I Come from Women Who Stayed Too Long

I'm learning how to stay differently.

Note: I usually record a voiceover for these essays, but I’ve been at my parents’ place more often and space for quiet recording is limited. For now, I’m letting my words come through in writing alone - as I’ve realized that by waiting to record I’ve delayed my process and sharing. Thank you for reading ♡

I think often of my grandmothers, women that I didn't really have a relationship with but I could hypothesize what I imagined their lives to be. Women who stayed in relationships for matrimony, tradition, family and reputation, maybe for security, out of scarcity and simply not knowing any other way. Women who may or may not have loved the husbands they lay beside - the same men they bore thirteen plus children for. Women who I imagined laid down because matrimony and religion taught them that they must submit and succumb to their husbands.

This same submission sometimes shows up in my own body. As I lay down and reach climax, tears rush forward uninvited - not from sorrow, but something older. Like the ghosts of women I come from are weeping through me, their stories stored in muscle memory and marrow, a grief not fully mine but carried in my bones.

I wonder how often these women had to take it, had to lay down. How this taking passed down to their daughters and granddaughters. How this shaped the love lives of the women before me, how it has continued to shape mine and manifests as a pattern of codependency and lack of boundaries. How it feels like a continued aching - the aching need to stay in places that we don't belong, places that don't feel loving.

photo found on Pinterest taken by Stacey Lamb Photography

I was told my maternal grandmother was forced by shotgun to marry my grandfather. They were Indo-Jamaican and a matrimonial contract was already put in place by their parents that they were to be married. My grandmother was 17 and my grandfather was 25. My grandmother, appalled, and appealed "I don't want to marry that big y'eye bwoy" commenting on my grandfather's wide, almond set eyes that are a defining feature of our lineage (I too have these big y'eyes lol). Her father grabbed his shotgun and basically said "this is happening whether you like it or not."

I don't know what choice could have looked like for her in the 1940s, but choice led her to spend the next 60 years with a man she did not know.

I don't know much of anything about my paternal grandmother or her relationship with my grandfather, but what I know of my grandfather and his creation into this world is that he was the product of a wealthy, white German Jamaican man misusing a young Black Jamaican girl. This man created many outside children behind his white wife's back, promising the mothers' land and money so long as they didn't take his last name.

My great grandmother wasn't having that and raised her son poor while proclaiming to everyone legally that he was a Helwig. I don't know what became of my great-grandmother's love life, but I know that she raised my grandfather to have the same values of marriage, duty and tradition. He eventually took a wife that aligned with those same ideals and they lived and died together under the commitment of marriage, with my grandfather passing first and my grandmother living the rest of her days tended to by her children.

This is the same on my maternal side, my grandfather passing first and my grandmother living her last years being tended to by her children.

It's odd, both of my grandmothers left behind one man and 13 children each. Seven boys and six girls on the maternal side, and the inverse on the paternal side. Coincidences like this affirm my sense that my parents were twin flames - destined to do life together, but somehow missing the mark on healing the wounds and patterns that most twin flames are meant to reconcile. I am the product of these flames.

On both sides of my ancestral line there is unfaithfulness. Husbands with children created outside of the thirteen made within the matrimonial home. There is alcohol, abuse, and what I imagine to be passed down traits from slave owners. There is care and martyrdom and codependency. There is tradition and familiarity turned into love. There is staying power.

I too have stayed too long in many a previous relationship. Stayed to the point of abuse, stayed past the hurts, stayed despite unfaithfulness and mistrust. Stayed because I feared hurting their feelings even though mine continued to ache. Stayed because in some way I belonged in these unhealthy spaces. Because the unhealthy felt familiar and chaotic, intense and safe, because all I had ever known of love was harsh words, sudden outbursts, insecurity and hurt.

This is how I knew to love. This is what I thought it meant to unconditionally love someone: staying despite it all.

In some strange way I admire this about my grandmothers - that in spite of the hurt, the possible humiliations, the things they may have never spoken aloud, they had staying power. As I write this I feel the tension rising - we are not currently in an age where women are celebrated for staying in spite of it all. We are told to leave, to run, to find freedom.

But what would it mean to stay? What does it mean to stay when you feel you have no other option?

It's a question that sits uncomfortably in the ears of many abuse survivors: "Well, why did you stay?"

It's a question I've grappled with myself and it's a question that I know many people who have been in toxic relationships can answer in a multitude of layered ways.

We stay for love.

We stay for security.

We stay because of the kids.

We stay because we simply think we have to.

For belonging, for worthiness, for fear, for love.

Maybe my grandmas stayed for all these reasons and more. I'll never know for sure.

But what I do know is that whether I agree with their choices or not, their staying power lives in me too. And where that endurance has kept me stuck, it has also kept me going. It has kept me believing in love, kept me open, and is now teaching me softness.

And sometimes I wonder if this is what it means to be the product of twin flames.

My parents, I believe, were meant to do life together - brought together to heal, to reckon, to transform, but as mentioned, somewhere along the line, missed the mark. They say twin flames produce love children. And maybe that's what I am - a child born not just from love, but from longing, from fire. (Oddly enough, I'm a fire sign). I think this may be why unconditional love is a value that sits heavily on my chest, even if I'm not always the best at practicing it.

I recently heard someone share that they are spending the next 20 years of their career life focused on learning A.I. It was strange for my ears to hear this level of devotion out loud, especially around a technological tool, but it made me ask myself "what do I want to spend the next 20 years of my own life doing?"

As I consider this question, I know that it is in perfecting the art of loving.

The way I have always known to love has been incredibly surface level - crafted through what I saw on television, what I witnessed among other relationships, and what people have told me love is. At home, I witnessed that continued tradition and matrimonial commitment - but it was braided with harsh words, silence and toxicity.

Now that I have tools, access to resources, a healthy partner that I am invested in growing with, and enough broken relationships under my own belt to say "girl wtf", I can say there is a lot about how to 'be loving' that I have gotten wrong.

I come from women who stayed too long, but I'm learning how to stay differently.

Not in pain, not in suffering but in softness.

Choosing love that doesn't harm me, doesn't say I'm unworthy, doesn't ache, keeps me safe.

And maybe that's enough for now.

Maybe if I do this right, the women who come after me won't have to unlearn so much just to feel loved.

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Author's note:

This piece is the first in a series of writings based on themes that are coming up for me - stories I'm finally giving language to.

"I Come From Women Who Stayed Too Long" is a reflection on the ways love and survival have been entangled in my family and in me.

It was open, a bit challenging to write. Fear comes up in me when I think of how these words might land, especially on the ears of my family. It may be hard to read.

But I share it as an offering - for the daughters of daughters who are learning how to love themselves better than they were taught.

Love you,

‘til next time,

tash ♡

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