CHILDREN OF THE 90s; HOW TO TRAIN A GOAT

I was watching reruns of the US hit TV show Blackish on Tuesday and in one of the episodes a young girl who has been misbehaving and rebelling is sent up to her room to think of her negative behavior after she misses curfew and takes her mum’s car out for a joyride. Her mum is also trying to parent and befriend her teenage daughter at the same time but can’t seem to balance doing both. The way some rich people parent their kids is so funny! Friendship with your children…ha! Ridunkulous.

Growing up in the ghettos there were only two forms of parenting… tough love and the rod. Yes… the rod. You have to understand that people who live in my ghetto are poor; some of my neighbours couldn’t even provide three meals a day for their children so there was a lot of frustrations going round. You had fathers who were Baba Ijebu addicts, the ones who drank, who sat in front of the house and watched people pass by and those who took out all their frustrations either on their wives, children or both. Discipline was the job of everyone. Some rich people beat their kids, but I have never seen a rich person who let someone who wasn’t family lay hands on their kids…who the hell you think you are! But not so in my ghetto; sometimes I would be walking by the passage way of the face-me-i-face-you house we lived in and from nowhere taaaaaa!!!! Would just land on my back; hot slap from Iya bobo; my crime… I forgot to say good morning as I passed her yesterday and she had been loading the slap for the next time she saw me. Which mouth will I use to go and tell my mum that Iya bobo slapped me on my back…hmmmmn….that kind mouth vomit never happen. Beating was a regular occurrence. It was a very rare occasion when a day passed by and I and my siblings didn’t get beat. The number one rule of my ghetto living is fear thy mother. Mothers were the de-facto chief disciplinarians because most of them were either full time housewives or had jobs/shops that let them come home at a decent hour. It wasn’t the fault of our parents that we were always getting our asses handed to us on a regular basis… I have to tell you dear readers, the kids in my ghetto are just like goats…yes I said it GOATS!!! We behaved like if someone took out our brains and replaced them with zinc, we got into trouble all the time, did stupid things that made absolutely no sense and we were always getting bloody. We thought catarrh from our nose tasted like butter and sometimes we put it on bread and imagined it was butter…yum yum yum right. We ate paper because we thought the juice was salty when mixed in with the saliva from our mouth. We smoked paper because it was cool, cut ourselves with sharp objects when we dared each other to and enjoyed licking our blood because we thought it made us vampires…and sometimes when we were really bored we got on the roof and played…knowing that the roof was weak and we could fall but we were invincible so no worries. Tell us not to do something, for example the skin of yam is to be thrown away not eaten and ooooh…..that is the part we wanted to rub on our skins and eat because we had been told to do the exact opposites time and time again…you see a pattern here… stubborn ass, ghetto goats like us, talking was never a solution and our parents were already frustrated with their lives so the only logical options was to beat us into submission.

My mum had five canes for each one of us. Junior and Chioma’s canes were easily spotted because Junior got into the most trouble so he got the fattest cane; Chioma didn’t so her cane was the smallest. There seemed to always be a cane on my mum’s hand all the damn time. We had an internal alarm to wake us up at 6:30am because sometimes when my mum was not in the mood to shout our names, you would just hear vooooooaaaaaaaa on your back in the morning. At first I thought I was dreaming but immediately the sting set in I knew it was time to prep for school. She was a master of surprise and attack knowing fully well that the beating that hurt the most was the one you were not expecting. Sometimes she beat us for no reason!!! I’m walking to the bathroom and suddenly taaaaaaaaaa will just land on my face. Ah ah mummy what did I do na! I would ask with hot stinging tears in my eyes and my mum would look at me with a pleased look in her eyes and reply idiot!! This is for the next stupid thing you do…just in case I forget to beat you…call this one advance eh!

Every evening after Block Rosary we would gather in the parlour after having our night time baths and talk about who didn’t get beat that day. Most times Chioma was the only one to avoid a beating… she was the cute last born no one had the heart to see cry.

You see there were no rooms to send us to when we were bad and naughty…it was the ghettos!!! Your parents could either afford a single room with shared bathroom/toilet/kitchen or a room and parlour with shared facilities. Punishment was handed out as soon as crime was committed. Do you watch American TV and see how kids run to their parents when they hurt themselves while playing? And their parents get the first aid kit, clean the wound and drop a kiss to make it all better….in ghetto discipline that one na story for the gods. If you bruise yourself, you were crying not because of the pain of the injury but because you knew for certain your mama would beat the living shit out of you for bruising yourself. It was even worse when you had to go to hospital…aaaah….The small money that they are saving you force them to use it to take you to hospital… Ka Chineke mere gị ebere because as soon as you were better you would get the beating that equates the money your parents spent on you at the hospital.

The types of beating varied though depending on what we did; if we were out at a social function or the house of a well off family member and behaved in a way my mum found embarrassing…for example eating the bones of the chicken because Chicken was only at Christmas/New Year. My mum would give us the eye…that hard glare that telepathically told you to drop the chicken or face 10 strokes of cane at home plus one week without meat in your stew or soup. If you forgot to do your chores it was two sharp slaps across each cheek, forget to answer when she calls your name, one slap on your back and another on your right cheek. The King of all beating though was lying or stealing. Number two rule of ghetto parenting is to never ever disagree or argue with your mother… her words were ALWAYS final and nothing she said was UNTRUE. For example if the evaporated milk in the fridge had magically disappeared, the culprit for this crime was always Junior…the fact that sometimes it was me or one of my other siblings was inconsequential. Sometimes Junior would be feeling self-righteous and say the words mummy it wasn’t me! My mum would stare at him with an incredulous look in her eyes and say are you calling me a liar! This statement was always followed by a stinging backhand slap and a zigzag motion of kung Fu style whipping. The last beating though that made all other beatings look like kisses was when anyone of us stole.

Oh!!! The beating that required my mum to lock the doors so that no one from outside could come in and beg or hold her back. It was a sinking feeling of inevitability that made your stomach feel like someone had dropped a ton of hot stones in you as you watched her flex her hands and turn her neck this way and that, watching as she reveled in the knowledge that just as Jesus died on the cross so must you also get what is coming and no one could save you. The cane for this occasion was always Junior’s fat cane and the number of strokes ranged from 50 or as the record stands 150. You cried till tears dried from your eyes and the only sound coming out from your lips was hmmm hmmmmm hmmmmmmmmm. Run from one end of the small room to the other end and my mum was sprinting right along with you, beating the goat brain out of you.

 Gotta  give it to her though, training five kids isn’t easy…training five ghetto kids…whew….jogging what…she stayed fit by constantly keeping us in line with the help of Mr. Do Good and I have to say…those were the days.