Dear baba and mama Makena,

I have this fine boyfriend😭💕…I’m very sure he is all you want in a son-in-law. However, I’m at a dilemma as to whether or not I should introduce him to you. I know you are quick to ask why…Well, this is why. My love has locs. Yees I can see your faces slowly turning red with anger and I can almost hear you say ‘Wee usiniletee mtu wa bangi hapa!!!’ And this is why I’ll keep you out of this beautiful phase of my life, because I am dating a “mtu wa bangi”.

Worse still, my brother can’t have some fire unkempt afro. If he insists on maintaining his afro, you rashly tell him how much of an arrogant son he is 🙄. And you still ask me why he’s trying to distance himself from you???

I turned 18 a while ago 💃🏿.But you haven’t given me any breathing space(hamuachi nipumue😂) since then. You still want to keep track of where I am every single second. When you call you insist on knowing whose voice is at the background🤦🏿‍♀. At 18 you want me to still ask for permission to go out with my friends, two months to the actual day. Eeei yawa…let me be!!! Actually, I have a confession. I have now become a professional liar because I have to answer your far-fetched questions to your satisfaction(before you grant me the permission and you’ll more often than not deny me my request) , and to avoid too many quarrels between us.

Yees I know having tattoo marks is clearly warned against in the Bible. But you don’t have to condemn me just because I felt a bit rebellious. After all, I’m only trying to express myself mostly because you haven’t given me a conducive environment to open up to you. Your religious self has created a distance between us, with no bridge for either of us to cross over to the other side.

It is now 2 years since I joined campus. I have been living like a zombie. You shattered my dream of becoming a top artist, simply because your school of thought states that any form of art won’t put food on the table. Now I have to wake up to calculus, accounts and algebra on a daily basis,yet you know too well math has never been an area of interest for me. I actually find you to be self-centered because you forced me into this,so that you’ll have the title ‘mama wa economist…baba wa lawyer’🤦🏿‍♀. And now, I can only find solace in crying myself to sleep and wishing I never came into existence.

In tears,

Makena.

These different perspectives of life between the 90’s generation and the older generations is the overlooked gap; the generation gap.

DISCLAIMER!!!

I have very liberal-minded parents who have embraced the fact that there’s the generation gap between us and I therefore do not relate to any of the scenarios above. I know many parents are open-minded as well, and I celebrate them for taking that bold step in their parenting journey. So the inspiration of this blog, is driven by the strained parent-child relationships most of my friends are experiencing. And how I wish their parents could see this and realize how much harm they are bringing their children.