When I was a little girl in St. Mary, my teacher lined us up one day and asked the big question: what do you want to be when you grow up? Down the line it went. Lawyer. Doctor. Teacher. Lawyer again. The usual parade. Then it reached my turn, and I said it plain: I want to be a fisherwoman.
The whole class burst out laughing. The teacher laughed too. She even reported it to my mother, and it became a family joke, how hilarious I was. Everybody laughed. And you know the part that stayed with me all these years? Nobody ever asked me why.
Because I was serious.
On the way to school, at the edge of town, there was a spot where the fisherwomen worked. Every time I passed, I would see them, a group of women sitting close together, almost in a circle, scaling and gutting the morning catch the fishermen brought in. And they were laughing. Always laughing. Selling fish, trading stories, carrying on, having the best time of anybody in the parish.
I didn't have the words for it then. But standing there in my school uniform, I knew exactly what I was looking at: work that felt like play, in the middle of people who felt like home. Those women had something the lawyers and doctors in our schoolbooks didn't seem to have. They had each other. They were free. And whatever that was, that is what I wanted to be when I grew up.
We didn't have the flashy things, growing up in Jamaica. No fancy toys, none of what children abroad had. But everything we did felt like the whole world. We were happy. We were free in a way I have spent my adult life trying to find again. And the fisherwomen were the picture of it, joy and freedom, right there beside the sea, every single morning.
It took me thirty-something years to understand that I got my wish after all. No, I don't scale fish at the edge of town. But look at what I'm doing: building a home for the fisherwomen, and the cookshop ladies, and the river guides, and every Jamaican making an honest living with their own two hands and a good laugh. Jamaica Outback is my fish table. Pull up a stool.
So mi dear, the next time a child tells you a dream that makes you laugh, ask them why. The little girl at the end of the line might be telling you exactly who she is.