SEXUAL MATTERS, OUR SMALL-TOWN HOUSES, AND THESE PERILOUS TIMES.

Mt topic today was motivated by a conversation I eavesdropped on. It was these two young boys I met who were arguing and one of them was aptly angry about being sent to go out and play when all he wanted was to sit at home and watch television.

Let’s try and reconstruct the narration albeit in prose. I will give these young boys names; one will be Erick and the other one Kevin. Kevin is the older one. They are raised in a simple family comprising a father, mother, these boys, and their sister.

Kevin is about 14 while Erick is aged 10 and their young sister is 5 years old. They stay in a bedsitter house and I don’t want to go into describing the arrangement because I only joined the dots from their conversation and pieced together how the situation could be.

Their father works and his schedules include day and night shift given the fact that Kevin at some point told Erick that he is very happy when their dad goes on day shift during the holiday seasons and night shift during the schooling period.

But on this day, their father was on leave and had been around for two days now. Then their mum on this fateful day sent the boys out of the house to go and play with other children because it is the holidays and get to interact and forge friendships.

Their young sister had gone to their neighbor’s house to play with the neighbor’s daughter as she is accustomed. The boys however love being indoors watching TV. This schedule got interrupted by their mum who sent them out unceremoniously because their dad needed to rest and sleep since works very hard and the leave is his salvation.

Kevin seemed to doubt that because they had all slept the night before. That is why he was angry that he was missing his favorite program because his dad was ‘tired’ and needed ‘rest.’ He didn’t have a choice at the end because Erick reminded him that defying their mother’s orders was akin to signing death warranty.

The conclusion I came to after weaving the whole story together was that kelvin and Erick’s parents needed their own private time to be intimate. Now that the boys and their sister are usually with them at the night and boys are around always during the day this holiday season and the man of the house is on leave, things were bound to end this way.

The only problem is that these parents will remain mum and treat the sexual topic as taboo to the boys thinking that they are very young to even know of anything as such. The older boy seemed to understand something to do with the ‘rest’ and ‘sleep.’

I looked at him and thought how long it would take him before he fully understood the issue of sex and probably start experimenting. The interaction with the parents may lead to a future where a relationship exists in which the parents cannot freely advise the children on matters of sex because as with everything the foundation was all shaky.

The city life with the burgeoning numbers of rural-urban migrations has made housing expensive and inadequate and as such families are living in small enclosers leading to even possibilities where the parents engage in sex at proximity to their children.

The effect is that generations are arising exposed to sex from an early age whose influence is unlikely. It calls for creativity and proper understanding of what we want of ourselves and what we want for our children and the interaction we build with them at the earlier stages.

The times are perilous and we better act as though we are not in our time and that sexual matters are to be openly discussed with our children to help them. If anything, we would be building generations of aliens.