Raising my daughter

Having a daughter is so much fun, what with plaiting hair, tying ribbons, buying pretty, pink little things and all. But one day we are going to have more serious issues to discuss than what ribbon colours to put on her head.

The current dating landscape has changed very drastically and raising a daughter has become quite a daunting task.It is actually quite scary to think of things I shall have to deal with in a few years.There is a host of things to worry about when you become a parent, such as unwanted teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, in particular HIV,which more and more teenagers are beginning to be infected with. Also concerning is the possibility that your daughter might make poor choices regarding the men she dates, which might result in her being miserable for the rest of her life. I’m going to really be involved, without being a smothering mother, in my daughter’s life from an early age so that she learns to trust me with everything happening in her life.

I don’t plan to raise my daughter the way I was raised. The first time I discussed boys with my mother was at 25, when she asked why I hadn’t brought the man I was about to marry in about a week’s time to meet her and my father. It never crossed my mind she would want to meet him because boyfriend discussions, as an unwritten rule, were always off limits. If I have other marital concerns now, it would be hard to run to her because we never discussed boys, we can’t start by discussing husbands because they come from boys. We skipped a crucial stage. I won’t say she made a mistake, I’ll just say she employed a strategy that won’t work for me or the environment that we live in today.

My strategy is to be my daughter’s best friend, the first person she turns to for makeup tips, poor child, and when boys start making passes at her. We will sit down together over ice cream or tea and cake and discuss why she should choose one boy over the other.  I want to be her go-to girl when she experiences her first heartbreak so that we can figure out things together. It might be difficult to do because as a working mother, time might be a constraint, but the same way I advocate for date between couples is the same way I will advocate for dates between parents and their children. There’s too much focus on husband/wife relations and children are neglected somewhere along the way.  I remember our debating sessions in high school with schools like Marist Brothers and Bernard Mzeki College. A popular topic to debate on was Juvenile delinquency is due to parental negligence. I recently read an article about a Swazi mother that was arrested for “dereliction of duties” after her 14-year-old daughter was impregnated by a 24-year-old man.  I don’t think that it’s fair to hold a mother wholly responsible if her daughter turns out badly, because she will obviously make her own choices as a young human being. I would, however, want to stand up proudly and tell myself and the world that I did my best to steer my daughter in the right direction. If I detect that some topics make her uncomfortable, I will rope in my sisters or friends to help, and I will also help with their own daughters. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child.

My first glimpse of what sex involved was during biology lessons in high school, but that was just the process of procreation being described, not the actual act.  My daughter’s teachers at school, her friends, the Internet, or mass media are not going to be the first resources my daughter has for sex education, so help me God. The first time I heard anyone talk expansively about sex, the practicals, was when I was old enough to attend my first kitchen party. That’s not going to happen to my daughter, because at that stage it’s usually too late and I feel that’s not exactly the right environment for one to have her first lessons on sex. A novice is bombarded from all directions by various women from various backgrounds and might be too overwhelmed to understand anything. And some of these parties are drunken orgies, decorated by male strippers, where not everything should be taken seriously. The ones that have church women involved aren’t usually so lurid, but some of the blessed mothers are almost virginal in their approach to sex and obtaining much from them would be like drawing water out of a stone.

Here’s what happened at the bridal shower that was hosted for me. My five aunts, one after the other, lectured me on my spiritual life and relations with my in-laws, and that was it. I fell short of rolling my eyes and snapping my fingers diva style and saying, “Hallooo! In case it hadn’t crossed your minds, I’m not marrying this man so that I can go and play with his relatives!”Other younger women grew tired of the sermons and said it was time to discuss sex. Like bats out of hell, my aunts gathered their plates of rice and bottles of soft drinks and flew out of the room. I don’t get why sex is such a scary subject when we are all an offshoot of it.

I want my daughter to know that, under the right circumstances,sex is a beautiful act which she shouldn’t be embarrassed about. I don’t want her to feel it’s a dirty and evil act that will see her go to Gehenna for. What happened to me during my pre-marital counseling will not happen to my child, not if I can help it. My husband and I had our counseling delivered to us by a manic nun at the main Roman Catholic Cathedral located at the corner of 4^th Street and Herbert Chitepo Avenue in Harare. This Sister started off by informing us that she was a pro-lifer. For that reason she condemned the use of contraceptives as it was as bad as murdering fetuses. Then she got into an invective about how we, women, went through life thinking men slept us because they loved us, when in actual fact we were being used. As she said this, she made movements simulating sex (which I wondered where she had seen. Movies perhaps?). She contorted her face and spoke like a deranged man, “I love you, let’s have sex”.  It was actually a very scary and confusing experience for me. Awkward too, because my husband-to-be was sitting right next to me.

The angry nun said we were only to have sex for procreation. The venomous way in which she denounced sex made me hesitate to point out that there were verses in the bible that actually supported sex between married couples.

 I’m sure she would have descended on me like a tonne of bricks. We were with this hysterical nun in the last month preceding our wedding and she went out of her way to portray how revolting   sex was, even in marriage. I would always leave the counseling room with my tail between my legs and head hung in shame for even allowing it to cross my mind that marriage had anything to do with sex.

I think sexual illiteracy is just as debilitating and damaging as any other form of illiteracy. Kids today jump into bed before they are emotionally prepared for the consequences, and as a mother, it would break my heart to see my daughter suffer because of poor decisions she made, particularly if I didn’t give her proper guidance. It’s wrong for parents to fly off the handle and say, “You shouldn’t have done that!”when their daughters fall pregnant, have abortions or contract some sexually transmitted infection when they didn’t guide them on what to do in the first place. I will tell my daughter that moving from a relationship that has gone sour is a lot easier if you haven’t exchanged too many bodily fluids. However, the fact that you have done so should never tie you down to a person you don’t like anymore. I will also be open about mistakes I made in my life, so that she knows I’m talking about things that I really know about.

I had a very strict upbringing, whose benefits I only saw much later in life. I will also be strict and draw lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but all rules will be discussed, not just enforced. I don’t believe that children should just be seen and not heard. When I was a teenager without a cellphone, boys would call on our home number and my father was notorious for wanting to be the one to pick the phone, as if he ever received many calls. If a boy asked to speak to me without greeting him first, he would ask to be greeted first. After that the poor boy would then ask to speak to me, and my father would say, “About what?”

My father knew what time we would usually disappear from the house to see boyfriends. He would choose that time to carry his cup of tea and stand outside by the gate for ages. The poor boy would walk “up the road and down the road, up the road again”, to quote Chaka Demus and Pliers in their song, Tracy, waiting for his girl to come out. I remember peeping from the bedroom window and seeing my boyfriend, after seeing my father, walk past the house with a serious look on his face as if he had nothing whatsoever to do with anyone in our house. I have four sisters, so with five girls in our house, a lot of shoes lost their soles on our road.

Now, I’m not going to play cat-and-mouse with my daughter’s boyfriends. I know I would never win that war if I antagonize my daughter. My father tried, but he definitely didn’t win, because as he became stricter, we became more devious in our effort to protect our relationships which, in retrospect, deserved to be stopped. My father was not entirely wrong, trying to protect us from the little bad wolves. I feel sorry for him. He must have been terrified of what would happen to his daughters if he didn’t get involved by drinking his tea standing at the gate like a prison warder. His heart must have been burning with love for his daughters and worry about those boys’ intentions. All he needed to do was talk to us.

I will request to meet the boys that my daughter will date, with hopes that if they meet me they will respect my daughter. I won’t deny that it will also be for screening purposes.  I will sit them down and have a serious talk about their intentions with my offspring. If a boy is taking my child out, I will want to know where they are going and I will tell them what time my daughter should be home. When she’s still a teenager, I will not mince my words about how I view premarital sex, but at a certain age I will have to ease up and leave my daughter to decide when she’s ready.

I hear a lot of people whose mothers passed away wish they were still around so that they could discuss serious issues with them. Sadly the ones that are living don’t seem to be doing much in their children’s lives. I don’t ever want to do things in half measure, so while I’m still hanging around, I will be active in my daughter’s life. When it comes to sex, I’m not going to be quiet about it and mutter, “I won’t talk about it. That’s not how I was raised.” We can’t afford to regard sex as a taboo subject anymore. It’s tantamount to throwing our children to the wolves while naïvely thinking we are protecting them. I’m aware it won’t be easy to start talking about the birds and the bees with my child, but it can and will be done. The fact that I didn’t get that kind of talk from my own parents doesn’t mean I should perpetuate a culture of keeping mum over important subjects. My daughter isn’t going to be found trudging in the dark on matters relating to sex. Certainly not on my watch.