KAMLA PERSAD-BISSESSAR
"A mother's sacrifice is not just in what she provides, but also in what she withholds to protect her children."
ON MAY 12 we celebrated Mother’s Day. Every year on that day we all pay tribute to our mothers and espouse our great love for them. Do we do these tributes to make ourselves feel good, or do we do them genuinely for our mothers? Sometimes the line between both purposes is blurred.
In our tributes we never honestly reflect on the pain or hurt we sometimes caused our mothers because of our selfish desires. We never speak of the indifferent, dismissive, negligent attitude we sometimes showed them because, in our entitled minds as children, we egoistically take it for granted that they would always be there for us, forever, no matter how badly or selfishly we behaved.
My beloved, dearly departed Ma, Rita Persad, was born into severe poverty in colonial Trinidad. Her father died when she was small and she was raised by a widowed, single mother. By age ten, Ma was doing laborious garden work and menial jobs to help support her family.
In the Indian caste system, Ma would have been categorised in the lowest caste. In the Western class system, she would also have been categorised in the lowest class, the underclass.
While working as a maid, and doing menial tasks at a shop, she met my father. They began a relationship and married some time after I was born as I vaguely remember the occasion. His family was opposed to any relationship with my mother and he was cast out from his home, so we were always on the move renting house to house.
While renting in Siparia she ran a roti shop; eventually that folded and she began making pholourie which she sold from a glass case at the roadside. I remember my birthday came around and I invited my friends from Siparia. I clearly remember that absolutely no one came to my birthday except for one girl, Janice Singh; the parents of the other children did not allow them to attend.
It was on that birthday that I first understood how my Ma was viewed and that I was viewed the same as her. Ma was seen socially as a poor, uneducated, menial task worker, low-caste underclass woman from a single-parent home.
In that time, women like Ma were objects of derision, ridicule, scorn, viewed as lower than the white line on the road who could barely read or write, destined for an existence of marginalisation, humiliation and nothingness. Not everyone can have a storybook life, life is imperfect.
Being a child and not knowing any better, feeling ashamed of how we were seen socially and naively wanting to fit in, one day we harassed our mother, broke her glass case and coerced her to stop selling pholourie at the roadside. Unknowing to us at that time, every cent she earned from that pholourie went to her children’s upkeep. On that day my mother’s sacrifice and love were betrayed by her ignorant shallow children who were chasing superficial social acceptance. To this day I regret my actions.
When my father’s family opposed my move to further my stud
