What ‘Patsy’ Teaches Us About Making Peace With Parental Pain
Reviewing mother-daughter parallels in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s bestselling novel.
TW: Mentions of self-harm
Spoiler warning: Please be aware this review contains spoilers.
The relationship a mother has with her child can have a profound impact on the person they become. This is a point Nicole Dennis-Benn repeatedly and seamlessly drives home in her fiction novel “Patsy.”
This story is about a woman named Patsy who leaves her young daughter in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her best and oldest friend, to New York. Patsy looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses and finally put herself first.
But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny and quickly realizes that her American dream may not fit her new reality. Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, Patsy’s daughter, Tru, must move in with her father she barely knows as she struggles to understand why her mother left her behind.
This book is filled with several compelling female characters who share a maternal vulnerability. Daughters looked to their mothers for guidance, mothers looked to their daughters for validation, and these voids crippled each woman as they tried to achieve self-actualization at any cost.
“But di weirdest t’ing bout life is dat it’s only understood backward. Yuh neva know what’s at di end ah dis tunnel waiting fah you, sweetheart.”
Patsy made it abundantly clear throughout this story that she harbored a lot for resentment toward Mama G, her mother, for putting her love for Jesus above her love for Patsy. Though they lived in the same household, Patsy often felt abandoned by her mother as she threw herself into her faith and rejected Patsy for not doing the same.
Similarly, Patsy abandoned her daughter, Tru once she obtained her work visa and confirmation that she could stay with Cicely in New York. Patsy constantly rejected her daughter because she could only see her as a burden keeping her shackled to a life in Jamaica she no longer wanted.
Patsy and Tru also tended to gravitate toward risky situations to escape the pain of being rejected by their mothers and community. Mama G’s love for Jesus made her oblivious to Patsy’s pain, and trauma she endured right under her roof at the hands of her mother’s former boyfriend, Curtis (referred to as Uncle Curtis).
In fact, Patsy’s desire for love and attention was so great that she leaned into Uncle Curtis’ affections, even if she felt her mother would disapprove, because she wanted him to stay around and therefore never viewed him as dangerous. Tru, on the other hand, copes with her pain by cutting herself. Though cutting is very dangerous and even nearly causes Tru to lose her life, she does it to take her mind off of the everyday mental struggle she faces.
“And while people would pardon convicts, drunks, and men who f*** goats, cows, dogs, and children, they are suspicious, almost terrified, of a woman without a family and no religion.”
One thing Cicely’s mother, Mabley, passed on to her daughter was her irresistible beauty and the ability to use it to get what she wanted from men. Mabley was able to handsomely profit from sex work and provide a comfortable life for her and Cicely. Although Cicely was never a sex worker, she did use her beauty to get ahead and establish a comfortable life for herself and the child she has with her husband, Marcus, in America.
Cicely also married Marcus to fill the void her father left within her. Not only is Marcus wealthy and white like her father, but he also rejects her to maintain his own reputation as her father did. Cicely’s father never wanted to see or interact with Cicely, even though she would be home at the same time he visited her mother, because he prioritized his family at home.
Similarly, Marcus never wanted to see Cicely for her true self — just the woman he wanted her to be — in order to keep up his political image. Marcus’ control over Cicely leads her to do drastic things that alter her image and repress her Jamaican heritage, such as bleaching her hair and skin and Americanizing her accent.
“Dey have all di power to punish us fah stealing from dem — fah daring to t’ink we can dream, much less love.”
Though Tru hardly remembers Patsy, she is more like her mother than she knows. This is most apparent through their queerness — their struggle to identify it, express it, and everyone else’s tendency to shame them for it. From her childhood to her teenage years, Tru finds more and more comfort in her masculine side and does many things to affirm it, such as cut off all her hair, wear masculine clothes, and wrap her breasts.
Patsy, while living in Jamaica, hides her queerness from everyone except Cicely. When she moves to America, she also shaves her head choosing comfort over what may look acceptable to those around her and those who know her.
Tru is also a big dreamer, just like Patsy, and will seemingly do anything to pursue her passion even in the face of adversity. Ever since she was a little girl, Tru wanted to become a professional footballer and actually turned out to be a very talented player in her teen years. However, when it seemed that she would finally have the opportunity to make her dream a reality, she couldn’t because she was a woman trying to play on a team of men.
Patsy’s talent was with numbers. She had dreams of moving to America, pursuing a career that utilized her knack for math, and earning enough money to support her new life and help her family in Jamaica. Instead, she had to take on a job she didn’t want as a nanny because she was undocumented, and made so little money that she couldn’t even save anything.
However, by the end of the book, Patsy and Tru had managed to make the best out of situations that had once threatened to crush their ambitions for good. Patsy finally found the freedom she sought in New York, though it came at a price and happened nowhere near how she originally imagined, and achieved the love she always wanted — in another and within herself.
Meanwhile, Tru finally begins healing from her mother’s abandonment and paved a new lane for herself so that she, and other girls with a passion for soccer, could enjoy and excel at the sport.
“You’re alive for a reason, Tru. You’re here to prove people, including myself, wrong. You can be the one to. change things.”
There’s this famous saying: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” I think that applies to families when it comes to toxic patterns that seem to go on for generations. We may have a lot of unanswered or even answered questions as to why our parents did certain things that affected us in significant ways.
However, it’s our responsibility to learn from their errors, end the pattern, and choose a new way forward the way Tru did by channelling her energy toward what actually makes her happy and making peace with her pain.
