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Elizabeth Nunez
The Color of T-shirts

I grew up in a middle-class Victorian home in Trinidad, a former colony of England. It may seem strange to some that I describe my home as Victorian, for if you see me, you will know that included in my ancestry are bloodlines that go back to Africa. But the point of colonization was to create subjects for the mother country, and we in the middle-class did our best to imitate English manners and English culture. I learned to keep a stiff upper lip in hard times, to hold my emotions in check in good times, and, above all, to restrain myself from overt expressions of affection in public. I knew my parents loved me, but there was little hugging and kissing in our home. I was determined, though, that when I had a child of my own, I would change that.

I had been living in New York for some years when John my son, was born. With no family members or friends from back home to keep me in check, I lavished affection on him. In photo album after photo album, there are pictures of the two of us, glued together: He is kissing me, I am kissing him. He has his arms around me, mine are around him, and I am smiling at him as if nothing and no one in the world could make me happier.

Jason, I used to say, loved loving. He was not self-conscious about hugging me in front of his friends or telling me that he loved me. When he was in grade school, we used to wait for his school bus together, standing behind the glass sliding door of the kitchen even though it exposed us fully to the street corner where his schoolmates gathered. Jason would hug me tightly around my neck and kiss me as soon as the bus was in sight, and then turn back several times as he crossed the street to shout, “Bye, Mom! Love you, Mom.” Then one day, when he was in fourth grade, he tugged me away from the glass door. “Not here, Mom,” he pleaded with me as I tried to plant a big kiss on his cheek. “Here.” He led me to a spot behind the kitchen wall. The next day, in his eagerness to avoid me, he ran out of the kitchen to the bus, leaving his lunch box behind. I ran after him. “Jason, Jason!” I shouted. “Your lunch box!” He ran faster. It didn’t take much for me to realize that my son was not merely running toward the bus; he was running away from me…

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers
Copyright 2005 by Elizabeth Nunez