Dating : My mother set a kitchen timer to ensure she beat all of her children’s butts equally.

My mother set a kitchen timer to ensure she beat all of her children’s butts equally. My mom was a small woman with six rumbustious children. There were three boys and three girls. I was the oldest by about four years; then there were stair-step children ending with fraternal twins. We were ingenious at coming up with things to do that could end in a spanking. Once, we took turns jumping out of the second-floor window. A different time we played a game where we punched each other in the eye to see if we got black eyes like on TV. Imagine my mom coming home from work to six kids, all with a least one, sometimes two, black eyes. She set that timer and spanked us in order, me first, yelling the only person who could hit us was her. We understood her painful lesson, but not for long.