My 4 year old asked
me a question. She said, “Daddy, do you know who my best friend in class is?” I
thought about it for a while, then asked, “Is it Aisha?” She shook her head. “Is
it Esther?” She shook her head. She has not yet known me long enough to know
that I don’t like guessing games. “So, who is it?” And she said, “Sean.” Sean?
Who the hell is Sean? But this is not what I said. What I said was: “Why? What is
it about Sean that you like?” And she thought about it for a while, then said: “He’s
neat. He’s nice. And he does what I say.” And I in turn shook my head quietly
and said, in the privacy of my own mind, lest ‘they’ say I am not being
‘sensitive’ – Women!
So, let me get
it right, you want me to wake up in the morning and, before I have even
finished rolling out it, to make the bed? Come home in the evening, remove my
shoes and put by the door, remove my socks and put in the laundry basket, empty
my bursting bladder then carefully put the toilet seat back down and not forget
to wipe it over once with antiseptic wipe before shutting the door carefully
behind me? Bloody hell. Boys like Sean make it hard for the rest of us.
True. Take this
issue of ‘niceness’. Left to me, I shall tell you once – I love you – at the
start of the journey, and feel absolutely no compulsion thereafter to re-visit
that conversation unless and until the underlying state of affairs changes. Not
so? But no, not this Sean fellow. I know his type. They will come and sit with
you in the kitchen, forming they are washing plate, making those of us who
honestly prefer to be camped in front of the TV look like assholes.
What shall we
do? We are in competition with Sean, this Sean who will do as he is told.
“Sean!” Shouted in soprano from downstairs. And if Sean is anything like me, he
will clench his jaws and mutter (even though the probability of being over-heard
is zero), “Ooohhh. Why must she shout my name like that, eh? Can she not come
upstairs and call me, eh? What is all this?” But still jump up at the next,
“Sean!!”
Yes. If Sean is
anything like me, he will have a frown on his face, and will walk as if someone
is pushing his waist from behind. And when he gets downstairs and finds her
standing at the sink, and she turns and tells him to bring the insecticide from
the upstairs he is coming from and come and hunt down the cockroach she spied from
the corner of her eyes dashing behind the cooker, he will swallow the urge to
bang the kitchen table and shout, “Nwanyi a, ishi a di gi mma?” Instead, he
will say in a voice throttled by bottled-up frustration and the need to make
love later that night, “Ok”. No. Not Sean. Sean will go up and come back to
kill the cockroach, all the time whistling Bryan Adam’s ‘Everything I Do, I Do
It For You’ under his breath. Bloody Hell!
(Deep breath). There
is no need for an elevated bp. Yes. My brother, I shall not sit down here and be
lying to myself, no, not here in the privacy of my own mind. Yes. If this Sean
survives kindergarten, and primary school, and secondary school, and
University, and the long, long line of babes waiting to relegate him
permanently to the ‘friendship zone’ for being ‘too nice’; yes, if he is able
to hang on to this his excruciatingly annoying ‘niceness’ through that season
of pimples when the babes in his class will prefer the boys that hide behind
the bush to smoke igbo; if his own advent of testosterone does not corrupt this
his natural instinct not to confuse aggression with strength, or gentleness
with weakness; then – eziokwu! – if I ever open my front door and find him
there, I will only hold the cutlass, but I shall not threaten him with it. Yes.
But are these things not still far in the future?
