I remember the day I ran into the house and threw my school bag down, flew up the stairs two at a time, zapped through the sitting room, down the corridor and into my father's bedroom like a cannon ball. He was sleeping. And I was panting, result sheet in hand. 'Daddy! Daddy! I came second!' He lifted his head slowly. Then put it down again. 'That person that came first, does he have two heads?'
Ah! Let me tell you something, even at the risk of sounding sexist, a man is not exactly like a woman. Yes. There are days I sit in my study and listen to my child cry. She does that sometimes, you see, when she wakes up from her siesta; sits in bed and starts crying, 'Daddy, where are you? Mummy, where are you? There is nobody here with me.' I tell you, it plucks at the heart strings, the voice of this little girl in a world that must seem infinitely vast and empty. Still, I just sit there and listen, till she gets up and comes looking for me.
I do not question it either, whatever it is that overwhelms my paternal impulse to jump up at the first cry of distress. For what is an immunization anyway? The world is full of things just waiting to kill you. And for many of them there are no cures. So, you have to bring it with you, that ability to fight back, carry it in your very genes, when you step out in the morning. It's the only way. Tell me, then, where do I take you for the vaccination against weakness, so you don't come in here tomorrow telling me you will die if he leaves you? There is a reason our parents made us eat whatever was put in front of us, left us standing there with a set of cold instructions: 'I don't care how you do it, if you have to lick the floor from top to bottom with your tongue, but this place had better be spick and span by the time I get back.' There are reasons.
It's what I want to tell them now, when they stumble and fall, and lie there crying; when they threaten me with tantrums just because I keep saying, 'No, baby, put that toy back on the shelf'; when they yell out protests at early evening lights-out, or the standing instruction not to leave unwashed plates on the kitchen table. I want to tell them that Life is not fair. It doesn't distribute things in equal proportion amongst all the six billion of us. I want to tell them what Corpenicus discovered, that the world actually doesn't revolve around us (even if we're cute and cuddly). It doesn't care that we're too young to be orphans, or too old to start learning new things, too beautiful to be widowed, or too privileged to be impoverished. It doesn't care. But these are not the sorts of lessons you can learn off a blackboard.
You see, when we were kids on the Taekwondo circuit in Lagos, there was this one fight everyone referred to all the time. Two boys in a final. In truth, one was a young man and the other in his teens. And the teenager had hurt his arm so badly he couldn't use it much, but still said, 'I won't quit.' And those that watched said it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, the way he fought, the way he glided on his feet with his injured hand tucked away behind him, the way he won; it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. Even grown-up men stood up straight to applaud. And people said – How? You can teach a boy how to fight, yes, but how do you teach him how to fight on?
It is for this reason that we must find the heart to say to our children, 'Go back.' Yes. 'Go back and try again.' So, I did. And when I came home the next time with result sheets even better than the ones I started this story with, I showed them to my big brother. He was no longer a teenager, by now his own genes had been fully encoded with flecks of steel. So, he smiled slightly, tapped me on the forehead and said, 'Let me tell you something, Dike. You can be a giant to everyone around you. But it means nothing if you're still dwarfed by the giant you could actually be. Try harder.'
Yes, my brother - that too is Love.
Image taken fom:
No comments:
Post a Comment