It is now April 26, 2019 and I am going over the reality in my head, you have passed away. I can’t get the grip of it in my mind or heart. As long as you were alive it felt like I had a lifetime to get my finances in order to come and see you. You were just to young to go so fast and unexpectedly. Just like my life with you was cut short once again you’re gone now forever and I don’t even know what date or what caused your passing. My God, you were just never to be a part of my life at all, I thought to myself. Ten years was the last time we spoke and Iwanted you to come and see us, I pleaded with you. You were the last to the meaning of my life as I just turned fifty-three. I wanted to get the chance to see you face to talk about life, my life and yours. I wanted so much to know so much about you, your life, and why you left us the way you did and now like a thief in the night you’re gone. I am sorry I took for granted, some how you’d be there when I was ready to come meet with you. I am angry that whatever was wrong with you didn’t allow you to put us first to bare the pain and come to come visit us. It would of been easier for you to come than all your children and grand kids. What was so bad, your arthritis, come on now! Canada is not always that cold, you could of make the sacrifice even if it had kill you, just to see us one more time and now look you’re still dead anyway.

There was a time I loved you unconditionally, after all you are my mommy and then there was times I resented you when I needed a mother the most. It hurt me at the age of ten when my sister stated out clear that you’re dead to her and I couldn’t understand her pain. Only after her death and the way she died, then did I understood her cries of hatred and resentment towards you. Where were you when we were hungry and left alone for days while she was left to take care of us, when the television fell into the crib and almost killed our younger bother at that time? The neighbors came to realize that we were left alone for days or even months, then the police and grandma took us in. We were babies and she was only four years old. Where were you when your children was being passed around from place to place to live, be mistreated, your girl children was left alone to be attacked none stop by a child molester predators who was entrusted to take care of them, that send you eldest daughter to drugs, alcohol, prostitution and bad relationships all the way to her demise, your middle daughter to fear relationship dew to vulnerability and fear of being abused, your last to spend her life ever fighting to stand up for herself after being told it was her fault for being molested and not tough enough to fight, being an over protected mother to her children to the point of obsessing over their well being not allowing them to go through life pains and struggles without trying to prevent them from falling, always jumping in front to take the bullet, not allowing them to get cut and bleed a little, obsessing to the point of making herself sick and crazy and as for your our boy children who felt bullied and abused by their father mentally and physically having no idea how it would be to be in the care of a mother. Where were when we needed the comfort and the wisdom of a mother in our times of puberty, schools, jobs and dreams for the future, joys and saddness, fears and doubts, first love and broken hearts, marriages and children, labour pains, health issues,everything that could be shared with a mother, from keeping a house to cooking, any and everything that represents a mom and her love for her family, mother? I so resented you for not being there even now as I am going through menopause and empty nest syndrome.

I remembered the day my father left and you cried as he kissed you goodbye and I vomited and out dog Buster licked it up. You made noodle soup for us the next day left said you’d be back and never returned. I recalled my brother throwing a book we had in the backyard and you or my eldest sister was going to go get it. You told us we couldn’t leave the house, but you were gone so long that by the time my eldest sister opened the backdoor to get the book to read it to calm my younger bothers who was crying that they were hungry the grass was taller than her so she couldn’t get it. The only time you came back was to have my baby brother in the house. I remembered you with two other women locked up in the room and you groaning as we all sat together in the living room being quite as you told us to. We all heard a cry and one of the woman with you brought us the baby to see we had a baby brother. Then you stayed for a few days and left the placenta in a pan on the floor in the bathroom and it would frighten me everytime I saw it, it looked so gross and there was flies all around it. You left again with the baby never to return for a long time again and when you did you returned you came with a man, put us all in the living room once again with the belt swinging between your legs, you said, sit there and be quite don’t move and you and the man was in the same room with the door locked laughing and groaning. At the time I didn’t understand, thought you were having another baby and as I have grown I realized that you were having sex in my father’s house with another man in our presence and you were drunk. I resented and hated you as my older sister explains and we spoke about it. I believed your action was the reason for my father to have left us and never came back. That was the last time I would ever remember us in our home. I know now as a mother you have to wait six weeks before you can have sex so it was that long or even more you left us alone and I never saw our baby brother again. I remembered seeing you once at our grandmother house in the bushes and twice at my aunty once when my grandfather died and another time you lay on her Sofa crying not even talking to us listening to the Beatles song Let it be and at another time you were staying at a house next to our school where every day I would hope to see you and one day we did and you brought us treats and lunch it was the happiest day cause you hugged and kissed us and cried to let us go. That’s the first time I realized you must love us and something is wrong with you. Never to see you again until I was eleven years old and visited the Caribbean with my dad and even then I didn’t get a chance to speak with you, my dad had refused to leave me with you for whatever reason. Then I found out that you had kidnapped my eldest sister to look after my baby brother we didn’t see after you give birth and left us in the house all alone, so he didn’t trust you. But I’ve always felt from you that my eldest sister and brother after me, you loved the most, cause they were your first. I have always saw myself as a daddy’s girl anyways, often wondering what kind of mother daughter relationship we would of had. I saw a lot of you in my eldest sister so we would of loved each other to death, but fight a lot I thought. I guess I saw you in her cause she was the only mother figure for us all without you being there and my dad always said she was just like you, especially her behavior. I never thought it to be a compelment because it was when my dad was angry at her.

Look what you’ve done to us again I thought to myself, when my eldest sister died. In life as in death, we needed you, I needed you to have been here to help take care of her children and bury your daughter. Instead she took care of me and all our siblings when we were left alone by you and it was only fitting that I return the blessing. When she had died my aunt cried when she remembered her when she came to the Caribbean for a visit and she met with my eldest sister that was with you when you kidnapped her and all she can worry and cry about is if we were alone and hungry, so sad a responsibility of the heart and mind for a nine years old baby girl. Were you ever thinking of your children like that? I thought to myself. Ever since her passing nothing have ever been the same in all our lives. She was an important part of holding us all together even though her drunken out of control behavior use to reek havoc, now none of us siblings hasn’t spoken to each other for decades now. Like Jesus when he was crucified all his disciples scattered so did we cause we had no parents to help us heal after the lose of a siblings, this is where the breast and shoulders of a mother comes into play after your children has grown up and you no longer have to nurse or burp them,but just allow them to cry their fears,doubt, pain on your breast as a pillow and hold them up on your shoulder. Where were you? We needed you, I needed you. Just as in life her death also reek havoc and to this day we can’t face each other cause all it does is reminds us of how tormented, painful and cruel a life we were dealt with. We can’t face each other even wth pretense cause the truth continues to pierce us through our hearts and minds the absence of her presence. Like the lost of you, how are we to go on now with no answers to our questions, why?

Thank you mother for all this pain and suffering I’ve endured not having you, in my life. As Psalm 27:10 stipulated “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” I had looked for you in every mother figure and women I’ve encountered in my life, like a lost sheep, I needed guidance of a shepherd to have found my way back home. Home where I was not afraid, but felt secured and at peace. You had chose out my path I thought when you left, a path of a wanderer, abounded, abused, so much pain and needless suffering, all because I believe you were selfish. There was a time I remembered as I had just gotten married and I spoke to you on the phone after you saw my wedding video, all you were concerned about was money and clothing you wanted, not about my life and my sibings. I told this story to a friend of mine mother and Iwanted her to agree with me that you were a bad mother for that, but instead she said, regardless she’s you mother. My question was why wouldn’t she be more concerned about us than the material things, what kind of mother is this? And yes after all she abandoned us and now she has the nerve to ask for anything, she should be the one trying to offer at least her heart and an apology. I believed everything you did to us was about yourself. You and your mother’s dysfunctions over your father and your life; then that of yours and my father’s. Because of this I sought the Lord and He heard me. I didn’t want to carry on the dysfunction, mental issue and boy I fought it with all my might. I often thought of how I would feel if you were to pass, but I never thought my heart and mind would still long for you with such grief. I often said out of sight out of mind, it would be no different than it always has been, you not in my life anyways and life will go on. But the devil is a liar, being a mother myself and the Lord opening my blind eyes, my stubborn mind and frozen heart just as Jesus did on te cross to say, “forgive them father for they know not what they do.” My life carried me to the cross with Jesus because of you, as he was innocent so was I mother, and yet an innocent baby.

My grandmother never told you her story cause back in the days it was considered none of children business. I didn’t get the chance to know your story, but I know a little of it through my own life as God allowed me to understand. You left us and started a new family with four children and have you forgot the six that you left, how blessed you are to have three daughters and three sons like they called us the Brady Bunch. I often wondered were you replacing us once again for your own selfish reason? I’ve heard from many people you are a wonderful mother even so with those children as once with us, but truly they got you at the best time in your life as you were matured and you made up with them what you couldn’t have done for us by far, as Psalms 51:17 says, “The sacrifice of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” So God must of blessed you with another chance by blessing you with more children. I’ve heard from family members that you’d hold all six of our pictures and cry for days in a depression. I heard that you’d mourn for us even with your new family, you never forgot us. Your heart always ached for each and everyone of us. And my shame was I never wanted to disrupt your perfect little family cause if you loved us you’d do anything to have come to us and find us and starting another family would be the last thing on your mind. The first thing would of been to make your wrong right, no? Then I found out you were an alcoholic, a smoker and you spend a lot of time in bars drinking and picking up men. The man that you are with now is a cripple and had no control over you, you did whatever you wanted to. I am not judging you, because strangely after my sister died I myself started to smoke and then quit, drinking was never my thing. I then started to recognize the patterns of mental depression within myself and siblings after the pass of the eldest and it is from both you and our father, that’s why you both couldn’t last together. We all in some way or the other inherited both of your mental issues and dysfunctions and attitudes, like a hereditary curse and spell.

I am not here judging you and if I am is because everything that you’ve been through and done I’ve experienced same things or even worst, but I fought and never give up. I had children and was young also, but unlike you for different men and left alone no mother or their fathers to help me, but I didn’t abandoned them. Unlike you I had c-cection to have all of them spending time in the hospital coming home alone in pain with no one to help but God if something had gone wrong. I mustered up the strength to do everything all by myself with the help of God guidance. I struggle with unspeakable tragedies in my life that I wanted to die, kill myself, but I had my children if nothing else, to be strong and to live for. I guess I have to thank you for that because I never would want to leave them to suffer what I did without a mother. Don’t get me wrong my father wasn’t any better either, but this is about you right now. I don’t think to myself as being stronger or better than you, question is, why didn’t you fight if I could? I didn’t get the chance to learn about your life and what caused you to be the way you were, but I know my story so that I can tell my children and they would never have to worry or wonder, all thanks to you.

You left me again mommy, why? My heart, mind, and spirit is so hurting with you and for you!