Sable Monroe

One of the strange things about childhood is that sometimes you do not understand the emotional meaning of a memory until decades later.

At the time, it just feels normal.

I remember participating in a school play at Alvernia Preparatory School in Kingston, Jamaica when I was a child. The play had a rural Jamaican setting, and I was cast as Dinah’s mother.

I still remember parts of the song:

“All the call weh mi call Dinah,
Dinah hear mi,
but she no answer…”

The role itself did not upset me at the time.

Honestly, I thought part of the reason I got cast was because I was tall for my age. I also had a strong Montego Bay accent from spending so much time in the country with my grandmother, and I think the teachers felt I naturally fit the rural character.

So they dressed me in a headscarf and country-style clothing and cast me as somebody’s mother.

As a child, I accepted it without much thought.

But looking back now as an adult, the memory feels emotionally different.

Because underneath the school play was a pattern that followed me throughout childhood:
people constantly treated me as older than I actually was.

Older children get assigned more responsibility.

Older children are expected to help more.

Older children are expected to carry more emotionally.

And even when adults do not realize they are doing it, children feel the weight of those expectations.

At home, I already felt emotionally older than my age much of the time. I monitored adult moods constantly. I worried about conflict. I adapted quickly. I became observant very early.

So looking back now, I realize part of me did not want to play the mother figure at all.

I desperately wanted to just be a child.

I wanted softness.

Protection.

The freedom to feel small.

But throughout my childhood, people often seemed to see me as capable before they saw me as vulnerable.

That is the strange thing about certain childhood memories:
sometimes what hurts is not the event itself, but what the event quietly represented.

At the time, the play felt fun.

As an adult, I look back and realize how tired I already was of carrying emotional weight long before I was grown.