My Mother Did Not Teach Me About Money. She Was Too Busy Surviving. This One Is for Her.

My mother had a saying. Feast today, famine tomorrow. She did not say it as a lecture or a financial lesson or a sit-down conversation about money management. She said it the way she said most things, quietly, once, and then she moved on. She was not the talkative type. She did not believe in repeating herself. What she believed in was demonstrating. And what she demonstrated, every day of her working life as a Post Mistress across three different Jamaican communities, was that you put something down for tomorrow before you spend what you have today.

What She Meant and What I Heard

As a child I heard the words. I did not hear the meaning.

What she was telling me, in five words, was the entire framework of financial discipline that most adults spend decades trying to learn from books and seminars and expensive mistakes. Do not spend everything. Always reserve. The good time will not last forever and the preparing you do in the good time is what carries you through the hard one.

She was a Post Mistress. She had a salary, a rank, and a responsibility to her family that she took with complete seriousness. She was big on saving in a way that was not fashionable or talked about. She just did it. Quietly, consistently, without announcing it. The same way she did everything.

And I did not listen. Not really. Not in the way that changes behaviour. I heard the words as background music of my childhood and then I grew up and spent years proving, through my own financial mistakes, exactly why she had been saying them.

What the Silence Cost Both of Us

My mother was not a talker. She did not have money conversations with us in the explicit way that I now try to have them with Avi. The lessons were there but they were embedded in behaviour rather than language. You had to be watching to catch them.

And I was not always watching. I was growing up, moving on, eventually moving countries. By the time I had Amelia in 2003 I was still living hand to mouth. No savings. No investments. No real understanding of what money was for beyond paying for what was immediately in front of me.

That is not my mother's failure. She gave me what she had the language and the capacity to give. The silence around money in that generation of Jamaican parents was not negligence. It was the inheritance of a culture that did not talk about money directly, where survival was the curriculum and the explicit lesson was considered unnecessary because the example was right there if you were paying attention.

The cost of that silence fell on the next generation. On me. On the years I spent relearning from experience what five words and one example were trying to tell me all along.

The Conversation I Would Have With Her Now

If I could sit with my mother now and have the money conversation we never had, it would not be me teaching her anything. She already knows.

It would be me saying: I understand now. Feast today, famine tomorrow. I get it. I pay myself first before anything else gets paid. I set aside twenty to thirty percent before I touch the rest. I have taught Avi the difference between an asset and a liability before she was old enough to fully read. I am trying to give her what you tried to give me, but with more words around it so it does not take her fifteen years to hear what you said in five.

I would tell her that the Post Mistress who moved three times and kept the door open for every relative who needed somewhere to land and still managed to save and provide and build stability on a government salary is one of the most financially intelligent people I have ever known. She just never got to call herself that. Nobody gave her that language either.

This Mother's Day, the financial tribute goes to the women who kept families fed on budgets that should not have stretched as far as they did, who saved without spreadsheets, who invested in the next generation without ever using the word investment. They knew something we are still trying to learn. Some of them tried to tell us. We were not listening closely enough.

"Feast today, famine tomorrow. Always put down something for tomorrow."

Omando's Mother