Hats off to my ‘mother in law’

THE EDITOR, Madam:

It first began with a far and distant dream by a seven-year-old boy who was asked the question, “What would you like to be?” The boy, who could barely speak, managed to utter a reply, “A lawyer”, and the hands of destiny seemed to have taken record. To say it was no easy feat would be an understatement; and the road to the Bar has been filled with twists and turns that have caused many to renege on their desire and passion to pursue this noble profession.

It was very important for me to recognise my present conditions and to adjust and readjust as I journeyed on. Financial dilemma confronted me and my family right throughout. I remember quite vividly speaking to a senior member of the administrative body of the high school I attended at the time, surrounding the non-payment of my school fee and CAPE fees -- with deadlines for both payments closing in like the Egyptian army on the children of Israel at the Red Sea. With no where to turn and having exhausted all options, destiny remembered the seven-year-old boy and rewrote the scripts for me in ways I have only read about in Shakespeare’s novels, or seen in the miracles of the Bible.

It was in this time that I met a lady in the person of Mrs Florence Darby, who would quickly prove her virtue as a lady to be appreciated for a lifetime, and beyond. Through her and her influence on other persons on the school’s board, I received that assistance I needed just in time to meet the ‘Egyptian deadlines’. I don’t know what it was about me that struck her, but we took to each other as if by magnetic attraction. Her, being an attorney-at-law was icing on the cake, as she grew to be a mother, mentor and a friend.

I began to dream again, and I pursued it with relentless ambition that led me to coin my own mantra to serve as my guiding compass, ‘A Determined Mind Is Ignorant of Defeat’. I finished high school with 18 subjects, split between CSEC and CAPE, and went on to pursue the LL.B programme at the Faculty of Law at the UWI, Mona campus.

I transitioned to the Norman Manley Law School in 2019 and endured two years of gruelling studies that would bring a strong man down to his knees; but not my knees, as they were being held together by a dream of a seven-year-old boy. I passed the second and final set of Bar exams in July and graduated Norman Manley Law School in November; and then the Bar started looking closer and closer.

Fast-forward to when we arrive at the Supreme Court on December 17, the day a son would be called to the Bar by his ‘mother in law’, the same mother, mentor and friend who has been with him since that moment of destiny bounded them together. Thus, that which was first divinely bounded is now legally binding.

JOSEPH WILLIS