Hey Mama

“For me, writing isn’t a way of being public or private; it’s just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It’s a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. This is the life I have. This is the life I write about. “

—Jamaica Kincaid (in an interview with Marilyn Snell)

Though I won’t be spending Thanksgiving with my mom due to COVID-19, I still want to express my gratitude for her. A couple weekends ago I spent the morning with my friend Porter and met his beautiful six-month-old daughter, Mia, for the first time. While his wife was at work, Porter and I took Mia on a walk and caught up on everything: work, relationships, our aspirations. Our friendship has long had an undercurrent of friendly competition, iron sharpening iron—he’d probably tell you that he was never competing, just winning! In reality, we feed off of each other’s energies, learning from one another. Even now I continue to learn from him; he’s started his own company, and more importantly, is a girl dad. Once he put Mia down to sleep, he started asking questions about my family. I broke it down for him, explaining how I’ve got three brothers (PJ, Paul, and Derrick) and a sister (Trisha), but I am the only child for my mom and dad together. After I mentioned that my mother raised Derrick and me as a single parent, he looked at me quizzically and said, “I don’t know how she did it.” He explained to me the difficulty of raising a child and how he couldn’t fathom raising Mia without his wife, Jules. I let that moment wash over me. I took it in, acknowledged it, but didn’t fully digest it. I had planned to write that afternoon, but the words didn’t come. I still don’t know if they are…

I’ve always dreamed of writing a book using the track list from Kanye’s The College Dropout as chapter titles. Thus, I often listen to old Kanye albums, Late Registration and Graduation as they elicit great memories. When I got home earlier this week, I put my Air Pods in and listened to “Hey Mama” from Late Registration. This is one of my favorite songs about the “mama”. Obviously, there’s Dear Mama by 2Pac, A Song For Mama by Boyz II Men, Thank You Mama by Sizzla, and I’ll even throw in She’s Royal by Tarrus Riley because I know my mom loves that song. The point is, mama is this Black man’s rock.

Tuesday morning, I listened to the most recent How I Built This with Melissa Butler, CEO of The Lip Bar. Not only an incredible story of passion, persistence, and resilience, but it resonated with me when Melissa talked about being raised by a single mom. As I reflect on how I built this (my life), my mom remains my rock. So again, I want to acknowledge her on this Thanksgiving, but it’s also a special day because it’s her dad’s birthday, or Grandpa Charlie as I knew him…

When I was younger, I asked my mom why squirrels didn’t get electrocuted while they walked across electric wires. This was a common thing; I often asked questions about the outside world but didn’t think to ask about things going on in my own house. It’s easier that way. Complexity can be tough on people, particularly when one isn’t mature enough to handle the truth. I also rarely asked questions about her specifically. To this day, I don’t know how my mom was able to put food on the table, pay my expensive educational fees, take us on vacations, and still have time for herself. She was—and still is—a superhero, to say the least. Yet, it took me a long time to see my mom as a woman, not simply my mother. Yes, she will always be my mother, but she is multi-dimensional, like everyone. Through explaining her past to me, she’s illuminated many aspects of my own life.

My mom suffered a lot of psychological damage after her father left her, her mother, and her siblings when she was seven years old to come to America in search of a better life. Whenever I reflect on this I think of the “American Dream,” typified by the man of the house leaving his family behind to come to the US where roads are supposedly paved with gold. He is then supposed to work hard enough to support himself, as well as send money home to his family. A kind of backwards idea though, leaving your family to one day have them closer—or maybe that’s me being naïve, as experience has taught me that often sacrifice now enables you to attain/enjoy something later. That “American Dream” can be a Caribbean nightmare, dismembering families; for years my mom longed only to have her father present. The most pertinent fact is that this was not part of the distant past; this was the mid 1950’s & early 1960’s when my grandpa Charlie came to blaze a new trail for a family I was not yet even part of.

When my grandpa left, my mom and her four siblings had to fend for themselves in Jamaica. By thirteen, my mom was separated—physically and emotionally—from both her father and mother, who officially split when she was twelve. She opted to live alone, in a different part of town, to make sure the family’s old house was tended to and well maintained. Grandma Rosie and my mom’s siblings had moved into more spacious accommodations while my mom remained at the previous residence to ensure that it stayed within the family. At Amherst, I complained that Val (the cafeteria) was bad, or that I was too lazy to go to the gym, or worse yet, that the door handle to my suite (where I had my own room) was broken. Now, I complain that I have so much to learn at work, or about the microaggressions I’ve had to face. But again, perspective trumps my inconveniences as listening to my mother talk about how she lived by herself at thirteen: no parents, no gym to worry about, and more importantly, no food whenever she felt hungry. Granted, as I thought about many problems during my upbringing, I understood things only in absolutes—i.e. love meant one person for the rest of your life—so when she first uttered that she lived alone, I thought to myself “how could she, at thirteen years old, fend for herself?” Yes, she received meals, support, and often went to grandma’s house, but still, to sleep alone in an empty house every night must have been hard. At twenty-two I was scared of the dark. I still get mad when the Uber driver takes too long to arrive or when he talks too much. But it’s clear that she raised herself before she raised me. To Porter’s point, I don’t know how she did it.

My mom has also discussed the psychological wound inflicted by Grandpa leaving her and the family at such a young age. She told me that it was hard learning about him, and even harder learning how to cope with his absence than it would have been to not know him at all. He left five of them: my mom, my uncle Allan, uncle Ken, and my aunts Dawn and Jasmine. The fact that he left to better their lives didn’t make it any easier in the moment, just as the truth doesn’t always make some situations easier at the start. If anything, unadulterated truth complicates situations; that too ties into the moral question my mom’s story alludes to, is it better to know or not know certain information—an easy question to pose, but one that I still grapple to answer. 

I remember a dinner conversation years ago at a close family friend’s house where I was asked if I thought I lacked anything being raised by a single mom. I affirmatively answered, “Yes,” to which my mom’s friend commented, “All a child needs is love.” I still grapple with this conversation too because though she wasn’t wrong, I wasn’t wrong either. My mom is a superhero, no doubt, but she is not a man. That may seem like an outlandish and very obvious statement, but the fact remains, I have learned much of what it means to be a man from my mom. And while during the first few drafts of this, I wrote out qualities that I attributed to being “manly”, like fixing things around the house and being the sole breadwinner, I realized I was perpetuating the societal stereotypes of masculinity. But, I was discounting a lot of the sheer persistence, grit, determination, and strength that only women possess. I remember the time in which she struggled to tell me that she had breast cancer. I had heard her talking to Derrick about it, and on phone conversations with others,  yet she wanted to protect me from the complexities that a diagnosis like that inevitably brings—shoutout to the Wright’s, Malloy’s, Weisz’s, Sinatro’s and many others that helped my family through that trying season. 

This notion of masculinity was further complicated by the fact that she did not bring men home. While I have read many horror stories about the pain and trauma associated with mom’s boyfriends hypothetically, my mother always made it very clear to Derrick and me that “No man comes before my children!” She really meant it. Though she would get dressed up and go out to dance (Wembley standup), that did not happen often. The majority of the time was spent making sure we were okay. Looking back on my childhood, there was nothing we needed that we did not have. My mom made sure we were always properly dressed, fed, and had Vaseline on our lips! She made it clear that education should be my primary focus and that “these little [girls] will only distract you!”—she did not say that with anyone particular in mind, but rather used it as a rash generalization preemptively stopping me from losing focus. Needless to say, I lost focus at times ☺.

So, while I never had my father teach me how to shave, or throw a football, or tell me about the birds and the bees, I have recently come to learn that absence is a sort of relationship in itself as my mom did fending for herself in Jamaica. Growing up, I felt so much pain and longing for my father to be around. At school I’d see my friend’s fathers dropping them off, picking them up, going to the park. Sometimes I got to be a part of it with them, and while it was always nice to have male mentors and father figures because it made me feel part of something, it also made the fact that I had no father that much clearer. I felt shame, regret, and uncertainty about my dad’s absence, but the gift was the knowledge that I could become my fullest, best self if I learned to live from that place of absence. I have tried to turn the “weakness” of not having a father into a strength, the same way my mom did, as connecting with people is one of my most cherished desires. 

I have bonded with some incredible men in my life. When I think about what Bob G, Tom W, Paul H, Billy T, Mike B, Brother Barnes, Will C, Sandy B, and Joshua P, to name a few, represent to me and have taught me I again realize how blessed I am. I don’t know that I would have kept going back to them had I had a strong male figure at home. By no means do they make up for the void of not having my father around, but I’ve been forced to deal with the world as it is, not as I wish it to be. Nonetheless, I haven’t lost touch of my radical imagination, expecting to be very present in my future children’s lives. 

When I look in the mirror, I see a man that I’m proud of—and a work in progress. The man I am today knows that I am nothing without the superhero mom who has supported me each and every step of the way. Yet, my life has taken on a profound element of self-reflection and self-determination in the absence of a blueprint or formula from a father. So, I thank my mom for being both a mother and a father as now I am creating my own definition of what it means to be a man. As Kincaid commented, “This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.” Self-reflection and difficult conversations have helped me grow tremendously. Still, though, as Porter said, “I don’t know how she did it.”