We’ll call her Grace for the sake of confidentiality, although we’re all familiar with her story. She came from Grenada more than 40 years ago. Then she was a young woman escaping domestic complications, including an infant daughter she left with her mother. She birthed two boys for different fathers before marrying a Trini who already had five children with his previous wife (who’d died of breast cancer in her early 30s and herself had two children from a previous marriage).
Grace took her husband’s seven children along with her second son into the marriage home, a wooden shack in the hills above San Juan. Then she made three girls, in quick succession, for her Trini man. When this extensive family moved to a housing development in Tacarigua in the mid 1980s Grace effectively became mother and care giver to 11; her Grenadian daughter would visit in “summer” school vacations.
If you compare her photostudio portrait back in the 1970s—demure, bright-eyed, country-girl attractive, with the wizened shell she’s become as an elderly 66-year-old, you’d swear these were two different women.
Grace’s retired husband has never applied to have her residency status regularised, so she doesn’t get a state pension. For more than 35 years she has cared for her children and their step siblings and of course in more recent years a rapidly expanding brood of grandchildren. She receives scant gratitude and no pay for all her sacrifice and work. She’s been abused verbally and physically by children and step children alike. Her only recreation— Spiritual Baptist services and trips to hospital, health centres and doctors (if she has a little change). She has “trouble with her nerves,” is in a constant state of anxiety, runs a continuous monologue (to herself as no one listens) and is only sustained by her faith.
For Grace there is no possibility of work/life balance.
Read the full article here - 03/28/10 Trinidad Guardian
