And these are my mother's hands. This is where she grew up, without electiricity, without shoes until she was 12, living in a two bedroom hut with a thatched roof that never kept the rain out. She was born almost right in the middle of her 11 siblings, with the brother that was closest in age to her dying when he was just 11. It was fruit off the trees that kept her and her siblings from starving, as the crops their father planted almost always failed. She's lived a little over half her life in the States, and yet she still can't resist picking a ripe tamarind off a tree.

I've met a lot of kids like me, whose mothers were from foreign lands and were whisked away to the States by their American husbands. But yet I was often the only one who had actually been to my mother's native land. All the other mothers either never went back or were just too ashamed of their own third-world roots so they beame preoccupied with raising their children to be "American."

It wasn't until I was in college, surrounded by kids who, though from wealthy parents who gave them anything they ever needed, insisted on wearing old ripped clothes and shoes with holes in them, that I realized why my mother absolutely hated seeing me in torn clothing. It wasn't out of pride or some class consciousness, but I think it was because she didn't want her kid to go through a childhood that even resembled the poverty that she went through.

 

Josalee Thrift Photo