Online Reporter
Fadzayi Maposah-Correspondent
I USED to think that I stayed in a very noisy household when my daughters were young.
Besides the call for attention (which always seemed endless), there was a routine that needed to be followed carefully.
Now I look at things differently because of what I have gone through and experienced, I am now a lot more patient.
With youth comes a lot of speed, now with maturity, I have learnt to relax a lot more. I now understand why at times the older children tend to think that the youngest in the family is spoilt. With wrinkles comes a special softness that youth cannot fully understand.
It is when children become adults that they reckon that their siblings is being spoilt. What they do not realise is that they too were spoilt only that the levels of being spoilt cannot be the same because experience has shaped how the parents deal with children.
There is a lot of experiential learning in life. It is not just for parenting, but for other facets of life as well. While some people find it easy to crawl out of their shells others may actually find it easier to build a shell and then crawl into it.
How we react to certain words may be based from where we are standing and what we have gone through. The words may be the same, but what they bring to mind and what they carry continues to evolve. As I said in the beginning, I used to think that I stayed in a noisy household.
Back then the noise could have been screams and the fall (and in some instances, the breaking too) of certain items. When items broke, the young girls would be asked to step aside and an adult present would clear the mess.
It then shifted at some stage to video games and loud music on the radio or on the television as the girls grew. Noise could also be door bangs as teenage tantrums became part of our lives.
The door bangs could also be heard when one of the girls locked themselves in the bathroom and was according to the other housemates taking longer than necessary and they too wanted to use the bathroom. Once they started answering one another, the bangs would combine voices at high volume. Then wearing my referee shoes, I would engage the one inside to understand that since we have one bathroom, she should try to be faster, but still ensure that she came out clean.
Of course there would be arguments about when she had gone into the bathroom. The one who would be outside would be arguing that it was much earlier.
Once the arguments started, the one bathing would pause the bathing so that all focus was on presenting heads of argument. Honestly at this stage, I really wished that I had a clocking system for the bathroom, just to reduce the number of arguments that would ensue.
On some days, I would ignore and pretend that I could not even hear the arguments, telling myself that I would only intervene when the arguments escalated and were getting out of hand.
With time, the arguments about bathroom use went away and my role at the bathroom door or in the passage was no longer necessary. The girls learnt to deal with their issue and worked out a plan that was comfortable to all bathroom users.
Now in the empty nest, noise is very limited. As I sit sometimes with the radio and television off, all I can hear is clock ticking. It is so quiet. What can break the silence can be car hooters calling for attention at different gates.
An occasional hoot is not noise. It is just the sound of car hooters. One word, but what may come to mind may be totally different. In a family set up the word noise can be different depending on the ages of the family members. Whatever the noise, there are moments when one has to get up and attend to the noise so that it does not escalate.
Cancer. What comes to mind when you hear the word? The month of October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. It is important to note that like the noise that I talked about earlier, it is about the stage at which it is attended to. The earlier the better. I am sure that we have all come across the sentence, early detection saves lives.
There is so much information that is available on breast cancer, some information is more accurate than others. Always seek to get information from a credible source.
When you think about cancer think about the examples of noise that I gave. There are people who have fought and won the battle against breast cancer, who are now cancer free.
They sit in the silence of the disease and occasionally remember the journey they travelled. There are those who are still fighting, they need someone to assist them as they handle the broken pieces, of life affected by cancer.
There will be changes and at some point there may be tantrums, tears too as one grapples with changes that they never imagined. Some no longer have a breast or even breasts, allow them to pause as they listen to what is going on around them.
Another group is cancer-free and they have never had cancer. They need information so that they can walk in passages and provide information to those who may need it. While they sit and listen to their bodies, they must be quick to notice changes and seek services.
When others hear the word cancer, the first thing that comes to mind is death of a loved one, because that is all they know. These need support in grieving and also be shown that some overcame. Hope needs to be reignited.
We are all at different stages. Each stage calls for due diligence. #October Breast Awareness Month.
Peter Tanyanyiwa