A BROKEN GLASS

 

A BROKEN GLASS

How joyous does it get when you finally have a child, especially at an advanced 30 something age? Not that you had any problem, but your career had to be fixed first before this family thing. But the baby girl is a new direction in life. A new commitment. A renewal of soul, mind and energy. Your close relatives and friends are equally happy for you, and you receive immense support from every corner that makes you, a new parent, have an easier life. The sum of the benefits that the little one has brought are of course greater than the straining you undergo, especially many times at night when you must be up to calm the crying baby. Imagine this baby growing up to 18 years and rebelling against you? Let’s call her Anita. At 16 years, Anita gets into a relationship with a boy in the neighborhood, whose character and engagements are very questionable. The boy, Danson, is son of a noisy couple who have been in the neighborhood for a long time. It was always noise and quarrels from their home. The interesting thing was, one would hear quarrels sometimes in the early morning but later in the afternoon see the couple holding hands walking down the neighborhood paths. Their boy had initially a disturbed outlook and as he grew up, grapevine had it that the boy was into drugs. The boy had completed form 4 but even after a year, he never seemed to be progressing to college. You try to talk your daughter out of the relationship, but she comes up with stories to hide her whereabouts so that she can be with the boy up and about. As she starts her form 4, she elopes and does not even wait for exam registration. She, however, sends someone with a letter saying that she should not be looked for, that she’s happy where she was and that she hated her parents and does not want to meet them again. She makes her threats come true because afterwards, you only hear that she has been seen but you never get to see her. Of course you tried everything. Professional counselling, your close friends and relatives talking to her, prayers and all sorts of ideas but none seemed to work. What do you do? Not fiction but true story that happened to someone. What can man possibly do? The mystery of life is that it has a way of playing us. How many have invested a lot in some courses hoping for a promotion only to end up in the same position years after? How many have loans taken to invest in a business only to have the money lost in totality? Then you pay back the loan many years to come with nothing to show for it. How many hoped that their influential relatives would help them get jobs only to be disappointed because those people had no intention of helping? How many hoped that their friends would come through during their lowest moment, but their friends were no-show? Only realizing too late that no one really cares for them? How many have been left by their partners for other people? How many have lost jobs in which they worked passionately like they owned the company? How many have been duped by close relatives, who they trusted above all other people? Life gives us many shocking disappointments which deal us painful blows. But so is that life and the unexpected shocks will keep coming. The most difficult lesson that I took too long to learn is that disappointments only require someone to rise again as quickly as possible, wipe out the dust, re-plan your life immediately and begin to follow the new plans. Dwelling too long on the disappointments of yesterday steals the joys of today and the energy we need to face tomorrow. Brooding over setbacks develops diseases that unnecessarily make us suffer or even lose life. The child glass analogy can be a good guide. When your child breaks a glass, you don’t throw the child. You guide the child so that they’ll be careful next time and you throw away the glass. In the same way, we should throw away all those disappointments of life or else, we will throw away our health and life, which is not a very wise thing to do.

@Stephen Mungai