I made my mother cry on Friday

May 12, 2013 Features / Columnists, My Column

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When I was a child I got into problems with my mother more times than I can remember. I suppose my case was like every young boy. For some strange reason, young people seem to detest members of the opposite sex. Parents and siblings and cousins are the exception.
I still remember her taking me to school one day and I was somewhat embarrassed because I wanted my friends to see me as a big boy. Boys who go to school with their mothers are known as mother’s boys. Then there was our poverty. My mother could not dress as flashily as some of the other mothers. Then there was the question of her age. In my eyes she was old but as I look back, she was no more than thirty-four when I was ten.
Then there was my first day at secondary school. Again it was my mother who took me. When we reached Georgetown, having travelled from Blankenburg, West Coast Demerara, she took my hand. As far as I was concerned I was a big boy… so why should my mother want to treat me like a child and hold my hand in the city streets?
That hand was to fall on me so many times, as recently as when I was in my forties and had been involved in a spat with my then wife. My mother came over because my wife called her in tears, listened to my wife, then slapped me without even hearing my side of the story.
But she was not always a tyrant; she taught me to love life and to appreciate every day. People would say to me that they never saw me angry. I thank my mother for that. She taught me to ignore insults and there were many of those when I was growing up. Being poor was a crime.
Because of that poverty I learnt to swim, to climb a coconut tree, and to do so many things that people take for granted. I had to climb coconut trees to get the branches to fashion coconut brooms that I sold with my mother to put food on the table. I learned to swim because there was food in the backlands and more often than not I had to cross canals.
Today I treasure every moment I spent with my mother. Before she left Guyana a few decades ago, I would take her to Winfield James’s Mother’s Day concert. I enjoyed hearing her singing along and then she would be talking about the event for days. Come to think of it, she could not have been much older than I am now.
I remember leaving home for the first time. I was heading to Bartica, because the first job offer I got came from St John the Baptist Anglican School. I did not know where Bartica was, except that I had to go there by boat. The year was 1966 and I would be eighteen on November 1. The letter from the school said that I should report for the job so that I could be confirmed when I was eighteen. I did not know that I could have begun working earlier.
On October 29, my mother got me up, prayed with me and with a five-dollar bill that she borrowed, escorted me to the wharf at Kingston. We left home in Beterverwagting about three that morning. I did not know that I could have got up later, cross the Demerara River and head to Parika and catch the boat later.
I began my adult life with that five dollars. I paid the steamer fare of about three dollars and landed on Bartica with the change. That was when life changed for my mother and siblings; I sent home money despite the distractions. The rent was paid and food landed on the table.
Today I share an unbreakable bond with my brothers and sisters to the extent that we call each other at the drop of a hat or for no reason at all.
On Friday I made my mother cry. There was a woman who started me off in school. Enid Bart could not have been more than twenty-three when I entered the doors of the kindergarten school where she taught for the first time. The year was 1952.
It was a tearful time because I had to leave Mommy. I learnt that I cried so much that my mother had to come and sit in school with me. It probably happened for two or three days. Enid Bart put an end to the tears with some slaps on my behind.
She always saw me as special and for years she was there for me and my siblings and my mother. In my adult years I always took time to visit her in the house she always lived at Den Amstel. When my mother came home on some vacation, I would take her to visit Enid Bart so that they could roll back the years.
Enid Bart died on Wednesday. She was eighty-five. I informed my eighty-nine-year-old mother who is now in Staten Island with one of my sisters. I think what bothered her a lot was the fact that she was here for the Christmas holidays and I had promised to take her to visit Miss Bart, as was always the case when she came to Guyana. I did not this time around.
I made my mother cry two days before Mother’s Day. I will talk with her today, though, as has always been the case.

 

 

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