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My Mother’s Resilience or Snow for Orange Blossoms
The first time my mother saw snowflakes falling in London, she thought they were orange blossoms. Her early childhood in 50s Jamaica was defined by fruits and flowers and the chickens she used to chase. London was really the end of that childhood. The snow fell like the frozen tears she couldn’t cry.
Her first mother, Miss Catherine, was her paternal grandmother, a domestic worker, who look after her while her biological parents worked in the UK. Knowing nothing about her parents, her sun rose and set with Miss Catherine until she died, leaving my mother in a precarious existence, a sort of house girl with strangers. She didn’t see her real mother again until she was about eight when she arrived in London, England and met her mother and father for the very first time.
She didn’t get to grieve Miss Catherine or understand that her experiences were not peculiar to her. She was part of a generation of ‘barrel’ children traumatized by being left behind in Jamaica as their parents followed the SS Windrush to the UK in the 60s and 70s.
Some experienced abuse, some abandonment. Familial bonds were rudely interrupted or more like never properly formed and rarely repaired. Ironically it was with Miss Catherine that my mother felt loved among the fruits and flowers that frame the memories of her childhood. She even…