• HOME
• ADVERTISE
• ABOUT
• CONNECT
  • Contact
  • Newsletter
  • Editor's Note
  • Meet Team
• MAGAZINE
  • Subscribe!
• INITIATIVES
  • Obaasema Village
  • Partnerships
    • Real African Women (R.A.W)
• MEDIA
• PHOTOS

• wellness
  • HEALTH
• culture
  • ENT'MENT
  • EVENTS
  • BOOKS
• features
  • NEWS
    • Be Informed
  • MONEY
  • DECOR
  • LIFE &♥
    • Relationships
    • Advice Column
  • WOMEN
    • Be Empowered
  • MEN
  • BLOG
    • CampusVoice
• style
  • FASHION
  • BEAUTY
    • AromaSense
• profiles
• spirituality
• powerhouse
• searchSite

Like Mother, Like Daughter
By Tricia Ferdinand                                                                                        

Some women fear becoming their mothers. We listen to them speak, we see them in action, and sometimes we decide that no matter how much we love them, no matter how much we respect them we want to be nothing like them. My mother is an extraordinary woman. She raised three children mostly on her own, and when economic issues in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago (two small islands in the southernmost Caribbean united under one government) were at their lowest she made the decision to leave her children in the care of her own mother for a time in order to make a life for my siblings and I in America. We eventually rejoined her five years later, and although life here has not always been easy we are happy. Still, I find myself wondering if, put in the same position, I would make the same decisions my mother did.

It has been twelve years since I moved to America, and I have since forgotten many things that were so crucial to my Caribbean culture. While my mother has   retained a thick accent reminiscent   of her birthplace, I can only manage   to sound like someone from New   Jersey. Granted, there is still a lilt   to the way I say “ear” and “bear,”   and if you catch me on a bad day I am liable to tell you off in the most “Trini” way. Still, for all intents and purposes I am American, and I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like otherwise. I also wonder how much I can truly relate to my mother, who remembers more clearly the streets of my grandmother's house and the hotels, guest houses and restaurants, before the large expanse of banana and coconut trees were cut down to make room for two-story houses. She knows words I can barely pronounce anymore, music I do not remember and foods I have never had (and potentially never will). I wonder what we have in common. I imagine first generation children of a parent or parents who have immigrated must feel the same way. There is an unusual disparity, a marked difference in the familiarity of one's immediate surroundings as compared to the knowledge that your immediate ancestry stems from somewhere else, somewhere often quite different than your American home.

The relationship between mothers and daughters is an intriguing one, perhaps much like the relationship between a father and a son. It is almost as though there is a certain sense of expectation, an implication that a parent, consciously or not, compares the life of his or her child to his or her own at the same age. Indeed, my mother has often said things like “When I was 20 I was not interested in those things,” almost absentmindedly, like a reflex. She does not make a habit of imposing her opinion (well…not quite in that way anyway), but she comments, wistfully at times, about her own young life occasionally in bits and pieces. She had done this for some time before I finally started listening, started wanting to know more about her, more about the woman and less about “my mother.” I wanted to know what she was like as a girl, as a young woman growing up in a Trinidad and Tobago I had never seen, and never would see. I wanted to know about her life with my grandmother, with my grandfather and my uncle and aunts. I wanted to know about life before my siblings. Before me. She gladly obliged.

As it turns out, I am more like my mother than I wanted to admit. We share the same love of traveling, love of reading, love of the colors brown and green. I found out that when she was in her mid-twenties she would treat herself to dinner and a book on every birthday. She has seen quite a few places in the world, some with friends, some on her own. She wanted very much to be loved. She laughed a lot when she was a little girl; she loved her grandmother very much, and as a woman, sought to understand her own mother, my grandmother.

The truth is there is much I did not understand about my mother, much I neglected to see. I found out that my mother was a person, is a person, with hopes and dreams and worries. When I hum now I hear the voice of my mother, when I laugh I hear hers just beneath the sound of mine. I see her hands in my hands, just as she saw echoes of hers in her own mother's. Now I know I wish to see and learn more about my mother, more of my culture. Our culture. Because that, I have realized, no matter how far removed I feel, we will always have in common.