I'm going to be an aunt

AKA The boy who cried wolf is about to be a daddy!

The news came as a surprise. People were going about their lives and then all of a sudden there’s a baby coming. This happens to everybody though, so at some point one accepts it and hops onto the ‘celebrations and excitement’ bandwagon. Yay for baby! But not when it comes to this particular person.

My brother has been pranking me from the day I was born, I believe. We are three years apart and my mother says that she always had to keep an eye on me because she thought he’d do weird things to me. He was playing jokes on me way before I knew what a joke was. So as the seasoned prank victim I have grown to become, I did not buy this baby story for one bit. I was not about to fall for yet another one. I knew better! I’ve been pranked many times by this person. I’ve run around googling things I believed to be true when they were actually things he had made up to entertain himself. Let me give you a very brief background of my run-ins with the master prankster himself.

Flashback: This then naïve, sheltered and closed-minded chick from the depths of Pretoria, (“ko bo daai man”), was once, on the eve of her first trip to the mother city, fooled into thinking that the south westerly blows so hard that there are rails lining the streets of Cape Town for people to hold on to when they go about their daily business. (to avoid being blown away, of course). I was told, in detail, of a particular unfortunate fellow who forgot to hold on to the rails and subsequently got blown away, right onto the front of a moving bus. You can only imagine what became of him. “The story was even in the newspapers.” I was told. It was only when I got to Cape Town that I realized, with a lot of embarrassment, just how ridiculous the whole idea was. But I’m not the only one.

Many can attest to the perfection of these pranks. I once colluded in one. My poor younger cousin once had the misfortune of visiting us for the summer holidays in Soshanguve. Nothing much happens in Soshanguve if you’re not allowed to play anywhere beyond the confines of the fence that surrounds your house, which forced us to be very creative with how we entertained ourselves. On one very hot weekday, the prankster himself decided to climb into our broom cupboard, chilled in there for a while and emerged with the most amazing news. He had been transported to a world far beyond the boring one we were stuck in. By then, I was a seasoned prank victim and could spot them from a mile away. So I decided to give someone else a taste of the oh-so delicious prank pie that I had been force-fed for way too long. I too went into the cupboard and verified this story about a world where houses were made out of chocolate and all sorts of goodies. People slept on beds made out of cheese, using polony as blankets. What a world it was! By now, my cousin was dumbfounded and couldn’t wait for his turn. Being the sucker punch he was, he went into the cupboard, and emerged a couple of minutes later with a look of disappointment on his face. You’d think it ended there, right?

My brother gave me one look of shock and asked: “Where did he go? I can’t see him” This here seasoned prank victim responded in a fake panic: “I don’t know. I think he’s here. He’s just touched me!” My poor cousin began to weep his heart out thinking he had gone invisible. The seasoned prankster did not let it go at that. He proceeded to go into a fake hysteria, pretending to call my poor cousin’s mother to break the terrible news to her. If the poor boy hadn’t thought the matter was serious, that sure brought everything home. He started going into a frenzy, trying to touch us to prove that he was indeed there with us. We kept running away from him, to make the prank more interesting. And so my wailing cousin chased us around the house several times. This was only met with comments like: “He’s here. I can hear him”. I don’t quite remember how we finally gave in to his desperate weeping, but we did and we thought it was the most hilarious thing ever. I don’t think my cousin ever got over that one. I can’t quite remember, but I’m pretty sure he opted to stay home for a couple of summer holidays, much to his mother’s surprise.

So when the very same prankster phoned me some weeks ago to tell me he was about to be a father, I laughed my heart out thinking, “you not going to get me again, bastard” I laughed hard at the parents to be, making sure that they knew I was on to them. They proceeded to tell me that if I didn’t believe them I should ask my mother, whom they had apparently already told. I called my mother and told her that I knew my brother was trying to pull a fast one on me, but I wasn’t buying it so she better come out and say it so that we don’t unnecessarily waste my airtime. My mother sounded shocked……Jesus, these people are good. They had even gotten my poor mother to lie for them, in the name of self-amusement. Sies…! But the poor woman was not budging. She was good…very good, it seemed. So I pulled the ultimate prank breaker and called the perpetrators back to tell them that my mother eventually broke and told me it was all a prank. Nice try, but they needed to try much harder. I waited for them to accept defeat…..Nothing! “What do you mean?”, they asked, “It’s not a joke.” It was then that I started thinking: “Okay, enough now. This is too crazy for a Sunday night, could these people be that bored?” So I called my mom back to try one more time to get the “truth” out of her. Nothing…

It eventually dawned on me that these people had actually genuinely just called me to let me know that I was indeed about to be an aunt. I was embarrassed, to say the least. I mean, who in the world reacts to such news in that way? I begged them not tell their baby that this is how her aunt reacted to the news of her existence (I really think this one’s a girl). What in the world would the poor child think of me? I must admit that it only started sinking in when other people started talking about it. But to tell the truth, I only really really really believed it when I saw the scan prints and the bulging tummy. The boy who cried wolf is about to be a father, indeed.

I am ecstatic. I can’t wait to meet her (or him, of course).

But even after all… this seasoned prank victim is still very cautious of the master prankster and his tricks.