Why do we put our needs aside for family members or friends? Why is it that we think we owe to please them? The short story collection When Trying To Return Home (Counterpoint Press, 2023) by Jennifer Maritza McCauley introduces the reader to various characters who struggle to find their identities within their roles in families and feel trapped. Collectively, all the characters in the stories express the overwhelming guilt of thinking they owe their families by pleasing them with whatever is necessary.
In the opening story, “Torsion,” a college-age daughter loves her mother too much to say no and will do anything to make her happy. Claudia struggles with her inner conflict between the fear of letting her mother down and the consequence of helping her mother kidnap her dying brother from a foster home. “I could never say no to my mama,” she tells herself, accepting her fate and succumbing to her mother’s harsh and suffocating love, the kind of love which Claudia is reminded that she at least owes her mother for all that she has done for her.
“I’ve lived my whole life giving myself to you,” Claudia’s mother says, reminding her that they’re bonded because they’re family, but the mother puts her needs first before her child’s.
“I just wanted to please my mama, my only friend. I wanted to pay her back for all of her love,” Claudia says, knowing that what she is doing is lawfully wrong. But she will do anything for her mother. McCauley portrays the broken promises that the mother has made to Claudia and the guilt of her familial role leads her to feel trapped. The other stories portray more characters going through the same generational trauma that McCauley describes in her opening story.
In “When Trying To Return Home” Andra, who is from Puerto Rico and half-black without parents, struggles to find her inner self and connect with “her people”. Andra lives in Florida where her co-workers question her about her race, leaving her to question herself. When she meets a lady who closely resembles her dead mother, she is overcome with a longing to connect with this woman, thinking it’s her mom. “She wonders about the Something Else her friends ask about. If it’s something she’s missing,” she thinks to herself not knowing it’s her mother that she’s missing. Andra had a close bond with her mother but since her mother passed, she felt that a piece of her was missing. “The triguena must have felt the crackle of recognition too,” she thought to herself as the woman closely resembled her dead mother and reminded Andra of her mother’s traits.
The woman talks to Andra in Spanish and Andra panics, not because she doesn’t know Spanish but because she thinks of her mother’s words “mi amor”. Hearing those words choked Andra only because her mother used those words affectionally only for her, as Andra knew those were her mom’s, and only her mom’s words. Andra knew that those words didn’t hold the same meaning as before when spoken carelessly by anyone else. “In her mami’s mouth, mi amor was a promise, a forever bond. This woman was just saying hello.” Andra wished her mother could’ve said those words and not a stranger who Andra decides to look at her as mami as she knew that’s not her mami. “The triguena looks nothing like her mother-Andra doesn’t want her to go.” She thinks to herself, she wants the woman to take her with her as if she were her own. McCauley portrayed this story beautifully as a daughter who longs for her mother and to have that mother-daughter connection again.
In “The Missing One” a young boy Kal growing up in segregated America is weighed with a burden that he is the one to make it out. McCauley presents the story of the early years of integration. Kal, our main character is put in Carson Junior, a white school where he struggles to fit in a society that won’t accept him, among teachers and classmates who make him miserable. Kal only goes to this school to keep his family happy and proud. “I’d spit some lie about how happy I was at that wretched school–I’d tell Mama life was wonderful, and I was making friends, and everybody loved me.” He says that to make his mother happy and not worry about him and to keep the image that his family has given him “Our little boy star” up to expectations. McCauley portrays our protagonist as a young black male in a white society where he is bullied just for his background and is forced to lie and tell his family what they want to hear. “The boys would hound me at recess, chase me behind the dumpster, or beat me fierce behind hawberry trees.” Kal’s mother had no idea what was going on with her son at school. All she cared for was his education. Kal’s mother compares Kal to his half-brother Bags, because Bags is homeless. His mother and sister put Kal in the white school so he could be something, unlike his half-brother Bags. Kal is burdened with a responsibility he didn’t want. He’s put with the burden of owing his family the education that they didn’t get to have.
McCauley has shown us that like these characters, we all have a trauma that tells our own story, a trauma that has created torsion between family members or simply against something you love. Our traumas have a profound impact on our lives, influencing our actions, decisions, and interactions with others.
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