(106) Curfew

When my eldest left home to further his studies, I was more concerned that he made good friends in the capital. I did not give him any rules about when to return to his hostel. After all, he was so quiet and homey that he hardly went out throughout his teenage years.

When we located a mattress that was in fairly good shape that one friend of mine would like to give to Kenneth, his father found one friend who agreed to loan us his van for transporting the item to Ken's hostel. I remember calling him hourly from five pm to one am on a Friday night. He did not answer. The next day, we drove to his hostel armed with the phone number of his resident head just in case he was not there to let us into his room. He was there, sleeping after a late night. I was really more taken aback than upset that he was out "teh-tarik" until 2 am the previous night and he forgot to take his hand phone with him. (it is a local beverage of red tea+milk+sugar, hot but being poured from one container to another to add air bubbles to the mixture to make smooth the texture)

Now that my youngest is in university second year, I am still enforcing a curfew of 12 midnight (been doing that since she was 15). Well! She is totally different from her brother. If the week-end is made up of three days, she would be out three days in a row. Should she promise to return by X hour, nine times out of ten she would return at least fifteen minutes after the aforementioned hour. If she is Cinderella, she would stand much chance of being turned into a pumpkin if she return past the appointed hour. If we were to argue nature versus nurture, I suppose nature would account for the opposite temperaments.  The kind of friends they attract would account for the disparage amount of activities between the two. Yet they came from the same set of parents.