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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/croww_0 on 2024-09-22 16:59:03+00:00.
Dad was always kind of a weird guy.
Weird and strict.
I always thought this was just because he was a single parent, but even that seemed to only barely cover his odd behavior. He expected the best of me, expected my chores to be done, expected the rules to be followed, and, if I didn't, there was only one punishment that would do.
Dad never hit me with a belt, he never spanked me with his hand, he never took my stuff or put me in time out.
No, Dad had a different sort of punishment he used.
He didn't introduce the jar until I was six, and it was revealed with a lot of serious contemplation.
I remember coming home from my first day of Kindergarten and finding my Dad sitting in the living room, the jar on the little end table where the magazines and rick rack usually stood. The jar may have begun life as a pickle jar, it always smelled a little of brine, and inside were beans. These were spotted pinto beans, the kind I had used on art projects and crafts since before I could remember, and I noticed they had been filled up to the brim. All in all, there were probably about three bags of beans in there, and a piece of scotch tape declared it to be my jar.
"Take a seat, we need to have a very serious talk," he said, and I ended up just sitting on the floor of our living room and looking up at him. He looked very serious, more serious than I had ever seen him before, and that scared me a bit. Up until now, Dad had always been this goofy guy who played pirates and astronauts and Mario Kart with me, but now he looked like a judge ready to sentence me to death if I didn't have a pretty good defense for my crime.
"You are six now, long past knowing right from wrong. In this family, it is customary to use The Bean Jar to punish children. Do you see this jar?" he asked like there was any way I could miss it.
I nodded and he smiled, seeming pleased.
"The Bean Jar symbolizes You. It is everything you are, and everything you might be. So, from now on, when you are bad, or insolent, or you disobey my orders, I will not yell at you or send you to your room. I won’t do anything but take a bean from The Bean Jar."
I almost laughed. Was this a game or something? Was I supposed to be scared of a jar of beans? This had to be another one of Dad's jokes. Dad was always doing stuff like this, telling me how the monsters in my closet could be kept away by a teddy bear or that the Cavity Creeps would eat my teeth if I didn't brush them twice a day. Dad was a goofball, he always had been, but I think it was his face that made me wonder if he was joking or not. Throughout the whole thing, he just sat there, deadly serious, and never averted his eyes from me.
"You're a smart kid, just like I was, and I see now that you'll need an example. You may think this is just a regular jar, but you're wrong," he said, reaching in and picking up a bean, "dead wrong."
He didn't even take it out. He just lifted a little, hovering it over the pile, but he didn't need to do anything else. Suddenly, miraculously, it felt like someone was touching my brain. It was the feeling of getting a sudden sadness, a sudden bit of anxiety, and I wanted him to drop that bean back in the jar. I needed to be whole, I needed all my beans, and he must have seen that on my face because he dropped it back in and I trembled as I tried to make sense of what had just happened.
"I'm sorry, but you have to know what's at stake here. You're my last chance, I have to make sure that you are perfect, and the Bean Jar knows perfection from flaw. My own father used this method, and his father, and his father before him. The Bean Jar is always used until the child's eighteenth birthday, or until all the beans are gone."
I was panting when I asked him what would happen if all the beans were gone.
He looked at me without mirth and without any sign of a joke or a goof, "You don't want to know."
That's how we started with the Bean Jar. Dad didn't suddenly turn into an ogre or become a villain overnight. He went back to being the same guy he'd always been. We would play video games together, build with my Legos, and play pretend after school. My Dad had never scared me like that before, he and I were always really close, but I remember how he would get when he had to take beans out of the jar. His face would become completely neutral, and he would walk to the jar and take out a bean before crushing it between his thumb and forefinger.
The Bean Jar was utilized even for the most trivial of infractions.
Forgot to wash my dishes? Lose a bean.
Forgot to put my clothes away? Lose a bean.
Stayed up too late on a school night? Lose a bean.
There was no escalation either. There was never any difference between forgetting to clean up my toys or yelling at Dad because I was frustrated. It was always one bean at a time, ground to dust between his large, calloused fingers. He would look at me too with this mixture of pain and resolve once it was done, his stoicism only going so far.
Those times he took a bean, however, were unbearable.
It felt as if each bean were a piece of my psyche that he was turning to dust. As a child, every bean made me hyper-aware of my actions, but I was still just a child. Sometimes I forgot things, sometimes I was lazy, and sometimes I thought I could sneak around and get away with not doing what I was told. I was always caught, always punished, and I always fell into a state of anxious, nervous emotions once it was done. I hated the way it felt when he crushed those beans, and I didn't want to lose another one. I didn't want to lose them so badly, that I trained myself to perform the tasks expected of me without fail. Five am: start the laundry. Five twenty: make breakfast. Five Thirty: wash my dishes. Five forty: dress. Six o'clock: clean up my room. Six thirty: backpack on, fully dressed, waiting by the door to leave. Three ten: Get home, do homework. Four thirty: Clean house. Five: Start dinner. Six: Eat dinner when my father got home. Nine o'clock: brush teeth, take a shower. Ninethirty: Bedtime. Every day, without fail, these things were done or I would be one bean shorter.
This manifested itself as a kind of mania in me. Not only did I have to get all my chores done, but I needed to get good grades too. After a while, good wasn't good enough either. What if Dad decided that C's and B's weren't good enough? I strove for all A's, and Dad seemed happy with my efforts.
To the other kids, however, I was a weirdo, and I didn't really have any friends.
Dad was my only friend, but it was a strange kind of friendship.
Like living with someone who has schizophrenia and could change at the slightest inclination.
I didn't have any real friends until high school when I met Cass.
Cassandra Biggly was not what you would consider a model student. Her parents had high expectations for her, but she was a middling at best. She came to me because I was the smartest kid in school, at least according to the other kids, and she begged me to help her. I helped her, tutored her, showed her the way, and soon her grades improved. That was how we became friends, and how she was the first to find out about the Bean Jar.
"So, he just takes a bean out and crushes it?"
"Yes," I said, not sounding at all mystified about the process.
"And...what? It means you have less beans?"
I thought about it, Dad had never actually told me what would happen, only that it would be terrible.
"When he takes out all the beans, then something awful will happen."
"Like what?" Cass asked, "No dessert for a month?"
"I don't know, but I know that when he crushes those beans, it's like a piece of my sanity is mushed. I feel crazy after he smooshes a bean. I don't like feeling that way, I don't like it at all."
I started crying. I hadn't meant to, I was sixteen and I never cried anymore, but Cass didn't make me feel bad about it. She just held me while I cried and eventually, I stopped. It had felt good to be held. Dad hugged me, but he never really comforted me. I didn't have a mom, someone whose job seemed to be comforting me, and as Cass held me, I realized what I had been missing all these years.
I had been missing a Mom that I had never even known.
We hung out a lot after that, Cass and I. Despite our age, it never became inappropriate. She gave me something I had been missing, a friend without the threat of punishment looming over our relationship. The realization made me feel differently about my Dad. He was still the lovable goofball that he had always been, but I started to see how our entire relationship hung under the shadow of that bean jar. As I pulled away, he became more sullen, and more suspicious, and I saw him holding the Bean Jar sometimes as if he wished to smash them. If I wasn't misbehaving, though, he couldn't, that was always the deal. He knew it, I knew it, and he knew that as long as I abided by the rules, he couldn't punish me.
Despite how it will sound, Dad was never cruel about the Bean Jar. He never used it to take out his frustrations, he never came home and punished me simply because he’d had a bad day. The rules were established, we had both agreed to them, and I knew that by following them I would be safe. I think, deep down, Dad really did think he was doing the best for me, thought he was molding me into something better than I could be, and I guess he was right, though it wasn’t fair, not really.
Then, one day after coming home from Cass's, it all came to a head.
D...
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