The truth is, I used to hit. (I’ve stopped—when? Decades ago now.) For example, I’d slap my husband’s arm in what was meant to be a playful way. Not hard. Well, a slap hard enough to leave a red mark on my son. Briefly. That was bad. This is my confession. The screaming was bad. The frightening loss of temper was bad. The irritability was bad. I regret all of it. Mea culpa. Je regret. In every language, I am sorry. I don’t know where that oral and physical violence came from. I was slapped just once as a child, but not beaten, not yelled at or berated, as best I can recall. I remember the abuse suffered by my peers. I don’t recall being spanked, just the one slap from my mother. [She did not remember doing this.]

In third grade a friend and I were coming back into the classroom after lunch and my friend Don punched me so hard in the stomach I went down. I don’t recall what I said to him that triggered his uncharacteristic violence—I was not a child who said ugly things. Even so, I believed at the time that I had it coming. I’d “asked for it” as we said at the time. Don and I remained friends with “no hard feelings,” another thing we used to say. I never hit anyone on the playground, but I shoved Pam out of jealousy, and then I ran home in shame. Another regret.

When I was teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the issues I addressed was pap’s beating of Huck. Some unrelated townspeople in the novel were shocked by pap’s drunken behavior but were unable to do a thing to stop the abuse. He was an ex-con, but beating his child was perfectly within pap’s rights in the early 1800s. I would tell my students in the 1990s that spanking a child was then illegal in Sweden where you could not do anything to a child of your own that you could not do to a stranger on the street. [In Sweden “[c]orporal punishment was explicitly prohibited in a 1979 amendment to the Children and Parents Codewhich states (art. 6.1): ‘Children are entitled to care, security and a good upbringing. Children shall be treated with respect for their person and individuality and may not be subjected to corporal punishment or any other humiliating treatment.’ The prohibition is reiterated in Chapter 2 article 5 of the Instrument of Government – one of four laws which together make up the Constitution: ‘Everyone shall be protected against corporal punishment….'”] Students told me that a hit that left a mark that still showed the next day was enough to get the attention of Child Services. Some of my students spoke knowledgeably about what Child Services would or could do about that.

As a mandatory reporter, I reported.

I witnessed abusive behavior from parents and reported. I saw bruises and reported. I heard stories and reported. Local police were not discrete and effective, but I called admin as required, and Child Services and even divorced parents. Once a student was so angered by my interference after he cc’ed me his suicidal thoughts in an email that he never quite forgave me. Another student denied his father’s abuse after I reported but decided I could be trusted. Child Services investigated and did nothing so far as I knew.

A student came to me to report that her boyfriend was using steroids and she was afraid of his increasing violence. She was afraid for me to say she’d told me. I took this information to an administrator who was also that boy’s coach and was bullied out of his office. Years later, a teammate of that boy told me he’d been using steroids in those years. I’d been helpless to stop it.

A married woman I knew came home from work to find that her husband had cut up all her work clothing and scattered the pieces over their bed. (He didn’t like that she was working while their sons were in school.) She was smart to call a crisis line. The counselor told her to immediately! put her children in her car and go someplace he couldn’t find her. The cut-up clothing was a rehearsal, she was told. She drove across two states to a family member’s home, a family member she’d been cut off from and wasn’t certain still lived at the same address. He did. She discovered later on after she filed for divorce that he’d been married before and that he’d put that first wife into the hospital. She was granted full custody of her boys.

Another married woman I knew had been moved by her husband away from family and friends, further and further away to a different city, into another state and then another, until finally to a house miles from a main road. That was the last I heard.

When I told my students one of these stories, inevitably someone in class, inevitably a girl, would call out, “Red flag!”

Yes.

The third time the police came to a family member’s home, it wasn’t the neighbors who’d complained of domestic violence but the ER doc that time. He was taken into custody. Both he and his wife were required to remain apart for a court-ordered period of time and both had to undergo therapy. His wife complained to me that this put her into a group of people she had “nothing in common” with. Sure. Wives whose husbands abused them—nothing in common with them. She might have recognized that his behavior was unhealthy. She loved her husband but was also a smart, educated woman. People aren’t always as rational and self-aware as you’d think. She stuck by him and they are still married.

I am concerned for my own temper; I have regretted my words and actions. I am old and hope to become much older. I worry about what might be coming in my life. A recent UN meta-study estimates that the incidence of dementia doubles with every 6.3 year increase in age, from 3.9/1000 person years (“person-years” = pyr) at age 60-64 to 104.8/1000 pyr at age 90+. In my 70s now, if I should develop dementia in the coming years, would I be the sort of person who screamed and hit in irrational anger? I would prefer to be the kindly sort of patient who simply forgot who people were exactly and smiled at everyone. Or the kind that dismantles the cabinetry. Both good and bad habits stick.

There is no knowing. The year is ending, and this is an entirely arbitrary counting of the passage of time, of distance between what once was and will be.

I am a patient maker. I was not always patient in every aspect of my life. I can feel regret, but I can’t undo the past. My mistakes are still remembered. It is not all that I am. I listened and comforted, checked in and offered support—I did those things too. We are none of us perfect, and regret, they say, benefits no one. But I think it’s wise to remind myself of the person I want to be, what about myself I want ended, the aspects of my own being and behavior that I hope to be remembered for.

Decades have passed, but this is only recounting. Let me be remembered for kindness and compassion, for curiosity and creativity, for striving to be the best I can manage for the people I love. Let me forgive myself and may others forgive me. Please.