Category Archives: Interviews

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.

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.

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.”

Norma Dunbar

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Norma Dunbar is a woman in search of herself. A traveler and writer, she is contemplative and open, with patience that hints at a wealth of personal experiences. She has spent the past few years bouncing around the world, driven by ambition, intrigue, and challenges, and her warm personality makes it easy for her to make friends on the go. There are few chances at excitement that she would turn down, and she rarely stops re-evaluating her own life.

Norma was raised in Okalahoma City and Lubbock, Texas.

“Okalahoma City is home, but Lubbock is too. My dad moved there when I was eight, and my grandparents still live there.” Her mother lives in a suburb north of Oklahoma City, now working as a loan auditor. Before that, more than ten years ago, she waited tables. “She got tired of being the old woman waiting tables,” she laughs. “She liked the quick cash, and she made better money than she could at a desk job. Even now if she went back to waiting tables she would probably make more money, but it wasn’t conducive to her lifestyle anymore. When we were in school, and she needed a day off, she just took a day off. She just wouldn’t make money that day. Whereas in real world jobs you have to request a day off, have to plan ahead. It was embarrassing for a while, like ‘Gosh, stop waiting tables,’ you know?”

I ask her what her relationship with her mom is like.

“It’s been good for the most part. I would say that hands down, my mom is the happiest person I know. She’s just go with the flow, very laid back. She’s okay with the way things are. She just bought her first house a couple of years ago. So she’s either at home remodeling, or working in the garden. She doesn’t have a whole lot of beef with life. She’s not one of those people who’s like ‘I was dealt a crappy hand.’ My mom refuses to live beyond her means. She does have credit cards, but if she needs to use her credit card, she pays it off immediately. She’s very well on top of her financial…now she wasn’t always like that. It took her a long time to get as responsible as she is now.

Norma’s parents are divorced, and have both remarried. I ask about her father. She takes a deep breath.

“It’s complicated,” she chuckles nervously, and chooses her words carefully. “Very very complicated. I love my dad. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love my dad. I don’t look at my dad as most daughters should look at their fathers, let’s say. I have a different relationship with him. And with my mom. When they were together, it was mass chaos. There were always people in and out of the house. They were young when they had me, they were twenty-one, they were partying a lot. My dad is in recovery. Part of the reason why they split is because my dad got clean and my mom didn’t want to, and then they went separate ways.”

“Is she clean now?”

“No, she drinks. Occasionally smokes pot. Dad is completely dry. He went to treatment, and when he got out, he wanted my mom to go, and she didn’t want to. He moved down to Lubbock, and they spent the summer apart. They spent eight months or something apart. I was eight, so twenty years ago. For a long time, my sister and I both were in the middle of lots of hurt and hate between my mom and my dad. Even though they both remarried, there was always drama and conflict between them. During that time I heard a lot of really bad things about my mom, and a lot of really bad things about my dad. They always treated me like a little adult in the house. The relationship with my dad is so different, especially when I talk to other people and I compare our relationship. People are like ‘Oh my gosh I can’t believe you say that to your dad.’ There’s nothing that I don’t tell my parents. I’m a tell-all. I can’t keep secrets. I can keep other people’s secrets. I can’t keep my own secrets. It’s a double-edged sword: he feels the same about me. He shares things with me that most people would want to, like, vomit and crawl underneath the bed if their dad shared with them. He tells me things that are completely inappropriate to tell a daughter. And you can use your imagination on that. It’s very dysfunctional.”

I ask her how her relationship with her parents has changed over time.

“With my mom, I don’t hold resentment, and I’m not bitter towards her anymore about things that happened when I was younger. I’ve come to peace with my issues with her, and now I’m just accepting of who she is, and I’m not going to be able to change her – I’ll never be able to change her. I’m okay with that. With my dad, there’re two things involved there: Addison and Parker [Norma’s young half-brother and half-sister]. Because he’ll withhold them from me if we’re not on good terms. If he and I are in battle, it puts that barrier between me and them, because they’re too young to have their own thoughts and opinions and make their own choices. Their little minds are still molding. They think that God created Texas and it should be its own country and all that hoopla, you know what I mean?” she chuckles. “I have to keep the peace with them, because I don’t want Addison and Parker to have bad memories of my relationship with them. They probably will, it’s gone to blows in front of them, several times, between me and my dad and Melinda [his wife], not seeing eye to eye. He would never say ‘You can’t see the children, I’m mad at you,’ but it’s a packaged deal at this point, because they’re too young.”

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

“My dad, sometimes when he looks at me, I get the brunt of what he saw in my mom that he couldn’t change. When my mom looks at me, she has that resentment of everything that my dad has become and that I’ve become. One of my memories of my mom was of…I was nineteen, and I was living in an apartment, going to college, and my place was right around the corner from the restaurant that my mom and I worked at, this Italian restaurant. For whatever reason, she came over to my apartment, and we were having a party, and so she was just kind of out on the town, you know? She got really wasted, and – and my mom’s good looking. She’s always had a hot little tight body on her. Gorgeous Lisa was her nickname at the restaurant. She’s the life of a party, she’s really fun. This particular night she had gotten pretty drunk, and I had just spent a whole summer working through my resentment and anger towards her and my dad. I don’t like to party with my mom. Very rarely will I get drunk with her, I might have a glass of wine with her. For whatever reason, there’s this deep part of me that knows she an alcoholic, and even though I like to drink, I always feel like I shouldn’t do it with her. So we’re at this party and we’re at my house, and the guys are hitting on her and she’s flirting with them, and it just sent me over the edge. I was just so…I was pissed off. I was so mad at her. And only recently have I said ‘I’m not going to waste that energy or that time in being upset with her for something that she’s clearly not concerned about and not going to change’. She will never stop drinking. And you know what? I don’t want her to stop drinking. She’s a fun gal. I don’t want her to change who she is.

“Like I said, sometimes my dad looks at me and he sees her, and in some ways I am, I am her, I am that girl, drunk and flirting with everybody, and being completely obnoxious and inappropriate. For him, I’ve always sought his approval. They say that a woman’s relationship with her father is the determinant of how she approaches relationships other men.

“One of the reasons why I try so hard with my dad is because he got clean…um…the way he remembers things is much more clear than my mom, because she’s continued to booze. It’s not different for her. My dad started saying this, and he still continues to say this, he still has so much guilt about the things that happened when I was younger. He’s so passionate about me not making the same mistakes. He apologizes profusely. He’s emotional about it. He cries and says ‘I’m sorry for what I did.’ He still has so much guilt about it, even though I’ve come to terms with it. I guess it’s one of those things that I couldn’t possible know what it feels like because I don’t have children. But at least he apologizes for it and doesn’t say ‘Well I did the best I could.’ For that, that I’m grateful for.”

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

“I do want to add that I didn’t discuss Melinda at all. She’s probably the one who has had the most influence on me as a lady. I didn’t mention her before, and it’s not because she hasn’t been a big part, because she’s probably been…you know, we’ve joked around several times that if she and my dad were to separate, I would probably choose her over my dad. This hurts his feelings, he’s said many times. Melinda came into our lives when I was eight, she was nineteen. I’m now twenty-eight, she just turned forty. She’s been in my life for longer than she hasn’t. One time my dad said to me ‘The things that I despise about Melinda are the things that I also admire.’ I think about that, because sometimes I want Melinda to be someone that she’s not. I want her to be more this way or that way. She’s really taught me how to handle different things, in different situations. You know, dealing with my mom and dealing with my dad. Handling those situations with more grace and dignity than I probably would have done on my own. I’d say I’m a good mix of Melinda and my mom. She’s influenced the way I carry myself, the way I fashion myself, the way I present myself to people. That all comes from her.”

Nic Davidson

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Nic Davidson is bouncing with positive energy. In some ways he reminds me of the squirrel in Ice Age who is constantly trying to get the acorn, except infused with a confident intelligence and resounding spiritual clarity. Nic is a youth pastor by profession, a convert to Catholicism, who will wait until someone brings up the faith before launching into his extensive knowledge of Catholic history and his deep love of God. He tries his best to respectfully contain his zeal around those who are not religious. He is warm, engaging, and knowledgeable, and there are few topics he seems uncomfortable discussing. Indeed, he is quite a talker.

Nic was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota. “It’s okay. It’s a good place. I got bitter towards the last five years, because I just got tired of the cold. Never liked the cold when I was younger. Great to be around my family, but I hate the cold.”

He moved out when he went to college in Minneapolis. “It was warmer. Two hours warmer.” He met his wife there, and they were married in 2001. “We met in an audition for a one-act, and then we got cast together. We played Rolf and Liesl from the Sound of Music. ‘I Am Sixteen Going On Seventeen.’ That’s the scene we had to do. I was the last choice. I don’t have a musical theatre voice, so to my buddy who cast her, I said, ‘Hey if you need a guy, I would love to be in a scene with this girl.’ He’s like ‘Yeah okay, if I can’t find anyone else on this earth then I’ll call you.’ He called me two weeks before because he couldn’t find anyone. I always joke that when she and I met, and we started rehearsing, she had a boyfriend, but not by the end of the rehearsal. But it was only timing, she was planning on breaking up with him. Our first picture together is of us doing that kiss on-stage during a performance.”

His parents were born in Duluth. “My mom had me when she was seventeen, with a guy, and he didn’t come from… he came from a really bad home. He was abusive to my mom and he was an alcoholic and stuff. My mom got pregnant, and the way my family found out was: my grandpa was told to stay away from this guy, and my grandpa showed up at this cabin they were at, grabbed her out of the cabin and was taking her to the car, and was like, ‘Stay away from my daughter.’ And he answered, ‘Alright well I’ll see you in about nine months.’ That’s how the family found out. They got a restraining order out on him, so I didn’t know him until I was eighteen. I met him just because of curiosity. When I was two my mom married Mike, he’s like my dad, my adopted dad. He was the only dad I knew, growing up. So they got married when she was nineteen, and I was two.

“When I was ten, I was looking at my baby book, and you know how they always have a family tree? One entire side of the family tree, each branch was scribbled out and rewritten with a new name. And at ten I was thinking ‘What the heck? She made a mistake on every branch on one side of the tree.’ I remember she was like, ‘Well, we’ll have a talk,’ and made it formal all of a sudden. She was really good about it because she never, she didn’t divulge until I asked, all through the years. At that point she just said, ‘Well because there used to be a bunch of names on that side, is all.’ For a ten-year-old, I was like, ‘Alright.’ Within a year I had thought about it more, and I asked, ‘Well why were there other names?’ She said, ‘Well the daddy you have now wasn’t the daddy you had before. He’s not in our life.’ And I was like ‘Okay that’s fine.’ Then as I got older I would ask more and more. Whenever it came up she would answer really honestly, but never forcing it on me, which was really nice because when I was fifteen, and going through all the angst, then I asked, and she told me most of everything, at that point. For me, she did the right thing. When I was curious, she was totally honest with me. And we were really close. It’s funny, I always say we grew up together because she was so young when she had me that we were really close, so she was comfortable being honest. She would say it wasn’t his fault all the way, but he wasn’t a nice guy, because his dad was highly abusive, like would slam his head against the walls and put him in the hospital. That was his upbringing.

“I was open about it with the dad that I did have. I told him when I was eighteen, ‘I want you to know I’m gonna meet Chuck, but it’s not cause I don’t love you, it’s just curiosity.’ I didn’t have one of those after-school special, ‘Oh I really need to meet him’ things. I just wanted to know more or less why. I had a solid home, my mom was great and my dad was really quiet…he wasn’t…he was a good man, he wasn’t a good husband.”

“You’re talking about Mike?”

“Yeah. They divorced when I was seventeen. It was never a bad home, he went to church with us every Sunday, he just never talked at all. He works long long hours, he comes from a family… I would say they’re lumberjacks. Five massive burly men, and they work hard, and they don’t communicate a lot. He didn’t communicate, so they’re divorced and they’re better friends now, our family is more calm. They fought all those seventeen years.

“That’s when I met Chuck, after the divorce. That was fun too, because I had never known him but we had the same mannerisms, we look a lot alike. Growing up my mom would accidentally call me him all the time, especially when she was mad: ‘Chuck! Nic! Just sit down!’ I was nervous, and he was so fidgety and nervous too. I’ll fidget with things, and so when I got done I had this pile of shredded napkin and I looked over and he had the same pile in front of him. He’s the same, in the nurture-nature thing, a lot of the nature’s the same, like we walk the same, but maybe more our moral fiber is different, as a result of upbringing.”

I ask him to describe his mother. He had earlier told me that despite going to a Bible college, he had considered himself an atheist for the better part of a year, and he built on that story to describe his mother.

“So my mom…so I told you about when I was atheist in Bible school, I always sum up my mom in that moment when at the church, I gave God the finger and I walked upstairs and I called her right away. She just said, ‘I love you, if you die an atheist I’ll always love you.’ That’s the way she was, she was really sacrificial, really giving, completely all-in. She was the perfect mom for me. She was always honest. One time I found, I don’t know what it’s called, dipping snuff, or chewing tobacco. I told her, ‘Mom I found this today,’ when I was seventeen. She’s like ‘Wanna try it? I’ve never tried it, let’s do it.’ Disgusting. That’s the way she was with me, very approachable, I never had a curfew.

He begins to tell me about his grandfather, Richard Anderson (“Same as MacGyver”, he says), whom he considers a father figure.

“My grandfather was solid. He’s the man, he’s a good good man. So I had a good male influence. We lived with him for a long time, until she got married when I was two. He was always there. When I was three days old, we came home from the hospital, he was driving home carrying me in the truck. I was always with grandpa. I know people have issues if they grow up without a father figure, but I didn’t have that. He wasn’t my dad, but he was the male that I needed, he gave me the: ‘Here’s what a guy is and does, and here’s how you treat people.’ I had a good upbringing, because of him.”

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

“Yeah. From when I was a little kid, there was a time when, like I said, she and my dad always fought. They fought all the time. It was right from the beginning, and I remember I was five years old, and my dad had just stormed out, and my mom was sitting there crying. And I had, I don’t even know what they were, I had this stack of cards of some kind that had writing on them. It doesn’t matter, whatever they are. I remember I was playing with them because I liked them, they were mine, and my mom was crying. I remember I said, ‘It’s okay mom, it’ll be alright, we have this card.’ And it made her laugh, and I remember thinking ‘Oh wow I made her feel a little better.’ Then I realized how stupid it was, I critically thought, ‘Ok this actually helps in no way.’ But as I said it I thought, ‘This will help, if I tell her we have this card, this will help.’ I don’t know why that always stuck out, I think it’s because I saw my mom cry a lot, and I was able to make her laugh then. For whatever reason, I always remembered that one.

“I think my dad, the only, I guess it’s not the only good memory, I don’t have bad memories. The only memory that stands out is the day that he left, because of the divorce. We were still living at the house. Like I said, my dad never really talked a lot. He was packing up his stuff out of his crappy dresser, he was packing it and he was crying, and he hugged me. I remember, even as a kid, bawling – I always cry, I’m a crier – but I remember thinking at the time, ‘Okay this is one of those moments, this is one of the moments that you actually won’t forget, this is the movie moment.’ Because I was seventeen years old. It was tough on my dad, because my dad crapped it up for the first fourteen years of the marriage, and then toward the end when my mom was like, ‘I’m filing for divorce,’ it woke him up. It was too late for her. But he changed. That kind of hit him, and I remember that about him.

“My grandpa there’d be too many memories to stand out. He’s quiet, he’s soft-hearted. My grandpa he’s the farmer man, the ‘You don’t say a lot, but when you say it you mean it’ type. When he would talk it was it was always good and it was always loving. He’d do anything. I totaled my car when I was in North Carolina, and within a day he was there, he drove all the way with his truck. He’s driven all over the nation for me. I don’t have one good one. I should, there’s just too many.

“And Chuck. I guess that memory with the pile of napkin would be the closest thing to a good memory. He’s got good intentions, he’s a well-intentioned man.”

I ask him if there’s anything he wants to add.

“The only thing I would think of to add to the end, and I’m always hesitant to be that way, but I when I got into college, I found myself always wanting older male approval. I started to realize that I had formed my view of God based on the male examples in my life. I started to think that God was like my biological father, so God was just pissed and drunk and abusive, like he was just an angry…whatever. Or he was silent and he would leave. I had to work through that, that was the biggest stuff I had to work though, just, ‘Well these are the guys that were in my life, what is He like?’ If God’s a “he”, you know. Having taken from then, when I started asking all those questions, till now, to get to know Him, God, the one that they were supposed to be acting like, God the father, the idea we get from Scripture. Then taking the time to get to know Him and how He thinks of me and allowing Him that relationship, has really helped take all of the rest of them, not just in stride but to put them in their correct structure and framework. I always hesitate to bring God into stuff, but I think the only reason I am what I am, if there’s any good, is as a result of that relationship. Being able to, in my worst moments in marriage, my worst moments in relationships all through college, after going through all that to be able to turn to Him as a father, and actually having that father who’s the perfect father, to be the father they all should have been in a sense. Seeing the goodness that we’re made for, and seeing the goodness in Him, in my life, helped me to be what they weren’t. I would be remiss to not mention that, not to be overly religious. It’s always about His goodness, through all of that, when it all goes to crap, when they each fail you in some way, the fact is that He hasn’t.”

Steven Black

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Steven Black is calm, patient, and mature. He is a man who absorbs all the things he encounters – he prides himself on being a media junkie – and filters them into his own unique perspective. He places deep value on work and his friendships. Having spent the last year in Amsterdam to complete his Master’s, he is now applying for PhD programs, hoping to end up in a university near his fiancée. He is deeply reflective, and constantly in search of ways to better his understanding of the world.

His parents, William and Barbara, live in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto, Ontario. Steven was born in Toronto. His sister, four years his senior, was also born in Toronto, and is currently living in Europe with her husband. I ask him if Brampton is still home.

“Yeah, that’s home. I was born and raised there. I’ve done a lot of traveling, but aside from Amsterdam and three months in California I haven’t lived anywhere else.”

I ask him about his parents’ careers.

“My dad used to be a jeweler, it was sort of the family business. After that he went into car sales. He was always good at retail, so a friend of his suggested he look into car sales, and it took for him. My mother used to be a bookkeeper and social worker before she had children, and then after… well, while she was having children, she didn’t work. Once we grew up, she got a job in sales: she was the manager of a retail store for ten years. Recently she went back to school for medical administrative work. She actually just finished in April. She’s sixty-two.”

“What made her go back to school?”

“Retail is a really exhausting job. You’re on your feet all day, and you tend to work for big corporations who don’t respect you as much as they should, so it just got to the point where she needed to change. She was getting older and acknowledged that she didn’t want to be on her feet all day. She was always interested in medical administration, and has a few friends that work in that field. So she’s looking for a job. The program she finished has a pretty high placement rate. It’s a really well-known program, so hopefully that’ll get her foot in the door.”

I ask him if he inherited any of his parents’ retailing skills.

“A little bit. I used to work in retail, but I didn’t really enjoy doing it. I’d say most of the skills that have been passed on in terms of retail experience is negotiating, and trying not to get screwed over – what to look for. I found that incredibly useful. I remember with my dad, I really wanted a Discman. They had just come out, and everybody had a Discman. We go into the store, and he says, ‘I’m going to buy you a Discman for your birthday.’ I’m like, ‘Oh that’s amazing.’ I’m so excited. ‘But you gotta pretend like you’re not excited and I’m not gonna buy it for you.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’

“So we go to a Magnavox, which I don’t think even exists anymore, and he’s talking to the guy about the Discman and starts negotiating a price. I’m thinking to myself, as a kid, you know, ‘This is a retail store. They have set prices. You can’t just walk into a retail store and negotiate price.’ So the guy, he’s talking to him for like ten, fifteen minutes, then he says, ‘Okay, if you’re not gonna do any better for me then I’m gonna leave.’ So I look at him, really upset because I thought I was gonna get it for my birthday present, and he looked at me kind of like, ‘Remember what I said before?’ I think, ‘Oh yeah.’ So as we’re walking towards the door, the salesman at the Magnavox conceded to what my dad had offered. They were expensive at the time, they were like three hundred bucks, and he knocked off a hundred, so it was two hundred in the end. I remember thinking what an impossible thing it would be to talk someone down at a retail store in a place where you wouldn’t commonly negotiate a price, but there you go he did it. He’s a likeable guy. Good retail person.”

“Did he do that a lot?”

“Just in situations where he felt like it was overpriced, or maybe he was being taken advantage of.”

I ask him to describe what dinner with his parents would be like.

“My dad’s really laid back. It takes a lot to get him riled up. My mom’s very hands-on, she’ll make sure, ‘Did you have enough to eat? Let me get you another drink.’ She wants to take care of people. They kind of balance each other out. We’d be eating dinner and my mom would be like, ‘Do you want more of this, do you want more of that?’ And my dad would say, ‘He’ll tell you when he wants more.’”

I ask him if the way he sees his parents has changed as he gets older.

“Absolutely. I think my perception of them has changed and their perception of me has changed. They were always caring parents, especially when I was young, and then as a teenager I had the rebellious phase, and they would view me as rebellious, so sometimes when I would say something that didn’t make sense they were just like, ‘Oh, you’re just being rebellious.’ I think as a child I respected, I mean I still respect them a lot, as a child, everyone looks up to their parents and wants to do right by them, and I saw them as knowing the right answer for everything. When I got to high school, that’s probably when I started questioning some things. Maybe what’s best for them isn’t what’s best for me. I saw them as very intelligent people who know a lot and give really great advice, but who sometimes might not know exactly what I’m going through, so I might need to do what’s right for me.

“I think now there’s a huge turning point where they’ve realized that they don’t always know what’s best for me, so they make a point to give advice and say, ‘We’re sure you’ll do what’s right for you.’ But there were a few times, when I finished high school and when I finished undergraduate university, I was still living at home for a few years. I was out of that rebellious phase, so if I was saying something, I would say it because it made sense to me. And then a lot of the times they would be like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re saying this but you’re not gonna do it,’ and I’d have to tell them, ‘Listen, I’m not sixteen anymore. I can understand how, I finished high school and undergrad, it feels like I’m still your little boy, but that’s not really the case anymore.’ So sometimes I have to remind them that I do know what’s best for me. I know what I’m talking about. So I guess that’s how I’ve changed. I always looked to them for the answers, and in high school I looked elsewhere and they thought I was being rebellious, and then now they also acknowledge that they don’t always know what’s best for me.”

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

“Yeah. In the beginning of 2009, I had taken a job with a major telecommunication company. I became really upset and depressed with the job, it did not turn out the way I thought it was going to be. I really didn’t like what I was doing, and I felt stuck, because there was a recession and people were looking for jobs, so it wasn’t a good time to quit, and it wasn’t an easy time to find something else to do. So I felt stuck in a job that I really didn’t like. Most of the people I worked with were older than me, they were like, ‘You know, this is not for you, maybe you should do something about it before you become like me and get stuck here and it’s five, six years down the road.’ I really wanted to do something about it. If I’m unhappy I want to make myself happy, not just sit there and hope everything will get better. I told my parents that I’m quitting my job. Immediately their reaction was, ‘Obviously you need to do what’s right for you.’ We had reached that point I had mentioned earlier where they don’t know exactly what’s best for me, but they’re still giving advice. So they were saying, ‘I don’t really think it’s a good time for you to quit your job right now because it’s a recession. A lot of people are unhappy with what they do, but they have responsibilities and they have to suck it up sometimes.’ I said to them, ‘If this is five, six years down the road, and I have kids, then sure, suck it up, if I have mortgage payments, car payments,’ but at the time I didn’t really have any financial responsibility other than to not be a liability to my family and friends.

“That argument didn’t really stick with me, because if I go out, and I try to do something that I’m really happy doing, then in the end, because of kids, car payments, mortgage, and I don’t get all the way there, I have to settle for something that I’m really not thrilled with but I have responsibilities, that’s fine. But if I’m not even gonna try because I’m afraid of a recession and I’m afraid of what might happen, then I’m going to regret it. That was a really hard divide for us, because they were being really practical, and I understand that they were looking out for what’s best for me, but they couldn’t be in my head and see how unhappy I was. I’d like to think that if they could, they would have also told me to quit my job and find something else. So I ended up formulating this idea that I would apply to a bunch of Master’s programs and apply to a bunch of jobs. In the end, I worked teaching swimming part-time, and tour-guiding from January to September, and then September I went to Amsterdam to work on my Master’s. When I got accepted, my mom was immediately like, ‘Oh I don’t think you should go.’ Not because she didn’t think it would be a good experience, but it would be really hard for her – my sister had already moved out. My father said ‘I think that’s a great idea, you can go and get a Master’s in a year, whereas most of the programs in Canada were for two years, and you can get a lot of experience on your own two feet.’ They were supportive when I got accepted but they were still kind of worried that I wouldn’t be able to find a job.

“So I had been there from the end of August to the middle of October, and my parents came to visit. My fiancée and I were there together, and I had made a lot of friends, I was doing well in school, getting good grades. I was significantly happier, you could see it in my attitude and behaviour. Things were going really well. For me, it was the right move. Towards the end of the trip, my parents took me aside. They were just like, ‘Listen, we know that when you quit your job and told us that you were going back to school we gave you a hard time about it. When you came here, we weren’t huge fans about it. Now looking back on it, seeing what you’ve done with your time,’ they said, you know ‘we were wrong, you obviously knew what was the right thing for you to do, but we want you to know that for you, we’re really proud of you to see that you know what’s right for you.’ I told them that at no time did I think they didn’t have my best interest, but it’s just something they couldn’t have understood, because it was my happiness, and that’s something that’s hard to explain. In the end, to hear that was a really great memory for me, because that was the very definition of, we really respected each other. Of course I’ll always be their baby boy and they’ll always be my mom and dad, but I felt great at that point because I can talk to them about serious stuff. We can really converse as adults with mutual respect. It was a really nice feeling.”