Dr. Norma P. McPherson Early Childhood Education Scholarship

A specific situation in which I had to draw on my Caribbean heritage to overcome a challenge was the passing of my late mother. My mother was a single parent for me and my older sister for the entirety of my life. I never knew nor met my father and my mother was all I had for the entirety of my life with the occasional great-grandparent. She passed away from metastatic ovarian cancer on July 4th, 2020, and was diagnosed two years prior when I had just started my sophomore year of high school. When she passed, I had just recently completed my junior year of high school and during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was stricken with grief from both situations and unable to do my regular every day including eating, sleeping, and overall taking proper care of myself as I had done before. My family is dominant Jamaican from Kingston and Manchester. During my grievance period, I made a realization that had saved my life truly. During this period of intense grief, I pushed everyone away and had no motivation to do anything. I remembered my culture during this time, and our motto "Out of Many, One People". The meaning for this basically is that, we are better when together and stronger rather than when we are separated and weaker. My mother raised me in our rich culture as she was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. This moment is an inspiration for future generations as, at one point or another in everyone's life, there is turmoil for whatever reason. During these periods, it is almost a reflex for some but for many Jamaicans to push others away; more so for my generation than others due to our strict childhood environments. I want to give back to my community of Jamaican-Americans that is it okay to reach out, to feel vulnerable, and to overall feel not okay, but to also learn to rely on others as we are a people together regardless of differences. My mother was a nurse, who had a passion to help others, especially the sick. I have that shared passion with her for helping others, but helping those academically rather than sickly. Academics of those who have lost a parent are statistically shown to decrease due to emotional distress, lack of resources, and the overall giant change in their life. My mother's passing inspired me in a sense as, though I wasn't doing well mentally or emotionally due to the sudden change, I graduated from my high school as the first Posse Scholar in the last nine years and top 1% of my graduating class of 250 as salutatorian. I would not have been able to do this without relying upon and reaching out to others during my time of need and I want others to learn that it is okay and necessary to let other people in.

I have had a lot of trauma growing up in a few different areas of my life. Every situation taught me something new. For this essay, I am specifically going to talk about the situations with my sister. When I was younger, probably elementary aged, my sister struggled a lot with her mental health. Although she is doing much better now, it still caused a lot of damage to my emotional wellbeing. My sister used to be very emotionally and physically harmful towards my parents. I didn’t realize it when I was younger, but how my parents chose to handle it taught me a lot. My parents would do their best to de-escalate situations that my sister would create. They would try and get my sister to articulate the emotions she was feeling, and why they were happening. My sister being young and mentally ill, didn’t always understand what she was going through so this didn’t always work. It did help me understand that listening can get you quite far in a situation. My parent’s interventions taught me to be more in tune with how I was feeling and to be more considerate of how others were feeling as well. Though that has made me a free therapist to more than one friend, it continues to help me become an amazing teacher. I work with children of varied ages, some of which are still navigating understanding their emotions. I have one particular situation that will always stick with me. There was a child in my swim class around three to four years old who screamed and cried with each lesson. He was in another teacher's class at the time and this day I actually had some spare time so I took him for a one on one lesson. We spent fifteen minutes where I just held him and we took turns taking big deep breaths. Once I got him to calm down, we talked about how he was feeling. He ended up being able to verbalize that he was scared. Knowing that, I was able to find different ways we could learn things together and created games where he would feel comfortable. By the end of the lesson he had no more tears and we learned that taking deep breaths and expressing our feelings will get us a lot farther than screaming and crying. He was a very sweet child and that situation really reminds me that compassion and time will get you so far with children. Instead of forcing a scared child to do what I am paid to teach him, I got a scared child to talk me through his emotions. We worked together to make the pool fun which decreased his anxiety significantly. I really look forward to being able to expand my knowledge and skills with children as I continue my education at the University of Maine this fall. Emotional identification and regulation continues to be a lesson I use daily. Though I am forever impacted by my sister’s actions, I have learned to turn parts of it into something positive.