🌹 The Characters: Mama

Beloveds,

she was my first introduction to love. my first experience of what it felt like to exist in this world and have someone's presence feel like home.

i call her Mama.

she was born in the hills of Jamaica. she raised her children with what she had — which was mostly strength, endurance, and a love that didn't always know how to say itself out loud. she cooked. she prayed. she showed up. she kept things moving even when things had no business moving.

she was not a perfect mother. i don't believe in perfect mothers. i believe in real ones. and she was real.

in June 2018, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. for five months, i was the one beside her — back and forth between Montego Bay and Kingston, hospital waiting rooms, watching the pain consume her. watching someone who had always been solid become something fragile and temporary.

i was angry at her for it. i didn't know that's what i was feeling at the time.

on October 26, 2018, at 2:15pm, my brother called.

"San, just hold it but mama gone."

i fell to the floor. i screamed. and then i spent the next several years trying to outrun a grief i had never been given permission to feel.

here's what i've learned about Mama since she died:

the silence she kept when i needed her to speak — that wasn't indifference. that was her inheritance. a pattern passed down through women who learned early that keeping the peace mattered more than keeping themselves.

she was doing the best she could with what she'd been given. which, like most women of her generation, wasn't much room for her own truth.

i broke that pattern. this book — this whole series — is proof.

but i couldn't have broken it without understanding where it came from. it came from her. and from her mama. and from her mama's mama. and from all the women before them who swallowed what they should have been allowed to say.

i write for all of them.

Mama — this one is for you. for your life, not just your death. for the woman you were before you became someone's mother. for the love you gave me even when it came in forms i didn't always recognize.

YOU were my first home.

her full story — the five months of illness, the grief that came in waves for years after, what it meant to become a mother without my mother — is in Book 4: Goodbye, Mama.

it's not a sad book. it's an honest one.

or if this is the post that makes you want to read all of it — the full collection is available as a bundle - Speak, Mamacita: Seven Stories of Unsilencing Trauma.

A portion of proceeds from the Speak, Mamacita series supports The Sanctuary Foundation, launching November 2027.

next week: 🕊️ Papa — the quiet love i didn't know how to receive.

Talk Soon,
Santana Chevel 🌹