Bad things seem to happen to the same people over and over.
Soon as they get over a horrible phase and think it is time for champagne, the bigger, 'badder' brother comes knocking.
It is as if life is not about enjoying, but about fighting a terrible cycle of events that seems to evolve viciously.
That is the better stuff. Even worse, the vicious cycle transcends generations.
Can it get worse? Take a man who watched as his father repeatedly beat up his mother to a pulp.
This man, besides having constant bile against his father, would swear throughout his life how he would never lay a hand on a woman, no matter how hard that woman pushed him.
Shock and behold, he grows up to be an improved version of his father.
His
children feel about him as he had about his father, but he is somehow
blind to this. He fails to see himself in his children.
He is blind to the future and the fact that his children would probably grow up to be just like him and his father. How do you break this cycle?
And how is it that a child from a divorced background is always the first among his friends to divorce?
It
is every child’s idea of heaven to have two parents living together in
harmony and, naturally, a child who grew up with divorced parents would
want to give his/her own child better.
They will spend time and energy looking for the right spouse, one who would do the distance of “till death do us part” with relative ease.
Two children down the line, there are divorce papers, court battles, and the vicious cycle makes its mark on yet another generation.
Do we become what we detest most? Does fate have a goal against all human beings – you know, just to prove who is boss, and expertly steer us towards the very path we repeatedly swear never to take?
Is the decision to be better people out of our hands?
Perhaps
it is a genetic thing – like high blood pressure or diabetes; if it is
in the family then you are at a risk of getting it and there is nothing
much you can do about that.
These are musings triggered by watching enough people make mistakes, swear never to repeat them, then repeat them as soon as the dust settles, musings from watching many children of divorced people follow in their parents’ footsteps.
They are musings from watching enough people who witnessed their mothers’ agony from the fist of their fathers dish out the same to their spouses.
It is either genetic or we are generally a damaged race.
On a slightly lighter (ish) note, about six years ago I was in a matatu that was carjacked.
We were taken to a notorious outer Nairobi estate where we were relieved of all our possessions.
After
that I swore never to set foot in that neighbourhood as long as I
lived (forget the fact we were carjacked in a different estate and
dumped in this particular one, but everybody loves to hate on it and I
was joining the wagon).
As fate would have it, within months, I was living in this same estate as a happy wife and was not nagging the husband to move out.
Moral of my story: If you are to swear not to do something, do not do it too loudly lest embarrassment wash over you when you do exactly what you swore you never would.
by
cikukimani25@gmail.com
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