She Was Not Just Your Mother. She Was a Woman First. Did You Ever Know Her?

My mother is the kindest woman I know. I say that not because it is what you are supposed to say about your mother on Mother's Day, but because it is simply true in a way that I have tested against everything I have experienced since. I have met a lot of people in two countries across several decades. Nobody compares. But here is the thing that sits with me now that I am older: I spent most of my life knowing her as my mother. I am only beginning, even now, to understand her as a woman.

The Woman Behind the Title

My mother was born the third of seven children in the rural parishes of St. Thomas. Her father was a farmer. Her mother kept a shop. She grew up in the kind of community where everyone knew everyone and the land was part of your identity in a way that city people never quite understand.

She left school and went straight into the postal service. And then she climbed. She climbed all the way to Post Mistress, which was the highest rank available in the system at that time. Not through connections or luck. Through the quiet, consistent excellence of a woman who never made noise about what she was capable of but simply demonstrated it.

That promotion changed everything for our family. With the rank came relocation, moving between postal districts the way an American might move between zip codes. We moved from Hagley's Gap to Mavis Bank. Then the 1988 storm came and we moved again, this time to Gordon Town in the parish of St. Andrew, where I would spend most of my years from 1990 to 1999. My mother's career was the engine of our family's geography. She moved us forward. Literally.

The Door That Was Always Open

Growing up, I genuinely did not know that my mother could say no.

Not because she was weak. Because she chose not to. Her sister's child needed to attend a school in Kingston. They came to stay with us. Got on their feet. Moved on. Then another cousin arrived who needed a job in the city. She was accommodated too. This was not occasional. This was the operating rhythm of our household. The door was always open and someone was always walking through it. From her side of the family. From my father's side of the family, the few who were still in Jamaica after most of his thirteen siblings had migrated to England before independence.

As a child I experienced this as just the way things were. As an adult I understand it as a conscious choice made by a woman who had more than some people and never once thought that entitled her to hold it for herself alone.

That is the village in practice. Not as a concept. As a lived reality where a Post Mistress in Gordon Town quietly funded the upward mobility of an extended family one relative at a time, asking nothing in return, making no announcement of the sacrifice.

The Woman I Never Got to Ask About

Here is what I never did. I never sat my mother down and asked her about herself. Not as my mother. As a person.

What did she dream about before the postal service? What did she give up when the career took us from parish to parish? Did she ever want something that the family's needs quietly overruled? Was there a version of her life that she imagined before she became the woman at the centre of everyone else's?

I do not know the answers to those questions. And that is a kind of loss that does not announce itself until you are old enough to understand what you did not ask.

The mother falls away eventually, if you let it, and the woman appears. The woman who had a whole interior life before you arrived and continued to have one while you were busy growing up and taking her presence for granted. Most of us wait too long to look for her. Some of us never look at all.

What to Do With This Before It Is Too Late

If your mother is still alive, ask her something you have never asked. Not about you. About her. Where did she want to go that she never went? What did she want to be before the world decided what she was going to be? What is the thing she is most proud of that has nothing to do with her children?

She will probably be surprised that you asked. She may deflect. She may tell you she has no complaints. Push gently. Because underneath the mother there is a woman who has been waiting, maybe for a very long time, for someone to be curious about her rather than grateful to her.

Gratitude is good. Curiosity is better. Gratitude says thank you for what you gave me. Curiosity says I want to know who you are. And knowing who she is, really knowing, is the most honest form of love you can offer the woman who gave you everything.

"A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take."

Cardinal Mermillod