Plight of the Distraught Child (2)

On a cool morning, Shantel was typing (rather swiping) away her life on her newly acquired Smartphone. It was her mom’s gadget-gift as had been promised when she completes her high school studies. She was on the co-driver’s seat while her mom drove to work, while trying to make a conversation with her. But Shantel would only make monosyllable responses amidst giggles elicited from a conversation she was having on WhatsApp. It didn’t take long before her mum got fed up and pulled over, amidst spurts of anger.

Her mom couldn’t understand what ‘faceless’ conversations kept her glued to the phone. Was she getting addicted (rather hooked) to this gadget? Or was it the well anticipated teenage behavior of self assertion, distraction and independence? Before she could make any conclusions, she stopped the car gave one angry look at Shantel who by this time was lost in the virtual world of illusion and hadn’t even realized that the car had stopped. Too angry to contain herself, she slapped Shantel’s face, pulled her hair and grabbed the phone.

The rest of the journey was quiet. Not even the slightest sound was heard between them apart from a few sobs as Shantel mopped her wet face with a napkin at regular intervals. The journey to work had been spoiled by the foul mood. Shantel got out of the car, rushed to the store house and began her routine work of stock taking and record keeping. Her mom on the other hand got into a her office and began receiving clients as was customary. Nothing unusual happened the rest of the day. There was no talk between the two, but clearly Shantel’s world had been shattered.

Her WhatsApp conversation had been stopped midway without her understanding why? The clueless and faceless individual on the other end of the Smartphone was unaware of the happenings and went on texting. Shantel’s mom had kept the phone in her handbag without a decision on what to do with it, or with Shantel.

In the evening, the drive back home was quiet. Although Shantel had recovered from what she could have filed as parental abuse, she wasn’t in the moods of conversing with her mom (ever again!). It’s only on arrival home that she asked her mum for her phone as she needed to make an urgent call to a friend considering the news that her KCSE results had been published. Her mom walked upstairs to get the phone from her handbag.

While at it, she saw a WhatsApp notification that 100 messages had been received. For a moment, she felt the need to ‘eavesdrop’ into the messages. It was a real shocker to see and read the texts and graphics being exchanged between her daughter and a contact named Mickey. The conversation was seductive and libidinous. Graphics had been sent between them. She was staring at a hint of wild passions and unchecked tendencies towards voyeurism, which is a mild form of pornography.

Shantel’s mom was crushed to the core. She had heard a few cases among her friends and members of her women’s chama complain about their teenage daughters and sons but had always talked about her Shantel as one who was sanitized from birth, a Nazirite! She couldn’t reconcile with the reality at hand in the form of a gadget that was meant to usher her adopted daughter into adulthood. She quickly raced down memory lane seeking answers to the question of ‘what did I do wrong?’

Her daughter had been her greatest delight, especially immediately after adoption. She adopted her at a tender age of 4 years. Her husband was supportive of the idea to adopt children after a prolonged waiting period of siring their own child. Considering the pressure from parents and friends, she thought to quell the disquiet through adoption.

Perchance she skipped the counseling process that supports parents who choose to adopt children.

Feeling too excited at the time, she took in Shantel and talked about her to anyone and everyone who cared to listen. The bubbly girl brought joy to their lull home and she was happy to buying anything and everything that would distract her daughter and make her feel comfortable. After two years of what she considers as rough-shod induction into parenthood, the excitement had waned off thanks to the pressure of raising a child where both parents are career people.

Too many house helps had ‘camped’ at their house some staying a night while the longest survived three months, only. Shantel’s mom was at risk of depression considering the work-family balance that every career woman battles with.

Back to the text messages and she kept scrolling and crying in the same breath. At the age of 6 years, Shantel was shoved into boarding school, in class one. It was a hard decision but seemed to be the plausible compromise at the time. She was getting overly depressed by the predicament of what she thinks were insane house helps. She had installed nanny cams to keep tabs with the happenings in her house while she is away. In the evenings when she arrived home she would scream at the sight and sound of things on those nanny cams.

She became emotionally unstable and at times threw out the house helps in the middle of the night on seeing how innocent Shantel was being tortured while she was busy in the office growing her career. Her business was taking a nose-dive and everything else (in her life) thanks to the cost and pain of raising a child. It was at this point that they arrived at the (more costly) decision of taking a 6 year old to a boarding school.

So, from class 1 through primary and secondary schools Shantel went through various boarding schools spread across the country. Some were public, some private, some Christian and others were secular schools. She had lost count of the number of schools that her little Shantel had been to. What she didn’t realize at the time was that Shantel had picked many deviant habits but her busy personality and life couldn’t allow her to catch up with the daughter. Was she to blame? Perhaps yes, perhaps not?

This was a breaking point for her. All the time she was sure that she had an angel under her care, but looking at the text/graphic conversations with the faceless Mickey, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. The truth was, Shantel hadn’t received adequate parenting at the time she most needed, at her formative ages. She therefore got easily influenced in the various school she attended and didn’t have a consistent pattern of moral values to adopt. She became a child caught in between her unavailable parents and the ever available world of influence.

On this fateful day, Shantel was at a confluence where the values of her world and that of her parents stood in stark contrast to each other. She was distraught, even as her parents became even more distraught. Shantel adds on to the endless list of children in distraught. Children who have been tossed to and fro by the motions of this dark world as their caretakers get engrossed in their busy lives to make a living or keep up with the Joneses.

The effects can be seen in a girl who is in her teenage hood, but deeply drenched into sexting and pornography, strapped with a clear misunderstanding of sexuality. This is neither fiction nor another statistic…. it’s a story with a human face.