This thesis is a memoir of the women in my family and their relationship to motherhood, both adoptive and biological. The primary source of this work is memory and is contextualized within the Caribbean culture. The process of interpreting these memories relies on narrative, cultural, and life history theory that disarticulate ideas of motherhood found in North America from those in the Caribbean. The beginning chapters are a personal memoir of motherhood while the end chapters are analyses of the theoretical foundations of what I have explored. In the last chapter, I reflect upon the personal process of writing memoir. There is no equivalent study of the perception of the adoptive mother versus the biological mother in the Caribbean. These stories of my family contribute to our understanding of motherhood in the lives of women of color in the Americas, many of which have been missing from history's larger narrative. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection