There’s a moment in your adulthood where you become aware of your parents’ humanness. The frailty in their bones from years of labour; the knowing in their eyes that can only be won through experience. You begin to understand, with certainty and clarity, how an unjust world shaped who they became and moulded the kind of relationships we end up having with them.

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In this episode of “Like A Real Book Club”, we meditate on the complexities of Caribbean motherhood - ladened with a history of patriarchal violence that has architected the tenuous, terrible and beautiful bonds we form with the matriarchs in our lives (and, of course, how these relationships are depicted in Caribbean literature). For us, humanizing mothers beyond the emotional labour they perform is a catalyst for a host of hard, and sometimes uncomfortable, emotions about what it means to exist as a woman who is mothering, but also how we see these women. Do we recognize their humanity untethered from their children? Do we provide space for their anger? Their resentment and frustration? Have we made room for them to mourn the loss of who they were before they were expected to give life?