Change that is difficult to deal with
We’re told incessantly that change is the only constant thing. Along with our parents, Spenser Junior’s ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ also reminds us of this fact that ‘change is the only permanent thing’. He and other management authors implore us to embrace it or be left out. I also repeat this message to my personal and corporate stakeholders. As a result, I try to embrace change, updating myself as much as is possible.
A few changes rattle me though, they trouble my being. When I encounter these kinds of change, I do a deep self review. Once my mind has found that place of rest. In this case, the thinking is weighed against personal values etc, I just let everyone else be and then it doesn’t matter how strong the urge to get into an argument on the matter is, I just ignore.
My nine year old it was that drew my attention to this matter. I had been threatening him with being sent off to boarding house. Being a ‘shapiro’ he’d often have answers to my threats saying ‘Only 11 year olds are allowed into secondary schools’ or that ‘in this family we do primary six’ (that was a line I had used in response to a friend, which he had picked up).
On this occasion, after my threat, he boldly responded ‘that’s okay Mum, just make sure its Sholape’s brother’s school’. I engaged him to understand the choice of Sholape’s brother’s school.
That’s when he informed me that ‘Sholape’s brother had recently delighted him and Sholape with stories of how great his Lagos boarding school was. It was like a ‘home away from home’ I was told. They had washing machines, air-conditions in their rooms, DSTVs to watch and even ‘ate some things they didn’t eat at home’.
Oh, I knew the schools he meant alright. The ones that have shown up everywhere we turned these days, the hotel boarding houses. The ones that offer children ‘cosier than home experiences’. They had first made their entry about six years ago and I really did struggle with this at the time as this wasn’t my understanding of boarding houses.
True that it shouldn’t be a house of complete deprivation as ours was, but still, I do think the principles should still be the same (this is where I’m told I have to change and I refuse to) principles around learning discipline, learning to and then to abound and abase – so somewhat like a camp where you can learn to survive with little. The reasoning behind this at the time (apart from getting out of our parents hair) was to learn all of these along with independence.
Undoubtedly, ours was tough yet it was fun. Many years after, it is tough to undo the discipline we were taught and learnt. I think my concern is also around how our generation of over compensating parents have now found over compensating schools. Where just like home, everything is done for you; clothes washed, they get served deserts, and you typically use hot running water every day. My friend tells me she was shocked to find out that her younger son had no idea that you could sleep without air conditioners. He genuinely didn’t know. So he asked his grand aunt whilst how he was to sleep without one?
Do these schools help them appreciate the small things of life one wonders?
Little wonder when my nephew Tobi’s A-list Abuja based school often comes last when I hear the group of cousins grading schools. To use their words ‘We don’t want to go to Tobi’s school, there, it is too hard’. A Great catholic school- Tobis’, it offers serious discipline, great meals (unlike ours) and a strong level of intellectual agility. Children often chasing each other in class average.
To my mind that’s a great upgrade of the boarding houses we knew, only they have no midterms and are not allowed meals in their hostels on visiting.
My older sister, Tobi’s mummy tells me that the school never tires to hand them ‘how to behave when you are visiting rules’- I reply that this is essential to manage our generation of mothers who are given to excesses. In my view my nephew and his friends have much more appreciation for pizzas, TV, game time, and what we’d otherwise consider ‘the basic necessities in our environment’.
They now know that things don’t come on demand. It’d be a pity if my son doesn’t know his parents enough to realise that he wouldn’t be going to hotel boarding house. Not in this month of Sundays.
Nkiru Olumide-Ojo