M A D R E

I don’t have the best relationship with my mother.

We’re just very different people.. it’s crazy how someone can birth you and.. be so contrary to who you are. It’s even more difficult to find the nuance when that’s supposed to be your mother, probably the strongest bond on Earth to have.

We see the world differently, and that wouldn’t be a problem if she didn’t make it a point to at least try to spoil my world, only because it doesn’t fit her expectation.

At first, I didn’t hold it against her that she seemed unable to take me as I came. Because her story and lifetime were tough from the start.

Her father passed away when she was still very young, less than 10 years old, and her mother didn’t at the time have the means to care for her.

So she was given to her aunt to raise, and yes, she absolutely had a Cinderella story.

I have to give it to her, she’s smart as hell.

She did well in school, but was treated like a maid and was a maid at home.

She cleaned, cooked and did her homework diligently, feeling that she owed her existence to her aunt and her family, and perhaps her child mind accepted that in order to earn her space, in that home, that was what she had to do.

Her aunt was the wife to one of the president’s

big brother.

That president served from 2000-2012 in Senegal, and so although my mother did not grow up with money, according to what I was told, at some point that side of the family’s financial conditions probably shifted drastically.

Anyway, as for any person, her childhood affected her in ways I probably will never fully understand.

She became who she became, a teacher, a tech specialist, well versed in the art of assimilation and adapting to a world she thought, I think, owed her.

When she left home and created a life in the U.S, I remember my grandfather telling me that in a conversation with her, she shared that she lived some of the best years of her life there, and that she wouldn’t want to come back to Dakar anytime soon.

Maybe ever.

This is why you ought to be careful what you say.. because 20+ years in, she has not been able to obtain a green card to travel out of U.S territory.