Holding my son’s crotch in my hands, I gingerly tilted it allways as I peered closer. Yet he winced at each turn.
“This boy is becoming a man” I considered silently trying to minimise what was an embarrassing moment for both of us.
“Dear God, you know I really shouldn’t be doing this. This is a man’s job and not how I planned to spend my Saturday” I opined
“Oh please shush and get on with it! How do you think all the single parents who raise children of the other gender, alone, do it? my head reprimanded
“Or the numerous solo parents including those living in the same space with an absentee partner?”
“Ah, yes. How come I have never contemplated that?” I rerouted my thoughts as images of some single parents within my circles surfaced.
I saw Nina, who has spent the last two years nursing her young adult son after he got injured in that car crash.
I saw Mamezi’s mom, my neighbour back at Yaba in Lagos. Raising four kids after their father walked. I remember that trying period when she was washing and cleaning her eldest son. A life-altering illness had him incapacitated. While his two immediate younger sisters found it quite awkward, the youngest boy was too small.
She pitched in and did what had to be done. There was only so much you could depend on his friends for. Who by the way, had their own lives to grind daily.
Furthermore, I saw Mama Sara. Who had to move into her son Joe’s home after his accident. Joe’s wife had taken the kids, cleared his accounts and made a run for it, as he lay in hospital with a head injury. Joe was our colleague at the bank, who had been knocked off a Moped and almost got crushed by a 16-wheeler. After his discharge from hospital to an eerily silent house – and as the rest of us sat in our comfort zones, and wondered what would happen to him – his mom who could not afford such a privilege, moved in to nurse her son who was in his 30s.
Then I remembered my friend, Roseline’s dad.
“Ah, that widower who raised his own five after vowing never to remarry”
Rose was the youngest of three sisters and two baby brothers. I recalled how he held their hands through teenagerhood and young adults. The sanitary products he provided. The talks. The hugs The cries. How he would walk into the girls’ room and sit and talk through things with us.
So it was that as I applied the wet oats around his scrotum, my discomfiture ceased. The mixture was soothing the itch and he began to relax.
As he laid back on his bed, calm after hours of frenzied scratching and hobbling, I felt accomplished. Because whereas the two visits to the Walk-In Centre and a Pharmacy where he was attended by male medics had not helped, I, a woman, has done it.
Meanwhile, why is there no guidance around managing such sensitive moments? I brooded as I walked off with pan in hand
If a parent gets this uneasy, how about the child in question?
Have you been in such a situation? Care to share your feelings?