Stingrays and bugs in mud

My eyebrows have disappeared as I have aged and a while back my daughter bought us an eyebrow painting kit. I have grown used to being eyebrowless and painting new ones look too harsh for my face. I know there is a happy medium, but seriously, do I want to bother spending time on trial and error. My aunt used to paint on her eyebrows each morning. And let's just agree that she was late for everything in her life. Maybe because of having to paint on one side and then not get the opposite side to match. I have heard that beauty is a painful process and okay, I never got as far as being a beauty, and painting eyebrows seems like too much effort to get closer to that ideal. Maybe I should get them tattooed on? But knowing myself, I might become so excited about it all that I might opt for purple brows, or blue or green. Who knows? My daughter is considering dying her hair blue and while we were at the Auckland museum for the Egyptian exhibition, I spied a woman with purple and blue hair. Getting quite excited, I pointed the woman out to my daughter. Who said "No, not that colour." Oh okay then. I quite liked the look of the mixture of hues. At the museum there is a seating area around a circle where images are projected onto the floor. Children run and jump on the moving symbols and we watched as these kids found games to amuse themselves and companions to join in their fun. A little boy, too young to jump with two feet, tried so hard to emulate the older children and hopped and skipped to his heart's content. Another child chased the flounder fish and stingray images across the painted sea as they raced across the ground. Outside, in the late Winter sunlight, families sat and had picnics under the Pohutukawa trees. We opted for lunch at the cafe, but there is a room to eat your own meals indoors if the weather outside is frightful. And because the children racing around did not belong to myself, I could enjoy their antics and say "Not my piglets, not my mud." and smile as parents looked frazzled. Aaah good times.

This upcoming generation of children are being dubbed 'Generation Alpha'. Children who are unafraid to show their emotions, to tell the truth or stand up for themselves and others. Some call them Honey Badgers. I have seen a honey badger ('ratel' in South Africa) once or twice, but it's not an animal I would associate with soft and cuddly or cute in any way. But yes, it does have ferocious defensive and protective traits that might be associated with the newest generation. We have a prime example of a Honey Badger in our family. My 7 year old granddaughter. At church each Sunday, she happily goes off to class with Bro H and his wife F. Bro H decided that the childrens names were too difficult to remember (he's joking really, funny, clever guy) anyhow he renamed the children with easier to pronounce names. Granddaughter was called Fred. She looked up at him and said "If I'm to be called Fred then I will call you Bob." Yup, not afraid of standing up to authority figures at all. He happily agreed to answer to Bob and has done so for the past few years. He was once a professional singer and performer, so he was the obvious choice of music director for our church services. 7year old GD, aka Fred, often goes to sit with him before the services start and chats away to her friend, Bob, perhaps instructing him on how best to direct the music. We were all chatting one day and I mentioned that the grandchildren had learnt to play the piano, thanks to their father's instructions. My daughter (not the one with potentially blue hair) said to him that 7year (Fred) had learnt her scales, tried them once and said "yes, I know how to do them now." and refused to practice them anymore. As we spoke, Fred tilted her head to the side and perhaps didn't enjoy how we were portraying her to Bob. She looked at him, squeezed past us in the pews and went straight up to the piano and started playing her scales, flawlessly. Yup, she is a Honey badger. I can see a future Prime minister or Queen in the making. Queen Fred? Mmmm it does have a nice ring to it. Can we hope that the Generation Alpha will be the ones to save the Pangolin? Otherwise known as cute little animals with tongues longer than their bodies and covered with scales. They are also closely related to bears. That sounds like something out of a science fiction story, a scaled bear. I can visualise a cute Honey Badger, cradling a Pangolin while telling off the poachers with a stern voice.

Talking about saving the world: did you know that on the scale of what we can do to save the world from global warming etc, recycling is listed at number 60. Yes, we might be cleaning up the oceans and saving sea life by recycling, but as to the effect globally, it's way down the list. The top thing we can do to change the world is to stop using fossil fuels. I was doing my bi-annual reader/writer job for high school children during their exams, and one question was how to be more kind to the soil if we are farmers. They suggested we look at indigenous ways of caring for the land and the question asked for an example of how we could achieve this. My young student, who comes from a farming background, said "Oh they just pray over the land and hope it all works out fine." What? Sadly hitting students over the head until they think clearly is frowned upon. After the exam was over and we were sitting waiting for the time limit to expire, I told him a few ways that indigenous people use to fertilize the soil, I am not allowed to do this during exams. Anyhow, I spoke about companion planting, seaweed fertilizer, lime from seashells, compost and mulching. I told him that using these things might be more beneficial to the land than tonnes of chemically engineered fertilizers etc. Maybe I'm turning into a Honey Badger, badgering the poor student to try and inform him of alternative methods. Not that he was convinced of course. He asked me if I was a farmer and I had to sadly inform him that I don't have green thumbs or gardening skills of any sort. Although, I did manage to care for my pawpaw (papaya) tree until it gifted me with a delicious papaya. Yummy. My grandson and I ate it whole, didn't even take out the seeds because it was so small and tasty. Just like the ones that grew in our gardens back in Africa. Through frost and icy rain, my pawpaw has survived in New Zealand through me talking to it each day. Oh okay, maybe I do say a prayer now and again. Shucks I do sound like that indigenous farmer that my young student was imagining. Actually I sound a bit like my father in appreciating indigenous cultures and a bit like my mother with her love of nature. Would they be proud of my little pawpaw? Or relieved that I didn't resort to violence against a student? Maybe both.

As a frazzled young mother, I would often not mix my cake mixes to the required consistency. Which allowed little blobs of white flour to survive into the baked chocolate cake. When my children's friends would come over and be offered a slice of cake, they would ask "What is the white stuff in your cake?" Obviously their mothers were much better at mixing batter than I was. More pedantic in getting things perfect? Anyhow, my children would pipe up and say "That's bugs in mud cake." or pudding or biscuits. You name it, my baking was riddled with bugs in mud moments. Sometimes the dry flour would puff out of their mouths as they ate if it was a particularly large 'bug'. Oh what the heck, I'm not trying for perfection. I'm in awe of mothers that keep all their balls in the air at once without once dropping some important task. I was never a good juggler, my balls fell on a regular basis. But seriously, I'm very proud of who my children have grown up to become despite my bumbling efforts at being a good mum. I think the trick to growing happy adults is to teach them to find happiness in the small moments in life. Forget the bugs in the mud and focus on the good. Dye your hair all the colours of the rainbow, wear the tutu to do your shopping, thumb your nose at tradition and never be scared of colour. Get rid of the beige and go for the vibrant. Life is meant to be amazing and by judging ourselves to be what others expect of us, is to always fall short.