When I was about 6 years old, me and my 4 year old brother followed this one kid we knew from school back to his house. He had passed by our house on his bike and assured us his house was just around the corner. Well I guess he forgot to mention this was “around the corner” in bike miles. It took us maybe 2 hours to walk there and by the time we got to his house we were sore-footed (we did everything bare-footed in Jamaica) and tired. It was after 6 in the evening and no one knew where we were. I remember thinking to myself that we were in trouble anyways and since my mother was probably going to have us both killed we might as well spend the last few moments of our lives playing video games. Well, my mom did not actually kill us, but she had done everything short of call the police and report us missing. By the time we got back home every single one of my relatives was at the house looking really worried. The public flogging we received lasted maybe 30 minutes, and was quite humiliating even for a couple of toddlers. I did learn a valuable lesson though – that family will be there for you in good and hard times, and if you are the cause of the hard times they will stick it to you.

I have a large family. My father died at the young age of 35, leaving behind an 8 year old me, my 6 year old brother, and my mom. My mom remarried 3 years later and had two more sons thereby increasing my sibling tally to 3. My step-dad also had 4 daughters and 2 sons from previous relationships and they were rightfully pronounced brothers and sisters. So, in total, I have 9 siblings. I told you I had a large family.

So now I am 29 years old and I have been in the United States for 7 years of study and 3 years work: a grand total of 10 years away from home. Yet, even now, when I say I am going “home” I am referring to my mother’s place in Kingston, Jamaica. Its been over 20 years since she beat the crap out of me and my younger brother that memorable evening, but to this day, whenever I am back home in Jamaica, I never go anywhere without telling my mom where I am going and when I plan to be back. It’s a testament to the huge influence my family has had on me and the person I have become. In order for you to know who I am it is absolutely necessary to know a little about my family – a big part of who I am.

My Mother
My mother is a criminal lawyer. Being a criminal lawyer in crime ridden Kingston would normally be a very rewarding profession, but my mother is a self-proclaimed “poor people’s” lawyer and so does various court cases for bags of bananas, cases of rum, a goat – anything but money. As a result she isn’t very wealthy. On the other hand, she is very well known and respected amongst the working class. Being extremely adept at her profession also meant that me and my brothers never got away with anything and, in fact, were made to suffer for countless things we did not even do. The woman would question me and my brother separately for Pete’s sake and unless our stories matched we would be found in contempt! All in all, my mother had very few flaws, and a stronger, more determined, dedicated, and hard-working woman I will never find. Now, if only some of her qualities had rubbed off on me

My Father
As I said before, my father died when I was really young. He was murdered right outside our house while I, my mom, and my brother slept. Whenever I tell people the story of his death there still remains a twinge of loss inside of me, but, in truth, I feel more pride than anything else. The gunmen who confronted my father that night did not want to rob us. Back then my father was well known in Kingston and was quickly rising in prominence to being a strong political leader in the community, something his rivals would have none of (yeah, Kingston is a tough place). They insisted he give them the keys to the house and hand over his gun. My father’s response was to throw the keys on top of the roof and fight for his family. He lost his life in the process. I remember refusing to view his remains at his funeral because I wanted to remember what he looked like alive, and the strategy worked: the last memories I have of my father are vivid and permanently etched in my mind (I think one was of him beating the crap out of me – he seemed very much alive then). I still wonder what I would be like today if he was still alive. My mom insists I would be exactly the same as I am now as she sees so much of him in me and my brother. The older I get the more I agree with her.

My brothers
My step-siblings did not live with me for more than a few years at the most and so I will use this section to concentrate on those 3 assholes that have been the bane of my adolescent life. For personal reasons I will call them brothers ‘S’, ‘A’ and ‘D’ (ironically enough, they did make me ‘SAD’ on many an occasion).

Brother S
Brother S (I am starting to feel like a member of the Nation of Islam with all this “brother” nonsense) is my only full brother and perhaps the person I am closest to in life. He was only 2 years my junior and we did everything together. S is also the street smart one among us and was wrongfully, I might add, seen as the trouble-maker of the group. I remember breaking a lamp in the living room while playing indoor badminton (don’t ask), and, with me having gotten in so much trouble that week, S decided to take the blame and the whipping for me. In the same breath, I also remember him telling my mother that it was not him who had thrown a 15 pound corned beef sandwich in the kitchen garbage and that it must have been me – a lie that I only got out of by showing my mother that I must have been innocent since I threw my sandwich out the window. I remain best friends with that lying skunk to this day.

Brother D
D was born when I was 11 years old, which would make him 18 now. I think he is the most confusing of us and maybe he suffers from middle child syndrome. Because of the age gap between D, me and S, he was somewhat of a lonely kid. He did not have the ever-present playmate that me and S benefited from and so was always trying to go over to a friend’s house. D is more like mom than any of us. He is thoughtful, incredibly considerate and also very emotional. What a sissy! He did get one extremely annoying trait from his father (my step-dad) though: it is literally impossible to get a straight answer out of this kid! I once asked him if he borrowed one of my shirts and his answer was so convoluted a tax auditor would not have been able to make heads or tails of it, and this while he had the shirt on.

Brother A
The youngest of us, A, is only 10 years old. Incredibly, he probably has the most potential having miraculously attained all of his older brothers’ best qualities. He is almost as street smart as S, at least as book smart as I am (ok, I admit it, he makes me look like Forest Gump), and can tell a story as well as D. A and D fight constantly and, despite being sorely over matched in size and weight, A still manages to come out on top. The kid just knows how to manipulate the hell out of mom. His one flaw is his conceit. He is immensely popular at school, is cute as a button, and has this combination of dimples and mischievous eyes that drive women crazy – all of this resulting in one cocky MF. I know A the least of all my brothers because he was only 1 when I left to go to school. I tried to keep in contact with him by phone but at that age he never truly understood who the hell I was and why I was so interested in his life. I remember asking him once how mom was doing and he replied, “She is fine… how is your mom doing?!” Then there was the time I was bragging about owning a copy of “A Bug’s Life” and he didn’t believe me. I was shocked when this three year old kid says “Yuh too lie!! Lemme talk to yuh woman!”

My Step-Dad
To be fair, my step-dad stepped in admirably as my father after my dad died. He never treated me and my brother any differently than any of his kids and I think we even appreciated him way more than his previous children. For years he was the primary source of wisdom in a household that sorely needed all the wisdom they could get. He had a story for every situation you asked his advice on and, incredibly enough, his stories always ended up confusing us even more than we were before coming to him. The worst thing about his parables were how long and winding they were. By the time he got to the end of the story you had no idea what the moral was, how it was relevant to your current conundrum, or even what the conundrum was in the first place. My step-dad has a serious problem though. He is so proud and stubborn in his ways that he has allowed personal disputes between him and his relatives to drive huge wedges between them. He and my mom are going through a divorce and his kids are not too fond of him these days. He deserves his current alienation… but I can’t help but feel sorry for him. Ah well. No family is perfect, least of all mine.

So there you have it. My family in a nutshell…

Darn it! Seems like all the circuits to Jamaica are busy! I cannot, for the life of me, get through to Jamaica to tell my mom Happy Mother’s Day. Jamaicans I tell you. I am betting that all 4 million Jamaican immigrants and people of Jamaican descent busy mucking up the islands phone system right now. Ah well… at least this reminded me to post a little something on my mother: the person indirectly responsible for this entire blog. Happy Mother’s Day mom!

My mother is an amazing woman. She is a criminal lawyer, as well as a mother of four boys, two of which still live with her. The fact that my mother seemed more at ease with dealing with hardened criminals than four wayward boys is a testament to the difficulties in raising us four. I can’t give her all the credit for raising us all as a lot of other people factored into that. But I do know that she has been the major contributor to who we are as people. Each of us have a few of her qualities and every single one of us could probably argue someone to death!

Growing up, I never won an argument with my mother. Arguing with mom was like trying to out-litigate Johnny Cochrane (RIP). She always seemed to make so much sense… and even when she didn’t she always had the “well it’s my house, so my rules” weapon on her side. I remember accompanying her to court one day and watching her interrogate a police officer who had made the mistake of arresting one of her clients. The look on the officers face as my mother proceeded to grille him and casually paint him as an incompetent, deceitful, and corrupt member of the force reminded me so much of how me and my brothers would look during one of her lectures. In fact my mother used to use some of the same techniques she used to such effect in the court room on us. Sometimes she would call us in one at a time and grille us on exactly how the living room lamp broke. Other times she would kind of shout questions rapidly, one after the other, over and over until we broke. Has the hair on the back of your neck ever stood up when someone got mad at you? Ever get a shiver down the middle of your spine when someone looked at you a certain way? Yeah… I had a healthy fear of my mother. Healthy I might add.

Mom used fear to good effect. She used to tell me and my brother to come home from school before dark. But you know kids, we would get all caught up in our game of scrimmage or cricket and somehow never notice that the sun had gone down. One such evening both me and my brother S were gallivanting with some friends after school when one of the guys stopped suddenly to stare wide-eyed and shocked past us. Apparently my mom was on her way up the pathway and did not look in a good mood. Not wanting to get embarrassed in public, we grabbed our bags, jumped a nearby fence and took a short cut home. We got home panting and ragged just as she drove in the driveway with this smug look on her face. “Where have you guys been?” she smiled disarmingly, “I just needed the keys to get inside the house ’cause I can’t seem to find mine.” Mhmmm Hmmm, yeah right. Both you and me both know we narrowly avoided a flaying in front of an audience not likely to ever have us forget it. Forgot your keys my ass.

scrimmage (noun): Mini-version of football/soccer played with a tennis ball.

cricket (noun): A British-born game of bat and ball with occasional breaks for tea.

Mom helped galvanize the bond between me and my brother too. Me and S were very competitive siblings close in age and size, for the most part, and this led to many a fight. But who wants to spend their youth squabbling when there was a more cunning and common enemy to face? Being smaller in both size and wit to mom we would try to tag team her hoping to come out on top every once in awhile. It never worked. She always managed to turn us against each other in the end… divide and conquer tactics I suppose. She would plant the seeds of dissension within our ranks by commenting how one of us had said it was the others’ fault and our two man platoon would fall apart at the seams. Crafty!

But in between and around all her miserableness and bickering mom was… well just mom. The trips to the hospital to mend a broken hand or stitch a split lip, her long and arduous work hours to provide us with everything a kid could want for, her words of encouragement when we were afraid to fail, her late nights staying up with us to do homework (I think she enjoyed doing our homework wayyyy more than we did), and lately her steadying and dependable presence as well as steadying financial presence were all done with a mother-like zeal that I may never be able to reproduce myself. If there is one thing in this world I can depend on its my mom. She is always there and always turning that nightmare into a peaceful dream. Appreciate it mom… more than you know, we all appreciate it.