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Growing Up


It's never easy to grow up. Countless times when I was young when people asked how old I was - I always used to say , " I will be ... years old next year" or "I will be turning ...years old". For some reasons I was keen to reach adulthood. So much so that when playing with my sister and friends we would act like adults. Dressing up in our parents clothes, nicking food from our homes and bringing it together and cooking up a meal in an old pot in the back yard of our house - I guess that that is where I get my culinary flare from. At times we did naughty things like folding up bits of newspapers and lighting it up and pretending it was a cigarette.

One time, on a rainy day, we decided to build a little mud hut right in front of my house! By the way that was my idea. Everything was underway but unfortunately my grandmother popped over for a visit and saw what we doing before the project got underway - she surely beat the daylights out of us that day! All this was all in the name of acting and longing to be grown up.

Unfortunately this behaviour and attitudes don't stop in childhood - but gets worse when a person gets to their teenage years. That's when they experience with the 'real' thing. That is when people start smoking to show to society 'how grown up they are', youths start rebelling against their parents and doing what they please, that's when teens start to venture into drugs and sexual relationships. This is all done in the name of acting grown up.

It just take a second to look around your family, your neigbourhood to see the evidence of this terrible mindset. The increase in the number of teenage pregnancies - from as young as 13 years old! Youths not respecting elders - here in London this point is displayed before me almost every day. They play their music out loud from their mobile phones on public transport, they speak so loud to each on the buses that you can hear them all the way on the lower deck of the bus - using vile language while their at it. One day my husband witnessed a terrible incident while travelling to work. A young lad approached an old lady on the bus and tried to snatch her bag from her but she held onto it he continued tugging at it and shouting out abuse - saying he was part of a gang and what not. The bus was packed but nobody dared to do anything. Why? Becasue the laws of the country protects minors! If the youth turned onto anybody who tried to intervene and started to attack that person - then the person would have to defend themselves. But guess what - if the police would then turn up, 99% chances are, that the person who was defending themself from being attacked would end being charged with assault! It actually did happen a few months ago - one celebrity Jack (Jane Goodyears boyfriend) here in the UK, was charged for assaulting a minor. The minor was the one that started it all, he said something offensive to Jack and they ended up in a fight.

Thank God - literally. That just as I was getting in flow of moving with the crowd, I woke to smell the coffee. I been a fairly good child all along. I went to Sunday School almost all my young life. Even went to Sunday School at the UCKG at Smith Street around 1994 and I learnt a lot of things from our sunday school teacher. But in high school I started off with the wrong set of friends. We thought we were the coolest in school. Almost every class one of us would disrupt the teacher in one way or another and the only thing that we always spoke about was boys. Very soon I had vandelized my bag with tippex and written vile words on it. And I didnt see anything wrong with it - cause everyone else was doing it. However one of the most embarrasing things that has ever happened to me was when my mother was called in, to speak to one of the senior teachers, so that I could get my school bag back as it had been confiscated because of the rude writting on it.

Soon after that I started attending the UCKG again. The Victoria Street branch.
I met great friends there but above all I discovered my one true and greatest friend. I soon had the vision of what type of person I wanted to grow up to be. And above all I learnt that I should enjoy every moment in life, not to rush into things and not to be in a hurry to grow up. It is inevitable, its going to happen anyway, either that or my time on earth will be over.
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