LINDA JONES greets you with a broad smile, and exudes engaging warmth, but the veil of happiness is soon unmasked to expose a store of painful memories that are fuelling her passion for helping other women.
The ordained minister and author has documented her “very difficult and arduous journey” through most of her life, in her latest book Soul Survivor. In what she describes as her “flagship book”, she bares her soul and exposes the pain that has dogged her life from childhood.
From a birth in the heart of Port of Spain in Duncan Street, to growing up in George Street “a place that nobody wants to come from,” her tumultuous journey has taken her to Canada and now to Barbados, where she lives with her family.
Through it all she has carried the burden of “a lot of hurt; a lot of pain”, though the Christian life she leads has provided a lot of respite.
It has taken her seven years to complete Soul Survivor. She said she had the manuscript for seven years, picking at it and putting it back continuously “because I did not want to write it”.
But she finally struck up the courage to finish the book and will unveil the intimate details of her troubled past at a conference book launch at the Radisson Hotel on April 22.
“I have written the book, not to disclose my sordid past and pain, but if you don’t deal with the hurt and the pain of the past, it bleeds into your future and if the root problem never gets dealt with, you are always going to be bleeding into somebody’s life, your life and more likely it is the people who are close to you who will suffer.”
The first-born of her mother’s three children, Jones admits she grew up in a home in which she witnessed the constant beatings endured by her mother at the hands of an abusive father: “He came home drunk and he would beat her every week.”
This physical abuse coupled with emotional abuse suffered by her mother, along with the sexual abuse Jones’ mother later told her she had suffered from her own mother’s boyfriend when she was younger, had made life unbearable for Jones’ mother. It impacted negatively on the relationship with her own daughter, which Jones admits remains strained up to today, though she nonetheless still cares for her mother.
Jones’ mother left her three children behind in Trinidad and moved to the United States to escape her partner’s abuse and the young Jones found herself being shuttled from home to home to home, living with family members but feeling like she was in foster care “because nobody wanted me”.
She anticipated a better life when her mother eventually returned to Trinidad and took the three children to Canada to live with her. But the teenager’s happiness was short-lived. At age 17 she was left to be mother to her two brothers when her mother left them again and went off to the US.
She sent back money to take care of them, but that was no substitute for the parenting for which Jones longed.
In the ensuing years and as a result of that abandonment, Jones admits: “I fell into all kinds of madness and relationships that were
very destructive.”
There remains that “love-hate relationship” with her mother even now, as she confessed there is still “lots of animosity” between them. There remains a constant battle of conscience – “the war, the emotional blackmail, the guilt, the condemnation” that have characterised the relationship between mother and daughter over the years.
“My home life, my relationship with my husband was the only stable thing that was able to keep me in a place of sanity” Jones says of her relationship with Oliver, her husband of 33 years, and with her 24-year-old daughter Joy, the treasured baby that survived among her mother’s many miscarriages, the reason Jones describes her only daughter as “just a beautiful spirited child”.
“Sometimes I am here and I am going through something and
I won’t tell her and she goes: ‘What’s up?” I try to convince her nothing is wrong, but if she is not satisfied, daddy gets a WhatsApp – “Is mummy all right?”
“She is just a beautiful, spirited child.”
For Jones, her husband, a retired electrical engineer, is her “physical rock on earth.” She has been married twice and admits her current “stable marriage” is a complete opposite to her first, in which emotional abuse was common.
She believes the meeting with Oliver that gave her a second lease on marriage was divinely inspired. Together they have made accommodation in their home for the sanctuary where each finds the time for outreach to women and young men.
“I have to credit him a lot with the stability,” Jones said. “Much of any turmoil in our marriage was my own turmoil and he understood from early the dynamics of what I was going through, so he knew how he had to shift to accommodate that.
“We have a very stable marriage because both of us knew that what
I had we did not want.
“I also wrote the book to show more than anything that God can redeem anybody and any situation because it was His relentless love that pursued me in all the madness that I got into.”
“What was I seeking? I was seeking that father’s love.”
Estranged from her father for 40 years, she says God brought them back together when she searched and eventually found her late father in a nursing home, stricken by Alzheimers, eight weeks before he died.
Jones gave up the Sunday morning sessions in her home sanctuary last year to pursue the Women of Worth ministry she set up to “help those women
who are walking around with baggages of secret pain”.
“They are hiding behind preaching; they are hiding behind the pretty clothes or singing or whatever they do . . . . We hide, we lie, we look like we have the lipstick on, the make-up, but we need to tell people we have difficult times in ministry and we want to pack it up and give in.”
There were days she contemplated suicide, and she thanks her husband for saving her on one such occasion he calls “the dark night of my soul”. But she has survived and is determined to help other women survive.
“I am the person I am today because of those experiences,” she said. Of the ministry in which she is now engaged, she said: “I did not choose it. It was chosen for me.”
About one thing she is sure: the abuse, self-hate, and resulting feeling of worthlessness will not be a generational curse. “I am not going to pass that on to my daughter. I made the decision the buck stops here,” Jones said.
Jones’ seventh book Decrees Or Declarations For Soul Survivors is coming out next month and she is currently pursuing a master’s in theology, while continuously doing research for her weekly CITA Radio programme Words Of Wisdom. (GC)
