Every parent dreads the moment their daughters will start being noticed by the opposite gender. This period can be frustrating especially if your daughter is easily swayed. Your daughter will start getting proposals of “friendship” from team mafisi. Young fisis.

When schools close, it is a very trying moment for the parents. The girls are always being monitored closely like a notorious criminal. Mothers have spies all over. Once in a blue moon, a girl can be sent to buy few things after much painful deliberation. The parent fears to expose the girl to the world. At this prime high school age, it is almost inevitable to go to the shop and not be stopped by young, pimply boys.

Before you reach home, you meet your mother coming for you, having been signaled that you have been spotted with a looser. If you have been sent and you happen to bump into your friends who are GIRLS, you spend long talking about nothing sensible. If it won’t be about the latest soap, it will be gossip about how evil your mother has become. The group of girls stands by the road side chit-chatting. They talk about everything except how they performed in the exams. They say how hard chemistry is, how they were punished unfairly during the term for oversleeping… Then, shacks! Jane snaps that she has to go home. Then she strides away.

On arriving home, she finds her mother brooding, almost exploding. She had concluded that Jane must be in someone’s house. A man. She must be with that looser son of John who smokes, or Anderson, that drop out, or God forbid, she must have gone to see someone then she got drugged and raped. Mothers’ imaginations are the worst. On seeing Jane,

“Hio enye unatafuta kwa bidii  utapata! Utakuja kuniuliza!”

That is meant to be a threat and a black mail. This statement is meant to make the adolescent girl feel guilty and spew the truth. The girl will just roll her eyes and is probably met with a resounding slap that zaps her back to reality; that this is Africa. That very night, another urgent meeting is convened to look into Jane’s promiscuous life. Nobody gives her audience. She is called all manner of names and she cries bitterly. She is branded a Merimela. Ironically, she is still intact, just being a stubborn teenage. But also parenting has no rehearsals.