Barbados reveals

Part I.

I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me.  I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time.  The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful.  I let myself be on my own.  Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose.  I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes.  The sun was hot on my face.  I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me.  I started to time travel.  My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore.  I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me.  In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children.  I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever.  I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean.  I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails.  He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.

I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea.  I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this?  I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven.  I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here.  I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados.  I concluded that it was possible.  Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with.  That I might find my way to myself somehow.

The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open.  Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness.  But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction.  She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.

Part II.

I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself.  She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep.  She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful.  She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken.  I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist.  I don't say that with pride.  But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise.  A two year break from the grind.  We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?"  I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.

I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white.  In Barbados I was black but a different black.  I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker.  I was efficient, abrupt, focused.  I acted with precision and purpose.  I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses.  Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds.  My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones. 

I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue.  I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities.  That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people.  Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else.  Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented.  Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle.  There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time.  I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats.  I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.

I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame.  In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out.  Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me.  Wasn't I her kin?  I had no friends.  Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies.  I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier.  I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted.  I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.

I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic?  Why couldn't she?  Why did she always have to show her contempt?  Her wounds?  Her pain?)  I asked her not to be as she was.  (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life!  My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.)  I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape.  (Let them feel special and important.  Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you.  Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.)  I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet.  (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success.  Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.) 

In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians.  It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile.  The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape.  There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide.  That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me.  That they believed it made it worse.  When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove.  We both did.

In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot.  I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life.  Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day.  The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island.  It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips.  She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission.  She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things.  She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.

I got lost in Barbados.  Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her.  I fell in love with this place and then the east coast.  My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise.  It was morose and melancholy.  There was a Victorian sadness to this place.  Ghosts, secrets, and whispers.  It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me.  They shared their secrets and let me tell mine.  This included my shame and my pride and my confusion.  I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected.  That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected. 

I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her.  I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad.  I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it.  I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler?  I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world.  I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets.  I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right.  I wanted antiseptic correctness.  I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me.  Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair.  I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.



Part III.

Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news.  I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes.  I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there.  I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus.  I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back.  When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See!  I knew you were from the islands!"  To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person.  My parents and their parents are from here too.  We've no Caribbean roots that I know of."  They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes.  They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret.  There is no secret.

My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected.  Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception.  There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors.  That's no secret.  They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family.  We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records.  What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade.  My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas. 

As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived.  I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me.  I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity.  I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs.  These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were.  That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.

It is with that love that I return to Barbados.  To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection.  That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving.  I have been that way for myself.  Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough.  That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest.  That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was.  Than I am.  When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted.  I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors.  I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face.  I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story.  I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose.  I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat.  I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.  

Barbados nearly broke me.  She did crack me open.  And is now filling those cracks with moon dust.  What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life.  Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am.  I have learned to love being this black woman.  I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate.  I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own.   It isn't only mine to bear.  What is my own is the light.  What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water.  What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves.  What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.



(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Hothouse flowers in bloom

This is me talking from the wound.  I know all about holding hands across the aisles and all the way we've come.  I know that we want to be color-blind and cast the world open and diverse and accepting of all of our unique qualities.  But I am often a bit player, the confided in best friend, the fringe, the exotic, the unreal.  When I tell you that I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, that I am tired of carrying this load and you ask, "Why do you feel like you are carrying the load?  Don't you feel that all women do this?" then I know that you don't know.

I know y'all love Soul Train and Beyonce and Jay-Z, Oprah, Barack Obama, and Michelle.  I know you would kill for Oprah's giveaways, love Neil Degrasse Tyson, Van Jones, and every and any ball player who does not take a knee.  I know you had a cool, wicked best friend/roommate/co-worker who gave you fist bumps, maybe even hugs, and held your hair back when you went all the way in and hurt yourself with the alcohol or the weed that you smoked up and she did only in secret when she was around your other white friends.  I know that you know that Naomi Campbell is beautiful and the fiercest walker we've ever known, and that Vanessa Williams was the best Miss America, probably the only one you remember, and that Misty Copeland inspires the hell out of you and all the little dancers who have to "overcome something."  Black.

We are the Titubas to your flying around the room foolishness.  Listening to your cries, your stories and tall tales, moving the earth to heal your wounds.  Standing by you because we've had no other option.  When you go to trial, we are there with you.  We might even hang first before you get released on appeal.  When we go to trial you might bring things to the jailhouse before the lynch mob shows up.  You wonder if we might survive it, rise up, come out the other side stronger, more knowledgeable, and still compassionate, softened, kinder, more enlightened.  

You've watched the film next to us, in the seventh grade, heads bent low, when you see them hosing down the black people.  The black people.  Marching peacefully and fighting for their basic rights.  I'm struck dumb, maybe you were too, of the older, black church ladies in their pillbox hats and their short strap purses carried delicately on their arms, moving forward with dignity, self-respect, desire, trembling pride, hosed down with water meant to quell a raging fire.  Raging.  Hell yeah.  Inside.  Magic.  Students, girls and boys, holding on to one another, twisting like vines, never letting go of each others' hands until the torrent is just more than a human body can bear.

The shit has to seem like witchcraft because the tropes and assaults were meant to take us down and still we rise. I read on a site, in the comments where I should not have trudged, a young white woman demanding of the black hostess, "How are you so strong?  Black women are so strong!  I wish I could bottle some of your strength and face the world."   Now God bless her heart, I know she hit the trip wire with that BS backhanded compliment, but no one on there was up for her tomfoolery or her games.  To paraphrase, "Bitch, you kidding me?  We been carrying this shit forever.  You can't even see us we holding it down so hard.  We went in and voted to save the world and y'all still undecided.  Take a seat.  Ask us how we are so strong....what choice did we have when everyone turned their backs and tried to ride ours, the niggers of the world."  We've toiled.  Our backs are splitting.  

Heads high even when we have nothing or little or a lot, but someone just had to tell us they think we didn't deserve it or got it because of Affirmative Action or a quota system that would surely have seen the mediocre (white) pass but not the exceptional (black).  Your mediocre calls out our great with no shame.   Maybe you don't know the difference.  Go low and we go high and say what you will but still we slay.  Calling us ugly and monkeys, animals and devils, heathens, idiots, sexpots and studs.  Before the power structure threatened to take the one tool that poor blacks and whites had to find their way to any chance at that American dream, there was education.  My grandparents told all of their charges it was all they could give them.  They could work the farm or the factory, or they could learn.  And there were tests put before them each time they succeeded and excelled.  They'd just take the test again.  And again.  And again until there was no denying their excellence. 

The rebirth of cool and slick and funk and style with roots so deep they reach to the core of the earth and out the other sides.  We recall that deep, dark, black soil from which we were conjured, all of us, where the seeds of our souls are planted, where we have grown in sealed cages, like hothouses.  Outside you see the foggy windows but inside there is a rich world, to which you have little access until you know how to cultivate and grown the most delicate of plants.  You may touch the surface, clear the glass outside and peak in and see a world of lush greenery, steamy and hot, ripe with hope and expectation, creativity, drive, a microcosm into which you have never been invited because we are afraid.  We have been protective of that space.  You must remember that pesticides have been sprayed all over our blooms.

 Colorism breaks people in many countries of the diaspora (thank you, colonialism) and in the good old United States of America, just one drop of black blood made you black, a taint you could only hide if you were fair and could "pass" yourself off as white, giving up everything.  My aunties recall walking with my great-grandmother and having white people see her with them and think they were her "girls," what might be delicately called, housemaids, were they white, something that burned her up.  She held them up, gave them their place, and their names.  She tended to their delicate souls.  

Whether the hair in a natural, long or short, wig, weave, pressed, relaxed, braided, colored, shaved today and down the back tomorrow, don't touch it or any part of me if it is just to dissect, tear apart, explore and navigate like some unfamiliar planet.  We are from here.  Of this soil. Right here.  And our feet touch the ground, wiggle deep.  We can put our ear down to it and hear what's coming, taste the air and feel the storm, rub the soil between our palms and know that there will be harvest or famine.  We are more than just our bodies, place holders, stand ins for your desires, your whims, your hopes, your gardens.  You can't imagine how deep the roots go to the center of the earth.  We are in front of you and we are deep down and we are in the air. 

Everyone is down when the gettin's good and the get down is low and funky and directed by Baz Luhrmann, but when we're being called out in numbers for the televised firing squads or tell our own stories in our own words, the spoken word hits the white window panes and the anguish gets distorted in the patter of rainfall against the glass.  You mouth the words, "I can't hear you," and don't dare open the window to get in as you turn back to familiar pastures.  There is a deep patch of forest where everything grows wild and resilient.  We are made of that stuff.  It is beautiful and awe-inspiring, tenacious, dignified, regal, magical.  It is from these roots that we have found our strength, healed ourselves when no doctor was present.  Salved our own wounds when you hurt us.  Made our own crutches when we were too tired to bear weight.

I'm weary.  I've grown so hot and ripe in that hothouse.  Angry and violent with vibrant color and personality, wit, humor, and pain.  You must come to know this garden.  You must come to know what lies in there, to have a curiosity, to learn, to walk silently, to listen.  If you come into this garden, you will know why I feel like I have carried so much and want to lie down.  In bloom.  And for even just a few seconds know a moment of existing just because I am beautiful in my own world before being plucked and studied in yours.



(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Tip of the iceberg: An average life

This is how I feel right now.  I am in 9th grade reading Huckleberry Finn with my class and each time they call Jim a nigger, I cringe.  And it's said over and over.  Many look at me sympathetically, shrug their shoulders, some even touch me on the arm if they are close enough because we all know, no matter how we all long for the adventure, that poor, ol' Jim and I have more in common than Huck and me.  I don't deny that most feel uncomfortable with the language that is explained away with a "that's how people spoke of black folks at that time" but when we move on to "A Farewell to Arms" everyone else can drop their shame, their melancholy, longing for the expectation that I have forgiven this past and that "we've come a long way, baby" and get back to modern living.

But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree.  I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers.  We are mixed by choice and very often not.  I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand.  Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people.  These were not stories or headlines.  These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors.  No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.

I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up.  Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us.  And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really.  I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default.  The life you think of when you think of every day life.  And then I wake up and remember that I am black.  That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life.  That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.

My grandmother told me often that she wanted better for me, for all of us, was grateful for what she'd seen us achieve in such a short amount of time, hoped that "white people were fair and good" to us. There was palpable fear and doubt, but also hope.  I wanted to tell her, to show her that all her suffering and her efforts had not been in vain, that we were advancing.  That the rapes, assaults, laws, white supremacy, and pervasive and accepted racism were seen as the horrors they were, were being put firmly in the past, and that WE were being seen for the "content of our character."  And the advancement of our family specifically was tied to our advancement as black people in America collectively.  Many black families will tell you the same. For us to be able to just be average, regular, unspectacular, under the radar, just living our lives gave her hope.  It was the tip of the iceberg.  She was sure we'd overcome.  I carried that hope for her.

There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped.  My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run.  People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car.  Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record.  Having to consider that I had a clean record.  Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism.  Um, AND those too.  Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country.  Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you.  Tells you it's not your turn.  

If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us.  If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege.  If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive.  If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf.  When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing.  We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.   

This racist system is real and it's killing all of us.  Not just Black people, but our country.  It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true.  It wasn't then and it isn't now.  But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart.  And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming.  We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop.  We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us.  It just might.  Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have.  There is prayer, meditation, and there is love.  And love...

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  1 Corinthians 13

I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again.  Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life.  I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters.  This conversation is just the start.  It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.

RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.


(c)  Copyright 2015.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Mother's Day: broken and fixed

Delicious treats dreamed up by my love, fabulous gifts, and the comfort of family makes Mother's Day special or at least appropriately celebrated in the eyes of our everyday-is-a-party culture.  I don't need pomp and circumstance and surely don't stand on ceremony, not for this made up day.  Mother's Day is always a strange one for me.  My husband, who is a private chef, almost always works so that the lady of the house can celebrate with her family in grand fashion.  THAT is her Mother's Day.  

Mine, at least for the past few years, looks more like this:  my husband leaves for a beautiful destination of the rich and famous by private jet or souped up, tinted-window SUV to prepare luxury meals and treats for his clients, and I finish out the week of school, activities, play dates, grocery shopping, story reading (now listening since the 6 year old is thrilled to show off her reading), and socializing on my own.  It's our rhythm and save the early school drop off on Friday when both girls need to be ready early enough to drop by 8 am, I can and do handle it.

I am too keenly aware of how quickly my children are growing up.  Little chubby hands and fat, yummy fingers have become strong and elegant, rolly-poly bodies have elongated into graceful torsos, arms and legs for days, and beautiful faces resting on long necks.  I measure time by these changes, recall real life events by growing and falling teeth, short or long hair, training wheels or riding free.  In a mother's calendar there are also injuries and ailments as mile markers, moments that stop one's heart, and shore up strengths one did not know were there.

I remember when Lily broke her finger one summer when her cousin was visiting and recall her saying with pride after she'd been X-rayed and splinted, "I can't believe I broke a bone!"  She was beaming and proud of her ability to hurt, to suffer, and to endure.  She was so human in that moment and she brought my fantasy of being able to protect them, live the hurts for them, take the force of the blow, crashing to the ground.  And months later when Virginie, walking with some friends along the creek that either trickles or rages through our town depending on the season, tripped and cut her chin requiring three stitches, I regretted the choice I made to allow her the opportunity to explore and court danger.

It's the delusion I have of shielding my children from life's pains and ills and woes, and physical safety seems a good place to practice.  How many times a day do I say, "Be careful!  Watch out!  Don't touch that!  Don't slip!  Don't fall!  Look out!  Why would you do that?  You are going to hurt yourself!"  And hurt sucks.  The iconic images of motherhood show women cuddling and comforting their children, holding them close, wiping tears and touching boo-boo's.  The urban mythology of mothers lifting cars, running into burning buildings, staring down wild animals or humans to keep their babes safe only emphasizes this expectation.

When I arrived to a screaming Virginie, hurt on an after-school play date, her middle toe on her left foot smashed by a falling board, I immediately knew it was bad.  She was screaming bloody murder.  There was blood everywhere.  Her tears were fat, her fear palpable, and I needed to make it right.  Though I hate driving, especially on any road with more than 2 cars, I packed up my peanut in the car with her favorite things and some warm clothes and raced her to the ER.  I carried her in and though I did not scream like Shirley MacLaine in "Terms of Endearment", I would have if the staff wasn't so efficient.  I hadn't taken the time to truly look at her little toe because I'd gone into autopilot, but now we had time to be together...and I peeked.  

She looked at me with those longing, big, brown eyes, eyelashes glued together with tears, and asked, "Is it bad?  Is it bad, Mama?"

"It's alright, Peanut.  We are going to get you better.  These people here are going to help us.  Just hold onto Mommy if you feel scared."  And she squeezed.  And I squeezed back.  Also the tears.  Her toe looked so, so terrible and it was.  I wondered how this tiny thing had suffered, what she must have felt and thought, when pain, pain like that is still relatively new.  I thought about all the hurts I'd ever had, all the hurts from which I will need to shield her, all the shoring up, all the armor, and I wished that I could take the hit.  I silently prayed, "Why didn't you let it happen to me?  Why did it have to be her?"  And I became steely because we had hours to go and I was angry and hurt for her and I could only be by her side and bombard her with love and comfort.  (Broken)

She was wheeled into a room for an X-ray to make sure that her toe wasn't broken.  It was cold in the room and made heavy by the lead aprons we wore to shield our organs from the radiation.  Hers was a ladybug.  Mine was blue.  She lay there on that table, following directions and holding still, tiny tears falling to her ears, balling her hands into fists.  She was pulling it together.  She looked at me and I smiled and she at me.  She got to wheel herself back in a wheelchair (a wheelchair!) to our triage curtain and she beamed.  Though she could "feel her heartbeat in her toe" we were coming to the other side of this ordeal.  When she was back on her bed, I got on with her and we cuddled.  She asked me if it was okay for me to be on the bed with her to which I replied, "Mommy makes her own rules when it comes to her babies.  If you need me here, then YES, it's more than okay."  

After a long afternoon into evening, Virginie ended up losing her toenail and getting five stitches to close her toe.  A piece of antibiotic gauze was put in place to hopefully facilitate regrowth of her nail.  She will have to get a boot to walk and is taking antibiotics to protect against infection.  Sutures, rather than stitches, were used to close her toe because, as the doctor said, "This is not like the stitches in her chin that we put in to allow minimal scarring.  This is her toe and it needs more time to heal.  If it scars, it's in a place where no one can see it...unless she is wearing sandals."  She'll have her tiny scars tucked on her foot, shared only with those she allows close.  

And so will I.  Teeny, tiny little scars made each time I see them hurt, whether on accident or on purpose, lacerate my heart.  I will see the stitching, the jagged lines where the skin came back together.  Those are for the physical ouches.  And of the psychological tears?  The emotional punctures? Hidden wounds?  As she lay on the suturing table, wrapped in the cocoon to prevent her from moving, fear, frustration, pain on her face, I put my nose to hers, felt her eyelashes on my cheek, and whispered to her about the unicorns and sweets we think about before we dream.  We talked about how we were together and how I would never leave her, would always be nose to nose, eyelashes to cheek, butterfly kisses, even when I wasn't really there.  She quieted herself, went inside, and she believed me.  She trusted me.  Even in her hurt she believed that I would give her everything I had, that I was somehow feeling her pain or that I would at least walk with her through it.  Comfort.

My husband is not here and we are not having a crazy display of elegant foods.  I won't drink a mimosa in bed, nor will I sit with my feet up or even sleep past 6:45 am.  I won't play queen for a day or do "something special for myself," at least not the kind of special that many believe moms are looking for.  I am relieved that my girl is alright.  I am proud of myself for getting in the car and driving her to the hospital and keeping a cool head.  I am grateful for the people in my life who know what an accomplishment that is for me.  

While sitting in the emergency room before Virginie was seen by a doctor I thought, "My baby will be scarred.  She's only six years old and something is already broken.  Her perfect little feet, her tiny toenails are gone."  Yes, I know it's ridiculous.  When they are those cute, little cherubs, smooth-skinned and innocent, we try so desperately to keep them clean of wounds, bruises, hurts.  They are the best of us, the good in us, the pure.  Each fall, scrape, tumble left me holding my breath, hoping it wouldn't be too bad, that it would heal quickly and leave no trace on their bodies or in their hearts.  

Two days after she was hurt, Virginie is hopping on one foot through the house, laughing and smiling and chatting as she always has.  Her foot is wrapped and the gauze is looking worse for the wear even after just two days.  She's been fixed, is on the mend, will come out unscathed if not unscarred.  But it's me, Mommy, who is taking a little longer to heal.  Being a mom (for me) means going all the way in.  Into the pain, into the hurt, into the past, into the joy, into a depth of love that frankly, nothing in my life before ever prepared me for.  It's breaking and putting myself back together all the time.  Its carrying the hurt with them and for them.  It is doing my best to keep them from being broken.

We're together this morning and we are whole.

Happy Mother's Day.


(c) 2015.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Learning MLK

Black National Anthem

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

Written by James Weldon Johnson (1899), music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1900)


When I was a little girl, though I suspect younger than my two ladybugs, to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and legacy, my family would spend the afternoon at a black church listening to people who'd lived the Civil Rights era, talking about about our history and the life of this man, and singing and clapping and dancing to some incredible church music and old Negro spirituals.  We were meant to reflect, consider, uplift, and rise, rise, rise above what our people, African-American people had endured in our own country.  A suffering that weighed heavily in the story of my immediate family.  This was not the story of just my ancestors, but of my people, my family, my father and mother and uncles and grands and greats.  It was not the past.  It was the ever-fluid present.

The emotion was so visceral, so intense in those moments that I was often embarrassed and humiliated by the heaviness.  I was "one of the only's," "the Cosby" at my school (calling it largely white would understate it).  That my father and mother were well-educated and had good jobs and provided for us well above even the national average allowed others to define us as "past all that."  But we weren't.  We aren't.  That our experience as middle class, educated, law abiding, good neighbors seemed beyond the norm was just the start of the misunderstanding.  That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was still being debated as a national holiday confused the young me.  That I celebrated in a church full of African-Americans and very few others hit it home.  This was my cross to bear.  Everyone else got to have the day off.

I supposed that my white friends were spending the day shopping or watching TV, hanging out, while the weight of my people and really the future of our nation, felt like it rested on my shoulders, or ours, as we endured to keep the memory, the truth, and the history alive.  I wanted everyone to be considering Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way I was.  As a man, a true person, not just an idea, who lived and breathed among us, the same air I was breathing now, and who saw severe racism and institutional injustice and wanted it changed.  I felt burdened in a way different than my parents and their parents had because, according to so many who "don't see color" I was not living the outright barbaric terrorism of the times before the Civil Rights era and was living in a nearly all white community, proof to so many that things had changed.  But I still felt racism's sting in the subtlest of ways and much of it was internalized.  I still felt that it was mine to prove that we were equal, alike, multidimensional and multifaceted. 

It has been an interesting lesson for my husband and me as we teach our children who are biracial and bicultural  about this very particular man from this very particular moment and then open up the discussion to the greater topics of racism and equality, tolerance and acceptance.  They are so young and still at an age where they see the differences but do not have cultural references as to what those differences mean to some people.  Because I experienced that sense of other, I have been both protective of their feelings as such and have also opened the dialogue before their questions about otherness have even arisen.  Since they were very small, they have seen both of our families either in person or via Skype.  My husband speaks French with them and they see him speaking with his friends and family only in French.  We have looked at the map and the globe to discover just "how close and how far" we are to where Papa grew up.  We have visited with my parents and family full of aunts, uncles, and cousins down South in Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.  When we lived in Barbados, they saw what looked to them like a thriving nation where black and white people worked along side one another, where they saw many more people of color in positions of power, where racism was, of course,  in play, as it is everywhere, but where they were not isolated because of their racial make up, where they were, in fact, part of the majority.  They learned there about the East Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean through the friendships they made, and though they certainly asked questions about where folks came from, it was more a curiosity of geography than fear or confusion about race.

We have made it clear through our friendships and relations and the way we speak about all people that intolerance based on color, creed, religion, or sexual orientation will not be accepted in our home.  They have never said they wished they were not black.  Have never said they don't believe themselves to be beautiful.  Have never said that boys are smarter than girls, that white is better than black, that something is a girl game or a boy color or only for one group or another.  We talk about other peoples' customs and religions, even practicing some of the holiday customs and going to services when we can to demonstrate how all people are just striving for the same goals for their families.  And yet, when the specifics of the pre-Civil Rights era come up, I am taken back to that pain. 

As they have begun to learn the very cursory history and stories they are shocked.  If the separate water fountains and segregated schools are enough to burn their cheeks and hurt their hearts, imagine how they were brought to silence, sucking the insides of their cheeks, when I told them that Grandma and Grandpa had grown up, been little kids, just as they were now, and had lived this abject racism and in the case of my parents, poverty.  That Grandma and Grandpa and their brothers and sisters and so many other families and children just like them could not look away from it, rather had to live it and breathe it every day of their lives.  That their lives, in the minds of many, institutionalized in the country they called home, were not as valuable as the lives of others.  They see the absolute injustice right away and struggle and fumble for words.  It is not an abstraction talked about as if a bygone era, but a tangible truth for people they love and hold dear.  Because they still see us all as equal, they are just unable to comprehend.  This is how it hurts.  As the true terror and violence of that time comes to light for them, they will need the strength to endure and to forgive and to continue the legacy of a real, live man who gave his life in that struggle.  For them, a real, live man who looks like Grandpa, for whom their eyes sparkle and who is loved infinitely.

Both girls are extremely empathic and feel for others so deeply and compassionately.  I feel so lucky that we are the same in that way.  But they, as I long ago, cannot define how it hurts, just feel the lumps in their throats, the flush of their cheeks, the knot in their hearts and they weep.  They have cried for friends that "would not be our friends if the brown and the white could not be together."  The oldest has a dear girlfriend who said she'd just have to be in jail because she loved her friend so and would not put up with that nonsense.  I loved this comment more than I realized because it keeps returning to me, to my heart.  I love it because during those MLK celebrations of my youth, I would have loved a professing of love and commitment such as that from someone who "didn't have to," was able to choose her commitment to the rights of others when the privilege was hers.

I was a young person and am now a grown woman.  What I shared is not shame but the real visceral pain of that history, of what separation, exclusion, divisiveness of any kind does not only to us on a global scale, but what it does just to our own individual selves. We miss the true evolution of ourselves--physically, emotionally, spiritually, nationally, internationally, globally.  We miss transcendence if we cannot "lift every voice and sing."  I am working hard to keep that love in mine.  I hope as we celebrate the man and his actions, we each make a commitment to ourselves and our actions. 


(c)  Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Lady Bits: Bounce your boobies, Part 2.

Please.  Take your time.  I am just waiting on this news feeling like hearing it out loud could pull down the poll of the circus tent of my life and cause everything to collapse, hurting, maiming, maybe even killing some of the performers.  Was it two to three business days you told me?  Was Monday a holiday?  I checked the cell every few minutes thinking maybe the phone was still on vibrate.  Answered lots of solicitations on the home phone just in case, somehow, the call from Arizona was the lab, knowing full well that the lab was up the street and that it would, in fact, be from my doctor's office that the call came.  But it didn't come.  Not for two, three, four, five, or six days.  I waited and let myself be convinced and reassured by friends that no news was good news.  "They would want you to know right away if it was indeed C," still no one wanted to say it and I surely did not want to hear the letters that follow 'c' in that word.

My dear husband, seven plus years older than I am, always (so sweetly) reminds me that I am young.  "You are still young and beautiful." And this not only when he is feeling frisky.  Nowadays when we say things like this, it is often in relation to how much more of life there is to live, that yes I CAN still wear a short skirt if I like, do something crazy to my hair, start a new career, try new things.  But when it comes to health issues--aches, pains, pinches, twists, tears, and pulls, age has slowly crept up with us.  When I see pictures of some of my childhood mates, I see their parents' faces staring back at me.  I read posts about injuries from doing things that were once facile, part of every day movement until just the wrong thing slipped or "went."  We laugh about those pains.  "Getting old," we say.  But aging also brings more serious health concerns and a need to make at least annual trips to a physician.  The laissez-faire attitude of our youth has given way to consideration of each new freckle, rising cholesterol, too much sugar in the blood, lack of time for exercise or sleep, lack of time for anything really as a sign that we are creeping over that hill.  We feel young inside but our bodies demand us to acknowledge that time has passed and that we need to be tender with them.

My dance classes and my meditation practice, my family and my love for them gave me the physical and psychic strength to prepare for the worst news but really expect the best.  I, full to the brim with anxiety and too much nervous energy, found ways to distract myself from the waiting for results.  My house is now spotless and that includes all closets, drawers, cabinets, and the attic.  I danced my brains out and allowed people to love me, care for me, bring me food, invite me to parties, looked them back in their eyes to thank them, and just breathed in and out every single day.  I breathed to the top of my head and down to my toes.

On the fifth day I started calling and leaving messages.  I felt embarrassed to be calling as though it was expected that I'd wait patiently for the news.  I wondered, in all the prep I was given for the biopsy, had anyone in the medical profession thought about my feelings, fears, hopes, anxiety.  While I'd been warned not to take aspirin 48 hours prior, and been told how the procedure would happen (ultrasound, cleaning of the breast, numbing local anesthetic followed by a tugging or pulling sensation that would collect the cells to be examined, then days of soreness, bruising, swelling, a little pain, and a tiny scar underneath), very little was said about the shallow breaths I was taking, the tears that came to my eyes when I thought of having to tell the girls that something was wrong with Mommy.  When they kicked or pulled or tugged at me and accidentally hit my ailing breast, I'd wince and then smile.  I didn't want to give them anything to worry about. I was reminded only once to go back to my life as usual.  I felt, and I could be wrong about it but it felt this way, that no one wanted to say what it was they knew I was afraid of.  One does not go in for a biopsy the way one might for a new retinol cream for wrinkles.  The biopsy signifies there is something in there that is unknown and the big unknown, the one that sets most of us on edge, is fucking cancer.  I was scared shitless that I might have breast cancer.

For every day that I waited and meditated and danced and wore a brave face, I was scared, humbled, awed by the life I'd managed to make for myself.  For people who loved me, for a community I belonged to, for friends, family, strangers, humankind that had the urge to live, to be part of this carnival called life.  It had never been called into question for me in such high resolution.  Yes, I was full of anxiety in Barbados and did fear losing it there and once there was some crazy turbulence on a plane where we dropped a few feet and I grabbed the girls and cried my face off, telling them how much I loved them over and over again until we steadied, but I never put myself, allowed myself to see myself as old enough, ready spiritually, to imagine the end of my life.  Breathe in.  Breathe out. This I would tell myself every moment that I drifted to those thoughts.  Because that was what scared me the most.  I went all the way there every time.

A rogue nurse in the office sent me a secret text to tell me that the results of my biopsy were negative two days before my doctor's office gave me the official word.  I want to say that I danced on the ceiling, but I instead sat quietly on the floor, complete silence all around me, save the ticking of the clock in another room and the hum from the fridge.   I felt relief for myself and compassion for those, many of whom are my friends or family or acquaintances, whose tales don't or have not ended on this note.  I can still not touch the bullet resting on the inside corner pocket of my left breast.  The bruising and soreness has proven a longer healing period than expected, but I know my little lump is there.  I want to remove it.  It is no talisman and I am not brave enough to carry it.  Even knowing that it is benign, it presses at everything dear to me and threatens to pull the tent down.  I'd prefer a scar where it once made itself cozy, an 'X' to mark the spot where my fears were released and my dreams held tight in a deep inhale were released.

Do your self exams and get a mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, or thermal scan if you are over 40 or have a history of breast cancer. 


(c) Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Story time

I have spent the entire summer with my girls.  Their father is working full time, often six days a week, and we decided long ago, after the years in Barbados had me traipsing from Miami to Bim with the girls and all kinds of stuff alone (A-LONE), that we should take trips together from here forward.  We have had an epic Mommy Camp summer with more iPad and less study binder than I'd hoped for but also gardening and visiting and swimming and playing and talking.  I know that we will all look back on these dog days with joy and easy smiles.  At present it can be rather tough.

When we get ready for bed at night, I try to have a pile of library books on hand.  Because I have a new efficient and excited reader, we often get through the stack before I expected we would and find ourselves with time.  I turn off the lights in their room and we stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars around the room, listen to the hamsters running amok, and hear ourselves breathing.  These past few nights, the girls have started asking for "stories that come from my mouth" instead of books.  How did they know they had the right mommy?

I can spin a yarn, tell a tale, work some magic.  But with the stories that I tell my girls, there is something more.  The tales are not tall.  Have no wizards and fairies.  They are instead, opportunities I have taken to impart feelings of self-worth, relevance, value, intuition, connection, and divinity within.  In the last story I told last night there were three sisters.  The first sister wanted to see the world and put on her backpack and hiking boots, took a map, and a tent and went off to see what nature had to offer.  She walked through the jungle, climbed mountains, scaled walls, drank from clear rivers, and watched herds of animals as they interacted with one another.  The second sister wanted to see the world and all that man had made, so she packed up her fancy suitcases, beautiful clothes and traveled to the world's best cities.  She ate delicious food, stayed in amazing hotel suites, looked at art, listened to live music, saw live theatre, and was inspired by architecture and the built world.  The third sister stayed behind.  She crossed her legs and sat in meditation.  She did yoga.  She searched for the invisible string that connected her heart to all the hearts in the world.  She concentrated on love and light, opened herself to being compassionate and available to all people and all things.  She listened and watched and learned so that she could understand people and what made them do the things they did.

Before I could finish my story, my four year old called out, "I'm like her!  I'm like her!  The third girl is me." 

 I asked, "Are you sure?  You don't want to travel the world and see those beautiful things?"

To which she replied, "She already knows those beautiful things.  They are in her heart."

As I finished my story with the return of the two sisters to home where they regaled each other with wild tales and stories of impressive sights and sites, I closed with "all three found their way to the truth about the marvel of all things."  Both girls lay quietly, slowly breathing, eyes blinking to close.  I kissed them both on their foreheads and slithered out of the bed.

Each night there is a story like this.  Each night I heal the wound, the emptiness, the hurt and longing of my nights in my bedroom alone.  Each night I hope they do not feel those same fears.  I have no idea if these stories will be important, if they will stick in their minds, rest gently in their psyches to be recalled when compassion, love, connection, empathy need to be called up.  But in the darkness, after a long, arduous day spent in the company of chatty, little babes, I hope I am giving them stories that will take root in their minds and in their hearts when they no longer want to snuggle up to me and be told stories "from my mouth."



(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.