Have you ever gotten so mad at your children that you’ve pinched or scratched or hurt them in the process of trying to behave “properly” and hold your emotions in?

Brian Doyle, the editor of Portland Magazine, has a piece in this month’s Utne Reader about the shame parents feel when they get so frustrated with a child’s behavior that they face their own shadow fully and see their true animal fury. This happens to everybody, but the shame of recognition in the conscientious parent is paralyzing and severe. It almost makes you feel that ye olde days of spanking were superior, but of course, they were not. Doyle opens his essay, which is called “A Sin,” like this:

“Committed a sin yesterday, in the hallway, at noon. I roared at my son, I grabbed him by the shirt collar, I frightened him so badly that he cowered and wept, and when he turned to run I grabbed him by the arm so roughly that he flinched, and it was that flicker of fear and pain across his face, the bright eager holy riveting face I have loved for 10 years, that stopped me then and haunts me this morning; for I am the father of his fear, I sent it snarling into his heart, and I can never get it out now, which torments me.”

The boy had consistently neglected warnings and picked on his brother, but Doyle writes that his own livid reaction made him ashamed “down to the bottom” of his bones. He goes on to write–

“I do not know how sins can be forgiven. I grasp the concept, I admire the genius of the idea, I suspect it to be the seed of all real peace, I savor the Tutus and Gandhis who have the mad courage to live by it, but I do not understand how foul can be made fair.”

In the end, he does find forgiveness and he apologizes to his son as they sit in the woods together near their house. The essay is masterfully written, all on one page.

I am grateful that the Utne Reader publishes beautiful things like this, articles that otherwise would have been missed.

Doyle’s most recent book is “The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart.” I noticed his work a few months ago when an excerpt from “The Wet Engine” appeared in the anthology “The Best Spiritual Writing of 2005.”