Growing Pains

Have you ever wondered how – growing up as kids – we wished so much to be all grown up so we could go to school with our brothers and sisters? Boo; I myself couldn’t even so much as wait that my mother had to glean a grade one place for me when I was in my fourth year!

Amazingly, we can’t find it in our hearts to be satisfied with the seven years of plenty in elementary education either – we wanna grow up even more, and physically expand in the process, as we long to explore our fantasies and the crushes of infancy. How we would love to pile up more years so we can go to high school and discover the mystery of dating, whose grandeur the elder sibling has succeeded in immortalising in our gullible mind and hiding from it in equal measure.

“You’re still too young for girls,” he sneers. So we wish to grow up again, become taller, go to high school, possess that booming voice, those curvaceous coca cola undulations that are the opium of many a coked out mind, grow the pubis that we wish to bury in pussy (some of us wanna bury our innocence in a lot of pussy; others in just one), or to hide the pussy, trap the dream man – who we refuse to believe has already been chased into extinction by our clever rivals – into holy matrimony.

Those are our dreams for high school. Alas; once there, we discover that we need more; so we start pulling time again, because we want to grow a beard to add to our collections of secret little places where – in our elementary school naivety – we had absolutely no idea Mr. Hair could find a home. We would rather grow older and get the diploma. The degree. Or both. The Master’s. Then we hold all our academic achievements in the sun and realise they can buy us a car – if we could find the perfect workplace. Isn’t that why we were wishing to mature fast all along – that we could secure that dream job?

Yet not all of us realise those dreams. Having fallen by the wayside, we loiter by the roadside, dreaming new dreams and conjuring up ways to hunt for that guy called Money so we make it through today; maybe we find him in some unsuspecting guy’s pocket, or we cajole him into shoving his coins and notes into our inviting crevices hidden under the mop of hairy stubbles. Who cares if hitching the skirt a few times per night in the red light district is not a dream career? It gets food on the table, doesn’t it?

Well come to old age. We have grown up all we wanted; we have the car, the cash, the crib, iPod, the iPhone, the iMac, the iMat, the iBed, the iBlankets, the iHome and the iWatchamacallit. The botox. The kids. The kids’ kids, who will remind us of how old we have become by asking us how in God’s name we are able to pull out our teeth at night when they cannot do it. It is at that moment that we begin to reminisce – and miss – the old days. The first days at school when the Miss Somebody patiently taught us that a pencil could actually be handled with two fingers instead of the whole ten, and be used to write instead of scribbling all over the page. Those were the days. Days when every letter in the book looked like a car or some animal, and every picture looked like mum or dad or the bother or the sister.

We will wonder too, about the fate of the girl on whom we had the first crush. Or the boy who caused us a lot of blushes when he reported us to the teacher for telling him we loved him. The friends we had in high school – oh boy, how we wish we were sweet sixteen again! The magic age. Those were the days. All the friends we thought we could never live without – the Ruvarashes, the Rosemarys, the Mollys, the Blessings, the Victors, and the Chimutis who made the journey through secondary education one big smile. How the hell did we grow so fast?

Spying down at the moving mass of people in Robert Mugabe Road from the lofty heights of that high school balcony. And arguing the tenets of fluvial geomorphology with Messrs Chasara, Manyati, Shonhiwa and the whole bunch. And shocking fellow Literature students into raucous laughter when you fished out the part where Odili pointed out that Chief Nanga’s first wife was so old she could no longer remember to put on knickers; that was why her frock was in the constant habit of being trapped on the parting of her buttocks. For buttocks it was back then, not ass. (And the Miss. Munjomas, Miss. Malijanis, the Miss. Tembos, the Miss. Mupeiwas and the Miss. Rhodas would screeaaaaaaaaaaaam.

“Whaaaaaaat! What if she was wearing a thong?”

Oh, girls; really? A thong. In 1966. Oh; purrrrrleeeaase)!

And we would wonder how fast the college days flew. Our quad-mates with whom we shared the revered bus. Oh; the bus – with its potpourri of believers, beliebers, nose brigades, maboorangoma, masaladhi, magan’ha; all sorts of people, from all sorts of places. You could think in our assorted way, we were a microcosm of modern day Zimbabwe with all its latent and fomenting feuds and love-and-hate soap operas. God; those were THE days.

Now, where we had teachers, classmates and quad-mates, we now have bosses, managers and workmates. How time really flies – and you thought it was just a metaphor the first time you heard about it in Grade 7. Those were the days. The days of our lives. But wait a minute; which ones did you say were the days? Oh, definitely the ones at kindergarten of course. No; the ones at primary school. The ones at high school? College, maybe; they do say college days are the best days, don’t they? No; my wedding day.

It is hard – looking at them in retrospect, it seems everyday of our life was the day. Even the day when we willed the earth to open up and swallow us as retribution for having illegally sampled her Junoesque, buxom bosom in front of discombobulated classmates. Something good came out of that misdemeanour; if it wasn’t that she did not report you to the disciplinary authorities, it was because you gained a friend by acknowledging that you acted like a complete ass (even though ass was not in the lexicon those days) and ate humble pie before Nero burned Rome. You could think of a million days that were best for you; I know I can. Yet, it is a pity isn’t it; that we only realised how life has been good to us when it is very late? We only want to acknowledge the good that we have had when there is no longer a point to it.

There is a moral to all this, a lesson that we, if we all didn’t pretend to be busy doing nothing, could have learnt a very long time ago – that we are gonna be fine, whatever it is that we think of doing. It does not count how pessimistic we might be; we surely have had our place in the sun. We have had a lot of places in the sun, actually – only that we are too busy ogling at our neighbours’ suns that we missed the millions of moments that our own sun shined. Our Scatterbrain was too busy lamenting our Lilliputian falsetto that we did not realise that the heavens had let us fly, prosper and had us nestle back safely without even realising it. 

I know we cannot twist, let alone control the hand of fate (pity those who pretend to). But the greatest character has been in our ability to embrace whatever fate throws and us, even emerging fine from it too. Bruised, but fine. Our reaction to such testing times is a true testimony of our unrelenting human spirit; a force of will that refuses to die. An irresistible force that triumphs even over an immovable object. It was that force that carried us to where we are today. Sometimes it is not exactly where we hoped we would be at this stage of our life, but nine times out of ten, we have managed to glean life out of our situations.

So; let’s look behind in pride – days past were good days while they lasted. If we are asked to change some of our past deeds, I certainly wouldn’t. Actually, I thank my lucky stars everyday that a last minute glitch meant I couldn’t go to the highest institution of learning in the second biggest city of the poorest yet richest country of the poorest yet richest continent on earth. For it meant I had to discover the captivating splendour of the quad and its footprints of past greats, and everything.

So go on; take his/her hand and jump the broom into the unknown and certainly uncertain cesspool called marriage. You can as well proceed and take that opportunity presented before you – who says you can’t do it? You just gotta know one thing for sure – you are gonna be just fine. You came unscathed from your first day at school. And lovemaking wasn’t as painful as they said it would be either – in fact, the very act made you wonder why on earth somebody would have the guts to be so blasphemous to the point of even suggest that the way to heaven is that bad.

Boy. Girl. You were good then. You shall be good now.