When I was a little girl I would wish for my mother, but she was always shrouded in mystery. I used to wonder if it would be easier if she were dead, instead of living across the ocean.
My father had abandoned us long before my birth, and would show up to demand his rights years later.
The judge said I would have to go back to Canada, the land of my birth that technically owned me. My mother wasn’t allowed to go back; Jamaica will always be her home, despite her best efforts.
I grew up with my a single parent, my father, who struggled to know what to do with my hair or my desire for a female parent.
I used to long for her.
Elementary schools are unsympathetic to children who don’t have parents. When we were forced to make Mother’s Day crafts, I would give mine away to my grandmother, but that was never fully satisfying.
If only there wasn’t an ocean between us, then I could have the perfect mother. She would love me for who I am, and I would never doubt my place in the world again.
Life didn’t turn out like that.
While I did visit with my mother a couple times as a child, it was meeting her again at sixteen that really opened my eyes. In some ways I could easily picture a life with her family, in others we were worlds apart.
Our differences seemed inescapable.
When I became a legal adult she started to ask for favours. Plane tickets to my backyard wedding, visas, to sponsor her latest attempt at getting in the country.
I pulled away, and still I yearned for her.
I wanted the fairytale. The mother who swoops in to nurture her pregnant daughter. Birthing my own child only made the pain of losing her fresh.
Yet she was in my life then, from a distance, over seas. I wish I could tell you things got better, that we rebuilt a relationship and are on good terms today.
We don’t speak.
Before, when she could access me online, she would bounce between sending random memes with thinly veiled judgements, polite small chat, or accusing me of being a horrible daughter.
She has so much anger at losing me, but I know there was a part of her that wanted me to go. I’ve read the letters.
Perhaps she wanted to go with me back to the promised land.
I don’t think she has ever dealt with losing me, her only daughter, and when we speak she only sees her pain.
Sometimes she’s nice, others she’s scathing; always she’s absent.
I wish she desired to know me, my beliefs, and favourite things in life. How to spell my name. After all this time, we are still strangers.
Grief is a funny thing. Now that she is truly out of my life, I no longer miss her.
My daughter has been asking questions, wanting to know about my childhood and where I came from. Beyond describing her appearance, I don’t have much to tell her about my mother.
It seems that women died when I was a baby, and I’ve never liked the woman who took her place.