He tells me he punishes his son by sending him to the “Naughty Corner.” He’s 5. The son, that is. Naughty Corner. I turned that phrase over in my head, like you would an idea you haven’t quite warmed up to. I let it simmer. Naughty Corner. Sounds like a dark corner in a seedy club where men in shiny suits sit with wispy women with dark bony knees. I don’t know, man. I don’t know if that’s where I want to send my child.
“So yes,” he pressed on, “ when he becomes unruly, when he’s acting up, I make him stand at the corner, and face the wall.”
“For how many days?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“Half an hour tops,” he said. “Then I send him straight to bed.” He sipped his Tusker Malt proudly, like he had just solved a major delinquency conundrum.
“Do you send him to bed hungry?”
He laughed. “ No, of course not, don’t be silly, I offer him an orange.” I grinned.
We sat there in silence as we cringed at the sight of the deejay sipping Snapp. Which is a bit like watching an old woman floss her teeth.
Finally, I told him, “When that boy grows up, he will kill you in your sleep, be sure of that.”
He chuckled.
I was asking because I have reached a point where I can’t seem to discipline my daughter. Or rather, I don’t know how to discipline her. I mean spanking is out of the question because I heard it can turn your daughter into one of those girls who demand their boyfriends to spunk them when they become young adults (again, stuff you will hear from fathers in bars).
The other day she refused to go to bed, and instead stretched out on my couch (MY couch!) and pulled a duvet to her face like she pays rent around there. Like she was waiting to watch Hard Talk on BBC. The house help tried to shoo her to bed with little success, then the missus tried with the same result. So she came into the bedroom where I was reading a magazine and said, “Please go ask her to go to bed.”
So I put on my best James Earl Jones voice (“This, is CNN,” remember him?) and shouted from the bedroom, “Tamms, go to bed!” You could almost hear the bats outside flatter from trees and neighborhood dogs whimper in fear. But not her. Not my Tamms. She ignored me. She just continued pressing the remote with her tiny thumb with chipped nail polish.
At that point I had a few options: walk into the living room and water-board her, Guantanamo style. Or grab her by her tiny legs and dangle her out on the balcony until she is emptied of the vegetables, rice and minced meat she had for dinner. I read somewhere that at that age (4) kids need “firm loving” (I know) so I did what any sane father left with little options would do; I begged her.
“But I’m not sleepy!” she whined.
“It’s late, Tamms, and tomorrow is
school, you need to sleep!” I whined back, “don’t you want to grow tall?”
“No.”
“If you don’t go to sleep now you won’t be my friend.”
“Mummy is my friend.”
“No she isn’t.” I said.
“Yes, she is.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Yes, she is.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Yes, she is.”
“No she isn’t.”
“Yes, she is.”
I stared at her, coldly. She ignored me.
“Please go to bed, it’s late. Please?”
She turned in her seat and looked at the clock above, “I will go when the small is at 12 and the big is at 2,” [small being the minute hand and big being the hour hand]
“That’s 2am.”
“Yes,” she said like she knew what 2am was.
“ Come on, get up,” I said more firmly, struggling with my cool.
She was adamant, I got pissed off, so I switched off the television, switched it off from the power socket then grabbed the remote control from her hands before she could hide them behind her back. She stared at me with horror, like I had just called her fat. Then I repeated one last time that she needed to go to bed. Her lips started trembling, but she didn’t move a muscle…OK, not counting her lip muscles.
So I then– and listen to this genius – I switched off the living room lights and walked out and closed the door, leaving her there in pitch darkness. I heard her break into a cry back there in darkness. I heard the house help console her. Then I thought I heard her say, “ I always knew he was not my father.” Someone giggled. The missus.
In the morning I woke up to cold treatment. Very cold treatment. When I chimed a “good morning!” she stared right through me, like I was mist in Kinungi. Normally when we are leaving the house, she insists that I carry her and her school bag to the car. Not this time, hell hath no fury like a woman left in darkness; she quickly trod ahead of me, and quickly scampered down the staircase just in case I was deluded enough to think she would allow me to lay my hands on her. Or her beloved pink school bag.
I bet if I had listened closely I would have heard her cussing under her breath; “ what kind of a self respecting father switches off all the lights and leaves his own child in darkness to be tormented by ghosts and then eaten by wild animals? His own flesh and blood! I’m better off in a children’s home. In fact, I will move out…once my piggy bank is full, you wait. Oh, you wait; I’m soooo moving out. I’ve had it with this big fore-headed jackass. I’m tired! Enough! I’m so out of here! I will get out of this dump; get a place of my own where no one will sprain my small tender wrists while wrenching that stupid remote control from my hands. Where I can watch TV all day and all night and nobody will tell me that I have to take Scots Emulsion or those awful green vegetables. Oh, you wait, end month, I’m ghost. Gone, baby, gone! ”
The drive to her school was punctuated by stony silence. My efforts at conversation were thwarted by the back of her head. She looked out the window the whole time, disgusted by my sight. Disgusted by the mere sound of my breathing. At school, when one of her teachers opened the passenger door, she stepped out and walked away without as much as a goodbye (I know who she learned this from.) It kind of hurt me, if you want to know the truth. And I’m not being sissy. At this point, if this was an Indian movie, I would have ran after her, and started singing, and she would have run to the gardens and hid behind a tree and peeked from around it as I sung my dark heart out. Sung like a canary.
But instead, as I watched her walk away swiftly, I thought it would be hilarious if she sort of stumbled on her Bubblegummers and sort of fell on the grass. Not to hurt herself, of course not, but you know, just a soft landing where her dress covers her face, exposing her dreadful purple bikers she always insists on wearing. I think that would be more fun than an Indian movie.
We eventually made up, which meant me kissing her ass and buying her loads of edible stuff. But those moments are many. Those moments of fatherhood and I thought, I would come up with a list of my moments of fatherhood. Both good and bad.
When she hangs from my hand. She likes to hold my right arm with both hands and then her feet off the ground and literally swings on my arm like a monkey. It says she believes in my strength as a father and that informs my strength as a man. It says she can trust me to hold onto her. It says she believes I’m dependable, that I would never let her fall. And it makes her feel safe in an endearingly childish way because in her words, “you are so strong.” Between you and me? That shit really hurts my shoulders!
Sometimes she will ask me to bring her pizza pie, those tasty pies they now sell at Pizza Inn. She will say that in the morning when I drop her off to school, but since I never think she will remember, and since I have a memory of a goldfish, I sometimes forget. And when I walk in through the door, she will ask me, “Did you bring me pissa pie?” (She has never learnt to call it Pizza, it’s always pissa) and I will look blank. I will then suffer through the pain of watching disappointment wash over her face, how her face will fall because she had been thinking about it the whole day. But because she’s a great kid, she will offer me a brave smile; like it’s not a big deal I forgot, like it’s not that important. But I know it is important. At the moment it normally feels to me that I didn’t just forgot to bring pissa pie, I forgot about something more important; I forgot about her. And it kills me.
She sits on the carpet, cross-legged, staring up at the TV. She is totally absorbed in cartoon. So absorbed that the carpet could be burning and she wouldn’t feel it. Now I love it when I’m in the next room and I hear her giggle periodically at something on TV. That innocent giggle; unadulterated, the purest form of glee. That giggle can stay in my head for a long time. If there ever is a soundtrack for fatherhood for me, this sound is it.
She will touch everything and anything in the house, but she knows my laptop is a no-go zone. It’s my shrine. She never touches it, unless I open for her a blank word document and she types stuff on it. I love it because there is a mixture of reverence and fear in her where my laptop is involved. She imagines I would go bananas if she touched it, and yes, it would make me anxious, but at the end of the day it’s just a laptop.
I love when I’m writing on the couch and she comes and squeezes herself next to me and just sits there in silence, watching the screen and not saying nary a word. I love it because I know she mustering the courage to ask me if she can touch the letter “T” for Toy. Or Tamms.
Have you seen a child sit on a chair? With their small feet dangling at the edge? Their small feet swinging in and out like a yoyo? Have you seen? Doesn’t it make you feel that life is great even with all its barbs? Doesn’t that action tell you that everything will be all right, that it’s never that serious? Every time I see a kid do that I get an overwhelming urge to steal them. I’m serious.
She likes purple. It’s her favourite color, when purple is your little girl’s favourite colour you know it will be your favourite colour too somehow, by duress. But purple on hair looks dreadful even if it’s on your favourite girl. Sometimes when she is fresh off the salon and she expects me to notice that her hair is new. But if I’m too slow, she demand to know if I like her hair. I don’t know if gaudy purple braids that look like a deep-sea weed is my thing. But I like where it’s all coming from; her sense of vanity.
There is that moment most mornings when I go down on one knee to tie her school shoelaces. That moment when, while I’m tying the laces, she sort of places her right hand on my head. Like she is blessing me. Like she is according me the greatest honor a father can be accorded. That to me is always makes me tender inside. And at that precise moment when I can feel her tiny hands on the crown of my head, nothing ever can burst that bubble, not even when she quips, “Papa, you don’t have hair here!”
I’d love to hear your moments, gang.