Daddy good morning, please am sorry I won’t do it again, that was how i woked up every morning from strokes of cane in my house when i was a teenager.
Image by me extracted from my father’s album
I am from one of those family that have the mixed parents where one of your parents is cool while the other is so strict, on my own part my mom was the cool one and my father was a man of principle therefore being very strict; he was so strict that even within yourself you know that any flimsy mistake you will be subjected to sweet lashes of cane like he calls it.
This has been his own way of keeping us in order and being organized even when he his not around us and it definitely worked cause the fear of being flogged always do the magic. However, me on the other hand was an over energetic and a very playful teenager, i was always having rough plays at any slight freedom or in some cases when my father was not at home and at the end of the day when i sleep, i always recaps of all my plays during the day which will eventually ends up in me bedwetting over the night.
Every morning i wake up to lashes of cane from my father because he wakes up first to go to the mosque for the morning prayers and I have to clean myself up before joining them; this continued to happen everyday like a routine; playing hard during the day, bed wetting over the night and got woken up by lashes of cane. It went on that it got to a point i started waking up before my father then i will clean up my bed, put it outside so the sun can dry it when it comes out and then proceed kneel down on the other side of my bed holding the cane and waiting for my dad to come and pass his judgements on me; which he will but every time he always says why are you such a goat if it where to be another child after every strokes everyday it was supposed to put them in other but in my own scenery i get adapted to the cane daily and will continue by saying am not a wicked father; you’re the inconsiderate child putting us both in this position; you need to change.
It continued like that until one day i did my thing as usual, cleaned up and waited for my father to come and flog me but surprisingly that day he just looked at me and said meet me in the mosque, i was shocked cause it never happened before; i followed him quietly to the mosque for the prayer but during all of the prayers i couldn’t even concentrate the thought of what will happen to me after this prayer kept bothering my mind but through out the whole day my father didn’t say anything about it neither did he flog me as he usually do. I wondered what was he was thinking and why, through out the day i didn’t go out to play as usual and even at night I couldn’t sleep I was consciously waiting for those whipping to show up but it didn’t; amazingly for me that night because i was too conscious I didn’t bedwet for the first time due to the fear of not knowing my fate for my previous one; i guess it did the magic because since then i never bed wetted again.
Up on till these day i wondered why he stopped flogging me over that and i looked back and laugh out loud at how i was willing to get flogged rather than working on changing I guess a teenager will definitely do their thing.
This is my entry for naija weekly prompt
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