by: Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu
This brief guide is divided into two sections for fathers and mothers, but we trust it to yield wonderful and sustainable results, even when swapped.
Section 1
Your sons are the true continuing links of your bloodline, so draw closer to them. Encourage your woman to be closer to her daughters. This may seem trivial, but whilst you buy your sons car toys and video games, buy your daughters teddy bears with braided hair so they’d play-nurse them; this prelude to motherhood prepares them for the inevitable, especially psychologically.
Practicalize before your sons what it means to be men. Question their mother why she alighted from a private car when the house is beside a bus stop. Demand who bought the new chandelier earrings that rarely leave her ears of late. Stay a week on an unannounced business trip. Return and question her why she wasn’t home at the time you returned. If her reply is unremorseful or unsatisfactory or unnecessarily talkative, punish her but not to death. A single kick or slap is enough to show you’re in charge. Just ensure the kick or slap is heavy enough to make her sob and beg you and serve better dinner.
In their adolescence, tell them no arts or education courses. It is either the sciences, law, engineering or they become handymen and sponsor themselves. Encourage them to learn coding and programming and leave catering and fashion to their sisters. If one of them talks or walks or sounds or behaves like his sister, the spirit of homo is circling your house. Be thankful you discovered early; you fathered a son, not a soughter. Call him to order, but if he insists, withdraw his sonship license and watch him self-correct. If this fails, up the ante: dip him in boiling water and kill his impurities.
Remind the normal ones that money fulfills men as husbands fulfil women. Share with them the juicy advantages of you being 10 years older than their mother. They’ll learn and won’t look at women older than them, especially ones above 30 who have dry vulvas and lower possibilities of childbirth. Remind them why you didn’t marry Dr. Ann; she was proud. Established women are proud.
Finally, if they return to you broken, vent that they aren’t the true sons of their father.
Section 2
Start from the roots. Remind your daughters that the greatest gift you handed their father was your virginity and that gave you the edge over the other highly skilled women in his life. Each day, before you pull them all into the kitchen, or scatter them across the house with mops, warn the boys to return from the football field early so their food won’t get cold. Make the girls understand it is the duty to do domestic chores. They could act stubborn. If they do, whether in the throes of frustration or perceived partiality, remind them they won’t last long in their husband’s houses with such rebellious behavior.
Like their father does not teach his sons, do not teach them about condoms or attractions, but the rule of thumb that just the tip leads to pregnancy. With Mummy GO’s absoluteness, etch it on their consciousness that little or no makeups, longer skirts and thicker tops will not only accelerate their heavenly race but retard the steps of rapists and sexual offenders towards them. Cleavage and thighs attract men like excreta attracts flies. They will have themselves to blame if when this happens.
Warn them to beware of politics and feminists. The former is for women who don’t have time for their homes. The latter are lesbians or misandrists or then choosy but now distraught women unable to find men to pluck them out of shame. In contrast to the timelessness of their brothers, remind them breasts sag and faces wrinkle and menopause is real so they’d know they are depreciable fruits that prompt quick harvest or face drying up, uneaten. Show them the scars on your body and remind them marital long-suffering is the hallmark of virtuous women.
Remind them that men are polygamous in nature and could bring one or two extra-marital mistakes home for correction. Tell the story of your stubborn sister who lost her husband to a side chick because she decided to fight and not allow God to judge.
Enjoin them to pass the legacy to their children, and when they come back to you chucked, leached and pale and helpless like exploited yokels, shake your head and tell them you are disappointed in them.
Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu’s work appears in Lolwe, Peatsmoke Journal, Salamander Ink, Second Chance Lit, Fiction Niche, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Quramo Writers’ Prize 2019 and the Nigerian NewsDirect Poetry Prize 2020.
