Growing up as a brown girl, my earliest memories are of adults telling me how I should be. I now see that much of that messaging was a concerted socialisation campaign, sometimes unconsciously projected by adults onto children. The effect was a cumulative undermining, questioning how we took up space and what made us us. Our hair, our clothing, our “attitude” were all objects of scrutiny, usually from those who felt we were “too” something. Now I realise that their own fear drove their criticism of us. One of the earliest criticisms I remember was from an uncle who accused me of being too strong-willed. Luckily, my grandfather didn’t allow this opinion to stand.
As I look back at these memories, I see how these messages led me to question myself and, at times, reject myself in a world that often tells us there’s something wrong with us. In my environment, I often felt different, and the difference sometimes led me to dislike who I was. This, in turn, contrasted with what I observed in my mother.
Defiant self-definition
My mother was a great teacher of defiance. As a child, I watched how others would comment about her mothering style and her manner as a wife and nurturer, and how she refused to do what others felt she ought to. She would always listen to their comments, smile and continue doing things her way. Some of those comments might have hurt her, but she preferred defiance to the standards imposed by others. She preferred to be herself. In a community where our dense living conditions meant that we lived under a microscope, with much gossiping among neighbours, she preferred to keep to herself. She would rather read or watch TV since people would talk about her anyway. Even in her family, she was her own person, refusing to bow to the pressures others tried to impose, choosing instead to be who she was.
While everything in her environment tried to define her behaviour, my mother was unapologetically herself. She defied social stereotyping to do as she chose. Her defiance confused and sometimes agitated me. I could not understand why she would not try to be more like others – why she would not try to fit in. My own longing for acceptance led me to work hard at hiding these ‘deficiencies’ or make up for them by doing the things my mother refused to do. I tried to deflect attention away from her, even wanting to fill the gap and compensate for her stubborn resistance to conform to what others wanted or expected from her. I couldn’t understand why my mother did not seem to need to be liked, respected and accepted by our community.
Looking back, I realise that it had less to do with taking a political stand than that it was more painful for her not to be who she was. As a result, my mother honoured who she was (in all her imperfections), choosing to show up in the world as herself no matter what.
Bold vulnerability
As an adult, I learned that when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we find the courage to be real and to share our problems, dreams and insecurities with others. Accepting our vulnerability enables us to value our complete selves and know that our self-acceptance, rather than external approval, defines our worth. However, up until my early adulthood, I had a complex relationship with vulnerability. Perhaps it was in response to witnessing my mother’s vulnerability. In my childlike sense-making, I interpreted my mother’s vulnerability as a weakness, laying many of the challenges I experienced in the domestic sphere at the feet of her vulnerability.
Seeing my mother’s vulnerability up close was difficult. In my critical unconsciousness, I struggled with anger, never quite able to understand my mother’s reality. I could not see the fullness of her experience and acknowledge the stress she experienced as she navigated the narrow definitions of womanhood, wifehood and motherhood. At the time, I was unable to understand how rare it was for a brown woman to show her pain instead of reverting to stereotypes of women as having “unrelenting grace under pressure” and the “ability to withstand significant adversity”. My mother was raw in her honesty of how bewildered she was at the breakdown of her relationship. And in this process, I got to witness her humanity. Yet, it took me almost twenty years to understand how radical it was for an uneducated brown working-class woman to counter the internalised narratives of black women’s invincibility and expressions of strength and resilience. Only as an adult, with critical consciousness, and more profound empathy for her experience, could I appreciate the challenges she faced as she modelled emotional vulnerability; something that I struggled to do for the longest time. My mother was incredibly flawed and by no means a saint. I am well aware of how her determination to stick to her way often went way beyond discomfort and sometimes caused us, her children, emotional harm. However, as I reflect on her legacy, I cannot help but recognise her lack of parenting knowledge and of role models to guide her. I find it ironic that my mother, who had far less education than me, was far more adept and in touch with her experience than I was. As I continuously work on my own journey with vulnerability, I am eternally grateful to her for these lessons and acknowledge our very different realities.
Asking for help as a superpower
My mother was pretty much self-taught. She had to drop out of primary school to care for her many younger siblings, as her parents were both fruit and vegetable vendors at the time. She was less literate than everyone else in the family, and sometimes people would joke about it. She was unperturbed. She read widely and watched a lot of television, even learning English this way.
I always marvelled at my mother’s ability to assess a situation and figure out what she needed to do. Without hesitation, she would just get on and do it. She was never afraid to ask for help and to admit what she did not know. She was always willing to learn. I remember her going to a bank and finding the forms she needed to complete highly complex. However, she felt no shame in asking for help. This willingness to ask for help contrasted with my super independence. I took such great pride in being able to do it myself and ask no one for help. My mother would often remind me how, even as a child, I would never ask her to help me with anything, whereas my other siblings were all too eager to ask for help. When I look at my mother’s example and contrast it with my own, I can see how my refusal to ask for help is a kind of arrogance, a blind insistence on doing it all by myself, no matter what. On the one hand, this trait is driven by the fear of appearing weak. On the other hand, it reflects the underlying belief that no one’s help is worth the price of my vulnerability, and that ultimately, no one can console me or ease my pain; no one is that strong if I am not.
Even when I already have too much on my plate, I find it difficult to ask for help or to say no. As I started understanding my mother and myself better, I realised that I am not balancing giving and receiving. So, asking for help is important — even if it is a little scary. I learnt the hard way once I overcame the block against asking for help, that asking enables me to reach out and build connections with others. I learnt that independence is not meant to isolate, that I am not meant to handle everything alone, and that the sooner I open myself up, the better it will be for everyone.
As I understood more about social change and activism and encountered the work of ancestors such as Audre Lorde, I learned that “without community, there is no liberation”. This challenged the very individualistic approaches of neoliberal white supremacy culture. In many ways, I could appreciate the wisdom of my mother’s approach to life and had to challenge myself to rethink and recalibrate to integrate her teachings into my life and work.
Power and subversion
One of my favourite lessons from my mother was about power and subversion. In a world where black women are often portrayed as victims of complicated systems of exploitation and oppression, this lesson from her speaks of their agency. My mother was the queen of subversion. You would be fooled into believing that what you see is what you get with her. She had so many layers, and only if she allowed you closer, would you be able to appreciate her many depths. She learned to read a situation and figure out her best strategy. Some might call it dishonest, but I think it was often pretty smart of her.
My mother found work a necessity rather than a pleasure, seeing it as a means of survival. Taking care of eight siblings from the age of 10 onwards, and then working from the age of 16, she was tired of the hustle of her life. She and my father were factory workers, which she hated more than anything. Her relationship with work was much more of a realistic acceptance of her circumstances. She did not have opportunities to explore her talents and interests, as her life had primarily been spent in service and the care of others. While good at what she did, she never sought any advancement, rejecting the additional responsibility that might come with it. This disposition, suggesting she needed care rather than being able to ‘perform’ care, was a red herring. She enjoyed it immensely when others underestimated her resourcefulness and capability, allowing her to push back and exercise her subversion muscle. Subversion requires great courage as it is often the means through which women (or those in positions of less power) use very subtle but radical ways to circumvent patriarchal norms.
As a child, I observed her acts of subversion, unaware that this was her agency in action because she allowed others to believe something to get the outcome she wanted. As I got older, I would catch her in acts of subversion in her relationship with my father – and at times, would use it against her, getting her to buy my silence. She remained unapologetic about this strategy – and in some ways, it helped me to understand her better. Strangely enough, her modelling of subversion was the very training ground for my later activism and my analysis of the complex ways in which people hold power.
As I made sense of this strategy of hers, I came to understand how it was influenced by external forces such as patriarchy, racism and capitalism, and how the negative effects of these forces on our experiences shape our decisions to overcome any negative effects. My mother’s understanding of this, her acceptance of herself and her courage in disrupting aspects of her experiences were important in shaping my confidence to achieve whatever I want.
Radical self-acceptance
Last but not least, my mother taught me more about radical self-acceptance than I could ever learn in any self-help book. With her defiant personality – and her continuous modelling of doing what she wanted in the face of resistance from those who tried to define her – she was great at modelling radical self-acceptance. Her self-acceptance allowed her to acknowledge her flaws and shrug them off if she rejected someone’s interpretation of her experience.
Up until she died, she showed me that she was completely okay with herself and that she would continue to do life on her terms. Now I know that living one’s truth can be scary and isolating, yet she courageously expressed herself and chose to live her truth.
As I find the language to understand my mother, I have come to celebrate her role in reinforcing my belief that “I am valuable and good enough.” Choosing to live her truth meant she chose to love herself unconditionally. Her lessons in radical self-acceptance showed me that it comes from within, challenging the many opposing narratives that may confront one. I am immensely grateful to this human for journeying with me as my mother. She was the best person to ground me and teach me what I needed to know on my journey of becoming. I continue to see the many ways she taught and modelled what it means to walk through this earthly experience as fully me! Her example taught me that radical self-acceptance practices as liberatory political resistance expose the paradox that freedom from suffering is a daily practice.
