about how wonderful it was that I was my mother’s last child, my mother would always respond in a sad, “You know what they say” sort of way: “Denye eish tuiye mama!” (The last child kills the mother!) I could never make sense of that statement, or the reason my mother repeated it whenever someone said something nice about me, her baby.
As the last, I was the smallest and weakest; therefore, I became everyone’s punching bag, picked on by a house full of angry people and lacking the strength to fight back. I was about twelve when I first heard my mother tell this story. She was at the hospital, giving birth to her sixth child in almost eight years. A nurse who had become familiar with her almost-yearly maternity visits cautioned, “Madame, you do know what you’re doing to your body, right? Having all those babies so close together. Lady, you’re killing yourself!”
My mother’s reply was always the same, “Nurse, you think I want to be here?”
My mother repeated this story every time one of us got a year older; it seems, to remind us, especially me, of the childbearing pains she had to endure.
Birth control was not readily available in Saint Lucia at the time, and large families were commonplace. However, other women seemed better able to manage their down time between pregnancies than my mother was.
Aside from having six children who survived, my mother had given birth to two babies that did not grow past infancy. After her seventh child, Elias, was born in September 1964, this same nurse gave my mother the contact information of a woman who would give her a homemade concoction to prevent her from having more babies. She heeded the nurse’s advice, taking her prescribed herbal birth control drink faithfully.
On March 9, 1966, I, Esther Joseph, was born.
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