JULY 14

My mother was born the second oldest of 10 children in Spur*Tree, a small bush town in the parish of Manchester in Jamaica, West Indies. The oldest daughter.

This is an important fact, because by virtue of birth order, my mother inherited a litter of children at a young age when her own mother died a painful death. Cancer. My mother doesn’t speak of her mother very often, so the one time she told me details I listened with an intensity that rivaled only the directions given as child to avoid an ass whupping.

“My mother had 10 children. One didn’t make it. Not long after your Uncle Gilly was born my modda [because shortly after delving into her mind’s museum, the Patois accent appears, heavy, and I feel almost like an intruder] get cancer. Ovarian. She wasn’t a small woman but I’ll never forget how she blew up, so swollen, she musta been bout 200 pound.

“She was laying in her bed in pain and all the children were outside around the house bawling. All you could hear was bawling, and my father singing. He could sing! That man had a voice, boy! I was outside hanging clothes and my father called me and said that my mother wanted to see me. I walk in the room and all I could say was I could feel death coming close. And my mother just looked at me, and said....”

I wish I could remember what my grandmother had told my mother. I’ve blocked it out. I remember it being grave and curt. Not the kind of frilly, heartwarming last words you’d see in a Lifetime movie (so this is how you know I’m getting old right…all of a sudden Lifetime is my SHIT!)

I guess subconsciously I cannot bear to curate those last words. Partly because of the pain so visible in my mother’s voice and face as she recalled it to me. Partly out of fear that remembering might somehow summon a similar scene between me and my mom. That it might speed up the slowdown. Or something.

So my mother was a mother long before she was a mother. Actually I take that back, because my oldest sister is really not that much younger than my Uncle Gilly. My mother, his oldest sister, is the only mother he’s ever really known.

Some years later her beloved father also died. The kids were pretty much grown by then, save for the two littlest, and my mother had had two more of her own. And soon after laying her father to rest she made the decision to leave her children in the care of her closest sister. She moved to Washington, DC, in a immigrant worker program which imported many young West Indians to this country to work as domestics.

As fate would have it, this is where my mother met my father, and where the context of my conception begins.

My mother never passed on to me the issues that so many of my friends have inherited from their mothers. That’s not to say we don’t have our issues. That’s not to say that my mom’s not as crazy as every mother is biologically and psychologically destined. Instead there is a healthy distance, a respectful boundary that she’s established. It doesn’t really exist between her and my older sister. I’m guessing because my sister was born in Jamaica and knows that life. The life, and subsequently the history, from which I’ve always been sheltered.

I imagine that there are things my mother has repressed. Actually, I can’t imagine. The dim echoes of her scant recollections of life with her own mother are haunting. I probably won’t ever ask her about it until she is nearing the end. If God willing we are granted that type of ending. When it wont matter any more, those recollections. When she’ll soon have to face her mother herself.

In the meantime I call her every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, after Wheel of For*tune. Sometimes on my lunch break so I can hear her fussing with my nephews. Or to hear what she’s cooking for everyone. Or to let her vent about her latest shenanigans down at the grocery store. (shout out to Weg*man’s!) To respectfully tune her out when she makes a dead dad reference without warning. To smile wide at every overwhelming ounce of support, every reminder to pray, to stay safe, and to remember that "Mommy loves [me] much, much, much."

In the meantime, I wish my Mom a Happy Birthday, and many moooooooore!