Chapter 15: When Grandma is Your Mom: An Auto/Ethnography on Loss & Other-Mothering in One Caribbean-Canadian Family

The African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child” captures the essence of how I made sense of my world as a child. This self-reflexive auto-ethnography explores my experiences with other-mothering as a child born to an unwed mother in Toronto, Canada in the early 1970s. After my birth, I was sent to live on the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago with my mother’s family. My grandparents assumed the role of my parents and their daughters shared in my upbringing at different points in my life. As a child, I knew that my circumstance was unique because it was clear that my cousins lived in two parent households. Growing up knowing that my biological mother lived in Canada shaped the ways in which I understood my relationships and my status as “quasi-orphan” and displaced, albeit in a context that provided a solid foundation for my sense of self and identity. Using Collins’ (2000) concept of other-mothering, I discuss how my grandmother’s death in 2013 deemed me motherless. I share how we prepared for her funeral as a family and the out-of-body experience I had on the day of her burial. Today, I deal with her loss by forging ties with my aunts, who deem me, at once, niece and sister. I consider the extent to which her loss has solidified my place in our family as I work to fill the void that her passing has created.