed.

“It’s out of my hands,” my mother would say, “what kind of mother would I be if I DIDN’T follow through on your punishment?”

She would let me plead my case and repent for whatever sin I had committed—probably involving a sassy mouth—before ultimately hanging up.  It was mind blowing.  I was merely seconds away from going to the home for naughty children.

You’re probably thinking, “Wow!  This kid was dumb,” and I would agree with you if you only knew this much of the story, but let me enlighten you to how Mom doubled down on her bluff.

Sharon had created a whole backstory for the home for naughty children, so when we asked about it, she could readily answer instead of stammering around her story and ultimately watching it all fall apart.  Every question we asked instead, created a deeper understanding of the stone-cold institution you would envision carrying a moniker like “The Home for Naughty Children”. 

You would think that the name would be a dead giveaway as it sounded too generic and unoriginal.  That was a stroke of brilliance from my mother who routinely referred to specific places with common nouns instead of proper names.  The Nanum Dairy, where we picked up fresh milk, was called “the milk barn,” Safeway was called “The store,” Albertson’s was “the other store,” and Super One Foods was “the store we don’t shop at.”  Mom wasn’t good with names, so when she said “home for naughty children,” I knew she wasn’t making it up.  It would have been suspicious if she had given it a proper name like: Washington State Department of Correcting Troubled Children.  So the mere fact that she never gave the name of the facility just strengthened the notion that it existed.

One time, when my sister and I started a fight and Mom wanted to convey her nuclear option, she picked up the newspaper and gave it a quick scan and said to my father, “Looks like the home for naughty children picked up three more kids in Ellensburg this weekend.”

My father, unfamiliar with the art of theatrical improvisational acting would pick up his cue to react with a questioning look back at my mother, who would return his confounded look with eyes boring into his brain while her lips silently told him to agree with her.  But I saw it, and smelled something rotten in what my mother was doing.

“The paper doesn’t say anything about the home for naughty children,” I said, believing I had caught my mother red handed.

“Oh, it doesn’t?” my mother began, “Well look right here on page two,” she finished with a flourish, slapping the paper down on the coffee table.  She had me come over and look at a section she was pointing to, “See?”

My mother was right.  There in the paper was an article about the home for naughty children.  She was pointing right at it.  She actually showed me proof in the local newspaper that the home for naughty children existed.  If I wasn’t five years old, I would have been able to read every word of the article she had hastily put in front of me and then jerked away.

“Not so funny now, is it?” She asked looking at me as if I should be ashamed of myself for questioning her word.  “It’s cold in here,” she said with a shiver, “I think the fire is dying.”  She wadded up the newspaper and threw it in our fireplace insert.  “Now stay away from the damn fireplace,” she said casually as she headed into the other room.

I wondered if I had known any of the kids that were picked up.  I wondered what kinds of torture or merciless, backbreaking work they were now being forced to do.  I didn’t question the validity of the home for naughty children for a long time after that.

The next occurrence was after I had socialized with other children and had brought up the home to them, hoping to piece together more of the mystery of the institution.  Other children hadn’t heard of the place, which I thought was odd, considering that in my mind, two prisons stood out: Alcatraz and the home for naughty children.

At first, I just attributed the fact that other kids didn’t know about it as me being just a really rotten kid, who had to be reminded of such dark places to keep my actions in check. 

Then I thought I had it wrong, and that my mom had probably broken some rule and gave us fair warning where other parents would just call the home and have their kids picked up using the element of surprise.  Those agents from the home were probably trained professionals, but every advantage would count when picking up naughty children, especially the very naughty children.  I had always wondered how the three kids from the newspaper were picked up.  Did they go quietly or were they snatched simultaneously with the aid of several different types of law enforcement.  The briefly seen article didn’t have an accompanying photo, so I never had any idea.

I had asked mom a few times how the kids were taken and if it was scary.  Mom would just answer serenely, “I bet it was very scary for them, being taken away from their mothers,” or “You know, I would really hate to have to find out how that’s done.”

Still, I had gotten to know some genuinely bad children and they hadn’t been picked up yet.  This made me collect enough courage to push my mother all the way to the edge.  I started slapping my sister around and sure enough, Mom chimed in with the threat to call the home for naughty children.  I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I am sure it was extremely sassy and enough to send Mom to the phone.

I stood there in front of my mother, defiant.  My six-year-old intuition calling my mother’s bet, waiting for her to call the home for naughty children.  Mother looked at me with the receiver to our wall-mounted, kitchen rotary phone (in eggshell white) held loosely in her hand.  She nodded at me slightly, indicating it was my last chance to stop being a turd.

“Go ahead, call them!” I bellowed, “they don’t exist anyway, you’ve been making it up!”

Mom tightened her loose grip around the phone and drew the receiver to her ear.  She locked eyes with me as her finger quickly rotated the number selector. 

My heart was breaking as I came to the realization that, “you already knew the number?  You didn’t have to look it up?”  Had she no faith in her own son?  Then I pulled it together, figuring she had probably learned the number for Somer’s sake.

“Of course I do,” Mom said, drawing closer to the end of the seven digit sequence, “every parent knows the number for emergencies just like this.”   She reached the end and brought the phone in closer to her head.  I couldn’t hear it ringing, but I saw a wave of relief wash over my mother before she spoke back to the voice that had obviously picked up on the other end.  Was it relief that she would soon be burdened with one less child?  Had I driven my poor mother to this state, where giving up her child was now a relief to her? 

“Yes, is this the home for naughty children?” my mother asked with purpose, and then she held the receiver out in front of me so that I could hear a tiny, authoritatively stern woman’s voice reply to my mother’s question.

“Why yes it is!” said the voice.  As my mother’s stare said to me that she had in fact, told me so.   I heard the voice ask another question, “How many children will you be needing us to pick up?”

HOLY COW!  They do pick up! 

I scampered off to my room where I hid in my closet, starting to cry and waiting for the bastards to come and take me to a place where none of my naughtiness would fly.  I couldn’t charm my way out of punishment and chores there.  Eventually, after years of backbreaking labor picking rocks from fallow fields, my records would just transfer directly into the penal system where my big act of defiance in a kitchen, sassing my mother would prepare me for a life inside the clink.

I could hear my mother laugh cruelly while talking to the administrator.  I’m sure they had shared a joke at my expense.  It wasn’t much longer that my mother came into my room and coaxed me out of the closet with reassurances that I wouldn’t be going away to the home for naughty children that night.

Mom cuddled up with me on my bed and held me as she calmed me down.  “I just needed you to calm down Steve, you were driving me nuts today with your yelling and fighting with your sister.  Enough already,” she said to me looking for assurance.

“I’m sorry mom, please don’t send me away,” I said through the last of my tears.

“Not today,” said Mom.

We just sat there as I calmed down and my mother hugged me.  I felt like this woman loved me so much, that it would indeed pain her to have to send me away, but if I did end up at the home for naughty children or the Washington State Department of Correcting Troubled Children or Madam Chechvernischk’s Children’s House of Forgotten Dreams, it would be because of choices I made, not my mother.

“Mom?” I asked.

“What?” my mother replied.

“Is there really a home for naughty children?” I asked, believing we were sharing a moment of true understanding between each other.

My mother waited several seconds before pulling me in for a very tight hug and held onto me tightly as she felt I could handle and then said, “Yes, yes there is.”  Then she added, “And I would prefer you never go there.”

Years later, when it became apparent that there were no newspaper articles on the home for naughty children, and my mother’s friend Lael was the phony receptionist that answered the phone at the non-existent home,  I justified that fudged answer with the fact that juvenile halls are kind of like homes for naughty children .  If you had a child, you too would probably prefer that child never go there.

My mom had found a way to use my overactive imagination in a way that some might find cruel, or odd.  However, I believe it was an effective tool.  Unfortunately this story is heavy on how my mother used deception and illusion to keep me in line.  It illustrates a side that was a very small part of her duty as a mother to raise us children the best that she could.  She did an amazing job (this compliments both her AND me… and also Somer).  Most importantly, I want you all to remember that the real concept that made the home for naughty children so terrifying was the idea that if I was to be dragged away to that horrible place, the worst part would be that  I wouldn’t be with my mom anymore, and that’s the Damm truth.