I was brought up by a widowed mother. When my dad died, we moved in with my mom’s mom – me, my sisters and my mother. My gran worried a lot about us growing up without a father and told my mother that she had to be ‘hard on them, especially Chris’. She always egged my mom on and I think that sometimes mom punished us not because we deserved it, but to please gran.
Before we moved in with my gran I was occasionally spanked by my mom’s hand. She whacked us quite hard, hard enough to make us cry and squirm, but not really hard enough for us to be afraid of her. When we moved to gran’s, she changed and spanked us with a slipper.