Kwisha mimi... My little Tasha has a boyfriend!

Guess what! My daughter, Tasha, who is almost nine years old, has a boyfriend and I think that’s a crime. Heck! I had my first boyfriend when I was in college.

And even back then, ripe as I was for some love, I was one of those naïve girls who would draw the map of Africa when talking to the lanky and uncultured fellow.

Back to the discovery. The other day, when I was signing her school diary, in the typical nosy mummy-style, I decided to ransack her bag and that is when I stumbled upon the hidden note in one of the compartments.

“Hey Tasha I really like you,” were neatly scribbled on a note, signed by one Justin. It was spruced with a naughty emoji (yep even we old school career mums know what those things are).

My first reaction when I saw this stupid note was to overreact.

“TAAAAAAAAAAAAASHA!” I screamed my lungs out calling her from wherever she was.

From the way a parent yells a child’s name, they can tell a mile away from the tone, there is real trouble.

When she heard my voice from the kitchen, she was right in front of me, within a fraction of a second.

“What’s this? I mean who’s Justin?” I tried to ask her in the most polite way I could although I was seething with rage inside me.

“Muuuuuum, that is my stuff, why are you rummaging through my things without my permission?” she tactfully tried to evade my question. The nerve.

I mean today’s children have guts. You find them licking sugar from the jar and they blame you for snooping on them.

When we were growing up, children were there to be seen and not heard and if you were caught ‘katianaring’ with boys, you would be skinned alive.

But these Matiang’i kids are a whole new kettle of fish. The good thing is that I am enlightened enough to know that caning is not the solution when you make such a discovery.

So how did I maneouver through this sticky maze? Lengthy mommy-daughter talk in my room.

“Mum si the other day I told you there’s a boy in our class who likes me? Si he’s the one who wrote that thing,” she opened up.

True, she had told me about that nagging boy, some months ago, but it never hit me that it was serious. Thing is this: My daughter and I have open communication lines and we talk about everything. That’s why it was easy for her to open up and share from the word go.

She is still a child, and the naïve advances from the equally naïve boy have been confusing her and she did not know what to do about it, so she reported to the teacher also.

As parents, we need to always keep communication lines open with our kids so that in case of something, you arrest it before it escalates.

The writer is a married working mother of a toddler boy and a lower-primary girl. She shares her experience of juggling between career, family and social life