Deflection

I used to have a problem with accepting responsibility for my bad behavior.  I didn't like the way it made me feel.  It was an icky feeling, so I'd become quite good at deflecting the blame to someone else for the unsavory things I had done.

When I was a young girl, Hazel would blame me for everything bad that happened in the seven years that my mother, sister and I lived with her.  A hole in the wall?  Spilled milk?  Broken glass?  Front door left wide open? Cats got out? Cat's got fleas? Cat's got babies? Where's Carol Louise?  Not "where's Judy?" or "where's Harriett Louise?"  Oh, no.  I was always, always the guilty one.

CLANKITY, CLANKITY, CRASH!!

Who dunit?  Mother was taking an afternoon nap, so it wasn't her.  My sister Judy was sitting on the couch in a pretty Sunday-go-to-church dress with her hands folded in her lap.  Nope!  Not Judy.  Where's Carol Louise? On the garage roof having a picnic with some friends?  What's that on the ground?  Twenty feet of guttering?

Okay!  At first glance, it might appear that I was responsible for the CLANKITY, CLANKITY, CRASH!  I was eating Bolonga sandwiches and sipping cherry Kool Aid on the shingles at the time of the incident. But, no one told me it was against the rules to picnic on the roof, and if the guttering had been put up correctly, it wouldn't have come loose and fallen on the ground.  Hazel wasn't born yesterday, she said, so I suffered the switch and humiliation until her anger turned to exhaustion.  Beating me in front of my friends was more physical exercise than she'd had in a month.  She threw the switch back at the tree from which it came, and with heavy sighs, slowly walked back inside the house.

DEFLECTION

The change in direction of blame as it crosses a boundary

 between two media with different refractive indexes.  In other

words, for those of you who just said "Huh?" deflection is

when you've done something you shouldn't have, and you

refuse to accept responsibility for your actions.  Something

or someone else is blamed for your behavior.

                                           - Wikidikipedia

Now that I am an adult, I no longer fear the switch when I do something wrong.  Not because Hazel's one hundred and one and doesn't know where I live, or that I'm strong enough to fight off the switch, or fast enough to outrun it, or smart enough to deflect blame to someone else.  Nope!   The reason I don't fear punishment for wrongdoings, is because I never, ever do anything wrong.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.