Chapter Three of my work in progress presents the first portrait of a woman in my life: my mother. As the most influential person in shaping my self-identity and vision of the world, I could not neglect to tell her story. Moreover, given the current reality of our lives as women in 21st century America, where conservative legislators and the women who support them have forced us back into the 1950s and 1960s, my mother’s story becomes even more relevant.

The first draft of this chapter was written in February 2017, shortly after my mother disowned me as her daughter. In revising this chapter six years later during a period of grief, following her death a year ago on August 22nd, I’ve come to realize how much of my mother’s own pain and loss I’m still carrying.

Given my closeness to the subject, I found it difficult to tell her story without bias or judgement. My objective stance faltered during the narration of intense interactions cited in the portrait. Though I know very little of her life over the thirty years of our separation, my siblings have all shared stories of the terror they had endured. Despite my questions, none of them have been forthcoming about the incident or event that unleashed her rage against them and their spouses. My turn came later, following our reunion in 2003.

The story’s time frame is not linear. Prompted by Mother’s tendency to uproot the past during our conversations, the narrative moves back and forth between our time together in Guyana and in Los Angeles, Southern California. Do let me know if you find this confusing.

Chapter Three: Mother – An Indomitable Spirit

Mother was never a hugging and kissing type of person. She could be demanding and scolded us whenever we failed her expectations. The world could be ruthless; we had to be tough. I don’t recall her giving us lashes: That was Father’s role. “Wait till your father get home,” she would say.

During the twenty years I lived under her roof, I never doubted that she loved us and wanted the best for us. After all, she dedicated all her time and energy to caring for us. Convinced that a high school education would give us a better chance of escaping poverty, she labored daily for long hours as a work-at-home seamstress. During peak periods, such as the Christmas Season and Old Year’s Night, she would even sew through the night.

As the eldest, I was the first to attend high school. From my bed on the top bunk, which I shared with my sister in our one-bedroom bottom flat in the tenement yard, I could hear Mother argue my case with Father in the dining room. Just short of three points in the high school entrance examinations, I had failed to obtain a government scholarship but had earned a place at one of our country’s top three secondary schools for girls.

“You did hear her teacher,” Mother said. “She bright. She going do well—”

“Where the rass I going get money for that? When she leave school, let her get a job at Bookers Stores. They pay good.” At the time, Father worked as a clerk, clearing imported goods at the port, for a small, family-owned, importer and wholesale fabrics firm.

“I going pay her school fees. I going take on more clients.”

And she did. Not just for me, but also for my three brothers and sister.

In those early days, I didn’t know that Mother had enjoyed a comfortable life as a kid growing up in a large house in Barbados, where her father was born, as well as in British Guiana. I also didn’t know that her parents did not keep their promise to return to then British Guiana for her and her two younger sisters. One day here in Los Angeles, while I chatted with her as she watered her flower garden, she flung the plastic watering can to the ground.

“It’s the nuns’ fault,” Mother said, raising her voice in anger. She could fly into a rage without a moment’s warning. “I had to become a Catholic to go to their school.”

Having learned not to intervene when she got into a tantrum, I waited for her explanation. “My rich aunt in Barbados would’ve let me live with her. She liked me. I was her white-skinned niece. It vexed her I had turned Catholic.”

This was the first time I had heard any mention of her black Barbadian relatives. Unlike her Portuguese mother’s side of the family, her Barbadian father’s family were of a different Christian denomination.

Mother regretted never being able to finish elementary school. The reason for this is unclear: Sending girl children to school was not a priority in the 1940s. How she fretted whenever one of us got a low grade in school!

“You want-a clean gutters on the streets,” she would ask my brothers.

She did not spare me and my sister. “You want-a clean other people house? You want-a end up like me?”

I couldn’t bear it whenever she got riled up over our poor grades. Our success in school was a top priority for her. I would lie in bed crying as she ranted, while the needle of her sewing machine pierced every word.

During my second year in high school, Mother fought with Father to leave the tenement yard for a better location.

“How you expect your daughter to bring her new friends to this mud hole?” Mother said, during yet another disagreement with Father.

“The rent too blasted high,” Father said, raising his voice above hers. “You want me to start thiefing now? You never satisfy.”

“I talk with Auntie Katie. She agree to share the rent. Is three bedrooms. She like the back bedroom next to the toilet and bathroom.”

“The two-a-you got it all figured out, eh?” He slammed his hand on the kitchen table.

Somehow, Mother won yet another battle. Auntie Katie, our next-door neighbor with whom Mother had become very close, moved with us into a modern concrete bottom flat of a two-story house, just a block away in the middle-class neighborhood of Queenstown. With Father’s volatile behavior when drunk, the arrangement with Auntie Katie lasted for just over a year. After she left, Mother and Father moved into the room she had occupied, and the middle room became Mother’s sewing room. The five of us continued sharing the largest front bedroom, adjacent to the living room.

Over the following years, Mother furnished our new home with modern furniture. She upgraded her hand-crank table model Singer sewing machine for a foot-treadle model, the latest model in the 1960s. A local furniture maker she contracted constructed a cutting table with drawers for storing her sewing materials. We got a refrigerator. She bought everything on cash installment plans as was the practice in those days.

As her sewing assistant—hemming dresses and sewing on buttons, press studs, and hooks and eyes—Mother allowed me to continue working in a corner of the sewing room when clients came with their fabrics, to try on their dress or dresses before finishing, and to have their final fit and delivery.

One of her favorite clients was a single Portuguese woman in her early twenties, just five years younger than Mother. She had a vivacious and outgoing personality. Her boisterous laughter punctuated the stories she told Mother about the latest gossip at the Department Store where she worked as an office clerk. Without taking her eyes off the needle of the sewing machine, Mother listened to her woes about her boyfriend and in dealing with the men in the office. She made no secret of wanting to catch a rich husband. She liked her dresses to hug her curves, with low necklines to show off her cleavage. To her delight, Mother’s skill at sewing bust darts made her appear much bustier.

Miss Vivacious became Mother’s first bride, increasing her workload a hundredfold. As the wedding date drew closer, Mother sewed through the night on several occasions. In addition to the bridal dress, there were also the gowns for the three bridesmaids and the bride’s mother. My sister joined me in the laborious work of securing the embroidered lace appliques, beads, and sequins of the bridal gown. The church wedding for the bride and groom, the son of a prominent Portuguese family, attracted lots of curious onlookers.

Mother’s wedding dress and those of the bridesmaids won attention and new higher-paying clients. With the added workload, Mother hired a domestic servant (as they were called at the time) to take care of our washing and ironing.

Mother’s most regular client was a Chinese woman in her late forties. She and her husband owned and operated a general store in Georgetown’s commercial district. She was always well-dressed from her salon-done hairstyle to her painted fingernails and toenails, with matching jewelry and complete makeup. Every month, she brought Mother several cuts of cloth to make four to five new outfits. She never spoke about her husband, but another client told Mother that he was having an affair with a younger woman.

From among her several clients, Mother developed an enduring friendship with these two women, even after they migrated to North America.

While Mother stressed the importance of a good high school education to secure a well-paying job, she knew that a good appearance also mattered. Skilled at cutting out dress patterns to maximize every inch of the fabric, she managed to clothe me and my sister in the latest fashion at the lowest cost. If my sister and I could marry a doctor or a lawyer, her heart’s desire would be fulfilled. She never considered that I would have a dream of my own.

“I didn’t sacrifice my life to give you a good education for you to enter the convent,” Mother told me, when, at fifteen years old, I first gave her the news about my decision.

I heard the distress in her voice. I heard her sewing machine falter along the seam of the dress trapped under the broken needle.

Without any further discussion on the matter, Mother ensured that I went to every young people’s party, dressed in the prettiest frocks to catch the eye of every male present. When I graduated from senior high school at eighteen years old, she made her intentions clear. “You have to work for at least a year before you decide about becoming a nun.”

As always, I did as she wanted. To appease her.

Years later, here in Los Angeles, she became enraged at my refusal to do her bidding.

“I would’ve made a better nun.” She hurled the words at me. “You’re too selfish. You forget all you’ve achieved is because of my hard work.” She jabbed her chest.

Now a mature woman who had raised two sons alone in Brazil, I was no longer the compliant daughter who had helped her to raise my siblings and to make her burden lighter in every way I could.

“You’re not my daughter,” she shouted on another occasion, slamming the door of her apartment in my face and triggering the security alarm she had installed. From that day on, I ceased to exist for her. Such was the nature of her wrath for failing to live up to her expectations.

When economic conditions had worsened following our country’s independence from Britain in 1966, Mother, like thousands of Guyanese, saw no future for us in the newly independent nation of Guyana. After I left home for the convent in January 1971, she began sending my siblings, one at a time, to live overseas. Two brothers first lived with an old friend in Canada. My sister lived with one of Mother’s American-born sisters in the United States.

I was still in the convent when Mother left Guyana for the United States in the late 1970s—never to return. At the time, my youngest brother, who held a well-paying job at the local branch of an American bank, remained behind with Father. His immigration papers to America arrived years later in the early 1980s.

When Mother filed for divorce, her American lawyer mailed me the documents to serve Father. His anger left me with a migraine headache that lasted for three days. Their marriage had not been one based on love and mutual respect. Rather, it was one of expedience prompted by the societal Christian norms of the time for pregnant teenagers out-of-wedlock.

To outsiders, Mother and Father had seemed well paired. They were similar in height, about five feet six inches. They were both of mixed race and ethnicity. Neither were churchgoers. She was not a beauty, but her white complexion and pear-shaped body with shapely legs attracted the attention of men. He was a handsome man with a muscular physique from weightlifting. Both enjoyed dancing. But Mother had such an indomitable spirit that Father had no chance of conquering her heart, if he ever considered such a possibility. During the years I lived with him after leaving the convent, several women showed an interest in having a closer connection. Yet, he never dated or married again. Neither did Mother.

When we were kids, they went to dances and the cinema with friends. This changed over the years as Mother had little time for recreational activities. Father, whose life centered around his numerous friends, always had friends over at the weekend for drinks, eats, and card games. These became more lavish when we moved to the Queenstown flat that had a large backyard. For several years until Mother ended it with her persistent complaints, he organized a monthly barbecue on Saturday nights with music and dancing. My siblings and I had to help with the preparations and clean-up.

As early as I can remember, they argued about everything: money, Father’s drinking, his no-good friends, putting his friends before his children, his lack of ambition, her endless demands, her extravagant taste, and more money issues.

When I migrated to Brazil in 1987, Father was left alone in Guyana. He passed away in 2001. Still, until her death in 2022, Mother remained chained to his corpse, unleashing her fury and emotional pain on each of her children and their spouses. My sons, too, received an earful of hate about their “good-for-nothing father,” making it difficult for them to connect with her as their grandmother.

“He robbed me of my youth,” she told me one day outside her apartment in Los Angeles, furious at me for forgiving him. “Let me tell you what kind of man he really was.” She poked her forefinger in my face.

“I don’t want to know,” I told her, backing off. “It’s all in the past and long forgiven. You should forgive him, too.”

“Over my dead body!”

She flounced off, leaving me standing alone in the courtyard.