Fimbo Publishing

As a parent, I know it’s pretty easy to love your kids. Not always. It can get tricky to summon that warm fuzzy feeling when they wake you at 3.00 a.m. with colic, or when the toddler breaks your prized trophy, or when your six-year-old craves attention in the loud, inexhaustible way of six-year-olds, or when your teenager gets high on cheap weed and crashes your bosses’ new car. But for the most part, it’s easy to love your children. They share your genes. You see pieces of yourself in them. You carried them inside you for nine months and felt them kick, you saw their tiny eyes the first time they smiled, you know that they belong to you. For adoptive parents, you made a conscious choice to own this little person and love them and raise them. So it’s easy to love your kids.

But what makes our kids love us? When they’re all grown up, they can see themselves in us as they raise their own families, and they finally comprehend the sacrifices we made for them, and they love us for it – mostly they do. But what about when they’re little? They are only vaguely aware that they share our last names, and that our first names are Mum and Dad, but they can’t know what that means. They just accept it as normal, no question, but they have no idea what they ‘own’.

I just told off some twelve year old child for doing something perfectly logical – and all because he made my child cry. For that, I came pretty close to making him cry.

Here’s the scenario. My daughter saves up for two weeks to buy her favourite candy bar. For some reason, she goes to the shop and buys milk instead. Then she changes her mind – as women do – and returns the milk, asking for her money back. The child minding the shop tells her it’s against policy to accept goods once sold, and my child comes home crying.

I then go to the shop and chew the child’s ears off before eventually leaving extremely pissed with neither the milk nor the money.

As it turns, the shop owed her 100 tsh in change, so I did get that.

The situation was resolved when I refunded my child’s money and made her promise not to go to that shop again. But the whole mess got me thinking.

 …knowing something is wrong with your child, knowing they are ‘not themselves’, knowing something is bothering them, hearing them say ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ when they are only five, knowing they couldn’t explain even if they wanted to, because they can’t comprehend it themselves, and begging to make it all better…fear is being a parent.

About a year ago. My child asked me a frightening question. ‘Mummy, what happens to me if you die?” I was shocked. It came out of the blue. I tried to find out what prompted it, but got nowhere. Then I tried to brush her off, telling her I wasn’t going to die anytime soon. But she insisted, “I know, but what happens to me when you die?”

I then went round in circles and dropped some red herrings about burial and cremation, and carrying around ashes in handbags filled with chocolate scented envelopes. She giggled, and seemed to like the envelopes. Hours later, when I thought the topic was forgotten, she came and sat beside me, placed her head in my lap and said “Mummy, I don’t want you to be dead.”

That was a year ago.

A lot happened in that one year. I met someone whom I loved, and whom I thought loved me, and who my child was fond of. But then I realized they were not what they seemed, and I bailed. That’s when I got scared.

Ever since then, there’s something I’ve been meaning to do. But somehow I never got round to it. Stuff kept coming up. Excuses maybe, or maybe chicken, but I just never got round to doing it, until today.