It’s been a while I wrote an article and to be honest my excuses range from outright laziness to writer’s block but I just had to shake the excuses off and do this post in honor of one of the dearest persons to my heart who happens to be the main character in this gist. It’s also her birthday…congratulations my darling, love you plenty❤️

So, this happened about a week ago…  I was chatting on WhatsApp with a friend. Let’s call her “Mama Bear” and I noticed from her response that she was distracted so I asked what the issue was and she wrote “Sister, confused, I am out to rescue my son, he went to a cafe with a friend and finished eating and they hit them with a bill of N50k”. Now I know my friend well. She does not play with money like that at all. I called her and that’s where the real drama unfolded.

It turns out that her son (undergraduate in his late teens) went with a friend to have pizza at someplace in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria. As is customary at restaurants, the waiter asked if they wanted anything to drink and suggested they had a glass of some alcoholic beverage which they happily agreed to try. My two guys downed the drink and when they were ready to leave, the waiter gave them a bill of N50K – N4k for the pizza and N46K for a glass of vodka!!!!. Fortunately, (you’ll understand why I said so in a minute) between the two guys, they didn’t have the N50k to pay in fact they probably had about N10k. Anyway, my friend’s son calls his older sister to help…nothing from there. After sweating a bit and exhausting all possible options to raise the money to settle the bill, they decided it was best to fall into the hands of Mama Bear than the court of social media or be at the mercy of bouncers. They did the brave thing and called Mama Bear.

When my friend got the call, she did the most unusual of things. She asked for the name of the drink, drove to the store, bought a bottle for N14K, drove to the Café, asked for the manager, introduced herself as the mother of the boy, paid the N4k for the pizza, handed the manager the bottle of the drink, asked for the bottle from which the boys had been served at the Café, and walked out with her son and his friend.

Guess what? The manager apologized to her! You know why? Turns out they wanted to scam the young men. They had probably tried it on several “rich kids” and gotten away those who all they had to do was just “swipe the card”.

I’m still amazed at her ingenuity in handling the situation. How did it even occur to her? If I’m being honest, had I found myself in that kind of situation, I most likely would have vexed seriously for my son, ranted with plenty hissing and to avoid further embarrassment, grudgingly paid the bill. It would definitely not have occurred to me to pull the stunt she did.

There are a few lessons to learn and teach our children from this incidence.

1. “Flexing” can be costly. When our children go out to restaurants etc., they should insist on seeing the menu that has the price list.
2. No matter how rich you are, financial management skills and the virtue of prudence should be deliberately passed on to your children.
3. Parent’s, position yourself such that your children can call you when they are in a bind.
4. Parenting in this age requires you to be bold and take action to protect your children.

Oh, in case you’re wondering what happened to the partially consumed bottle of vodka my friend retrieved from the Café, my friend’s son has kept it as a memento of another life lesson learned.

Shout out to you Mama Bear 👍🏾