A Love Letter to Barbados (and to Being an Immigrant)
When I first arrived in Barbados twenty years ago, I didn’t think of myself as an immigrant. I thought of myself as someone who had bought a house in the sunshine, with rum-tinted glasses firmly on, and a vague idea that this might be a nice place to raise a family. The word immigrant wasn’t one I claimed — not then, not for years.
And yet, that’s exactly what I was.
In the UK we hear “immigrant” in a very particular way — heavy with negativity, suspicion, fear. Meanwhile, people like me are often given a softer label: expat. It sounds glamorous, temporary, more like a lifestyle choice than a life. But the truth is, I am an immigrant. I left the country I was born in. I went through the slow process of building a life, of learning unwritten rules, of sometimes failing miserably, of slowly rooting myself in a new culture. I even went through the long bureaucratic road of becoming a citizen. That word — immigrant — belongs to me too. And it’s time to reclaim it.
If I tell the story honestly, it began in spreadsheets rather than seashells. In 2005, my husband and I were looking for a place to invest in US dollars without actually being in the US. Barbados, with its long ties to the UK and currency linked to the dollar, seemed to make financial sense. So we bought a house on the West Coast, becoming part of that class of homeowners who sip sundowners and sigh about sunsets.
But the island had other plans for us.
A twist of fate led us into the embrace of a Barbadian family, and for the first time I saw the depth of cross-generational life there — grandparents, cousins, aunties, toddlers, all woven into a living fabric of community. It was foreign to my husband and me, raised in the more fragmented family culture of the UK. And it was intoxicating.
Around the same time, we were starting fertility treatment at the excellent clinic on the island, and soon — to our astonishment — I had three boys under two. Suddenly, the dream of raising a family in a warm climate wasn’t abstract. It was urgent.
So we stayed.
No one tells you how hard it is to move countries. I carried enormous privilege — financial, racial — and still it was brutally hard at times. Lonely. Overwhelming.
There are practical things: bank accounts, utility bills, car insurance, making friends from scratch. There are the unwritten rules: no beachwear beyond the beach, greet every person when you walk into a room. My shy British self wanted to crawl into the corner and disappear, but slowly I learned. I went to every invitation, every coffee morning, every “come along and see” — sifting, fumbling, sometimes thriving, sometimes failing.
And there is the emotional work: discovering that some friendships are fleeting, because Barbados is transient, full of diplomats and postings. Understanding the “expat moan,” that tedious chorus about supermarket shortages and potholes, which quickly taught me what not to do. Learning the sweetness of when a Barbadian takes you under their wing — and the sting when they don’t.
It was a long apprenticeship in belonging.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Barbados gave me another unexpected gift: Indian Pond. We bought the old plantation house impulsively, long before we were ready to take it on. For years it sat in its crumbling beauty — part dream, part burden — while we tried to decide what to do. And then slowly, patiently, we began.
Renovating Indian Pond wasn’t just a construction project. It was an initiation. I learned the history written in its coral stone walls, the legacies of sugar and slavery that shaped its foundations. I learned patience, watching something unfold at its own pace — painfully slow at times, then suddenly flowering. We lived for a while in the little cottage on the property, falling in love with the rhythm of country life: roosters at dawn, rain on the mahogany trees, the kind of stillness you can only find when you’re off the coast and up in the hills.
And over time, the land itself became part of us. We planted cacao trees and watched them grow, bearing fruit that we could crack open with the boys, their fingers sticky with pulp, the smell of chocolate in its rawest form. The pond itself was their playground — swimming as toddlers, daring each other to jump as teenagers.
Indian Pond became more than a house. It became sanctuary. It became the backdrop of my children’s childhood, and their compass point now that they are older, studying away but always returning. For me, it has been teacher, mirror, refuge, responsibility.
To root yourself in a piece of land like this is to deepen your relationship with a country. Indian Pond grounded me in Barbados in a way nothing else could. It made me less transient, less “expat.” It asked me to stay, to commit, to care.
Barbados gave me my children’s childhood. They grew up under almond trees and in turquoise seas, with a perspective far wider than their small island home. They learned to sail in the Grenadines, spent summers drenched in salt and sunlight, and came of age with the sound of Soca music as their seasonal soundtrack. Even now, when Kadooment bands spill onto the streets at Crop Over, the pulse of the music trucks, the laughter, the colour, the heat. They are in them too.
Barbados gave me yoga. My first class was on this island, and it cracked me open. Every strand of my work now — teaching, retreats, trainings — comes back to that first class and the practice that took root here.
Barbados gave me lessons in humility and perspective. It educated me — viscerally, not theoretically — about colonialism, about the legacies of slavery and empire that still shape every corner of the modern world. You cannot live in the Caribbean and believe that colonialism is a footnote. It is everywhere: in the land, in the economy, in the privilege that I carry as a white immigrant. My children have grown up with this awareness, and I am grateful.
Barbados gave me friendships that I know will outlast geography. The kind forged not in nostalgia for “back home” but in shared life: schools, funerals, potholes after rain, mango season, the endless dance of figuring things out together.
And, finally, Barbados gave me myself. Moving here stripped away everything I thought I knew about who I was. In the process of losing old identities, I found deeper ones: teacher, mother, immigrant, friend.
Now, after two decades, life is shifting again. My children are older. My work is expanding in the UK. There is a churning inside me, a re-establishing of roots in another country. But Barbados will always be home. It will always be in my children’s bones, in my marriage, in the friendships that held me, in the yoga that changed me.
To be an immigrant is to live with more than one home. It is to hold love across oceans. It is to belong in ways that are complicated, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately richer than anything you could have planned.
Barbados, you have been my teacher. You have been my children’s cradle. You have been my greatest adventure and my deepest grounding.
I arrived in rum-tinted glasses, and stayed long enough to see clearly. And what I saw, what I keep seeing, is love.
Always yours,
Tory