I Wish It Were A Sitcom: Growing Up in a Caribbean Household
By Abigail Mills
A wedding cake hasn’t been delivered on time, so Mum decides to roll up her sleeves and use the kitchen the caterers have abandoned. In a flurry of flour, eggs and an ever so slightly sweaty brow, she produces the most amazing cake that you have ever seen.
She humbly presents it to the bride and the day is saved! In return the bride, who’s eyelashes and mascara have not moved an inch despite crying into her best friend’s lap, delivers an award-winning speech about how grateful she is to have her Mum – not only on her big day but to have had her on all the days that led up to this. We don’t know exactly what happened in those days but a handy montage of first steps, failed exams, shopping sprees and other life milestones big and small paint a good enough picture for us.
All is right with the world. The act of baking a cake and having gratitude for said cake received via a speech has shown us that a mother and daughter can work through anything. That is, of course, if you have thirty minutes, a team of producers and writers and thousands of pounds worth of production behind you to create the perfect sitcom.
What if you don’t have this? What if, at pretty much every step of your life, you have missed those opportunities for cake and monologues? That is what I have realised it has felt like for my family and me.
Don’t get me wrong, my childhood was great – idyllic even. Every generation says it, but being a 90s baby really was just the right amount of Fresh Prince, Knock-Down Ginger and Nintendo 64. But for me there was something missing, which I only began to realise when people casually referred to me as an ice queen or said that my brothers and I were a little bit too harsh with each other. Looking back now, I can see that the missing piece was simply emotion. The lost times of not hearing ‘I love you’ or ‘Are you ok?’ or even ‘Let’s talk about it’ have left such a gaping hole in my adult life that I have no idea where to begin with patching it up.
I suppose now, as a result of this missing piece, I overcompensate in two ways. Something I’ve noticed is that I pour my emotions into my partner in ways that can vary from cute to dangerously clingy. I also tend to shut down at any given moment and revert to the strict ways of my youth. But what do I do to get past this?
Can it be solved with a conversation with my parents? No: that would mean vulnerability, which is something to be glazed over in the Caribbean household I grew up in. Lord knows deep down I’ve only ever wanted to be friends with my parents, but they would remind me always, ‘I’m not one of your little friends’.
Perhaps, I’ve often concluded, I’ll try and start again with my own family; I’ll break the circle of suppressing emotion. It’s a strange space to be in but unless someone pulls a Bill and Ted on me and pops me in a time machine, all I can do is look forward and hope that my best is good enough.