I am wondering what to teach my children about winter. Beyond telling them that it is a cold weather season that black people don’t like. I don’t want them to be like my former self, afraid of the cold. I was raised in a country dissected almost equally by the equator. In Kenya, we experience…
I know you are a complete stranger but I know you. You are my aunty from the village, the defiant one. The one who rolls her own cigarettes, smokes laced tobacco, drinks the local gin and the men, dare not walk on her wrong side. You have probably refused to accept Christ as your personal saviour and do not have a single bone of affectation in your body. You are from the league of badly behaved women who were shunned by society because they were not demure and avoided because they only speak the truth.
Parenting psychologists generally assert that the first three years of a child’s life are foundational. How many fathers become absent in the early stages of infancy only to return bearing gifts and engaging in remedial parenting hoping to catch up on lost years over a series of fun weekends? Gabor Maté explains that children have an attachment need and in the absence of a nurturing adult to attach to, they tend to fill the void with a peer group.