Hurting and Holding on Part I: What Absence Teaches

Dear Che,

“I have a hard time letting go of the pain of my mother’s absence when I was a child. I know she didn’t have a choice, but it STILL HURTS. It holds me back from forgiving her and really loving her the way I want to.

How do I release this?”

Dear Hurting and Holding On,

What you have written is something a whole generation of Caribbean people has been carrying in silence for decades. You are not alone. You are not weak for feeling this. Trust yourself.

What you are describing is not only about your mother. It is about what her absence taught you at an age when you had no defenses against the lesson. When the first woman you ever loved, the woman whose presence was supposed to be as certain as breathing, was gone, your nervous system learned something. It learned that the people you need most may not stay. That love and loss arrive together. That, depending on anyone, is not entirely safe.

That lesson did not stay with your mother. It travelled. It shaped how you move toward women, whether you trust them, whether you let them close, whether some part of you is always waiting for them to leave, and if your father was also absent physically or emotionally, a parallel stream ran alongside it, teaching you that men, too, are unreliable.

What many barrel children carry into adulthood is not just the grief of a specific absence. It is a foundational uncertainty about whether they are safe in a relationship at all. That uncertainty becomes the water they swim in, so familiar they cannot see it, so deep it touches everything.

This is not a character flaw. It is what a child does to survive an early loss. She adapts. She learns not to need too much. She learns to see the leaving before it happens. She learns to judge quickly, sharply, before she can be disappointed, and that judgment, once a form of protection, hardens over time into a wall that keeps everyone at a careful distance. Sometimes even her own children. Or it swings the other way into over-giving, trying to become for her children the mother she never had, but from a place of fear rather than wholeness.

Now, the larger context. Caribbean parents who came to Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States were nurses, nannies, teachers, tradespeople, caregivers, people of skill, ambition, and enormous love. They left for better economic opportunities and were culturally displaced in ways they were never prepared for. They did not leave because their children did not matter. They left because the economic and racial structures of both their countries of origin and their countries of arrival made it nearly impossible to build a life any other way. Families arrived separately, not because love was absent, but because the system extracted labour while erecting every possible barrier to family wholeness.

Here is what those parents often could not afford to do: feel it. When survival requires everything you have, emotional narrowing is not a choice; it is a necessity. Many Caribbean parents were so consumed by the urgency of working, saving, sponsoring, and sending for their children that they could not see the interior landscape of what those children were living through. Not because they didn’t care, because survival demanded tunnel vision, and when the family was finally in the same house, they believed the hard part was over. They did not know their child had already learned to live without them.

This is perhaps the most painful gap in the whole story: the parent who sacrificed everything believes the sacrifice was enough. The child who waits knows something the parent cannot see that the body does not keep score of intentions. It keeps score of presence. Of absence. During the night, nobody came.

Here is what I most want you to hear: you can love and still be devastated. These opposites exist together. They live in the same body. Honouring your mother’s sacrifice and acknowledging your own pain are not in competition. You do not have to choose. Insisting that you choose that, if you loved her enough, you would not hurt, is one of the ways our community has kept this wound alive across generations.