I used to curse a lot. Like, a lot. Like every two sentences some curse word will show up in my lingo. My favorite linguistic choices were f#$%, which takes a glorified lead, followed by s#it and last but not least, h&ll. There’s others, but they showed up so sporadically it’s not worth ranking them. Like gaddamn. I love that word. Gaaaaddaaamn! You feel it? On it’s own it conveys such emotion you can feel it in the pit of your stomach. For years I was disturbingly comfortable with derogatory and crass words, and all their colloquial cousins and aunties. I could be talking about climate change and a curse word will somehow find its way in there.
You are probably wondering what this has to do with an article about my daughters. So let’s go for it.
I have a very nosy 6 year old, soon to be 7. I have a tenacious 3 year old who absorbs everything around her like a sponge, but says little. Scary little thing. When I walk through the door of my house, and they do their oh daddy is home up and down jump, at the back of my mind, a switch has to go off. The cursing switch. A few times I didn’t turn off the switch properly, and a word or two slipped out. Njoki would stare at me with curiosity as I made a fateful attempt to mask the said curse word with random and senseless words. Then she goes, “Daddy what are you saying??”.
I thought I was doing great. Figured my gimmicks were working. My innocent little one was not yet scarred, and I still have a chance to raise her with a halo around her head. Shock on me. She comes home this one time, and for some reason I was home early enough that day to see her come in from school, filthy looking, even filthier smelling but somehow still adorable. She’s got this twinkle she always has in her eye when she’s got hot tea from school to share with me. And there it was, so twinkly I knew this one had to be haat! I braced myself.
Daddy, daddy! Guess what word Sonia used today at the field!?
What word hun?
She used the F-word Daddy!
My head started spinning. The F-word? What F-word are we talking about here? Fart? Fat? Friggin? Fundamental? Fort Jesus? There was no way to find out without betraying my worst fear. If God forbid she actually knew what the F-word was, and knew enough to know that it wasn’t a good word, and hence potentially knew what it actually means, what would my course of action be? Punishment? Send her to her mother? Call the teacher and yell about what environment they were creating in that Catholic school that led to F-bombs being hurled around at the play ground? A vein popped on my forehead as I feigned shock and disgust at bad Sonia. And just like that Njoki runs upstairs to go change, leaving me a heaving mess.
There’s been follow up shockers. She knows the middle finger is bad. She wonders why other girls in school are wearing boob tops and she’s not. She knows which school mate has a boyfriend and which one doesn’t. She wants her ears pierced. She’s putting on her mother’s make up, often overdoing it so she ends up looking like she should be on a dark street hollering at men. She’s 6 for heavens sake!
It’s a nightmare that has me dreading every day I walk into my house what new reality i’ll be dealing with. And that’s just the first born, who will undoubtedly be a walking encyclopedia for the younger one as she comes of age too, so if I don’t nip some of this stuff in the bud now, this horror film will continue for a few more years, and I just don’t think my heart can take it for that long.
I worry. I worry about what kind of influence I’m being to my girls. I worry about what little traumas I’m inadvertently causing them through my temperaments and character growth areas.
Let me give you an example.
I loath kids games. All of them. They are irritatingly repetitive, mind numbingly dull and more often than not will involve me going on my knees, or crouching, or squatting. I’m 6-1, so any form of body curling or bending activity takes effort. I have the attention span of a warthog and the patience of a house fly. You do the math. The number of times my dear Njoki has complained that I don’t like playing with her is countless. And every time I have bowed to pressure and descended on to the carpet to put some silly blocks together with her, it didn’t take 3 minutes before I said (in my head) i’m done with this, let me go back to watching Big Bang theory. Then she catches feelings. Then I offer her Oreos to shut her up. Works every time. But here I am, worried that she will grow older with Daddy play issues, and some player with questionable tattoos will give her quality time and get her to open her legs just because he fills a play time void I did not fill while she was younger. The horror!
Sigh. So I tried to find a middle ground. Something we can both enjoy and won’t make me want to flush myself in the nearest toilet. I have this Cousin. Smart guy. So smart he got a scholarship to go study some Microelectronics something or the other in Germany. So smart they offered him a job afterwards in exchange for paying for his PHD. Anyways, he tells me a story about Russian kids playing Chess at age 4, and I’m like gaddaaaaamn, my Njoki is headed to 7, surely she can crack this thing. And lucky for her, I know how to play chess, and actually enjoy it. I went ahead and built all kinds of castles in the air about how we would become that adorable father-daughter that engages in Chess games late into the night, always trying to out do each other. I would see her winning Chess championships before she was 10, I would see her in Russia kicking some 4 year old’s tushi…oh I went to town! I bought the Chess board, brought it home with me and blocked out a whole Saturday afternoon for this exciting affair.
“Daddy, what is this?”
“Oh, this is Chess my darling, and you will love it! Here, let me show you”
“Why does it have all these boxes Daddy?”
“Oh, that’s where you put the Chess pieces hun”
“What are Chess pieces?”
“Let me show you…here they are!”
“Hi hi hi…they look funny!”
“I know, let me show you which is which”
“What is this one Daddy?”
“Oh that’s the rouk hun”
“The what?”
“The rouk, it’s like a castle where the King lives”
“Oh, like in <throws in the name of some kid show I don’t know>!”
“Yes! If you say so, and here’s the King”
Frowns.
“That doesn’t look like a King at all?”
“Of course it does, look, he has a crown”
“And these? They are so many!”
“Yes baby, those are Pawns”
“What are Pawns?”
“They are like Soldiers, their job is to go ahead of the King and fight”
“Who are they fighting?”
“They fight the Pawns from the other side”
“I don’t like fights Daddy”
From there onwards, it went south. The pacifist that Njoki has become could not fathom the concept of those little guys being sent ahead to die so the King could live. She thought it was unfair that some pieces could literally jump their way around the board while others had to go one step at a time. She said her favorite piece was the Queen and wanted to keep playing with it, all the while exposing her King. I was happy that she was happy that the Queen was the most powerful chess piece, but that was a moment of joy so rare in the 2 hour nightmare that I almost forgot it.
So here I am, 3 months later. I stuck through several more sessions of ridiculous questions, tantrums about how unfair the game was, tears every time any of her chess pieces were “killed” by mine, and eventually, I reached my limit when she declared that Chess was so boriiiing and could she please go back to watching TV?
I’ve had some successes here and there with Njoki. Taught her how to ride a bike, which she enjoys doing. She seems to be a natural born leader, always organising other kids and deciding which direction the game will go. I’d like to think she’s picked this up from Vera and I. Her social skills (when she gets comfortable around strangers) are dope, as are her manners, which I take no credit for. That’s all thanks to the Military academy of How to be a Proper girl that madam Vera runs in our house. She’s articulate, and has the memory of a grown up woman in a relationship. She will call you out on stuff you said 7 months ago.
Look, this parenting thing is winging it for the most part, praying to your deity that your kids don’t get scarred along the way, and trying your best not to lose your mind every time they trip and do some something that suggests they will be that drunk girl being groped by bouncers as the pukes outside the club in a dingy part of town. You guide, you coax, you coach, you talk to, you spank, you patiently let them make their mistakes, and if you follow my Dad’s parenting book, make sure before they hit 6 you have given them that one beating-of-a-lifetime that they will be telling their friends about when in their 30’s. Mine involved a wire that left marks so deep they are still visible on Njoki a year later. You become a little god. Feared, but loved in equal measure.
But don’t get it twisted. This is probably the toughest assignment you will ever do in your life, if you choose to do it that is.
Now go ye and sire, at your own risk.
