The bitter truth is not the Twitter truth
’How old are you?” is a very tricky question. Especially when you’re a father of young children and you might have to pay R120 more, depending on how they answer. A sign at the entrance to the Cape Town amusement park says “FREE for children under 12”. My children have cost me a small fortune in such fees because I decided to make babies with Mother Teresa’s ethical twin.
With sons of similar ages, my friend Nomo and I have been debating an issue for years. A simplistic summary of his stance is that we should be preparing our children for the ideal world in which we’d like to see them living. My position is ambivalent. To quote another friend, I have elevated fence-sitting to an Olympic sport.
Sure, entice them with the possibilities of the perfect world Michael Jackson implored us to create in Heal the World. But I also try to impress upon them that this world doesn’t exist just yet. My greatest fear about The Nomo Approach is that I’ll end up sending out sheep among the wolves.
We have two tenants in the house, young men formerly known as The Midgets. The 16-year-old got up early this past Monday to let me know that he wasn’t going to school as he was feeling a bit fatigued and wanted to sleep in. Look, spending the entire weekend on the Play Station can be a bit exhausting, so I told him to send the school a WhatsApp and let them know that His Royal Exhaustion was resting. Besides, he wasn’t asking for my permission; he was just relaying information.
I don’t think he truly appreciated the inner strength it took to not backhand him. And this is when I realised I am losing the tug-of-war between my way and Nomo’s way. This bugger doesn’t even fear me enough to lie to me. At his age, the only way I could get away with not going to school was to present myself at Sister Allana’s clinic at Inkamana High, having applied baby powder to my face for the pale effect and margarine above my lips for the snotty look before answering her standard question — “Ubhoshile namhlanje?” (Have you done a number two today?) — in the negative. Sister Allana took bowel movements very seriously.
It’s a brave new world out there. Truth be told, the fence-sitter in me approves. These 2000 babies are going to be the first generation to tell their bosses they’re taking the afternoon off because their boyfriends from Jamaica are around and they’re off for some muchneeded coitus. Somehow, I suspect that it’s going to be okay.
Back in my day, you couldn’t even take the afternoon off if you accidentally chopped off one of your thumbs. Your boss would say, “This is why the Good Lord saw fit to give you a spare thumb.”
The idiot that I am, I decided to try this unadulterated truth with the missus the other day. She was watching something on Netflix when she asked, “Baby, if we were in a plane crash on Kilimanjaro and I died, would you eat me?”
“Look,” I said, “if there was some seasoning on board, I might sauté a finger or two for sustenance. And if there’s some Tabasco and pepper, it’s definitely a go. But if the rescue party takes longer than a week, there’s a good chance they’ll find me cutting up some meat strips to prepare some wife biltong.”
She didn’t think that was funny at all, which I found odd, considering her insistence on the absolute truth where the kids are concerned.
I pointed this out, to which she responded, “They are kids and you’re not. You should know better than to tell me you’ve given that much thought to eating me!”
But the universe always finds a way to restore balance. As brutally honest as these kids are with their parents, this is not the practice on Insta, Twitter and Facebook. Socialmedia platforms turn the same kids into the woke Moral Police, who virtue signal their way through racism, colourism, Black Lives Matter, homophobia and another plethora of isms. In the words of that great philosopher, Ndumiso Ngcobo, “The truth shall set you free unless it messes up your Twitter street cred.”
Back in my day, you couldn’t take the day off if you chopped off one of your thumbs. Your boss would say, “This is why the Good Lord saw fit to give you a spare thumb.”