My daughter is beginning to get embarrassed by me. Not by anything I do/say/wear or how I use my hands to eat. Just ME. The whole package. Even when I am silent and using a knife and fork to eat pizza.
There’s a blush beginning to develop. A very faint pink flush but it’s there all right. It’s there and I know it well.
From experience.
It really brings into focus my relationship with my own mother, who was a non-conformist of note. And while I can be a real people-pleaser, never wanting to cause any waves, she was very much the opposite.
She would embarrass me constantly too. Not by anything she did/said/wore (well sometimes the Converse trainers and expletives were a bit much) or how she smoked with the young girls while her peers drank tea in a circle saying the rosary. No, just by being herself.
And history will judge us both.
Me for being me, slightly too teacher’s pet, always wondering how I can change/ tone down/conform.
And her for daring to stand out.
As for my daughter, the blush still needs to mature to a deep red, I’m afraid. I mean, what’s a childhood if not filled with cringe worthy moments unwittingly created by our parents? That’s karma right?
Hopefully by the time my sweet girl becomes an adult, her reflections and experience of the “blush”, will guide her to a place where she too can just BE. You know, just be herself, with the full appreciation that we are all different, all the same….and that’s wonderful.
Now shhhh, don’t tell her this BUT if she leans a little more towards the nature of her rebel of a gran, then that means my work is done.
That will be karma too. A fate I will gladly accept.
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Lee Mayimele - Writer 