West Indian parenting style…
Photo by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda.
West Indian parenting style led to the oppression of a generation of Caribbean-American women.
Met God, She’s Black created a podcast dedicated to the stories of participants open to sharing life experiences that are deemed uncomfortable and complicated. One of the prominent themes from many of the stories shared by the West Indian women who participated was about traumatic childhood experiences and their process to heal on their own. One of the revelations from a few of the women was the impact their parents’ stern behaviour had on them. This type of relationship resulted in the inability to count on their parents when horrific events occurred in their lives.
Many of the women expressed a lack of outward affection from their parents, and displayed abusive coping mechanisms. They revealed that their parents would preach the benefits of being raised in the United States, and constantly inform them what ‘true suffering’ was, disregarding the women’s experiences and berating them in the process. The parents’ inability to understand the turmoil the Caribbean-American women were experiencing led to loneliness, a lack of capacity to express emotions, and a self-loathing mindset that led to years of mental illness, self-inflicted torture, and acting out behaviour.
A Brooklyn resident with Dominican parents has lived over a decade of her life not speaking to her immediate family. The toxic chaos and alcohol abuse that were deemed normal growing up were things she did not want for her own daughter. She searched for internal peace by practicing yoga, meditating, and slowly cutting ties with negative people in her life. To make a decision to choose happiness despite the risk of not having family around is courageous, but it is also a natural progression for many individuals. This denial of the issues that occurred within the family and the negative response towards the issues within the household left people, like our participant, to make the difficult choice of seclusion.
One of the participants was an American woman of Haitian descent who expressed her trouble dealing with depression due to the struggle of sharing mental and emotional concerns with her mother. Suffering from depression was seen as a luxury that her mother did not have growing up, and was therefore a frivolous thing that developed due to idleness. This woman shared her suicide attempts and the loneliness she felt as she was going through her early twenties. She knew no one else who looked like her to share her experiences with, and for those she did speak with, their solution was always prayer and church. She had to seek professional help on her own whilst practicing mindfulness on a regular basis.
Another story came from a woman who was raped as an adolescent by someone she knew. She told her father and he left her feeling full of guilt and shame. There are numerous cases of molestation and rapes that are not reported to the police in the West Indian community due to the lack of support and desired secrecy. A common solution is religious intervention for the victim, which was the case for this participant. With no real empathy at home, or among her friends, she felt isolated, incapable of coping, and over the years distant from her family. This led to her taking steps toward living a life severed from her past.
Audre Lorde has a quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” For the women who were open to sharing their stories, they made a decision to have self-preservation in order to maintain some type of happiness. The cultural norms that result in sterile emotions within family dynamics are something that can take a toll on many of us as adults. What we have to look forward to is a generation of parents who learn from their own childhoods and commit to doing things differently.