The cost of being a mother in today’s world

Editor’s Note: Some stories only grow richer with time. This brilliant feature by Anya Nicole offers an unfiltered look at a defining moment in our cultural landscape, proving that true community stories never lose their impact.

The phone rang at 2:47 AM. My friend’s voice cracked through the receiver: “My moms in the hospital again.” Before I could ask what happened, she was already explaining the long list of everyone else she had called first: her brother in Miami, her sister in Mississauga, her cousin in Brampton. Then, as an afterthought: “I should probably book time off work.”

This is the invisible labour of Caribbean motherhood that nobody talks about. Not the cooking, cleaning, or child-rearing that gets celebrated every Mother’s Day, but the emotional project management that turns our mothers into the unpaid CEOs of entire extended families.

Your Caribbean mother does not just worry about her own children. She is tracking her sister’s diabetes in Jamaica, her nephew’s grades in Scarborough, her elderly neighbour’s grocery needs, and somehow still has bandwidth to counsel three different friends through their relationship problems. She is the family’s emotional 911 operator, therapist, and crisis coordinator all rolled into one. We have normalized this to the point where we do not even see it as work.

I started noticing this pattern after my own mother had a health scare. Watching her try to coordinate her recovery while still managing everyone else’s problems made me realize something profound: Caribbean mothers are holding entire emotional ecosystems together. This is cultural exploitation disguised as love.

We celebrate the strong Black woman without acknowledging that this strength often comes at the cost of her own mental health, physical well-being, and personal dreams. We praise our mothers for their selflessness, yet never question why we expect them to be selfless in the first place.

The data backs up what our lived experience already tells us. Caribbean women in Canada report higher rates of chronic stress, hypertension, and burnout compared to other demographics. They are also more likely to delay seeking medical care because they are too busy taking care of everyone else. We are literally loving our mothers to death.

Here is what is really happening: we have confused emotional labour with emotional love. We think that because our mothers do this work willingly, it means they want to do it. We think because they are good at crisis management, they enjoy being in perpetual crisis mode.

This pattern does not just affect our mothers; it shapes how their daughters learn to love. We grow up believing that caring means carrying, that love means sacrificing ourselves for others, and that setting boundaries is selfish. We replicate these patterns in our own relationships, friendships, and workplaces.

I see it in my practice constantly. Caribbean women who have inherited this emotional project management role and don’t know how to put it down. They are exhausted, resentful, and guilty for feeling resentful. They love their families but feel trapped by the expectations of always being available, always having solutions, always being strong.

Breaking this cycle requires conscious choice and uncomfortable conversations. It means teaching our sons to carry emotional weight, not just physical loads. It means asking our mothers how they are doing and listening to the answer instead of immediately launching into our own problems. It means redistributing emotional labour across the family instead of defaulting to the person who is always doing it.

Most importantly, it means permitting our mothers to be human beings, not superheroes.

This Mother’s Day, instead of celebrating how much your mother does for everyone else, ask her what she needs for herself. Instead of praising her strength, offer to help carry the load. Instead of buying flowers, consider exploring supportive resources, such as a free consultation, to understand how emotional patterns affect families.

The most loving thing we can do for Caribbean mothers is to stop expecting them to carry the world alone.