Documenting Moments & Creating Home

Alone doesn’t begin to describe how I felt after my divorce.

Shipwrecked… Isolated.. Watching the world from behind impenetrable glass…

I initiated my divorce. By the time I did my marriage was far beyond repair, a collection of broken promises that added up to zero. Leaving me the sole breadwinner of my young household, fighting depression to raise two toddlers and a breastfeeding infant and keep two businesses afloat while my husband wandered in and out of jobs, willfully oblivious to the damage he was doing.

And still walking away from that marriage felt like walking away from the only community I had.

“Ride or die”, that’s what it felt like when my ex-husband and I met. I had moved from Jamaica to the US just five years earlier, and I felt caught in between two worlds. The warmth and saturated color of the Caribbean was the oddly beautiful backdrop to my parents’ angry and tension-filled marriage. The rancor of their relationship seeped into my relationship with my siblings, driving us apart seemingly permanently shortly after we all left home. I wanted Jamaica — it was home — but I also wanted to be free of it. The fights, the conservatism of the culture, how lonely I always felt — the weird tri-ethnic girl with the not-quite-right-accent.

And then there was the United States. A culture so vibrant and fast-paced it took my breath away. White, black, Latino, Asian, city, suburb, town, Republican, Democrat, East Coast, West Coast, MidWest, South, Ivy Leagues, state schools, community colleges. More subcultures than I ever thought possible. So many little worlds in a big one.

My ex husband helped me make sense of it all. A fiercely proud Chicagoan by way of Portland, from a family that was both black and white. I perused photo albums of his ivory-skinned Italian-Irish grandmother and onyx-skinned Southern grandfather. The aunts, uncles and cousins that came in every perceivable shade. These were my people now. This was my tribe.

I so desperately wanted a sense of home that I overlooked things I knew deep down could tank a marriage. But I ached for belonging. For the Thanksgivings at his mom’s small, cozy apartment in south suburban Chicago. For the lazy, yellow afternoons driving through his West Side childhood neighborhood, passing his old high school where he’d graduated salutatorian.

A year or two after college, I read Barack Obama’s autobiography and he vocalized the same feeling, that meeting Michelle — so rooted in Midwestern blackness and African Americana — gave him a sense of home. I read the passage over and over again.

When I finally realized that my marriage could never be the home I needed, I desperately wanted, I felt I had lost everything.

Like a zombie I woke up, worked a few hours at my shop, then called a nanny to care for my kids while I fell into bed at 7:00 pm, clothes still on, too exhausted to cry.

I wailed my pain to anyone who would listen. I was so lonely it physically hurt.

Then one day it hit me — I wasn’t alone. I looked down at my children. Their three almond brown faces looking up at me, those beautiful dark-brown eyes, so filled with wonder despite the pain of losing a father. How dare I say I was alone!

Whether I acknowledged it or not, my union with my ex-husband HAD produced a home. It HAD produced a community. And while I wallowed in pain, which yes, was understandable, I was denying the existence of what I had created.

And so, I began capturing moments. Small moments. With the furor of a documentary filmmaker. Hero hiding behind the coat rack, brown legs poking out from beneath windbreakers and fleece, Sage making silly faces in my floor length bed room mirror, the hot pink mini-backpack I’d bought her hanging off her shoulder, Noah lost in a book, devouring pages by the hour. The more I documented the home I had, the more grateful for it I became.

And so I continue to document — almost every day. No moment is too small, too exhausting, too ordinary to acknowledge. And yes I still struggle with feeling displaced. (Although moving to New York — a city seemingly designed for people who can’t or won’t fit in elsewhere — has helped tremendously.) But I finally understand a truth that is simple and timeless: home is right here. It’s where I am and it’s who I’m with.