Growing old disgracefully
Hajira Amla
If you think your parents embarrassed you when you were a teenager, just wait until they get old and grey. Senility is the ultimate tool used by parents to repay children for the hard work they did “raising” us.
Every time I visit my parents these days, I marvel at the way they make me repeat every sentence I say at least thrice. My mother talks incessantly about her plants and spends about eighty percent of her day running outside to see if her ducks and chickens are ok. Then she calls my father outside to see the rat eating the ducks’ food and he spends twenty minutes myopically staring down the barrel of his air gun, engaged in geriatric pursuit. The rats must be sniggering in between mouthfuls of the ducks’ maize feed.
All of a sudden, the house seems to be full of Glomail and Verimark products. Everything seems to have a stamp on it that says “as seen on TV” – a sure sign of diminished capacity in my book. When I go shopping with them, they spend two hours in the supermarket filling two large trolleys as though they were chipmunks storing up for the winter – but if you think this is monthly grocery shopping, you’d be very wrong. They stockpile cooldrinks, potato crisps and milk as though they were selling them to the general pubic. They spend more money on their various animals than themselves – if they took the amount they spent on vet bills, vetinerary medicines and animal feed every month and donated it to a charitable cause, they could probably support a family of five here in South Africa (or a family of thirty-five in Zimbabwe).
My dad still smokes three packs a day and drinks like a fish but says he mixes his brandy with diet cola because “it’s healthier”. On the plus side, however, they do seem to be fighting much less these days, with only occasional spats of dour rhetoric emanating from the couch in the living room where my father sits.
On the whole, they are enjoying their slow journey to senility together and making others suffer – but I can’t say I’m totally undeserving. After all the nights I have kept my mother awake as a baby, all the nappies she had to change, all the times I got hurt and they wiped away my tears, soon it will be my turn to change their nappies and feed them. Eeew.
I’ve got to love them – after all, no-one else will.
