Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World. Kagiso Msimango
a “What a baby!” favour.
A poker face I do not have. My face broadcasts all my thoughts and emotions for everyone to see. For this reason I avoid meeting newborns. Nobody likes ugly babies, but we are not supposed to admit this. In fact, we are supposed to pretend that there is no such thing as an ugly baby. The thing is, most newborns generally look like internal organs, probably because that’s technically what they were not so long ago. As you happily scroll through your Facebook timeline, you are confronted by an image of what looks like a bruised, wrinkly spleen. It is dressed in a onesie, so you conclude that it must be a baby. You click “Like”, and may even comment, “Aaah man, he’s so beautiful. I could just eat him with a spoon!” Then mommy replies, “Thank you, it’s a girl.”
By custom many Black South Africans are encouraged not to expose a baby to people outside the immediate family before the baby is three months old. I suspect that it may, in part, be to save the public from being subjected to a baby before the cute kicks in. But many flout this cultural practice. I say bring back the embargo. The reason ugly babies are unnerving is because they go against nature. Cuteness is the primary survival mechanism for all infant mammals. Since they cannot fend for themselves, babies rely on their cuteness to evoke nurturing and protective instincts from older, more capable mammals in their environment. Even baby hyenas are cute. This is why, on giving birth and for many months afterwards, the mother is flooded with the hormone oxytocin that leads her to believe that she has just birthed the most beautiful being to ever grace the planet. This hormonal deception allows her to care for this constantly wet, very loud, utterly non-productive addition to the household. It is literally to ensure the survival of the species. It is why it always comes as a shock to discover that one’s children do not appear attractive to others, or when many years later you look at your children’s baby pictures and realise that they were not nearly as beautiful to behold as you had thought. Now, you never want to be the inglorious bastard who inadvertently disabuses the parents of the belief that gazing at their lovelet is not as transcendent as their hormones have led them to believe. So, with my overly expressive snitch face, I try to avoid baby reveals as much as possible.
A colleague had just had a baby and invited us to come bask in the glory of the beauty that had sprung from his loins. I expressed my trepidation to our boss, who then shared his fool-proof two-step strategy for this very dilemma:
Step 1: Always refer to the baby as “she”. If it is a girl, you are good. If it is a boy, you will be corrected but no one will be offended. They’ll simply assume that he’s so unbelievably pretty he must be a girl.
Step 2: When confronted with a pre-cute baby, simply exclaim, “What a baby!” It’s not a lie. It is open to interpretation, and the parents – thanks to the oxytocin – will interpret it positively. Everyone wins.
Now you may be wondering why I am giving you a Ted Talk on navigating the perilous waters of pre-cute babies. There is a point. Not all babies are a result of doing the dirty. We birth them all the time, in the form of products, services, meals, hand-knitted blankets, songs, paintings, crafts and books. We are creative beings driven to constantly birth the fruits of our being. Creating makes us happy – and social media has ruined it for all of us. People are vicious on the streets of social media. They point, laugh, judge and condemn other people’s babies. I was recently coaching a brilliant young woman, Zandile, who is writing her first book and believed that she was suffering from writer’s block. During the course of our conversation it became apparent that she knew exactly what she wanted to write. What was paralysing her was not a lack of material or an inability to express her thoughts; it was the anticipated dragging she expected her book to be subjected to once it was published. So she hates what she’s written because it is a poor, diluted, second-rate version of what she wants to express, in the hope of minimising the anticipated future ridicule. Social media is nascent in our evolution, and I think to some extent we still haven’t internalised that there are actual human beings behind those social media handles. Humans who have nurtured and deeply cared for these babies we are blithely tearing apart with our opinions, from behind our screens. I remember being tagged on an opinion piece by a stranger who criticised me because my previous book The Goddess Mojo Bootcamp was not inclusive of the LGBTQ community. It is a book on attracting healthy relationships, which I wrote based on personal experience and working with clients. I am heterosexual and, for whatever reason, so were all the clients I had dealt with on this particular issue, so I wrote what I knew. Which makes complete sense and yet, reading that woman’s post, even I didn’t like myself.
After my session with Zandile, I came back to this manuscript and reread what I had written so far. I realised that, just like Zandile, I had modified some of my stories to be as palatable as possible to those they may possibly offend – and that sucks. I do not want to distort my experiences just to avoid falling short of a stranger’s subjective quality assurance standards.
So let’s make a deal. I am going to pretend that I am sharing these stories with a dear friend, enabling me to be open, honest and vulnerable. Your end of the bargain is to be kind. Remember that there is a mother full of oxytocin behind this baby you are holding.
That part is for my benefit. I have a couple of suggestions for yours:
Be open: The majority of stories I share in this memoir are way off the beaten path. I suspect that sooner or later you will come across something you are tempted to dismiss as deluded ramblings. That would be a pity because this rabbit hole I am taking you down is littered with gems.
Be comfortably lost: I go off on various tangents, in life and in conversation, but I promise you there is always a moral. Hang in there and just go with the flow.
I am like one of those borderline senile characters they love so much in animated movies who share with the protagonist weird, seemingly irrelevant tales while the protagonist rolls his eyes. Ten minutes before the movie ends, during the final showdown, in a flash, the crazy tales coalesce to make perfect sense, unlocking a wisdom within our hero that allows him to defeat the enemy. At least that’s how I like to think of my ramblings.
If you don’t emerge from this adventure with at least one of these nuggets that bestow on you the power to vanquish your enemies, you have already learned the most important lesson when it comes to unfucking the world: the “What a baby!” concept, also known as “Be kind”.
So come along, friend. Come check my baby out.
The soul, in its longing to grow, will push us towards crisis points, bringing about a situation that will force us to leave behind the old toys and the worn-out ways of operating. Our soul brings us these crises to remind us that we don’t have to remain stuck in the land of the hunters and the hunted.
– Alberto Villoldo, psychologist, medical anthropologist and shaman
WHAT
THE
F*CK?
1. I am fucked
Dr Dax called for the nurse to fetch my daughter from his consulting room, and instructed her to keep Lebone occupied. He wanted to talk to me “privately”, he offered as he turned to face me, peering at me intensely over his glasses.
“Why are you not the one seeing me?” the doctor asked, his head cocked to the side, his face a mixture of concern, curiosity, and what seemed to me like disapproval.
“In fact, I was referred to you by my boss Reggie Meyer, but my daughter had this problem and, seeing that it’s school holidays, I thought I’d bring her to you. Reggie says you are really good. I tried to get appointments for both of us and couldn’t, so I decided to start with her.” I responded rapidly, feeling curiously defensive.
Earlier in the week, my boss had called me into his office, given me a Post-It with a doctor’s name and number scribbled on it, and suggested I make an appointment. He didn’t offer an explanation as to why he wanted me to see this doctor, and I didn’t press him. He simply told me that the doctor was his personal physician and that he