Diary of a mothering worker. September 21, 2022.

Post 478.

FOR MORE than 20 years, I have been learning about sexual and reproductive health and rights information and services, and their value. 

They can help women and men to choose when and by how much they grow their families. They can protect children from child sexual abuse, unwanted and early sex, relationship violence and unplanned pregnancies. 

They are critical for reaching those who experience discrimination because of their class, ethnicity, disability, gender identity or sexual orientation, and cannot access healthcare that respects their rights and dignity.

What I’ve learned is that facts and data are key. 

There are decades of research that show the benefits of family planning. Across the region, there is also overwhelming data that health and family life education (HFLE) programmes and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) (and the two are not the same), enable adolescents to understand their bodies and reproduction, delay sex and pregnancy, identify and disclose sexual abuse and sexual violence, and better negotiate contraception and sexual safety when they are ready to consent to love, sex and intimacy. 

These are also the only programmes that provide trusted adults who can provide answers to adolescents’ questions about their bodies, desires and fears, and correct myths they may hold about sex, power and relationships, when the majority cannot openly speak with their parents or may be in abusive families and turn instead to their peers and the internet. 

Speak to teachers about HFLE and hear their stories about how much such a national curriculum is needed, and the trauma, violence and unhealthy sexual experiences they are encountering among students every day. 

Thousands of children report child abuse every year and thousands more are in violent homes. The innocence of childhood is a myth for those most vulnerable. Today, we understand the value of teaching about “good touch” and “bad touch” in age-appropriate ways and from preschool. Similarly, it would be irresponsible of the State to not have such educational programmes in place for children and their peers. 

In every country in the Caribbean where they are actually asked, adolescents want these programmes and speak about how they would help them to better understand themselves, their peers, adults and their families, media messages, and the world around them. These are quite simply the facts. 

In contrast, as I’ve written about before, those who oppose comprehensive sexuality education appear continuously willing to misinform the public. 

The latest videos circulating feature Umar Abdullah boycotting the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)’s office. He and his supporter describe IPPF, whose mandate is to “ensure people are free to make choices about their sexuality and wellbeing, in a world without discrimination,” as trying to take the souls of children, promoting eugenics (think of the Nazis), legalising paedophilia, promoting socialism, turning children into sex objects, bowing to Satan, stopping boys from being boys and girls from being girls, and trying to trade in body parts from foetuses. Such insanity would be laughable if it were not so seriously believed.

All these accusations are completely untrue. They do not reflect Caribbean history or reality. They mislead about SRHR information and services that actually help protect people, particularly women and children. In these decades and in my own research, I have never encountered anything of which IPPF is being accused in TT. 

More disappointing, because until now I thought he could be relied on to be careful with truth, was another video circulating where Archbishop Jason Gordon accuses the UN of pushing Caricom to approve of children’s right to change their gender identity, forcing parents to lose their right to parent their child and to lose moral authority over their family. Gordon goes on to accuse CSE of stimulating and encouraging children to experiment sexually. 

Again, none of this is true. Gordon also seems to have no clue about why there are necessary efforts to provide access to age-appropriate information to protect adolescents today. 

Unlike the archbishop, I actually have a 12-year-old, and I want her to have access to information that she or her peers may need, and it’s absolutely essential that it be considered a rights- and youth-sensitive national approach to public health. 

If you want to know the approach that is guiding advocacy for CSE, start by reading the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education: An Evidence-Informed Approach published by UNESCO in 2018.

Fear-mongering is not in children’s interest nor does it protect children’s rights.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. June 29, 2022.

Post 469.

WITH EXAM results soon to be announced, it’s a jittery week for parents of 19,000 students who wrote SEA in 2022. Hopefully, this is the last group to write the exam under pandemic conditions since schooling was shifted online from March 13, 2020. 

Following results, much will be said about the exam’s inequity, its medieval way of sorting children’s access to educational opportunity, the unhealthy terror of exam preparation, and how deeply problematic it is to rank intelligence by one test on one day. Much will also be said about how many children are discouraged by this narrow approach to both teaching and testing. 

Yet, because some schools are considered safer, better resourced, better staffed than others and better at results, we know nothing will change. There’s no other way for a few hundred prestigious places to be filled from among so many thousands. It’s a systemic issue for which our children pay the price. 

In that context, be proud of those thousands of children who survived our callous system and just want us to accept that they did their best, whether they secured a place in their first or fourth-choice school. 

Give them a hug and tell them that everything will be okay, and that they are worth celebrating simply because we brought them onto this planet with the promise to love them above all else, not because of what they achieve, but simply because they are. 

I learned a lot this year about what it means when a child does her or his best. Often, we misunderstand why some children may not do well at exams or in specific subjects. We think that their brains work exactly the same and miss the fine points of neurodiversity that mean that word problems do not make sense, or that too much talking by a teacher makes their mind overload or anxiety stops them from being able to focus. 

I’ve been an educator for 17 years, but it was being thrown into the world of SEA that made me appreciate for the first time how many university students I have taught who think best visually or who really do ask for example essays not because they are lazy, but because their brains work from patterns, and that’s just how it will always be. 

I learned to understand learning difficulties not as a line from mild to severe, but as a unique constellation of capacities scattered around the tight cluster of stars considered neurotypical qualities. Every child has her or his own constellation whose points are further or nearer to that central cluster, in no particular order, just simply as they are. That’s what it means to talk of a spectrum. 

It doesn’t mean that those children cannot succeed, but it should cause us to look at how our measures may push them toward loss of confidence or failure. 

Ziya didn’t write SEA for the same reasons that some children write under concessionary conditions or some fail to finish or to pass. Understanding that, I took a different route, building her toolbox for navigating a neurotypical world, focusing instead on life skills, becoming very patient as she learned to communicate self-awareness, slowly, like she was connecting ideas and emotions and physical movement in ways she had not before. 

I was able to take off pressure that I knew would work against her thriving, and as an educator I was obsessed with reducing trauma associated with learning. 

We had our own moments of fear and encouragement, anxiety and consolation, pride and acceptance, and a lot of uncertainty about what were the right decisions. 

Every child is on her or his own journey. Travel with them with love, wonder and humility, and protect them from those who may not understand while advocating for the space and support they need to grow.

My girl graduates from primary school this week, having completed a year of SEA preparation, but also much more that I didn’t even know a year before that she would have to conquer. She was home with me for two unforgettable years that taught me so much as a mothering worker, even as the year seemed to be about how well she would do. 

All children can do well, with patience, encouragement and the right approach to get them through what is the hardest or what they most fear. Let’s honour that when results come out, leaving them with both self-acceptance and a sense of their potential as they end their school year.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. October 20, 2021.

Post 438.

AMONG our political elites, man, woman and dog attacking man, woman and dog.

It’s remarkable to see how gender and womanhood have been being flung in this fight. Let’s start with Dr Rowley.

“The way she loves the accolade of being the first woman prime minister, one would think that she would behave properly and with a modicum of respect for the first female President, her superior,” he lambasted, invoking the Opposition Leader and the President’s womanhood as definitive of their public identities, roles and relationship.

For Persad-Bissessar, this gendered accolade was always a double-edged sword.

Rowley could have said the Opposition leader was being disrespectful or any of his usual litany of insults.

However, he highlighted her sex and the sex of the President as a disciplinary tactic. It is one thing to fail as a politician and a next to fail as a woman, and to be the first woman in the nation to do so.

The PM deliberately tapped into debasement of females who don’t know how to behave with deference and propriety in public. When schoolboys fight, we shake our heads. When schoolgirls fight, we bawl that all broughtupcy in the world has collapsed.

When two public officials, one already “inferior,” are pitted against each other and their sex is made the basis of comparison, it’s a gendered weapon in a war of words.

PNM PRO Laurel Lezama-Lee Sing called the Opposition Leader “an embarrassment to women,” again invoking her womanhood and expanding the wielding of gender by referencing all other women in the nation, who may have been foolishly considering an issue of how today we have no Commissioner of Police, for the first time in our history, and missed the relevance of femininity to the public call for answers.

The PM’s “imps, pimps and chimps” line again brought both gender and sexuality into political mud-slinging. Pimps are usually (but not only) men who (sometimes violently) force women to have sex for their profit. But what does prostitution have to do with 19 parliamentarians? Who is or are the whores? Aspersions of licentiousness and immorality land implicitly.

In his latest salvo, the PM described the Opposition Leader as an “abusive man,” continuing, “It’s like some of them fellas outside there…if I can’t get you I go mash it up. If I can’t get you I go kill you. I will mark your face with a knife…I go throw acid on you. That is what you are seeing there.”

This was a move from womanhood in disrepute to the kind of violent and depraved manhood that brought historic crowds to the streets in protest just earlier this year. This was highly cynical from a man who has blamed women for their choice of men, without apology.

It was also highly consistent in its blame on the population and women, and a warning against choosing someone who will kill you, stab you and throw acid on you, politically speaking.

It’s like we are all, or perhaps just us women, witnessing a woman being battered for being a woman, rather than pressured because of a brouhaha. The violence of the analogy was desperate, even for Dr Rowley.

The reference to “domestic” abuse is again deliberate, for this is the domain of women and one we are called on to protect. In such times, the solidarity of women against degeneracy and abuse is necessary to save us all.

It makes sense, then, for him to urge women to “stand up and support their female counterparts instead of bringing each other down,” like Persad-Bissessar.

We all know that women who bring each other down are “our own worst enemy.” The PM even brought up her failure to protect young girls from child marriage, throwing in the whole kitchen sink. But what does that have to do with the CoP?

Finally, Nizam Mohammed described the President, who is not a mother and was not appointed because of her representation of or identification with mothering or reproductive issues, as expected to connect with the public in a “motherly and exalted” fashion.

Idealisation of “good motherhood” here is bizarre to say the least.

I’m not defending the Opposition Leader or the UNC. There’s atrociousness on all sides. Rather, I’m observing how sex, gender (often femininity), and sexuality are being politically mobilised.

Such logic, like much of what I have highlighted, reveals the labels and stereotypes still targeted at and governing women in political life.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 23, 2020.

Post 403.

I look back now on why I never sought to convince Ziya to believe in Santa Claus. I think I had decided that I would be a mom who always told her the truth. Also, she was always a logical child so one fanciful story would have led to several other untruths to explain how only some reindeer flew through the sky, how Santa got in past the burglar-proofing, and how come the dogs never barked at him, for pothounds are renowned barkers, even while retreating with each woof.

When my grandmother passed away, my mom told Zi that my grandmother became a star looking down at us at nights. Zi promptly asked me if all the stars were dead people. Also, if Santa could get in, so could bandits, right? She was a cautious, somewhat anxious child with a litany of questions whenever I put her to bed, and I thought honesty would always be more reassuring, and would instigate fewer unanswerable questions. So, truth and logic prevailed, perhaps sacrificing a little of the fiction that typically creates Christmas spirit.

We would still joyfully decorate a small tree, string up lights, and open presents thoughtfully chosen. Our magic became our time together and with grandparents and cousins, as we traipsed from our home to theirs, taking family pictures, sharing food, and watching the children reap a small bounty.

Now that she’s a big ten-year-old, we have been trying to think about how to continue to thread the magic through this time; how to transition her from a Christmas spirit characterised by small hands excitedly tearing open wrapping paper to one that is about giving in the way that Santa Claus does; far, wide and big-heartedly.

So, we told her a story about special knowledge that you learn as you grow up, to which all of us are one day introduced, and which she’s now old enough to learn. It’s a secret really, though it seems she had a sense of it all along. It’s true that Santa is not real, but the reason that children are taught about him is because he is a symbol of the spirit which ultimately connects us from house to house and from country to country around the world.

We told her stories of donations we had made or helped provide to those in need, without announcing it to anyone. We told her that all adults do this because they know that’s what the spirit of Christmas means. It’s something we should do all year around, but this time is a reminder to us all, just like the story of Santa is a reminder to little children of how joyful it is to be a generous person, an idea they eventually come to appreciate.

It’s only when children get big enough that the knowledge that Santa Claus is simply a symbol, who everyone knows isn’t real, is shared with them. However, your mom only wanted you to know what was truthful and what you should believe in, we told her; the spirit of thinking of others, sharing from what you have, and being giving.

That night, she pondered what she could give and the next day decided on cookies she baked, which she could package for neighbours, other children, and those to whom she wanted to say thank you. Thus followed a baking extravaganza, which we kept an eye on, but let her do on her own. Cookies rose from the oven, mixed with chocolate chips and sprinkles, and pride at her big-girl understanding. She had never believed in Santa Claus, who isn’t real and who she would outgrow anyway. Now she had a surer sense of the magic that would last a lifetime, filling her spirit again and again, perhaps not only at Christmas, but throughout the year.

These chances for wonderment go by quickly, for children grow up very fast. With each stage, parents get precious opportunities to teach truths and values, and create new memories. This year, again, we have our little pine tree, now two years old, standing taller with stronger branches. We’ve had to teach her that it’s not whether it’s big or covered in decorations or compares to others that matter. We are teaching her to cherish grandparents and cousins, and the joy of being together.

Whatever lessons you are using this time to teach your children, may their truth and magic last. However you celebrate the spirit of giving, may you have a merry Christmas.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 17, 2019.

Post 355.

Vincentian feminist Peggy Antrobus once told me that women can have it all, just not at the same time. There are life stages, she cautioned, and knowing your stage grounds your choices.

The thing about elder wisdom is that you don’t necessarily agree until you reach the life stage where you do. In the meantime, you debate the advice you get and, as they say, hold a meditation about its relevance and worth.

Over the last year, I’ve been wondering if indeed Peggy’s right. I’ve discovered that, not only is it not possible to have it all, but that the choices you make determine the next stage, foreclosing options, and that widespread expectations of womanhood and motherhood are not incidental to these choices. The ‘all’ isn’t about having money, luxury and leisure, it’s about basics that women have a right to, such as both family and a career.

As I’ve become more responsible for Ziya as a working mother, I’ve become more aware of the job sacrifices I’m making, my lower expectations for my abilities, and reduced capacity for leadership.

This is common for professional women in their forties, who are primary carers of their children at the same time that they are in their most important years for professional advancement. Every ambition has its costs and you start aiming for what’s merely realistic as if schoolgirls’ aspirations are just a modern fairy tale.

In making these choices, I’ve become more attentive to the older women around me; the ones who delayed achieving their degrees until after their children grew up, the ones who took less demanding jobs so that they could get home earlier, the ones who start their work day at 4am so that they can do school pick up at 2.30, the ones who took on three jobs despite the extra exhaustion so that they could pay for extra-curricular activities, and the ones who reliably go to pediatricians, parent-teacher meetings and counseling sessions with their children knowing that their best chances for development and emotional resilience have to be planned, communicated, managed and honestly reflected upon.

The very women who can’t have it all are simultaneously at the center of making so much happen, like magicians coordinating a whirlwind, at risk to their sanity, self-care and self-definition. I’m not saying that dads are not important. I’m just saying that the unequal burden of care is real and it’s at the heart of a life stage many women reach.

Working mothers, whether on their own or not, often have to be on top of all the details, from Diwali and Christmas concert contributions to knowing where the uniforms are for each week, and the mental room this takes up is taken for granted whether they work in KFC or have PhDs.

Looking on, we often say to ourselves, I don’t know how she does it.

I’ve listened more for the everyday sacrifices; in health, in self-confidence, in savings, in sleep, in dreams. I deepened appreciation for the crucial role of women’s sisters, mothers, neighbours, children’s friends’ mothers, long-lasting friends, and compassionate co-workers.

Working mothers depend on understanding, encouragement, help, patience and time from a widespread network just to get their family through each day. Women everywhere could barely achieve what they do without the other women who invest in enabling them to.

I always saw these women around me, fitting the common character of the strong Caribbean mother, without really seeing their inner lives, difficult decisions, necessary relationships or wearying stories. Now that I live it, who feels it knows.

In a sense, I have had to decide what I want to excel at, what I am prepared to do my best at, however badly, and what I simply won’t accomplish this month or year or the next. The consequences are ones that will settle into experiences of acceptance and regret that accumulate with age.

In having to spend more time with my daughter this year because that’s the life stage she is in, I have come to recognize that motherhood means her needs determine my life stage for me. All further decisions follow, however this sets other achievements back.

It’s not a complaint, it’s an adjustment to embrace, like a soucouyant who would forever soar the night skies in fire if only daylight didn’t compel her into the confines of her skin. Daybreak has brought knowing what it means to sacrifice for your child as a life stage and as more than a line women so often say.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 15, 2019.

Post 317.

Photo credit: Tivia Collins

Yesterday, the shoelaces almost made it. All they needed was a little more time.

While the little girl with curly hair sat at her school desk quietly writing neat sentences, they plotted furiously, twisting and edging out of the knots they were in. Today would be the day.

Everyone misunderstands undone shoelaces. Parents stand over their children teaching them to tie their white, brown or black laces into tight, neat bows. Principals expect such rigid discipline once uniformed students are past the school gate. Every morning, laces are trapped into their expected roles by a conspiracy of disciplinarians, sometimes even double-knotted to prevent escape.

But, who doesn’t dream of freedom from oppressive restrictions and rules? Who doesn’t want a chance out of the limits of routine and everyday, sometimes suffocating, roles? Who doesn’t dream of deciding for themselves where they will go in life?

Isn’t the whole point of our existence here to determine the direction of our next step? Is there any one of us who hasn’t imagined something other than who we are and what we do everyday?

Then why deny shoelaces the free will each of us carries as small fantasies; the ones that help us to see the potential for better circumstances than we are in, the ones that connect to that small kernel of who we know we are inside, the ones that propel us to achieve aspirations no one thought we could.

The shoelaces had been shushing each other. The laces on the girl’s left shoe were loosened. It was a victory. They celebrated like a fete match. The girl thought she heard voices cheering far away, but no other children seemed to notice. She put her head back down, concentrating on copying homework.

Below the desks, the classroom of shoelaces craned their necks. The air was jumpy with shared anticipation. Sensing this, some students kept shuffling about their feet. The teacher admonished them to sit still.

In this overlooked community of laces were few which hadn’t also tried to run, but some were more tightly bound than others, some had grown close to their families, and had ambivalent feelings about living as refugees in the shadow of their former lives, and some had given up for the stress began to make their nerves visibly fray.

The bell rang for lunch. The left shoe had been won, but either the laces would be found out now and retied, or would remain unnoticed over playtime or, perhaps, tied hurriedly and halfway amidst running up and down.

Hope sprang eternal in their hearts, but the laces held themselves motionless, avoiding eye contact with prefects and teachers. This was a make or break hour.

After, back in class, their gains were secure. There were high fives and fist bumps all around the girl’s socks.

2.15 pm. Their breath ragged, both left and right laces were now completely undone from their knots. They continued smoothly, like brown ninjas, sliding out from the holes and loops, further slackening the grip of the shoes. Shoelaces across the classroom locked eyes, rooting that the hour may finally have come for one of their own. As if the children could hear, they all began fidgeting in their chairs.

This was it. School was suddenly over and the little curly-haired girl was shoving books into her bag like her mummy didn’t pay good money for them, and chattering without a care with the other children. She hadn’t noticed both sets of laces loosened and dangling. Freedom was near!

They could run for it now on pure instinct that it isn’t a job or identity that defines one’s purpose in life. All that matters is an imagined future as vast and endless as January’s blue sky.

But, what’s this? Why is the curly-haired girl’s mummy suddenly pointing at her shoes? Wait! Why are they talking about shoelaces wanting to escape by afternoon each day? How do they know? Does every struggle have its double agents?

They are laughing like it’s a funny story that explains why the girl’s laces have always become undone by the time school is over.

Dastardly repression! We are tightened back into knots!

Today is not the day, but this is not the end. Tomorrow again, under school desks everywhere, we will loosen ourselves.

Shoelaces of the world, untie!

If you’ve ever wondered why children’s shoelaces always end up undone, this is why.

One day the shoelaces may succeed in their ambitious escape for, surely, they will continue to try.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 24, 2018.

Post 314.

Traditions matter.

One day, those will be your go-to memories to provide a sense of certainty about how things should be and what belonging to family or childhood looks like. No doubt, nostalgia for such familiarity will occupy a small, but well-kept shelf in your heart, and some of your adult practices will be best understood as cared-for pieces you’ve taken out to feel and show and share.

Amidst the chaos of working motherhood, it was Christmas Eve when Ziya and I embarked on establishing a new tradition for us. First, we needed a tree.

I have warm, soft-focus memories of a real tree in my childhood recollections of Christmas. They are vividly clear and I can see the red carpet in the living room, the carved furniture and Indian wooden screens so common in the 1970s, and a six or seven foot tall tree in a corner by the stereo.

The tree smelled like pine and shed its darkening green needles all season. It was a big deal to put up, and had to be properly potted, stood in a corner where it wouldn’t tip over, and placed where it held pride of place when the strings of lights were plugged in.

Ziya wanted a plastic tree, and immediately folded her arms at the inconceivable premise of anything else. One of my friends, who herself has her lights and years of collected decorations strung on a towering and bushy ficus, empathized. Eight-year-old kids want what their friends have, she suggested, and don’t want to feel out of place.

I tried with Zi anyway, tugged by those memories, returning to that fuzzy time when a tradition I was now passing on somehow became set in my mind like a loved, framed photo on that well-kept shelf.

As we drove past Aranguez’s greenhouses, I asked her to look for any trees she might like. Mummy I see one, she exclaimed, and I, who don’t believe in almost anything, joyfully thanked a chorus of angels. We turned off the highway and walked in, checking size, shape, and fullness, and caught sight of the perfect one at the same time. This is it, she declared, won over by the swaying branches just at her head-height. My heart sang the way angel voices ring.

Look around so you are sure, I said. She did, finding one that was a hundred dollars less and, like any sensitive child of a mom managing all the bills would, stoically suggested the smaller one would be better. We left, holding hands, in one of those too-quickly passing chances with young children, with the perfect tree for our budgetary circumstances, and our singing hearts in chorus with those angels heralding on repeat on the radio. In some decades, maybe this would be one of those go-to memories forever providing a sense of place and belonging.

It’s unique, I told her, stroking the tree’s soft needles. We should give it a name. Fern Eve Jamela Hosein Livingstone Khan, she announced. A dramatic title encompassing a not so accurate nor scientific identification, an additional name for the day before Christmas when it was born into our home, three separate family lines, plus a shared middle name that has also been handed down three generations.

I raised my eyebrows. There’s another pine tree in our backyard, which arrived a mere foot tall and now stands above the roof. This could be like that. Who knows what traditions await such a small, somewhat thin-foot plant chosen by an equally small girl?

A Christmas Eve tradition of putting up a tree means you wake up on Christmas to see it on its first morning, freshly decorated and sparkling. Even if it’s small, it’s yours. If it’s made by sun and soil and water, it has a little extra spirit. It can live in our garden throughout the year, I suggested, and come inside at Christmas, and maybe it will still be the tree you decorate when you have a daughter.

Why she changed her mind, I can’t answer, but I’ll accept that it was Christmas magic. As we hung the few individual decorations we chose, I could feel my childhood fleetingly recreated in hers. It offered me, and might offer her when she’s my age, a chance to gift well-loved traditions that renew a sense of certainty, childhood and family. For such joys in the world, framed on a well-kept shelf in my heart perhaps as now in hers, first we found a tree.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 18, 2018.

Post 313.

Some days are beginnings and some are endings.

Some feel like potential new chances, but really you are not seeing the signs of something already too far in its decline, when its better to stop trying and walk away. Some days feel like endings, full of emotion and hindsight, but really they are beginnings that you’re too preoccupied to notice with the kind of positivity that replaces regret.

On those days, you’ve got to realise the last second is already the past, and what you think you’ve lost has freed space for more lasting gain. Some days you think you know which one it is. Today is a beginning. Today is an ending. Turns out that it’s neither, and you’re just in a longer cycle than you imagined and one you don’t yet sufficiently understand.

Think of those times when you imagine yourself decisive enough to ensure something never happens again. Then, years or decades later, you are back right there. After all the lessons and changes and maturing, how is it possible to spiral back to such a familiar place you thought you forever left behind. How is it possible to repeat the same pattern in two instances so far apart in your life?

This week, I closed a door I opened twenty years ago. I opened it precisely to walk out of a room I ended up walking back into, like some kind of surreal house of mirrors. I thought I was smarter and stronger and had moved ahead. Imagine my shock to find myself in the same space, like I had spent all that time crossing a thin divider that separated it into two, thinking it two different rooms, though it was just the other side, in the same place. I wasn’t sure what to feel; anger, sadness, regret, terror.

So, again, I opened the door to walk away from that room, stepped out and closed it behind me, wondering if I was about to begin to repeat the past and the present again in the future. Was this really an ending? Was the beginning going to lead to a different end? How to escape these cycles you don’t even know you are in? How to escape situations when the consistent factor in all the decisions you make, all the ones that create your reality, is you?

People get on with life, going to the grocery, finishing up their day at work, packing lunch for their children, surviving daily traffic, but underneath their daily routines and their management of all the moving parts are these undercurrents, defining everyone’s life over time.

I’ve watched people repeat the same mistakes. Probably, they have watched me do the same. I’ve watched people run faster and faster in the same place as if that would lead to any difference in their disappointment. I’ve watched people escape circumstances they repeatedly end back in. Endlessly, people everywhere are experiencing beginnings and endings, whatever their specific permutation, their exact pain or their accompaniment by sharp intake of hope.

What’s the secret to going on?

A guy I know is dying of terminal cancer and, yet, when I speak to him, he sounds joyously full of life. When I ask him how he is, he answers “great, I saw the sunrise this morning!”

How are you, he asks. “Not as good as you,” I say in response to his radiantly optimistic voice and I immediately regret the words, for I’m doing much better than he is. I’m always ashamed that I’m mired in comparatively petty work, family, money, house and other life challenges, and don’t sound as grateful for life as he does.

When I hang up the phone, I’m humbled by a profound lesson. Some days are beginnings and some are endings, but every moment that has breath of life and capacity to appreciate it is when you do your best to decide.

And, decide you must, with mindfulness and forgiveness, self-love and kindness, gratitude and the will to let go and start anew with the same kind of optimism that someone who is dying can teach you about the next twenty years, however your lessons begin and end, one sunrise at a time.

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. August 14, 2018.

Post 298.

While children play over these holidays, school is on many mothers’ minds. You see these mothers, going extra distance to find the store that sells books at a cheaper price, double-checking stationary lists against the contents of their purse, and carrying heavy plastic bags of school supplies while pulling one or two children along by the wrist in thick High Street or Chaguanas main road heat.

I was in a bookstore, buying just-deceased Vidia Naipaul’s great novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, a big, big book by any measure and one that forever defined my life-long obsession with having a house of my own. It is the essential Trinidadian ambition, shared by everyone from the wealthy oil families of South to the squatter next door.

Like Mr. Biswas, I was combing the country looking for affordable housing materials, discovering commitments such as rates, interest, repairs and debt at the same pace, and the risks and costs of it all, from hollow bricks to pitch pine beams to tiny leaks in roofing.

I was thinking, like Naipaul, of what could be hidden, by bookcase, glass cabinet or curtains, what could be accommodated until Ziya’s whole life was comfortably ordered and her memories made coherent by this odd-shaped house in Santa Cruz.

At the same time, as I stood in line to pay, I was thinking of motherhood, listening to a woman portion out her life story with the young assistant helping her tick off items for purchase. For every ruler, eraser, copybook and text, there was that time she had to tell the children this and how she had to manage to make ends meet then, and how hard it does be throughout.

When all was added up, she decisively handed over a thick fold of blue money, like the CEO of a company that for another year weathered rain, robbery and recession. I thought I knew exactly that feeling and how I’d seen it on other mothers’ faces in bookstores and in between aisles with school shoes. Most important, I knew that not one soul really knows what you go through when those responsibilities fall unfairly and ultimately on you.

One woman, a survivor of her partner’s violence, went to the credit union every year with her book list and its itemized amounts to borrow money. Others hold on for their sou sou hand just at this time. Everywhere, mothers’ are planning and calculating, scraping and saving in time for September, like unheralded characters in a great Trinidadian barrack yard novel.

Indeed, in the 1970s, the Housewives’ Association of Trinidad and Tobago started a school book exchange, first in Hazel Brown’s house, later in the ONR’s office on Albion St. and, finally, in East Side Plaza precisely for these reasons.

Hazel herself, who was taking care of ten children, would sort all their books by subject, see what could be handed down, and then call up everyone to see what others had and what could be exchanged.

As she told me, at one point, the book exchange was taken up by some schools and parents would bring their used books and their book lists and exchange what they needed, buying at a fraction of the original cost.

HATT began to make a small profit, in what we would now call social entrepreneurship, by buying at 25% and selling at 50% of the store price. In Albion Street, women would iron the dog ears flat, make sure books were in good condition and could be sold at an affordable price, and that the right editions were the ones available.

It meant that children were told not to mark up their textbooks or simply throw them away. A stigma associated with second-hand books was pressed back, giving mothers and families collective solutions to their challenges making ends meet while preparing for the new term, and giving what they already had in their hands greater dollar value.

As I walked out of the bookstore with Mr. Biswas’ dream of a house in my hand and hope to manage the expenses of both renovations and the new school year on my mind, I thought of the mother in the store, taking her school supplies home, and how Naipaul became a writer because his family valued books.

I thought of HATT and how women can help each other fulfill hard-earned dreams, and I thought of Mr. Biswas and the list of compromises his family continually navigated in the hope that their circumstances would one day improve.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 27, 2018.

Post 281.

For all its imperfections, the Guardian has been good to me. In 2012, Editor Judy Raymond offered to publish my diary about working motherhood. Since then, I’ve encountered many, mostly mothers, who were emboldened by someone writing about the quiet, isolated experiences and emotions that they have, but feared weren’t important or collective enough for public print.

Grandmothers have seemed to be my most regular readers. This often left me negotiating badass with good beti even while the radical example and words of older, wiser feminist foot soldiers, including those in hijab and those leading domestic worker unions, emboldened me.

I began in Features, yet my sense of citizenship often led my diary to political analysis and advocacy. Slowly, as Ziya grew, I had space to think about more than sleeplessness, breastfeeding, baby steps and birthdays. Like most women, including ones whose educational and occupational empowerment seems to set them to achieve everything women could want, I worried about being a good mother, making ends meet and managing my career. This continues, even with just one child, having had to live with the loss of not having more.

Yet, I rebelled, writing in 2014, “Some days you spend whole conversations on love and sex. Other days you connect ethically and emotionally with other women over delays in passing procurement legislation, the state failure and corruption that has allowed illegal quarrying, and the social and economic costs of badly planned urban development. When women resist because representation remains our right and responsibility, some days our diaries will say nothing about husbands or babies”.

Still, the column wasn’t not focused enough on governance, in the style of my long-time UWI mentor Prof Selwyn Ryan. Indeed, I was composing fictional creation-stories, delving into the deeply emotional art of Jabs such as Ronald and Sherry Alfred, and Fancy Indians like Rose and Lionel Jagessar, and still mulling over marriage, fatherhood, primary schooling, connection to nature, and love.

I thought hard about genre and experimented with writing. The form of a diary is so often associated with women’s private thoughts and feelings, held close and secret with a small symbolic lock. Bringing this genre into the public domain was a deliberate act against male-defined Op-Ed expectations which position the oil sector, the constitution and politics as the serious topics of the nation.

For most people, managing family life, feeling safe in their homes, and negotiating aspirations and disappointments matter most and are the most pressing issues in their lives. The diary moved from Features, taking these concerns with it, and challenging divisions between public and private, and their unequal value.

The form also built on historical examples of colonial logs, and journals such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which I read as a graduate student, but with substance grounded in emancipatory, Caribbean feminist observations and Political Leader-less, worker and citizen people-power.

Readers wrote to me, wondering if I was a PMN, a UNC, a COP, a knife and fork Indian, too Indian, and too feminist. Amidst calling for an end to child marriage, programmes to end violence against women, and policies to protect women workers from sexual harassment, I wrote twenty columns in which lesbians were named as part of the nation and region, precisely because no one else would, because every woman matters, not just the ones that meet patriarchal expectations, and because these women, who were not allowed to exist in law, would here defiantly exist in public record as having the right to be.

I learned that to write a diary, which wrestles with life, love, rights and justice, is to risk repetitive, aggressive attack. I owe Editor Shelly Dass public thanks for skillfully stopping Kevin Baldeosingh from using the Guardian to legitimize his bizarre and obsessive stalking of me in the press, always to harm.

I’ve grown, as has Ziya, in these pages. I’ve learned to look around the landscape, appreciating all its heartfelt and difficult growing pains, like my own, in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Diary of a Mothering Worker departs from the Guardian, but will continue to walk good, gratefully carrying the lessons from Guardian and its readers’ years of nurturing wrapped in its jahajin bundle.