When the sons of their mothers give them grief

Lenox Lizwi Mhlanga

When I was growing up, I was accident prone. I guess I have never shared with you this shady part of my history. Ngesintu bathi abadala, ngangingezwa! I was very naughty. But then every mother will tell you that it is their sons who give them the most grief. My wayward antics were legend so were the injuries that I carried like a badge of honour.

What got me to write about this is a former student of mine who received the dreaded phone call that her son was in hospital with a broken arm. Well that’s just half the story. It so happened that the incident happened 300 000 kilometres away in Cape Town and she was in Harare on business.

Another former student who happened to be with her at the time, had to rush her to the airport to catch the earliest flight out. And guess what, she missed the plane out of Robert Mugabe International Airport to South Africa! Imagine the anxiety she was in thinking about the severity of the injury.

Well that incident got me thinking about the time I was growing up in the environs of Mhlahlandlela in Tshabalala. Many of you know that my late mother was a nurse. A good one too! She was so good that she was sister in charge of a number of council clinics in Bulawayo. She was at one time a tutor at Mpilo Maternity hospital.

On her final days on this wretched earth, the last two years, she happened to be admitted to both United Bulawayo Hospitals and Mpilo where she began her career and I and my siblings were born. She gave nurses there a tough time I won’t lie. Some of them may be reading this, but she was a no-nonsense woman especially when it came to her beloved profession.

Anyway, the last part will explain how she handled the results of my shenanigans when I ended up at some clinic or hospital injured for the umpteenth time. While every other mother would be worried that her beloved ‘Punchu-punchu’ was hurt, my mother developed nerves of steel. Let’s just say that she had just had enough of me and my misadventures.

I am sure she believed that I was deliberately getting hurt to catch her attention. Because of the alarming regularity I clashed with gravity and any other object in sight, she developed a numbness I found rather disturbing at the time. Yet, in hindsight, I was to discover that in that tough profession, you must hide your emotions if you want to get the job done.

Initially, my uncles were to blame for some of the injuries I got stitched up for. I slipped from one of my poor uncle’s grasp and fell headlong onto a hard cement floor. My mother who always expected the worst thought I was brain damaged. Then she was to comfort herself, I am told, with the knowledge that baby’s heads are soft and adjust easily to trauma.

I then graduated to self-inflicted harm like the day I fell from a tree, and hid the injury for days. Or the many occasions I crashed on my bicycle. For that I blame my father who bought it for me when I was just in Grade One! What about the sorry day and with no fault of my own, I had a peace of my right index finger caught in a door.

In all these occasions, my mother would be informed and as fate would have it, I would be carted off to the very clinic where she worked. That was the worst because I grew accustomed to what would follow.

As I wailed in pain, she would examine me with her tell-tale frown. She then hastily come to a prognosis.

“Nothing, to worry about, he’ll live,” she would say with a wave of her hand and leave me at the mercy of gargoyles. Well that is what I thought of her subordinates. Nasty looking, mean nurses who would come to the conclusion that an injection administered on my backside was the only cure.

On the worst of days, I can bet my bottom dollar, I would overhear her say to her nurses “Limjuje lingadlali, khon’ezakuzwa ukuthi ukungezwa akubhadali! (Give him the most painful injection so that he learns that being naughty has consequences).”

And to make it worse, the course of injections, which I dreaded with a passion, never seemed to end. At one point I was convinced they were injecting me with plain water, just for me to endure the torture. To this day, thanks to those heady days of enduring growing pangs, I feel their effect when it is overcast.

When I was older, she never missed the opportunity to remind me of what I was and what I had grown to be. I later revelled in the fact that she was proud of me. Not only because she was called by my very name, uNakaLizwi but because what I endured had toughened me up for manhood. If I had not gone through that riotous phase, she like any other mother, would have been very worried indeed.