“She Knew That In Order To Survive, She Had To Leave Us Behind”

“I can’t imagine doing what you did. Leaving my children behind like that.”

In Layaway Child, Chanel Sutherland writes about Caribbean domestic workers navigating the cruelty of their Canadian employers, and their daughters navigating the cruelty of their Canadian classmates. A woman is grilled about the children she left behind during a job interview to be a nanny. Another contends with a house guest of her employer who refuses to call her by her name: “Wait, her name is actually Majesty?” A high-school sophomore is the only Black kid in her critical race theory class. (It’s taught by the school’s white gym teacher, who tells his students that “when I was given the the task of teaching this course, I had no idea what I would do or where I would start.”) Two sisters arrive in Canada in identical polka-dot dresses, awaiting their “new mom.” Each story in the collection is a gut punch, punctuated by quiet moments of joy and understanding. Each is also deeply personal.

“My mom was 20 when she came to Canada. She left behind two small children; I was four, my sister was two and a half. She was really smart, she made good grades. She was also a brilliant artist,” says Sutherland. ”But she had to put those things aside. She knew in order to survive, she had to leave us behind and find a different path.” (In the book’s dedication, Sutherland notes that her mother, Bernadette, “laid her dreams down so I could pick them up.”)

Like many of the characters in Layaway Child, Bernadette moved from the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent to Montreal, where she worked as a caregiver and house cleaner. Eight years later, Sutherland and her younger sister joined her.

It wasn’t a seamless reunion; at one point Sutherland told her mom that she’d rather live with her aunt because her mom was a stranger. “She was no longer my mom when she left St. Vincent for Montreal. I understood my grandparents as my mom and my dad,” she says. “I think I spoke to her once while she was gone.”

Chanel Sutherland, author of Layaway Child.

The title for Layaway Child—also the name of one of the collection’s most heartbreaking stories—came to Sutherland when she was 14. “My mom would go to Zellers and she would put something on layaway, paying it off until she owned it,” she says. “I remember her putting money down on winter jackets for me and my sister and I was like, layaway, that’s what she did to us.” 

But it wasn’t until the pandemic that the book truly took shape.

“During the COVID years, my mom and I started taking long walks together and talking about our experiences,” says Sutherland.  “A lot of the stories that I learned from her became part of the book.”

These conversations helped Sutherland see her mother in a new light. “I had a new appreciation for the fact she was not this alien person I thought she was when I was a child,” she says. She hopes that Layaway Child helps other people truly see the domestic workers in their own lives.

“These workers are such an important part of our lives, and it’s almost as if they’re invisible,“ she says. “They’re human beings, and they have beautiful stories.”

Layaway Child by Chanel Sutherland, $25