What's Cooking!

Her Tuesday, a time when she is twelve years old and attending high school. She awakes not to the scent of eggs being poached or Trinidadian bake and smoked herring, but to rotted urine. She curses memories of this. To live in a time when most people had forsaken the use of the latrine and welcomed indoor plumbing. Other children like herself enjoyed the use of this luxury as well as their parents, most of them having grown up after that not having ever seen any of their parents' body waste.

Lilah was not that lucky, though her mother had a bathroom facility adjoining the bedroom they shared, she could not understand why her mother lay in one place all day and used a potty when it was time to go to the bathroom. When asked if she was sick she would refuse to answer madating to Lilah that it was her duty to throw out her waste, which most of the time consisted of days old urine and menstrual blood intermingled with bathroom tissue. The potty would almost be tumbling over with this fetid mess. Sometimes to avoid having to throw it out at that stage, Lilah would try to get rid of it when it was fresh or at least a day old. Her mother would spitefully demand that she not throw it out at that stage, sometimes aggressively cursing her. She was always to wait until it was past its rotted state before it was thrown out.

Why Lilah did her mother's bidding? She said that she was confused by her mother's self-proclaimed godliness and would get the feeling that she was sinning if she disobeyed her mother's orders. She was constantly criticized and put down or made to believe that she was like her barely known father when she disobeyed. When she asked her mother why she was being made to do such things her mother told her that she had done the same for her mother and could not complain, which even to me had no basis in common sense because in the times her mother would have grown up, they had used latrines or outhouses. In my opinion rational people generally want their children to have better experiences than they did growing up.

Lilah said that she even came to the point where she refused to throw out the waste and her mother bluntly told her, 'You have to do it because I wiped your bottom when you were a baby!' 'I never asked to be born', Lilah retorted. Patsy promptly told her that that was an evil and ungrateful thing for a child to say. Lilah would go on living with the belief that it was not worth telling anyone because she was being punished for her mother letting her be born. Her mother either directly or indirectly told her that almost all the members in the family did not like her, she began to believe that and that if she had told on her mother, that she would tell the family what a bad child she was. She feared that she would have nowhere to live. Wow!

People often look at the father as the parent capable of abuse, when we hear of such cases as Lilah's some might even feel that Lilah's mother was just a victim of single parenthood. When the father is the perpetrator of the abuse, they call him sick and sadistic. A systematic and abusive mother should be called the same, especially in this time of gender equity.

It Begins

Readers are warned that parts of *Lilah's accounts may have disturbing imagery. Readers under the age of 16 should be guided by a responsible parent or guardian.


She often cries. This is frowned upon in a land where sun is so abundant, even for a woman. She would be frowned upon as stupid or weak, crazy even. What else can she do holding a burden of a secret, she barely realised that she was keeping? She thought that it was common knowledge: what she went through. She had no idea of the 'Johari window' that bound her when she was a child and still as an adult. The name 'she' could be translated into *Lilah for ease and to prevent awkwardness of the reader.

*Lilah walks in shame as she wonders what her family thinks about her. She was an extremely gifted child. She was supposed to go to University, marry a well-to-do man and have one son and one daughter. Now she struggles to make a living, with jobs that sound prestigious but pay almost nothing. She rarely has the confidence to refuse jobs that make her feel like a doormat. She feels judged and always lacking.

*Lilah admits that she tends to keep away from her friends and family, something that they would hardly be able to understand. All they know is that this was bubbly, smart and confident girl barely looks the part anymore. What they do not know is that this break down of a façade was long being orchestrated. It pains her that she can never tell them the ultimate truth about her beginnings, because of fear of their disbelief.

The tears are always a blink away with her. As she recalls readily how her mother almost destroyed her life and is presently destroying her own. In a society that is still steeped in superstition and witchcraft and non-admittedly so, her mother never got the proper medical help that she deserved. She admits she watches some people walking through the town streets with their mothers and she has to look away, in jealousy. Why can't her mother go shopping with her on a sunny day and talk and laugh and trade things?

Instead, she has a story of what she refuses to call abuse. She uses the word mistreatment and neglect in it's stead. Her mother's secret weighs down on her as she has been made to sometimes be lumped or classed with her mother as one in the same. That sentiment that she swears she notices from even her family members hurts her too much, because to herself she is a woman that tried so hard to work and provide for herself from an age that she felt that she was able to.

She was conceived through a tryst that was never completed. One that would work to the advantage of her fundamentalist mother, who would go on to claim a miraculous conception.

I created this amateur video to indroduce a new series that I intend to delve into. A touching true story about a girl from my country and the effects of Emotional Abuse from a Trinidadian viewpoint. The nature of the topic will be a serious one. I do hope to bring awareness of a topic that needs not be hidden anymore. It is not my intention to alienate anyone, but these things need to be discussed and aired out. If we help save the children, we save us. I hope that I can help in some way. The name of the video: Motherless child. It was recorded at home and I did the Graphics on my lunch hour.