Caution- readers should take note that Punchaat (talking ill of someone else) is detested in all religions. The only reason the Laudium Sun publishes the Punchaat column is to reflect one of the realities of our society, which is Punchaat, Punchaat and more Punchaat. People need to respect each other’s privacy, be it that of family members or friends. Let us as a society stop the Punchaat so that we the Laudium Sun, need no longer reflect this scourge.
This column is for readers who have issues that are of concern to them. If you have problems with your neighbour, your mother-in-law, your boss or even with the shopkeeper down the road, write to us. This column is for you. If you so desire, you need not give your name or any other personal details. Publication and editing is at the discretion of the editor.
In order to avoid innocent parties being mistakenly identified, the Laudium Sun has, where necessary and appropriate, replaced names or other identifiers in this column with symbols like Mr? or Mrs X or XXX.
Looking at the kids of today and witnessing the lack of morals and manners among our youth is truly heartbreaking. We often hear that parents blame social media and the stressful times that we are living in, as the root cause of our kid’s destructive behaviour, but I strongly disagree with this argument. I firmly believe that as parents we are our children’s mentors and before blaming the society for a child’s moral decay it is our responsibility to instil good morals and values in them from birth. Children learn by example and what todays parents fail to understand is the profound saying that ‘the sign of good parenting is in the child’s behaviour, but the sign of truly great parenting is in the parent’s behaviour also’. With the recent surge in childhood suicides in our country due to bullying in schools and especially after reading a recent article on the LS about bullying at the TTT school, I feel that I can no longer hold my silence.
I am a 41 year old female living in LLL with my husband and three kids. My eldest daughter who is 16 is a grade 10 learner attending a private religious school in the LLL area, which name I prefer not to disclose. My daughter who has always been a very happy outgoing young girl has undergone a complete personality change from the beginning of this year. Her once joyous smile had been replaced by a listless, depressed expression and she refused to talk or interact with any of her family and friends. Initially I assumed that it was probably due to her heavy homework schedule at school, but as the year progressed, she had become more withdrawn and I noticed that she even started losing weight since she was hardly eating much at mealtimes. Incidentally, after passing by her room late one night around mid July and hearing her sobbing, I immediately realised that something was seriously wrong. I tried approaching her the next day about it, but she refused to talk about what was bothering her. I persisted and told her that if she could not confide in me then it would be best if I approached some of her close friends for assistance to help me understand her troubles. Upon hearing this suggestion of mine she went pale and begged me not to call any of her friends as she was no longer in contact with them. Totally shocked, I sat her down and demanded to know what the problem was. She burst into tears and in drips and drabs she revealed the whole story to me. She explained that during the early part of the school year along with many of the kids in her grade she had attended a classmate’s 16th birthday party, which I was aware of. It was at this party that a few of the children including my daughter’s three close friends decided to experiment with smoking weed. They tried pressurising her to join them, but she refused point blank and in fact she immediately called her father, my hubby, to pick her up early from the party by feigning a headache to us so that we would not suspect anything.
However, from this day onwards these three girls who partook in the smoking began to bully my daughter. They stopped speaking to her and began sending her nasty WhatsApp messages, mocking and belittling her. They even went around instigating some of the other kids in the class against her. Whenever she passed by them, they would snigger and make snide comments. She amicably tried approaching the girls to resolve the matter, but they merely started calling her vulgar names and one of them aggressively pushed her to the ground, after which my daughter began to live in fear and dreaded going to school. As time passed they went as far as dumping her schoolbag in the dustbin and circulating petty rumours about her to her peers. She had been suffering in silence for about seven months until this day, when I eventually got the truth out of her. She begged me not to reveal her problem to her Dad, which I agreed to but I calmly informed her that I would need to speak to one of the girl’s mothers whom I was familiar with, as we had schooled together and I assured her that we as parents would pacify the situation.
The mother I was referring to was SSS who was married into a very wealthy family and now lived in RRR Gardens. According to my daughter, SSS’s daughter was the most popular girl in their class and she called all the ‘shots’. Sadly, she was also the main instigator of the bullying against my daughter. This spoilt brat was used to everybody following her orders and when my child refused to obey her by smoking weed she earned this girl’s wrath. It had more to do with my daughter standing up to her than it had to do with the act of not joining her in smoking.
I called SSS up the next day and without going into the full details of the event leading to our daughter’s broken friendship, I merely stated that it seemed as if the girls had had a misunderstanding and that we should try to get them together to resolve the issue. SSS was not familiar with the situation but agreed with me and told me that she would call me back after speaking to her daughter. An hour later I answered my phone to hear an irate SSS on the other side ranting and raving that I had a very vindictive and jealous daughter, who was the only one that was totally at fault. I tried calming her down so that I could understand what her daughter could have said to SSS to bring about these accusations against my child, but SSS said that after speaking to her daughter she felt that the girls should keep away from one another as they were not suited for each other’s company. At this point, I lost my cool and told SSS if that was the case it would be best if her daughter would stop bullying my child. Upon hearing this SSS started venting her anger at me and calling me names and she even retorted that people of my ‘stature’ were always acting as victims, when coming into contact with people of a ‘higher’ social standing, as we could not keep up with them and thus we suffered from an inferiority complex. Although infuriated by her arrogance, I still thanked her for her time and assured her that my daughter would keep away from her child, but if there was any form of bullying against my daughter going forth, I would lay a formal complaint with the school.
The next day when my daughter returned from school, I took one look at her face and I knew that my phone call to SSS had been a serious mistake. My daughter angrily lashed out at me and blamed me for making matters worse and screamed at me to stay out of her life. She locked herself in her room and refused to come out until I threatened to inform my husband upon which she opened the door and called me into her room. She cried saying that she was so ashamed of her family especially of me who always preached about social evils, but who covered up what was going on in our own home. My first instinct was to slap her for her rude and audacious accusations, but I mentally reprimanded myself and kept my cool. I gently prodded her to confide in me and she finally admitted that she felt as if she had been living a lie for so many years because SSS’s daughter had told her that she should not be so uptight about smoking weed since her own father (my hubby) had a drug addiction issue. I listened in shock as she demanded an answer from me. At this point I decided that I could no longer keep my husband in the dark and I marched off to relate the entire story to him. My spouse listened in silence and thereafter he calmly asked me not to worry as he wanted to speak to our daughter alone. The two of them spoke for almost two hours and when they emerged from the room, both with tears in their eyes, my daughter begged me for forgiveness and promised to never bring the subject up again. She said she was ashamed of allowing her so called ex friend (SSS’s manipulative daughter) to get the better of her and allowing herself to doubt us. Our child reassured us that from this day forth she would not worry anymore about these worthless bullies and she felt very grateful to have such loving parents who trusted her so much especially her Dad, who had given her a clearer perspective on life by relating his own life story to her. My husband did not go into the details of their conversation to me, but he told me that he had come clean about his past to our daughter and that he had explained to her from his own personal experience, how it was better to lose certain friends who were never true friends to begin with. Whatever dad and daughter had discussed, certainly seemed to have a positive impact on my daughter, because since their conversation my girl seemed more at peace and more like her old cheerful self.
I am glad that out of this nasty ordeal our relationship with our daughter has strengthened, but what I cannot get over is SSS’s disgusting behaviour. SSS’s close male cousin YYY and my hubby had been good friends in the past. Unfortunately, both YYY and my husband had developed bad habits during their campus days and had occasionally smoked cannabis (dagga), but fortunately did not experiment with other heavy drugs. About two years down the line their families found out about their bad habit, after they got involved in a minor car accident coming home from campus, while being under the influence of cannabis. At that time dagga was not legal. Each of the families blamed the opposite party for influencing the other into smoking cannabis, despite them both being equally at fault. YYY and my hubby were forbidden to meet each other ever again and thus their friendship came to an end. The families independently sent the two of them for rehabilitation and therapy and thanks to the Almighty both boys overcame their problems, as they were not into heavy drugs. Two years after this incident my husband and I were married and to this day, I am proud to reveal that he has never fallen back to this bad habit, of even smoking a cigarette. I am shocked that SSS had shamelessly relayed this knowledge of my hubby’s past and disclosed such a personal matter to her young child who in turn used this information to her advantage to humiliate my daughter. SSS maliciously insinuated that my husband was a habituated drug addict, who was currently lying to his family when she was fully aware that both her cousin and my husband had put their past behind them. Instead of dealing with the problem of our kid’s broken friendship and trying to teach them not to fight and be mean to each other, SSS who refused to listen to both sides of the story automatically sided with her child and continued to add fuel to the fire. I kept asking myself what exactly did SSS aim to gain by revealing such sensitive information to her daughter and of what relevance did my husband’s story have to do with the girls personal issues with each other.
The only thing I can come up with is that SSS is purely vindictive and that her aim was to get back at me for daring to approach her and suggesting that her daughter was a bully. It seems that SSS has forgotten that ‘people who live in glass houses should not throw stones’. She had brought up an incident that occurred almost 20 years ago in my family, but less than four years ago her very own indiscreet behaviour had been the talk of the town. Perhaps she had assumed that her husband’s generous donations to various charitable and religious institutions could cover up her immoral acts, but at the end of the day we are living in a close knit community where the same people who talk with you are the ones who talk about you. The thought has occurred to me that perhaps this is the reason why her daughter has become a bully as the child is lacking the attention of a mother who is too busy with her own extracurricular activities. I have no intention of playing the naming and shaming game that SSS has played with my daughter by revealing SSS’s faults, but in no way will I be silenced if she continues to challenge me in the future. My daughter has been instructed by her parents that if anybody bullies her further that she should report it immediately to her teachers and that we will follow suit. I am well aware that SSS is well connected to the school board and that her family has donated large sums of money over the years to the school, but if the bullying continues and the educators turn a blind eye out of fear of SSS’s reprisal then I am willing to publicly turn to legal proceedings. It is a shame that today having money and contacts allows certain wealthy people to take advantage of those less fortunate than themselves. It is about time that parents learn to play a more active role in their kid’s lives and to monitor their friendships. Our children should be taught to report any form of bullying especially bullying which is most commonly taking place on social media. No human being, regardless of how wealthy they are has the right to belittle the next person. As for the likes of parents like SSS they should reflect on their parental skills and open their eyes to the damaging effects they are having on their offspring. It is not easy to raise a child in today’s times, but the least we can do as parents, is to make an effort to be good role models in our children’s lives.
My message to SSS is simple but clear, ‘I know that you read this Punchaat Column, and you know exactly who I am. As mentioned, I know about your sleazy ‘activities’ which I have for now not revealed. Let me tell you straight out, if your daughter ever makes my child cry again, your so call friends whom you show off so much to, will be reading in this column, about your revolting ‘actions’ about four years back.
Protective mother.
This column is sponsored by: STR Roadworthy
