The first day of my Z’s school was an exciting one. It was difficult as well, for me, because he would be leaving our four walls to join and be part of another community on his own, a community which I would not be part of. For the first time in his and my life, I would only get to hear about it, his new life at school. I was beginning to become secondary in his life.
The first week of my work felt something like this. I noticed many things as if for the first time and for others, an actual first time and in a way it reminded me of Z’s first day. How dressed up he was in his clothes and his new shoes that his father had bought him, how scared and excited he felt. How he felt like changing his mind when the car stopped- right at the gate where his teachers came to get him.
We took him up ourselves and as we stood outside the door of his classroom, about to leave, he had a look on his face- of fear, doubt, uncertainty, apprehension- not horror but close. And then, the swings distracted him and he was home again, in the familiar territory of playing. In the evening we came to get him, at the same time as his aunt- who had come with balloons and a milk shake in the car and pictures- many many pictures. In the flurry of activity, I looked down and saw his new shoes, they were torn beyond repair, unrecognisable. The sand pit had shredded them. I felt bad for his father who had taken such meticulous time and pride in choosing them and buying them.
On one of the days this past week, as I drove Z to school, he noticed that the police drove on the other side of the road and drove ‘faster faster’. I allowed the use of the word silly for the first time- from me, in description to the police. Silly has been a constant exclamation adapted by him from Peppa pig- a British cartoon- where the children constantly refer to their parents as “Silly mummy!” or “Silly daddy!”!” Z also noticed that “they need to make the road from our home [as] good as the driving road because it makes mummy’s tea pour”. Then later, as I came close to my work area, I saw an expatriate, on a red plated boda-boda complete with a helmet as any serious expatriate would wear when riding a motorcycle. As I brake peddled the car on the downward slope of a punctured road, he toddled past, shoulders hunched in the brief morning drizzle and I wondered if he knew something we didn’t.
The thoughts I have before I drop him to school are ones of teaching, being an example, what I can or can’t say in the traffic because he repeats it to me later- Mummy! This truck! It’s driving basides and basides!”, what we sing, how he is doing when he is sniffling about or coughing. Then I reach his school, and his teachers, passive-aggressively whisper- “He’s early today”. “Early?” I ask. “Yes” she responds, looking up at me as if I have caught her by surprise. “We try!,” I say, with an unaffected shrug. She doesn’t know that arriving in itself is an achievement. As I drive away, I think about how I can be earlier. I think about the baby at home.
Today, I thought about John Gottman’s theory of contempt. I think about how it feels to be vulnerable, to rely so heavily on someone when in need, emotionally and physically. I think about how it feels to be the one, the one who is needed. I think about how it feels to be the one who is moving, doing, being important [or as Z calls it- “I’m doing impoitant work as he fumbles through the keys on the laptop”] and whether I would run or stay. I think about Issa and Lawrence- Lawrence at his worst (poor and slumped over a desk in yesterday’s clothes) and Lawrence at his best (Lawrence the app creator, gymed and groomed] and what happened in between. I think about this movie Give it a year- that I watched, pausing in parts and finally switching it off because it was tainting my churchmosphere with its coarse, vulgar British humour – about this writer’s-blocked writer and his jet-setting wife and what happens in between. I also think about friends, about how there are friends who are good for laughing with but will never allow you into their pain and about how there are friends who are best for pain but in your good times they find it hard to be around you. I think about how Ugandans have a renewed vigour for work on Monday like a New Year’s Resolution but which dwindles by Wednesday. I think about the price of fuel, of a possible civil unrest, nations faraway, hair, the things I heard at lunch time, things I understood as if for the first time.
PurplePretoria 