Hannah Baker

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Hannah Baker is intelligent, well-read and not a little intense. Conversation with her
often keeps you on your toes and she’s never been one to lose an argument. Currently,
she’s finishing law school at NYU, which has suited her perfectly due to her idealistic
nature and her inclination to logical, reasoned arguments.

What do your parents do?

My father is a college professor at Langara. He teaches English and my mother is a
freelance writer. My dad’s been an English professor pretty much forever. Since he got
his Ph.D before I was born. My mom’s jumped around. I think she wanted to go into
publishing originally but it was really hard to find jobs in publishing after she graduated
from Barnard in the 70’s. Basically what she could find was secretarial level work.

She went to business school, which I get the sense she regrets a little bit. When she
moved to Vancouver with my dad, she got very involved with credit unions. She was
writing articles for this magazine Enterprise, which is like the newsletter of the credit
unions of BC. She writes all these articles pretty much about everything but always with
some credit union twist like Sexism and Credit Unions! Old people in the work place and
credit unions!

It was good when I was growing up that it was freelance so she basically stayed home
with me. Also my dad had these exceedingly long summer vacations so, I always say,
when I first realized that most grown ups do not have a summer vacation like the same
as the school vacation I was shocked. I was like “People just work for June, July, and
August? They do that?” And it took me surprisingly late to figure that out.

How does your dad like being a professor?

I think he likes it a lot. He gets frustrated with his students. I always wonder why he
doesn’t publish any academic articles because he has ideas and my mom says that his
thesis was really fantastic, like his dissertation was amazing and people wanted to publish
it. He doesn’t talk about this but I think he was really frustrated with academia at that
point. My mom says that he would have job interviews where they would say, do you
intend to publish, and he would just say, no. That’s why he works at Langara right,
because he would just say no, so he had to work for a place that was more teaching
focused. And I wonder why that is, I really do.

How did moving away change your relationship with them?

I think I have a really good relationship with them now. I worked with parents this
summer. I’m a law student and I interned at this organization where we represent parents
who have been accused of abuse or neglect. That’s the kind of work I want to do as a
lawyer. It made me realize how many different ways there are of being a parent so I think
it really opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of the things my parents did were deliberate
choices in the way they raised me, as opposed to just what happened. Because so much of how I was raised was, well that’s the way of the world.

Do you have an example?

Yeah, for example we didn’t have a TV. Or rather we did have a TV but we didn’t have
a cable hookup so when I was sick my dad would rent a VCR from the video store and I
would get to watch a movie – and it was a black and white TV. I never even thought to
complain about this, even though I loved TV and I would watch TV at my friends house
when I would get the chance. To me that was just, well we don’t have a TV. Or the TV
only comes out when I was sick. It wasn’t something my parents had decided; it was how
it was.

I guess the big one is that my mom is Catholic and my dad is Jewish but basically an
atheist. My mom and I would go to church and he wouldn’t. That never seemed strange
to me. I think sometimes I would see families at church and be sort of surprised that the
dad was there. It seemed sort of ‘moms go to church, dads don’t’ in my mind.

And every time I realized something like that I was surprised.

Anything you’d like to say in conclusion?

I think I would be friends with them if they weren’t my parents or I hope I would be.
And I’m curious about them. I’m curious about what their lives were like before I was
there. It’s funny to think that before you were born and after you were born, it’s just this
continuous bit of time. Yeah it was a big event for them but … their lives continued and
it’s funny to think of that.

My parents always tell this story when my mom was pregnant with me and they were
about to leave for the hospital, they left the door of their apartment building. They turned
back and I think it was my dad said “You know we’re never going to go through this door
just the two of us again. It’s always going to be the three of us.”

Robert Kissack

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Robert Kissack is a man of calm intelligence. There’s a reticence about him that is fascinating once it’s noticed. When he’s interrupted, he won’t fight to speak his mind, but will patiently wait until the conversation comes back to him, or will submit to the flow of the topic and give up on his thought. When he does have the floor, however, he contributes well-informed and humble opinions. He is a fine conversationalist, and an excellent sounding board for opinions and news. When we meet, at 8pm on a Saturday evening, he’s reading a book in a quiet corner of the café, with a beer and a cappuccino in front of him.

“A stimulant and a depressant,” he smiles.

Robert’s parents, Peter and Jane Kissack, live in San Diego.

“San Diego is weird, geographically. It has a relatively small downtown area, which is around the bay, but the city limits stretch very far north. My parents live, this is where I grew up, in the north suburbs of San Diego. Pretty much as far north as you can get while staying in the city limits. When our family first moved there, we lived in a couple of different houses, and then I would have been two or three when they bought the place that I grew up in. So around 23 years. As long as I can remember. They constantly talk about leaving. Not in a serious, we-don’t-like-it-here way. Now that all their kids are done school, now we’re all in the job market as functional adults – which is a weird thing to think about – there’s nothing tying my parents down to one place. There’s less of a need for an entire house. They don’t have any immediate plans to leave, but they think about it more than they used to.

“I’ve tried to describe the house to others before, and I have trouble, because what I say is ‘stereotypical San Diego,’ and that means nothing to people who weren’t raised there. It’s a one-story, it’s in a neighbourhood of houses that were built in the late-70s. No basement. Basements don’t really exist in San Diego, or Southern California, because of earthquakes. Quiet neighbourhood.”

Robert shared a bedroom with his younger brother all the way through high school. His sister had her own room, but the family never converted it into a room for either he or his brother.

“It’s funny because I think that colours a little bit about my parents attitude about my house, which is that things are slow to change. My bedroom still has bunk beds in it, although no one uses them. My parents always talk about getting rid of those. It’s still set up like two teenage boys are there. There are batman posters on the wall. They have that approach, they have this list of things they want to change about the house that’s 20 items long. They’ve been more consistent in the last couple of years, especially since my brother left. They were very pleased with their changes. I got a show. They cleaned the garage, and I got a picture emailed to me, with my mom standing in between the two cars, like ‘Look at what we did,’ as if it were a magic trick.”

I ask what his parents do.

“My mom is a…um…a bookkeeper for…um…you know, its one of those sad things where I don’t really know the title. She does accounting and organizational work for Big Brothers and Big Sisters, one of the successful chapters in San Diego. My dad is a software engineer, and has had a number of different positions. Since ’93, he’s owned his own company. For the past six or seven years, he’s been contracting with some Hollywood companies that do payroll software. He’s in the last year of a multi-year contract right now.

“My mom likes her specific job, and my dad likes his career. My mom spent a lot of time not working, and I think that doing what she does is very fulfilling. Helping kids is something that she cares quite a bit about. My dad, I think, likes his career. I think for him, liking your job isn’t necessary. It sometimes seems to not even to occur to him to like your day-to-day work, but the field of computer science is a passion for him. He works for some spectacularly weird clients in Hollywood, so dealing with that just sometimes seems insane.”

I ask him if there are any memories of his parents that are important to him.

“I feel like I have many small memories of my parents. Less of big moments, but many small, character moments, that are exemplary of who my parents are. The first that comes to mind, for some reason, and this has come up with my siblings several times, it was a couple Christmases ago. It was right around the time that the relationship I was in was coming to an end, and it was a very strange break, because I didn’t know if I’d be coming back to a relationship or not. So I had a couple of heart-to-hearts with my dad, actually, which felt weird, because we normally talk on a different level. We went for a walk with the dog, and as we were walking my dad, just out of nowhere, started talking, like ‘What’s the deal? What’s next? You’re coming up to graduation, you want to get married, you want kids?’ The one moment that stands out is when my dad was like, ‘You should probably have kids before you’re thirty.’ I thought: what a strange piece of advice. Very sound, but strange coming from my dad. And I mentioned it to my brother, and he, being the smarter person, sat there silently and said, ‘Dad was thirty when he had our sister.’ I quickly did the math, and a hundred percent, he was thirty. It felt very typical of my father, like it was this great piece of advice entirely based on personal experience. A good conversation, and that seems to stand out.”

I ask about his mom.

“Actually, this relates to both my parents, but it was my mom that did it. She was the person who woke me up on September 11th. At the time my dad was in New Jersey, working in New York for a week, on a business trip. And my grandparents were doing a trip on the East Coast, in Boston the day before, and flew to North Carolina that day. So we had three family members on the East Coast, traveling. I remember my mom waking me up and saying, ‘Come watch tv, something happened.’ And that was basically it. I remember standing in the living room with her, both of us watching tv, and her calling and trying to get a hold of my dad. We knew, based on timing, there wasn’t this question of, ‘Is he okay?’ We knew he wasn’t in the city. It’s strange, because that memory feels very connected to my mother, but I don’t remember her emotional state. I remember her being calm, because I think she had to be. She made sure we were getting to school, as well. She had an eye towards the practical. Despite having family members on the East Coast, I remember my mom handling the situation. She has a great capacity to remain calm in a stressful environment.”

The cafe we were in was closing. We thanked them, and left to find more depressants across the street.

Meghan Wong

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At 23, Meghan Wong is remarkably accomplished. She has completed two degrees, is the Academic Director of a Vancouver school, and has seemingly bounced from one country to another her whole life. Although she has a barely contained, youthful energy, she speaks with a wisdom that belongs to someone far older. We meet in a Starbucks near the school. She turns down coffee, but accepts an herbal tea.

“Do I look like I need caffeine?”

We sit, and she sips her drink. She tells me her parents names: Ren Rong Cheung and Xi Jia Wong.

“In Chinese culture people don’t usually change their names when they get married. My mom, when she moved to Canada, chose an English name for herself that started with R, so she chose the name Ruthy, which is the worst name of all time. My dad, who should have an English name because no one can pronounce it, chose not to have an English name. Now he goes by Zai-Jay most of the time.”

Her parents live in Shanghai now, although it wasn’t always the case.

“We own two properties, the first time we’ve owned property. My parents bought a house a few years ago. It’s in a suburb outside of Shanghai, in a place where there are only houses and nothing else. Everything in Shanghai is accessibly by subway, and it doesn’t quite reach our house, which is kind of a big deal. It’s far. They own another place, an apartment, on the eastern side of Shanghai.

“My parents went to London, a year ago, to visit my brother, and they went to visit Buckingham Palace, and they discovered that the Queen spends most of her time there during the week, and then on the weekends she goes to Windsor. It’s nicer, more remote. So our house is called Buckingham Palace, and on the weekends they go to Windsor.”

“Why have they only recently owned a house?”

“Until the last ten, twenty years or so, no one really owned property. It wasn’t a thing in China. In 1991 I moved to Canada, when I was 3 years old. We lived in Halifax and then Montreal, and we never had the money, we just lived in shitty little apartments. Then we moved to Hong Kong, and it’s very expensive in Hong Kong. We always had subsidized rent because we lived in the university faculty housing, where my dad worked. It wasn’t until we moved to Shanghai, just because of the money.”

Her mother is an accountant, and her father is a professor of accounting.

“My dad loves his job more than life itself. I think he’s a very good teacher, he loves teaching, he loves accounting, and I think the environment makes him comfortable. He’s not comfortable not being in control. He’s more comfortable when he’s working. My mom loves being an accountant, but she always says she took too much time off to have kids, so she’s not as high in the company as she would like.”

I ask about her family dynamic, and what dinner would be like with them.

“Um…I’m a little hesitant about how to answer that question. Mostly because I think our family is changing. I’m gonna give a long-winded answer. I think the problem with a lot of Asian families is that Chinese people in general have a different level of self-awareness, because they are not encouraged throughout school and throughout adulthood to become self-aware. To embark on a journey of self-discovery is not something that people do. So when they become parents, one of the things I always say is that the biggest difference between a Chinese and a Canadian family is that you can go to any average Canadian family, especially if they’re new parents, and what you will find on their bookshelves is a book about parenting. You will never find that in a Chinese house. Even if they do have it, they will hide it. They don’t want anyone to know. The idea is that this is parenting, you should just know how to do it. So what happens is… parenting is difficult. Here, in Canada, if you tell kids to do something once and they don’t do it, it’s like, ‘Okay, what can we do to fix this problem?’ With Chinese parents it’s ‘Well obviously you didn’t yell loud enough, and you weren’t scary enough, and you weren’t mean enough. And if you say it louder, and more times, and with a stricter face, they will listen.’ I think most kids tend to accept that, that that’s what it’s like with parents. Although things are slowly changing, in general, things are still like that.

“I moved away, and I never had a close relationship with my parents, and I thought the relationship I had with my family is very different from what I see on tv and with my friends. Once I went to university, and I became a lot more… you know, that was my quest for self-awareness. I realized that it was much more about being able to change things, not just saying, ‘This is the hand you’re dealt and this is your family so just fucking deal with it.’ It was more like, ‘Well, I don’t want this for the rest of my life. How can we fix it and how can we make it better?’ What I would say is that the dinner table at my house is…ten years ago very different from five years ago different from today. Ten years ago, nobody really talks, no sharing or opinions. A lot of passive aggressive fighting. My brother doesn’t say anything. My dad leaves early to work in the office. The quieter everyone else is the louder I get to compensate. Now my brother doesn’t say anything, because everyone’s used to me using big jokes and laughing a lot when everyone’s around. I think now it’s less and less like that.

“The whole feeling, when I meet people who have similar families, is that you grow up thinking your family is so different, and that nobody else can understand because you’re just this fucked up family that’s not like any other family. I always feel like my family is inferior. When you do find someone who has similar stories, it’s like an outpouring of relief.”

I ask her if there are any memories of either parent that stand out for her.

“One memory that I always come back to, I think I was eight or nine. Nine. Eight. Seven or eight. I was sitting on the floor in our living room, in this dinky little flat we had in Montreal, and we were about to go out somewhere. I was putting on socks. These were black socks, the kind that had a little pattern. On the outside ankle, there was a little animal, or something. I was putting on these socks, and I was like ‘I don’t understand, the penguins are facing the wrong way. They won’t face the outside. It’s facing the inside!’ I was getting really frustrated, and I said ‘How come it’s not the right way?’ And my dad stood there, and he said to me, in Chinese, ‘Actually, I’m not going to help you. I want you to figure it out by yourself.’ I said ‘Well what the fuck?! If I turn it inside out, the penguins will be inside out!’ And I freaked out and I cried, and I got so frustrated. Oh, okay.”

At this point, an elderly gentleman gently touches Meghan’s arm, and asks her to calm down. She nods and carries on.

“And um…and I freaked out. Eventually, I was just crying, and my dad just came over and said, ‘You just have to swap the socks, on the other foot’. And I was like ‘Oh…’

“I’ll still do things like that today. My dad isn’t like that. I think part of the reason he loves to teach is that he does love to help people learn, and impart knowledge. But he didn’t really do that with me. He wasn’t around very much and he didn’t take a lot of time to do that with me.”

“What about your mom?”

“What about my mom.”

“A memory.”

“A memory of my mom. My mom is very small. Shorter than I am, about five foot…maybe even like four foot nine…naw she’s probably about five foot. She’s plump, and super jolly, and probably the world’s least funny person. Like really really not funny. She never says anything funny. But it’s really funny. She’s so not funny. She’s definitely the least funny person I’ve ever met.”

Meghan is laughing as she describes her.

“But as a result she finds everything funny, and if she finds something funny she’ll say it six times. And because she’s small and jolly, when she laughs her whole body laughs. I think it’s great. So, growing up there was a lot of tension, not as the result of a confrontation, just ongoing constant tension. I remember, when I was about twelve, we’d gone out and we saw this watch that had like a million different features. My dad’s kind of pretentious, and he said ‘Oh if you bought this watch it would tell you all kinds of things, blah blah blah.’ And I started making jokes, saying ‘Yeah, because if I’m out, I can be like Oh it’s four o’clock, and I can tell you about the humidity too.’ I made all these jokes. My mom was peeing herself laughing and the more she laughed the more I continued until I spent like a half hour making jokes about this watch. Whenever I picture her, the first image that comes to mind is of her laughing. That’s one of my favourite memories of my mom, laughing at something that’s not even funny.”

I ask her if there’s anything she’d like to add.

“I think it’s difficult for even me to appreciate, let alone somebody who’s not me, or who’s not Chinese. I think that being Chinese is 100% the basis for all of my relationships in my family. Everything is because we’re Chinese. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I think a big part of that is the awareness that my life is so different from my parents’ life. It’s taught me the most patience. I spent a lot of my youth being resentful, impatient, saying ‘I wish my family was like this.’ As you do, you grow up and you learn to appreciate, and you see things in a brighter light. I’ve come to appreciate how different my life is from my parents. They grew up in the Cultural Revolution in China. They had a difficult life, but it wasn’t difficult, because it was everyone’s life. There’s no way they can understand my life and there’s no way I can understand theirs. I’m just beginning to get it, I’m just beginning to get all of these stories. I think every year our family dynamic is changing, as my brother and I grow up, and as my parents loosen up a bit. It changes, because I think it takes a lot to overcome.”

Her tea is cold now, and the old man long gone. I thank her and turn off the recorder.

Lester Waxman

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Lester Waxman is a sharp man, physically and intellectually. He is humble about his remarkable fitness. He never brags or tries to convert others to a healthy lifestyle, but it is an intractable part of who he is: he rode his bike over for this interview, in the middle of winter, in the middle of Michigan. He also has a keen mind. His conversational skills will at once relax you and challenge you – he can keep up with the small talk and tactfully direct the conversation towards reflection and depth. He is a good friend to those who know him, and a source of subtle inspiration. We meet over a bottle of white wine, and together we empty it.

Lester’s parents are Donohue and Clare Waxman, and they raised him in California, in the San Fernando Valley.

“Where is that? Northern, Southern?”

“If you took Los Angeles and cut it into a pie, on the northern hemisphere you would have these suburban areas mixed in. The northern part is the San Fernando Valley, and it’s huge. North Ridge is one of the arbitrary neighbourhoods in that area.”

“You grew up there?”

“The house that my parents own now is the house that I was brought home to when I was born, that they had just bought. It’s as old as me.”

“So that house is home.”

“A hundred percent. The house has changed a lot because of my mom, because of her hobbies. She is an interior decorator. That was her job, though she’s now backed away a little bit. She just decorates the shit out of houses. There’s about fifteen or twenty homes in LA, and you walk into them and you’re like ‘Holy crap, this is Clare Waxman’s M.O.’ She always caters to what the client wants, sometimes goes with what their style is, maybe more modern than she prefers. But she’s into country stuff, like these old suitcases, she takes 40 of them and stacks them in a certain way, or uses little trinkets like milk glass, which are midway between translucent and white opaque. They’re just old. She likes era pieces.

“So the space of the house has changed: you collect more things, there’s less room. We had a living room, or a den, and it changed. We used to play floor hockey, but now you walk in, it’s a comfy room with couches. The purpose changes. What is the same, about the house, is, I mean, I can walk around that house in the dark. I know what I always hit with my hockey bag. Trudging through the house, the same thing on the wall bounces back and forth, or doesn’t fall. The things that haven’t changed, like cleaning supplies, and the pillows, the hand towels, they’re always in the same place. 30 years. I could still go back there and feel like I know exactly where things will be. Her sister always says to my mom: ‘If you want me to buy you a gift for your birthday, I have to take something from this house.’ Because there’s no room for anything. The other thing she’ll do, my aunt will take something to see if she notices, and my mom could walk into a room and be like ‘Where’s the medium-sized wooden watermelon with the bite taken out of it.’ She’s not a hoarder, but an incredibly audacious collector. Everything has a proper place and theme.”

“So not cluttered.”

“No, organized. Hard to describe.”

I ask him to tell me about his dad.

“My dad is a Certified Public Accountant. He does taxes and financial advice. He’s one of three partners, and they have changed over the years. He got his name on the board some time in the 80s. Since I’ve known him, I’ve had this idea of him being a… the word big shot comes to mind, but that’s not right. My dad is not a big shot in his personality, but I’ve always known him to be the head of this company, people who do semi-important things. He would never boast about his position, or the accomplishments he’s made. Maybe I think what he does is a big deal, but he doesn’t talk about work. I know he’s getting new clients, because my family’s income has gone up since I was young, but he doesn’t make it a centerpiece around the dinner table. He likes his job, immensely. I remember, when I was old enough to know that you should do what you love in life, he was one of the first people I asked about it. Why do you like what you do? I could paraphrase his whole two-minute speech about it, in that it was about having people trust him. He really valued that. That trust really allowed him to help his clients. He enjoys the day-to-day, but he knows that’s not as important as saying he helped a client for fifteen years, put them at ease. Fifteen years is a long time, I’ve never thought of doing anything for fifteen years.”

I ask him if there are memories of his parents that stand out for him.

“I think, with my mom, it’s sitting in her black leather, little red BMW, when they were the size of Vespas. Red, black leather, and she had the windows down, and we were driving back from Nordstrom. There was a cassette playing, a cassette of Gypsy Kings. I could play that memory over and over, fifty times, and what’s significant about it is that: one, I love the Gypsy Kings now. It’s engrained in my blood, now that she’s played it so many times. But I identify my mom with leisure. We were just being leisurely. We were at Nordstrom, and she was maybe browsing, or chatting with some friends, met for coffee. I was just hanging around as a kid, and I remembering running around the store like a numb nut. We drove home with no deadlines, there wasn’t any place we had to be, maybe we’d stop by a Taco Bell or a McDonalds on the way home. It was just leisure, and I had fun. I don’t remember the conversations we had. She probably asked me about life, what I wanted for my birthday, what am I excited about, and I’m sure that all took place, but what I remember is being totally relaxed with my mom. No worries. I remember feeling happy, even though I was probably complaining about something. Yeah, that red car, and just the way she looked, she looked so beautiful, with the blond hair. So.

“My father. Memories of my dad, there’s a ton. I think the most interaction my dad and I had was when I played hockey, and he was the manager of the team. He did the logistics, organizing the team, filling the water bottles up, helping guys tape their sticks, dealing with that stuff on the bench. The time we spent was unspoken time, but being on the bench, the whole hockey experience, going to breakfast with the team, talking to him about things I’m working on with the sport, and him being incredibly encouraging. I didn’t realize that by him spending so much time – he doesn’t know hockey as well as the coach – he was supporting me by being manager, by being involved on the team. I was never alone, I always had him there. I didn’t think of that at the time, but he was at every single hockey game I ever played as a kid. Like wow. He never missed a game, and he was always on the bench. To me, that’s pretty cool. That’s a great memory, just how much he was there.

“Recent memories haven’t been as vivid. Maybe I was living in them before, now I feel like I’m living next to them. Not as attached. When I visit, I don’t notice their presence as much. It doesn’t have as much emotional response, my time is not as emotionally charged.”

I tell him that that’s a pretty common observation. The wine bottle is empty, and he guides the conversation back to me and my opinions, so I turn off the recorder.

Lise Johnston

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Lise Johnston has some of the most diverse interests of anyone I know. From bad dance movies to new wave French cinema, to baking, power tools, science fiction and Russian literature, she enjoys high brow and low brow indiscriminately and without shame. We have been friends for over a decade so I was curious what I would learn about her in this interview. I begin by asking what her parents do.

My father is a general practitioner, and my mom, I guess she’s an artist slash mom. I was deciding what I should say because what she always says is that she is singlehandedly saving the Anglican church. I don’t really know what that means but that’s what she says.

How is she saving it?

I don’t know! By attempting to teach students about the traditions of Anglicanism because they don’t care and my mom doesn’t like that because she likes the traditions of Anglicanism, like the Book of Common Prayer et cetera. Which is why she gives the book to anyone who shows the slightest interest in it at all.

We have this thing called like learner’s exchange and she did one. They get a speaker to talk about anything vaguely related to Christianity or Anglicanism.

What did she talk about?

Definitely the prayer book. It was like specifically a talk about why the prayer book is important. And what parts of it are, and why it’s good and shouldn’t just be thrown away because the language is from the 16th century.

How long has your dad been a GP?

I think that the first year my parents were married, which was 1980, he was doing his… I just know the American doctor show terminology, so I don’t know what it’s called in Canada, I guess it’s an internship… in Saskatoon. They didn’t have a honeymoon, cause my dad was in the middle of medical school so there was no time for a honeymoon. Then they spent a year in William’s Lake and he was the head of the emergency ward or something. My mom got pregnant with my brother and everyone in the entire town knew about it like 3 days later and my mom realized that being the wife of the doctor in a small town was … that everyone knew when they had sex apparently.

And then they moved to Vancouver in 1983. He was doing locum work, which is when you are a temporary replacement to another GP in family practice. Or whatever, it’s called a locum no matter what. They moved into our house then. They rented it and the week I was born they bought it. The people they bought it from are my dad’s patients and they gave them a deal on the house apparently. It was $500,000, which in 1987 was a shit load of money and my mom’s entire family thought she was insane. Apparently grandfather flipped out and did his usual ‘Jesus Christ Norah what the fuck are you doing? You’re going to bankrupt yourselves.” But we all showed them…Vancouver is on the up and up.

Has your relationship changed a lot in the last few years?

Well the entire time I was a teenager my brother was on meth. I was like a secondary concern which, completely, I’m not angry about but I felt like there was not a lot of time in their lives for me on a serious level. I hung out with my dad a lot. Maybe that’s why we’re friends more. But my mom was really depressed and she felt like she couldn’t leave the house because my brother would come home and steal anything.

I remember when I was like 12, Melissa, [the daughter of a family friend] took me to see some movie at Oakridge and it ended at 11:00. We missed the bus and we just decided to walk home. It was me and her and her cousin Diego. Meli was like 16 and Diego was 18 or something and it took us 2 hours to walk home. I was 12 and I got home at 1 o’clock, 1:30 in the morning. We stopped at a 24 hours grocery store for cotton candy. I remember there was no repercussions for that on me. My dad was mad at Meli and Diego obviously…but it was like, there was no time to be mad at me.

Like what did I do in high school? I did nothing, I never did anything wrong but I also never tried, at all, ever and no one really cared because my brother would disappear for days and that’s why I’m crying. So that’s yeah my relationship with my parents. They suddenly actually kind of care where I am, which is nice.

Are there any memories of your parents, together or separately that stand out?

My dad cut off three of his fingers with a dado blade on a table saw when I was like nine months old and he’s fallen off the roof twice. The third time he didn’t actually fall off the roof, he just slipped a little bit so that doesn’t count. And the first time he did it he wasn’t hurt. I was building a box, which I am fully capable of using a table saw correctly, since the first time I was allowed to use one by myself I was nine or ten years old, and last year I was cutting some plywood really unsafely and it kicked back and punched me in the stomach. I got really dizzy and then I phoned Dad and he said ‘Do you feel nauseous’ and I said ‘No’ and then he said ‘Ahh you’re probably fine.’ I’m sure that my complete disregard for my own safety when it comes to power tools: he definitely taught me that.

So just Dad almost killing himself – but the reasons he was doing that which is fixing things in ridiculous ways. They always end up looking really good when he’s done. It starts out looking terrible but then when it’s all finished it looks amazing and I think that’s exactly how I work. I start out and it’s like a bomb exploding and then at the end it’s, well not amazing but…

There’s just so much mess when he makes anything. The bathroom. He designed everything and he found all the stuff and it looked terrible. He had some guys come in and grind a pan for the shower out of the concrete floor and the entire house was covered in dust for like 6 weeks because it was so fine and it was settling. My mom wouldn’t vacuum because she knew there would still be more. Everything he does is a disaster at the beginning but then it looks cool.

My dad just taught me how to build stuff. And how to fix things. And how to hurt myself but I just brush it off and keep going. Dad taught me how to build everything and he started teaching me when I was like an infant.

The biggest way my mother has shaped my life is that she used to be really really obsessive compulsive about how clean the kitchen counters are. My brother and I would have to do it over and over and over again until she could run her finger over the counter and it would not come up with any crap. Now I’m also that way and I hate it but I can’t help myself. Dirty dishes are fine – but if the dishes are supposed to be clean they better be frickin’ the cleanest dishes you ever SAW.

Except now mom’s eyesight is going she doesn’t really care any more and it’s awesome.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

My parents are pretty cool.

Lia de Wolff

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When I was very young, I had a bath toy that was a blue bird, but my mother decided it was a shark. Singing the “Jaws” theme, she had it sneak up on me under the water. “Daws! Daws!” I would shriek delightedly as the “shark” attacked.

My father was a very tall figure that loomed in the doorway, perma-clad in a suit and tie. He made me a little nervous.

When I was slightly older, it was my mother who explained the facts of life to me. I was taught that babies were made by people “putting their bums together,” that the Santa in the mall was not in fact the real Santa (who was far too busy at the North Pole) but a helper who would pass my wishes along, and that some girls liked boys and some girls liked girls. “Do you think you would like to get married to Teri (my best friend at the time)?” she asked. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about boys at that age, so I told her I might.

I took to waking up very, very early to say goodbye to my dad before work. I would perch on the counter in the pale light beside the microwave, watching the digital minutes change and wondering if he had already left. Sometimes he hadn’t, and sometimes he had.

Sometimes I built Lego with mum. In her dystopic scenes, the little people stood poised to jump off roofs and got run over by cement mixers. I thought this was great fun.

My dad had built an attic playroom for my sister and me, and we regularly made a huge mess there. He asked me to clean it up one time, and when I was reluctant to do so, he had a suggestion. “When you have to do something you don’t like, it’s nice to have a little treat after. So how about when the attic is clean, I will give you two dollars?” I was immediately suspicious of this deal. I remember thinking, isn’t that bribery?

When I was seven, we moved to the city, to a much larger and nicer house than we had been in before. However, my dad’s financial ventures were not panning out and my mum’s lab relocated unexpectedly, so we spent a while eating mostly canned food.

My mum took over the role of piano teacher, giving lessons to me and my sister, and later to other children as well. “Ohp!” she would cry, whenever we hit a wrong note. “That’s a B flat in your left hand!”

I confronted my dad about being at the office all the time, and he responded by immediately starting to work from home. He drove us to and from school every day, and became a fixture with his laptop in a corner of the living room.

When I was old enough to get letter grades, I had to bring my report cards home for my parents to sign. When I showed them to my dad, he would offer me sincere congratulations and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. When I showed them to my mum, her eyes would narrow at the seven A’s and one B. “How can we get that B in Social Studies up to an A?” she would ask.

As a teenager, I became heartily embarrassed of my mum. I tried to make her throw out her mom jeans and stop wearing sweaters she had knitted herself. I tried to nominate her for the TV show “What Not to Wear,” for which she wasn’t as grateful as I had anticipated.

My dad took to doing the crossword in bed with ginger ale and BBQ chips. He slipped off to this refuge early in the evening, while the rest of us were doing homework and reading the paper. By ten o’clock he would be fast asleep.

When I was seventeen, my mum clung to me, shaking. She buried her face in my shoulder and her tears sank silently into the folds of my t-shirt. She told me that she and my dad were getting a divorce. She grew pale and skeletal, hollow eyed, and cried during the sermons at church. She told her tale of woe to friends, family, strangers in the supermarket, anyone who would listen. My sister and I tried anxiously to drag her away whenever she seemed likely to start down this path of discourse.

My dad avoided the subject completely. He drove us wordlessly to and from school, Enya or Forest Piano playing in the car.

As it turns out, my parents make better friends than spouses. They keep in touch and send home baking to each other’s houses. Sometimes my dad comes to help out with home maintenance. We spend Christmas and birthdays together, a sort-of nuclear family.

Now, my mum has a cozy house in the city. She can have her slow Saturday mornings with coffee and pancakes, loose pages of the weekend newspaper spread out over the kitchen, while the cat sleeps in a sunbeam. Our private dialect builds on the mannerisms of her parents: anthropomorphizing the appliances, saying absurdly hyperbolic things in mock serious tones.

My dad has a quiet place further out, with sweeping views of the water. He tends his little garden, watches antique and auction shows, and drives reluctantly to his stuffy fluorescent-lit office downtown. While the sun sets, we chat on the patio about work, philosophy, people we know.

They are two such different individuals that my sister and I remain openly puzzled as to why they got married in the first place. However, we are grateful they did. Having role models who didn’t agree meant we saw two sides of every issue. We have drawn on both of them to create our own values and identities.

Sarah Knowles

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Of Our Parents is excited to introduce a new format that will be added to the weekly entries. Readers can now submit their own stories, written in their own voice. Below is our first such entry. If you’re interested in sharing your story, email ofourparents@gmail.com, and we’d love to post it. Thanks, and read on.

Home is an odd word for me. I try to fit myself into the cookie cutter idea of “home” that the media portrays. A hometown, one house that all your childhood memories have been made of–a place you’ll always go back to and remember the smells, the look, the essence. I experienced none of those.

My parents were high school sweethearts and got married without two dimes to rub together. They married young, and were quick to start a family. By the time they were 22 they had my older sister at age 2 and me, a baby of 6 months. Luckily my Dad scored a sweet government job where he was stationed out in Germany. At 6 months, I left my “hometown” in Virginia to grow up in the scary new world overseas.

I lived in Germany until I was four years old and don’t remember much, except the bomb shelter below our house that always made my hair stand up. I have no memories of any interaction with my parents during the years we lived in Germany, but I do remember my first Nanny, Mildred. She was from the Philippines and she took care of my sister and I every day. I was so young that the memories are vague to say the least, but I remember looking up to Mildred as a mother. She fed my sister and I, bathed us, took us out to feed the ducks, played with us, etc. But one day we had to say goodbye to Mildred. Our adventures in Germany had ended and the new life in Korea was about to begin.

Korea is where my first memories with my parents were formed. We had another Nanny, Lorenza, but it was much different than in Germany. I didn’t want Lorenza to play with me, I wanted my Mom. At five years old I was doing all I could to get my Mom’s attention – including being as mean as possible to Lorenza. My Dad was still pretty out of the picture – he worked ALL the time – but my Mom was home. She was an English tutor for Korean children. And I envied those children. I wanted her attention and everyday that I didn’t get it, I became more introverted. I stopped trying for her attention and started bottling up my emotions, speaking little, and becoming resentful. By 7 years old after coming home from school I’d just retreat to my room and answered any “How was your day?” questions from my parents with an “I don’t know”. In fact, that became my standard answer for everything. My parents and I were on a crash course and nobody knew how to get it under control.

By the time we moved back to the States I was 8 years old and this time there was no nanny. For the first time my parents really tried to reach out to me but I wouldn’t take down the defensive walls I had built against them. It was too late. I was a pretty difficult kid: refusing to clean my room, help with chores, or do homework. I was struggling. And I could have cared less. My parents were concerned, but we made it through the days and life went on.

After moving from Virginia to Colorado and back to Virginia I had completed the rest of elementary school and was starting high school. There still was no sense of home and I’d been through the ringer getting attached to best friends at school and then having to say goodbye. Just one more tick on the chalkboard next to “reasons why I resent my parents”. In hindsight, it really wasn’t fair to hold that grudge against them. My Dad’s job has always more than provided for our family, and moving around to keep that job was what they needed to do.

But by the time I entered high school I was a complete emotional wreck of a person. There was still a non-existent relationship with my parents, my older sister and I weren’t those “best friends” type of siblings, and we had moved to a new town yet again, so I had to try to make new friends. Well, I did. And in high school I quickly got into the bad crowd of drugs, alcohol, and mischievousness. My parents didn’t know what to do or say as I continually got in trouble for skipping school and being the textbook definition of a defiant teenager.

At 17 years old I found out I was pregnant on Christmas eve. When I broke the news to my parents a few weeks later they were disappointed and hurt. For years after having my son we barely even spoke. This brings me to the most recent part of my life. I’m 23 now with a 5 year old son. I must say that I’m more than nervous about being a parent. I wonder what my son will ever say about me if he were to write on Of Our Parents. It only continues to make me reflect on my parents and my relationship that much more, and learn from the good and bad.

Sara Jackson

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Sara Jackson, known to her friends as SJ, is straightforward, honest, and highly sociable; after I first met her, she soon said “Mark I feel like you and I can be good friends – do you agree?” Her nature is well suited to the law degree she’s pursuing, as she is both organized and driven. She is a woman who aggressively maintains her friendships, regularly checking in to arrange coffee dates. Though she spent the last two years in Toronto, she moved back to Vancouver to be closer to her family, which is where she grew up.

“My dad was born August 8, 1928, so his big champagne 80th birthday was August 8th of 2008, which was pretty cool. So my dad is 84 this year. He was born in Georgia, the town of which I can’t remember off the top of my head. My mom’s 18 years younger than my dad, born in Jackson, Michigan, but moved to Dauphin, Manitoba when she was fairly young. Somewhere inbetween there she spent two years in San Fransisco, and then graduated from a one-room school in Dauphin when she was 15, and then spent her formative years in California. So she was living in San Fransisco in the 70s, when she was in her mid-twenties, which is pretty awesome.”

“Does she ever talk about it?”

“Yeah, and she’s actually saved a bunch of her stuff, so I have a lot of my mom’s platform clogs and stuff like that, some clothes that she wore. I dug through my grandmother’s photographs and found a picture of my mom and she’s totally this insubordinate…she was pretty cute. I have a really beautiful, sixties-style, black and white headshot of her on my desk right now, and her hair’s in a beehive. She was very thin, she was five-six and ninety-five pounds, she was a dancer, and she carried that kind of skin-and-bones physique. This picture I have has a very Audrey Hepburn kind of appeal to it, just cause of the black and white and how narrow her face was.”

“How did they meet?”

“My dad was a philosophy professor at UBC,” she pauses and starts to chuckle. “And my mother was in the graduate studies program of philosophy at UBC…She was the TA for my father’s philosophy class. They met that way, I guess before there were stringent ethics rules about dating students. The first time he had ever met my mother, it was a really late evening, and she was trying to get into the graduate studies building and my dad was the only person there. He was kind of doing this whole ‘Who is this crazy person, why is she trying to get in?’ So he said ‘Oh, you’re in Philosophy, let me see your transcript.’ And my mom, everyone had this stuff on paper then, so she shows him and it’s just A, A, A+, A+, and my dad’s like ‘Oh shit.’ And he lets her in. To this day, my dad still maintains that my mother is way more brilliant philosophically than he ever was.”

“What has your mom been doing since?”

“When she was pregnant with my sister, my mom was working night-shifts in the social services office. She was doing intake work, which was pretty depressing and high stress work. She’d get all the kids who had literally just been taken away from their parents, and she’d place them in the city. She moved her way up through the ranks. Now she does contract work for the government, in the Ministry of Family and Child Development. I think the way she would describe it, you know, it’s the type of work that’s kind of thankless but has to be done, and it’s an impossible job because the amount of money you’re given to work with is not enough to effect any major change. It just doesn’t end. It becomes emotionally exhausting to see kids who are being mistreated. In that respect it’s draining to do that, day in day out, for thirty years. She liked it, although I think she would have been happier if she had finished her PhD.”

I ask about how her father’s age affected his parenting.

“For me, having my father for these back end, retirement years, is that I think I got him for a period of time where he was just kind of tired of kids. It wasn’t like he was neglectful, he was just sick of piano recitals, and tennis lessons, and parent-teacher interviews. It’s just kind of exhausting when I come around and my father was 58 years old, and in his mid-60s while I was being that kid who was running around in Hallowe’en costumes and painting my face. When I got a little bit older, I could tell that my dad was a lot more relaxed about life and his children’s plans. I think that’s something that my older siblings didn’t have as much, they got more of the stress stuff. I can tell, in the way that my older two sisters (from a previous marriage) act around my father, they’re much more formal. A greater cognizance of etiquette. I feel more comfortable saying ‘Dad you’re being an asshole,’” she laughs.

I ask her if there are any memories of her parents that stand out for her.

“It’s funny, there’s kind of a consistent theme with my father and me, in the sense that I’ll be learning a new skill like, I don’t know, French grammar. I won’t get it, and I’ll cry. I remember this, in grade three or four, I’d be sitting down to do French homework and I just wouldn’t get it. My dad would try and explain it, and I think this is a byproduct of being a professor, is that once you know something so well it’s difficult to make it simple again. So my father and I, we would fight, because he’d be explaining what the future tense in French was doing and how it was constructed, and tried to show me the grammatical progression of verbs, and I would just be crying because he was just explaining it the same way over and over. He had this habit of explaining it again, but louder. You’re yelling at me and the words aren’t different they’re just louder and I’m not deaf. Or I’d be learning tennis, and he’d take me out and he’s hitting tennis balls, and I’d hit backhands over and over, and my dad would always yell out if I was hitting them too soon or too late. It’s another really prime moment where I would get frustrated and upset and my dad would get irritated that I wasn’t just doing it right.

“And every single time we’d do this, my dad’s was a big sailor growing up, and I finally got really frustrated, my dad would sit there and say ‘Sara. This – insert learning a language, learning tennis, learning to drive, or doing whatever – these things are like sailing. And it’s time on the water that makes all the difference.’ It was a sweet sentiment, to sit there after a while and say, ‘Listen, I get it, it’s just going to take some time. And you just need to stick with it for awhile.’ It was his concession that he wasn’t helping, and that I wasn’t being irrational. That idea has governed a lot of my life.”

“And your mom?”

“There are some memories of my mom that kind of remind me…my dad was older during the 60s, 70s, the hippy extravaganza. He didn’t hit that flower power…you know, he likes classical music not pop music. There are moments when I see the difference between my dad and my mom. She’ll recount these stories about being in Biology class when her teacher announced that birth control was now on the market for public consumption. And that’s huge. She saw Buddy Holly live and then sat down and had tea with him afterwards, when she was fifteen. These moments where I’m like, ‘Where is this part of you?’ So when we go down to California, where my grandmother lived in San Jose, every summer as a kid, that part of my mom would come out a little bit because my dad wouldn’t come along. There’d be a lot more of, we’d stop at a beach along the way and my mother would strip us down naked and let us run around in the water and it was fine. We’d listen to old music that my dad would never listen to. We’d get down there, and while my sister and I were in the house playing with my grandmother, mom would be tanning naked in the backyard. This is something she would never do, if my dad was around. It was part of her, ‘I’m home.’ It was kind of a nice, that my mom has this persona underneath. It was satisfying to know that my mom is more chill and liberal than I knew her as.”

Mark McLean

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Two weeks ago I got married, and it seems like a good time to reflect on the marriages in my life. In this week’s Of Our Parents, I tell a couple of stories about my own parents.

I often think of my father as two different men. Growing up, I remember him as quiet and reserved, prone to occasional bursts of embarrassing puns or sporadic public dancing. For the most part though, in the home, he kept to himself, reading the newspaper quietly at the kitchen table, working out in the backyard either gardening or picking up dog poop, or helping out whenever his wife or any of his children asked. When his mother and father died in the same week almost four years ago, it marked a change in his character. “I’m an orphan,” he told my mother. In his characteristically dark humour, he used his parents’ deaths as an excuse to get out of chores. When my mother asked him to do some dishes, he said: “Can’t. My parents just died.” (I find myself adopting his strange humour more as I grow older.) After their deaths, his character altered: he seemed to relax, take more joy in life, and was more prone to awkward sexual jokes and confessions of appreciation. He is now, in my eyes, a more jovial man, and I’m glad for it. But the father I grew up with is always that friendly man who’s hard to know.

After high school I took an ill-advised year off, in order to save some money (which of course I didn’t). By leaps and bounds, it was the worst year of my life: I was working at a dead-end job with low pay, my love life was a mess, and I was in a city I couldn’t stand. It was a rough year, and I had put all of my eggs into the basket of getting into the University of British Columbia, two thousand kilometers away. Every morning and night I would check my application status online, and every time I saw the word “pending.” One night I returned home from the bar at 3 in the morning, and checked the site again before going to bed. I had been accepted.

Quietly, I walked up the stairs, and knocked on my parents’ door, which alarmed them, since all their children were home, and they thought there was an emergency. I told them I got into UBC. My mother offered tired congratulations, but my father shouted “YES!” and sat up, pumping his fists in the air. He knew how unhappy I was and how important it was for me, and though we never spoke about it, my quiet father saw the accomplishment for what it was: an end to an awful time in his son’s life. It was an outburst of joy that was rare from my father, and it struck me in that moment that my parents knew far more about me than I realized.

It is far more difficult to pinpoint an important memory of my mother. This is a common thread, I’ve found, in the interviews that I’ve done: fathers tend to stand out in bursts of strong memories, and mothers tend to evoke feelings of comfort and continuity without any actual memories jumping out. “My mom was a mom,” is a sentence often said. The same goes for me. I have countless images of my mother being around, helping out, asking questions, checking on people, but nothing that leaps out at me. There were fights, and conversations, and loving hugs, but I cannot capture the enormity of my mother’s importance in my life. Rather, I feel a great, if broad, sense of gratitude for the role she played.

As I once mentioned to her, my mother has her fingers directly on the family’s emotional pulse. Whenever we talk, she is able to aptly hone in on whatever issues are going on in my life, and empathize with me. She has four children, a husband, and an extended family with it’s own normal complications, yet she is always up to date on what is happening with me. I can only imagine the emotional wherewithal and brain power that it takes to not only keep everyone’s stories constantly up to date, but to be invested and concerned with all of them. She is the emotional touchstone in our family, and perhaps that is why no strong memories jump out for me: her existence is so integral to our family that she fits seamlessly into any memory I have. To think of her is to think of my family.

I would be remiss to not thank them in this post, especially in regards to this blog. As a child, like most children, I was a self-involved little shit. There’s a moment, and perhaps it’s the mark of becoming an adult, when one realizes all the sacrifices a parent makes. At some point, I stopped thinking about how natural it was that my family is the way it is, and started feeling grateful for how much effort my parents put into their children. My two brothers, my sister, and I are a testament to their success as parents, and this blog would not exist without my continuing fascination with how families work. Thank you, mom and dad.

Courtney Strimple

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Courtney Strimple is, at first glance, quiet, slight, and unimposing. Beneath her shy veneer is a calmly burning intelligence, a curiosity about the mechanisms of everyday life and history that make her immediately likeable once a conversation is struck. She has a thirst to learn more about everything she encounters, and goes about discovering answers with delicate determination.

Courtney was born and raised in Hamlin, New York, a small town of around 200 just outside the Rochester area. “Same house my whole life,” she says. “It’s a one-street town. It’s a farm town.” Her parents bought the land at the age of twenty-four, and slowly built their home over the years. “My dad built the house about forty years ago. They’ve been married forty-two years. He just built the basics starting off, you know: bedrooms, family room. My dad’s a very handy man, so afterwards he added on a garage, an extension to the kitchen, a sunroom. He’s redone all the flooring, walls, ceilings. It keeps my dad busy, he needs something to do, so he was constantly working on the house and making changes to it. My parents are building a new house now, a log cabin, three thousand square feet. My mom always wanted a log-cabin house. They’ve been working on it for four years.”

Her father is semi-retired building car engines for GM. “He worked on an assembly line, built car engines for twenty-nine years, and when they went bankrupt, they gave him the chance to do the early buy-out, and they were going to pay him money to do it. He ended up not getting the money they promised, they told him that there was a glitch in the system, and they weren’t going to be able to pay him. It happened with a few other people who took the early buy-out. So my dad had to go back to work. They said they didn’t realize so many people were going to take the early buy-out. He works on the fuel cell concept now. The electric car. They build them up and then they tear them down, to figure out what made it work, what made it not work. He enjoys it, he likes being part of something so high-tec and so new.”

“So how does he have time to build a house?”

“He doesn’t have that much free time, he goes to work at seven in the morning to five in the evening. He’ll come home, we’ll have dinner, and then he’ll go and work on the new house. He’ll stay until nine, ten at night, then he’ll come home, go to bed, and do it all again the next day.”

I ask about her mom.

“She’s retired. She worked on and off. My childhood she stayed home. She worked as a special needs aide in our school, then as a culinary assistant to a chef that taught classes. When my sister found out she was pregnant, my mom decided she needed to retire, and help take care of my nephew. She’s been retired for four years now. She loves it. She loves taking care of my nephews and being able to be home. She’s active in her church, so it’s not like she doesn’t have anything to do. She loves being a grandma.”

Courtney is the youngest of five children. “The two oldest were adopted. My mom was told she’d never be able to have children, ever. The doctor said there was no chance, so they decided to turn to adoption. They adopted my baby brother first, he was nine months old. About two, three years later, they adopted my sister. She was nine when they adopted her. They raised them. Then my mom wasn’t feeling well, so she went to the doctor’s, and they’re like ‘You’re pregnant.’ Then my parents decided to see if it could happen again. Then I was just ‘Hey…happenchance.’ My oldest sister was in the navy for two years by the time I was born, so there’s a big gap.”

I ask her what dinner at her house is like.

“My mom would want to know everything about you, about your family. She would want to know what you did, where you grew up, what school you attended, are you successful. She’s very curious, learning about people she’s never met before. My father, I jokingly say he’s like Silent Sam. He’s very quiet. When my dad says something, you know it’s going to be profound. If you’re in trouble, it’s always mom to punish, and then if dad were to punish you, you know you severely did something wrong, because he never raises his voice. So my dad would talk to you, he wouldn’t act like he’s that interested, but he’s listening to everything that you’re saying. He just doesn’t say too much.

“I’d have to say I’m a little bit closer with my mom. Growing up, my whole life, my mom was right in everything I was doing, whereas my dad was more in the background. I’m fully aware that he was involved in everything I was doing, but he kind of took the backseat. It’s easier to talk to her, but then, again, my dad is a man of very few words. To strike up a conversation with him is like pulling teeth. Even now, I’m gone and I’ve moved so far away, I talk to him online and I can’t have a conversation with my dad because I constantly have to ask questions or say things to provoke him to speak. With my mom I can just talk to her for hours. I always feel like I’m boring the poor man,” she laughs. “I love my dad, he’s a great man. It’s just hard to talk with him.”

I ask her if there are any memories of her parents that stick out for her.

“One memory I always think of, every time I see a bike, I remember when my dad tried to teach me to ride two-wheelers. I was petrified. I didn’t want to fall, I didn’t want to get hurt. We share our driveway with the house next to us. Our neighbours were even watching – they’re very active in our lives. My whole family was sitting on the driveway. I’m sitting on this bike, and they’re all cheering me on. I was so scared. And he goes ‘Ok so we’re gonna go down the driveway, I’m going to hold on to you, then we’re gonna come back and I’ll still be holding on to you.’ So we did that, trying to get my balance. The second time we did it he said ‘Ok, we’re gonna go down again and I’m gonna hold on to you.’ I remember going down, and I look back, and my dad’s just standing there. I’m riding by myself. And the smile he had on his face was just pure joy. You know the saying ‘Actions speak louder than words?’ My father’s actions definitely speak louder than words.

“For my mom, one memory that sticks out, as long as I could remember I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be an opera singer when I was five. My mom enrolled me in voice lessons at ten. We would drive all the way to Rochester, every Wednesday for half-hour voice lessons. My parents would pay twenty-five dollars, which is way too much money. She’d sit there for the entire lesson, listen to everything my teacher said. On the way home she’d drive me to dance class, and then take me home and help me with my homework. That was up until I was thirteen or fourteen, and then I stopped doing dance lessons, because it was either voice or dance. It got too expensive. But every Wednesday, she would take me into Rochester and take me to my voice lessons. That was definitely big, my mom always pushed me in. She always asks to hear me sing. That’s the one thing she misses, since us being away: my mom can’t hear me sing. I would sing in church on Sundays, so if I hadn’t sung during the week, she could hear me. That’s one of the big things: she pushed us to succeed.”