Secrets That Hold Us

1.
“I didn’t grow up with my mother,” Mom tells me. We’re sitting on the front verandah looking out at the grass before us wilting in the afternoon sun and the dwarf coconut trees that line one side of the driveway. The coconut fronds dip with the breeze, revealing green-and yellow-husked coconuts. It’s hot on the verandah; the aluminum awning, put there years earlier to shield the sun and rain, traps the late afternoon heat as well.

“I was 12 before I knew my mother,” she says.

 My mother is responding to some transgression of mine, what specifically I don’t remember. Perhaps something I neglected to tell her. There’s a lot we didn’t talk about then and don’t talk about now—a trait I earned honestly, I now know.

To grow up in Jamaica is to hear and know these stories of mothers who have migrated abroad or to Kingston, leaving their children to be raised by another relative. Barrel children, we call them, a term that stems from the fact that the migrating parents often send barrels of food and clothes back home for their children. But this is not my mother’s story.

I am in my 20s then when she tells me about meeting her mother for the first time. My mother was 12, living in Clarendon on the southern side of Jamaica with her father’s twin sisters, a cousin, and three of her father’s