Over and over and over

Charise* is a young girl that we see nearly every time we go to PriceSmart, the Barbados answer to Costco or BJs or Sam's Club, just less and not exactly, but it suffices while we are here.  We get the items we need either in bulk or somewhat discounted prices than the highway robbery of the other "legitimate" stores.  We used to make an event out of it before we realized that we were overstocked with everything in the house and eased up a bit on the grocery shopping.  Truth be told, the visit to PriceSmart was once one of the highlights of the weekend.  I know, winning.


Charise took a liking to the girls immediately, chatting them up in the tightest of Bajan accents but with a softness to her voice than made it almost sweet.  Yes, I did cringe at hearing her misuse "she" and "he" for "her" and "him," something that drove me mental when anyone did it. "Look at she! She think she doin' somethin'!"   She played with their hair and tickled their legs while checking to make sure we were not trying to abscond with an extra pork loin or one more 16-pack of toilet paper than the receipt implied.  She was studying childhood development and education and wanted to open a daycare center.  I'd toyed with the idea of having her come and sit with the girls, but as she was always at PriceSmart, I just couldn't imagine when she'd have the time.  I was also a bit shy about having a woman we chatted with at the store come over to the house and be so intimately involved in our lives.  I know, paranoid.  But I just thought the level of mystery and separation was right in this instance.  I felt guilty about it almost every Sunday after she'd slipped me her number yet again asking if I knew anyone looking for a sitter.


We really don't know her.  Just our impressions from the mornings spent at PriceSmart.  She has a sweet smile, works very hard, seems to be well-respected by other employees on the job.  Her birthday is in April.  I know this because when she once asked about Virginie's birthday and I started to say April, I was unable to get the words out completely when she jumped up and said, "Mine too!  Mine too!" with the lift on TOO.  There is an innocence and openness to her that only the young possess and I was excited by it.  In a class system as structured and unforgiving as that in Barbados, I believed she would break out and create that day care center.  I'd seen her work her way through university, saw her studying in the aisles of PriceSmart, heard her talk enthusiastically about what she was learning.  I told other people about her and told the aunties at the girls' nursery school about her in the hopes that she might work with them before starting her own place.  I saw hope and opportunity for this young lady and I was thrilled.

One of the most heartbreaking and frustrating things about Barbados for me was how easily people accepted their lot in life.  Surely there are ambitious people, people trying to improve their plight, but in the working class, even with the offer of free advanced education, training programs, apprenticeships there is so much lethargy.  One can see it in the faces of workers everywhere.  A bitterness, a resignation, a hopelessness.  Life looks very long and exhausting when you are sitting on an island of 285,000 people working the same job, resisting the same boss/company/authority for your entire working life.  Didier and I often remarked to one another while driving through the country about the countless young people, boys to men playing checkers and drinking a Banks in the morning, girls to women carrying small children in the early hours, very young mothers, when we would take the girls to school, workers in the kitchens, grocery stores, shopping districts with hooded eyes looking at you with contempt or disinterest.  This was the Barbados that tourists, expats living high on a big company salary with little contact or attention paid to the locals, ever had to see or consider.  Maybe I didn't either, but that is not the kind of person I am.  I do consider.  It hurt to see.

So when we showed up at a jam-packed PriceSmart yesterday, full of people doing their Easter weekend shopping (from Good Friday through Monday is a holiday on the island with all days but Saturday completely closed) and spied Charise in the sea of craziness, I sighed with relief.  She came to me with full, rosy cheeks, a bright smile and a hug.  "Look at I.  Do you see I?"  And then I did.  I did see.  Charise was pregnant.  A little over three months but on her tiny little body it was already completely apparent, a little bump had formed low over her belt buckle.  I held her and congratulated her slowly.  She seemed happy, a little apprehensive, but happy and I did not want to appear tentative in my happiness for her. 

In stand-still traffic leaving the shopping district, I finally sighed and said aloud to Didier,"She was my hope for Barbados.  I am sorry that I am so sensitive about this.  I know it's silly.  But I wanted for her so much more."  There were tears, a quick surprising outpouring of love for Charise.  I know it's her life and it is certainly not written in stone that she will not achieve all that she'd dreamed, many have.  But I feared that the monotony and struggles of raising a child would get the best of her and she would have just her dreams as the proof that she got so close.  I don't know her boyfriend or her family or her situation.  I don't even know her really.  For all I have come to love about Barbados, it is the lost dreams, lost hope, monotonous existence that tear me down each time.  I can leave Barbados now.  I have seen the cycle so clearly and whether one lives well and comfortably or poor and with struggle, it's all the same.  All the same.  Over and over and over.

*Not her real name.

(c)  Copyright 2011.  City Mom in the Jungle.

Happy Birthday, Little Big Girl Now

When we arrived in Barbados, Virginie was only 3 1/2 months old.  Much of my fear and paranoia came from feeling unable to protect her (and Lily and myself).  I did not know this country, the Caribbean, anyone here at all and could not figure out how we'd found ourselves, a New York couple of something or others in the middle of this developing country, nearly out in the jungle.  There were lizards and monkeys and a mongoose and huge moths, bats, mosquitoes and debilitating heat surrounding me in a house full of boxes with wrought iron fencing on every window and door.  We had no neighbors on either side and the street was quiet and dark once the sun went down.  Virginie was nursing (ha! Still is, made you look.), could hold her head but could not sit up, and had not even gone to solid foods.  New mothers feel inadequate, but this was ridiculous.  I already had Lily but did not feel like I could even do any of the basics.  Virginie, though healthy and chubby and cherubic, seemed more vulnerable than tiny little angelic Lily had seemed.  The sensation was primal.  I felt terror and my fight or flight mechanism was on a hair trigger 24-7.  After the soporific experience of my pregnancy with her, this was a strange turn of events.


I carried Virginie heavy and low.  And by that I mean I had a big fat ass.  Seriously.  Each week as my ever increasing belly was measured, I was two centimeters larger than expected.  For example, at 20 weeks, one is usually about 20 centimeters and I was 22.  Funny, in the first trimester I actually lost one pound from the all-day-long sickness but made up for it in spades during the rest of the pregnancy.  At 25 weeks, with 15 weeks to go my doctor, in her sweetest "I am incredibly concerned you are going to be fork lifted out of your apartment to the hospital" voice asked if I was perhaps indulging in too many "too manys."  I really hadn't been, but Virginie was an insanely hungry caterpillar.  With Lily, I craved bananas and peanut butter on toast at 4 am and drank more orange juice than I would ever care to.  But with Virginie, we were so concerned about keeping her in there that I fed her everything under the sun under the guise of making sure she was inspired to stay.  Uh, yeah.  It wasn't that I ate too much, but I certainly didn't follow any plan to maintain a weight increase of 25-30 lbs.  I think that was pretty obvious to everyone.


My belly was just so big and I was still carting Lily around.  By early afternoon, I was on my face, even though Lily had a sitter 5 days a week in the mornings!  I was so nervous that Didier would get called away to Barbados before the baby was born that I had regular freak outs.  I wondered if I would have to give birth alone.  If I was capable of doing it.  If I wasn't, who would I ask to hold my legs, grip my hand, listen to me scream, have one of the most private moments of my life with in the place of my husband.  It did not come to that.


We already knew that we would be moving to Barbados and thanks to shoddy file management (It seems paperwork kept going missing while visas et al were in the process of being procured.) Didier was able to stay for the birth and even a few weeks after.  I suppose that should have been a premonition of things to come, but what did we know.  We were exhausted, overwhelmed, hopeful about a new position, a little scared about a new place to live, wondering how Lily would take to it all.  Secretly, I feared for this little wiggly worm.  I just wondered how this little girl would follow in the footsteps of Lily?  Lily who is so intelligent and sensitive and beautiful and kind and funny.  I cried so many nights imagining future confrontations between the "second sister" and the angel.  Lily with that gorgeous head of curls and the baby, yet unnamed looking all squishy and gooey on the ultrasound.  I said a prayer for her and told her I would look out for her, poor thing.


Didier had chosen Lily's name from the Marlene Dietrich song, "Lily Marlene" so it was "my turn" with Virginie.  We batted a few names around, leaning heavily on the French, mainly my suggestions.  I loved Eugenie and Clemence, deemed too old and too religious by Didier.  I also liked Vincent before we knew the babe would be a girl.  Didier liked Theophile.  Again, ah no.  When Virginie rolled off my lips, we both looked at each other knowingly.  That my father is from Virginia and that her name could hold a significance for the Penns too made it all the more certain. We chose Clementine as a softened Clemence and Belen for the woman who cared for us (my sister, brother, and me) when we were children, Belen Nortez Jones, a beautiful Cuban woman who sang songs to us in Spanish and taught us dance moves and demonstratively loved us.  I don't know that I ever showed her back the love she'd given me.  But I could share her forever with my child by giving Virginie her name.


Virginie let me wait it out until the end.  I'd heard rumor that second children often came earlier than expected and as big as I was, it seemed like a no brainer that even at 37 or 38 weeks that little babe would be fully cooked.  She came on her due date.  Thanks to the workings of my inventive doctor and something called "stripping the membranes" my water broke after an early morning appointment at both the hospital and her office.  Dilated 4 centimeters.  Not a contraction in sight.  And then--whoosh!  Walked into the hospital smiling and waving like a princess on parade.  Was screaming like a banshee minutes later and in well under an hour the most beautiful brown eyes I'd ever seen were staring at my naked, howling face.  Naked because I was so hot while giving my personal information to the nurse that I'd started to remove my clothes to put the gown on and found myself at 10 centimeters dilated before I had the chance to get the damned thing or the admitting bracelet on! 

I loved that baby right then and knew in an instant that she could hold her own.  I'd had nothing to worry about this one.  Virginie, though born in New York and a New Yorker, is a little Bajan girl at heart.  She loves the sea, the sand, the sun.  She is naked and cool and fresh faced and relaxed.  She loves Lily.  She loves Mommy and Papa and chatting and just being.  She is so Zen.

Each night before bed, when I kiss the ladies and we watch the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars slowly fade, Virginie tells me that she is a "little sesser and a big girl now."  Sometimes she gets tangled up in her excitement to talk and tells me that she is Mommy's little big girl now.  And she is.  Happy Birthday, Little Big Girl Now.  I love you so and learned to love Barbados for both you and Lily.  I'm a lucky mommy...and I know it.

 (c)  Copyright 2011.  City Mom in the Jungle.

Captured

Pulling back the curtains this morning to let in some light and the freaky white lizard's newest hiding place was revealed.  As expected, I screamed my face off, into the telephone while chatting with my sister who promptly advised me not to go batty over the lizard or the girls would be scared.  As I screamed, they did too, but more to mock their hysterical mother. 

Virginie kept shouting,"Lizzer!  Lizzer!  Get it, Mommy!  Oh no, a lizzer!" 

Lily, ever so calmly, directed Didier as the thing wiggled across the wall.  "It's over there, Papa.  He's going over the lights, Papa.  You can get it, Papa but you have to hurry up."  Didier, God bless him, chased after the thing with a plastic box and large mailing envelope but did indeed get the bugger into the box.  As my sister shouted into the phone, "Don't kill it,"  Didier took our white lizard mascot outside to set his beady-eyed pinkaliciousness free.  Far away.  In the grass.  Nowhere near the house.  And just like that the spell was broken and we were released from the fear of finding that miserable mosquito-chasing, wall-scrambling lizard behind just about anything in the house.  We are free.  At least until the next one gets in.

(c)  Copyright 2011.  City Mom in the Jungle.