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I was a fair way into my column when the call came. It was from one of the sharpest, most beautiful minds I know. He is not even forty, but he has accumulated wisdom far beyond his years—partly because he has lived a life that has been buffeted from all sides.
It is a vanity of mine that I think of him as my son. When I met him nearly 20 years ago, he was struggling against a heap of odds. My nurturing instinct kicked in.
I found his circumstances overwhelming, but I was also fascinated by his mental acuity and his unwavering decency in the face of almost unrelenting unkindness.
(via Neuroscience News.)
Watching him unfurl into a splendid specimen of humanity has brought me tremendous pride and joy. It makes me want to claim him.
To me, he represents the finest elements of humanity. He has been downtrodden, abused, left to find his way without support, and he has risen to such a sublime place that each time we talk, I am filled with gratitude that he is a part of my life.
So when he called me from Thailand in the middle of my writing, I was happy to hear from him. Since he left Trinidad, our contact has been intermittent on account of the time difference. We spent some time catching up, and then I asked him (because the column I had been working on was connected to Mother’s Day) what he thought about the concept and its practice.
His mother died when he was practically an infant and I was curious. The conversation that ensued was enough for me to discard what I had been writing, perhaps for another time.
In the absence of a relationship with his mother, he has been intrigued by the way people describe theirs. He has yet to meet anyone who felt satisfied with their maternal relations.
There is a lengthy list of grievances, often accompanied by anger and borderline hatred. This is exacerbated by the underlying feeling that one should appreciate the attempts by a parent to provide the basic necessities of life, and the sentimentality that surrounds the concept of motherhood.
His general counsel? He reminds his friends that their parents are humans too, with their own hopes and aspirations.
He suggested that it was very likely that they had suffered at the hands of their parents and guardians. That sometimes these experiences lead a person to either deciding that they did not want to repeat those patterns of behaviour or it could make someone decide that if they felt it, their offspring should as well.
(via Health Hiz.)
This way of seeing things was aligned to my own perspective. I really believe that the notion of a happy household is mostly mythical, more the aberration than the norm. It requires constant navigation and suppression of emotions.
He related the story of a friend who was pregnant when she discovered her partner was cheating. It is not an uncommon situation, but where does it leave a young mother?
Here she is, he said, often left on her own to find her way financially and emotionally. She has to earn an income, care for her child, put aside her dreams to just make ends meet. What happens to her social life? What happens when her hormones are whacking her around?
Caribbean women don’t get a fair chance to live, he said. How many children know the source of their mother’s frustration and anger? They might know their father is a deadbeat, but they are too young to assimilate the effects of this on the mental health of their mother.
We agreed that it is a sign of a person’s maturity when they can begin to see beyond the role of parent and to recognise them as humans feeling their way through this unpredictable thing called life.
To be frank, this conversation had taken its turn early, when we were catching up. Basically, I had said things were not great, but I was grateful to be still around and able to manage. He’d interrupted me: “That’s the language of trauma.”
(via Northern Beaches Psychology.)
When you know how harrowing things can become, you have a different attitude towards hardships. He knows it well. It was not the absence of his mother that trampled him, it was the presence of his father.
There is a tendency to make light of grim situations, almost as if trapping it within levity diminishes its harmful potential. This is just my observation.
His trauma began at the hands of his father, who really did not have a clue about what to do with this child. His brain, that sharp mind that has saved him, must have contributed to his early capacity to analyse what was happening to him.
Significantly, he was and still is a reader. He learned so much by his solitary curiosity. His work today is recognised globally in his field, and his writing is breathtaking.
I refer to this because it validates what I believe: that reading out of curiosity is one of those wonderful ways in which we can discover not just ourselves but the wider world and all its complexities… and find where we belong in it.
As we walk into the hype about Mother’s Day, that conversation was a reminder of the perpetual struggle to find balance in the world’s most complex relationship of them all.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
