Knock Knock: Parenting
When you knock on my bedroom door and I say “Hello?” What I mean is, “State you business and go away.” Its not an invitation to come in and sit by the bedside and engage on small talk about what I am writing and such…. Unless of course, I am living under your roof, then well your house is my house…
My parents personalities and parenting styles, growing up, could be surmised in the way they knocked on my bedroom door.
My dad rarely knocked, you could hear the rhythmic tapping of his wooden soled shoes as we walked past my door and then the pace slowed down and he would softly shout his message, “Whoever is not in the car in when I reverse out of the garage is walking to school…” Suffice it to say I never walked to school.
On the rare occasion that he knocked on the door, it was a soft, yet authoritative rhythmic knock that announced, Knock Knock: this is a door under my roof, I don’t have to knock but I expect to be treated with the respect I am extending to you. (-The if you know whats good for you was implied.)
Most of those times he would open the door and speak with one foot firmly planted on the door’s threshold… If he got in, then it meant someone was in very big trouble…
My mum on the other hand, was the frequent visitor who knocked with brief staccato notes that concisely stated, Knock Knock: I am your mother, ready or not I am coming in…. and of course, she didn’t wait for acknowledgement…
Its almost like she wanted to catch you by surprise and see if you were doing anything you shouldn’t be doing, so as not give you the time to hide evidence of nefarious misdeeds.
Even the tour around the room as she spoke, gave an air of an inspection for anything out of amiss but nothing ever was, except of course for the untidy state of the room and the clothes on the floor that should be in the laundry basket and the laundered clothes draped on a closet door, that ought to have been ironed and packed away… and the curtains that were still unopened way past sunrise.
As she opened the curtains and the windows, she would emphasize on how having a neat room was a reflection of one’s mental acumen… and then add a scary story of someone who found a snake in their clothes or got bitten by a poisonous insect that had crawled into their clothes….
At my big age I still shake my clothes before wearing them, just to make sure there isn’t some creepy crawly nesting in there… I catch myself telling my nieces and nephews to tidy up their rooms as I tell them horror stories of snakes and insects and breeding in unfolded clothes… I wonder what my knock sounds like to them.
Knock knock … its me.
~B
Becoming The Muse 
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