Mother, father, sister, brother

Family. Family Day. One way or the other, we’ve all got family. Ya, you can deny it if you want, but you’ve got family. And what does a family really look like? Even today, a lot of folks don’t stray too far in their definition of family. When I was a kid going to a Toronto Catholic School, no doubt about it, a family was one Mom, one Dad and their offspring. That was what God intended. Hell, once each day in reading class, our Faith and Freedom readers as much as narrated and graphically depicted what the perfect family should look like. Every page was filled with colour pictures of the smiling mom in an apron, a handsome dad in rugged, factory work clothes, fawning over one son, one daughter and one dog. That was a family. Their various adventures were as exciting as cooking, cleaning, going to work, going to school, playing in the garden, heading to church on Sunday and doing good deeds for the less fortunate in the community. Somewhere around page 25, the grandparents were mentioned—in the kindest possible way, of course. Grandma was good for the perfect apple pie and maybe a handknit of some kind and Grandpa, bless his pipe-smokin’ heart, could put the wheels back on the wagon in no time flat.

The Faith and Freedom reader definition of family was a dream to me. As one of seven kids living in a house my dad built on a VLA lot from plans created in some VLA office in Ottawa, I could do the math. We didn’t measure up. VLA homes all looked the same, inside and out, with three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room and a kitchen. Our VLAer was home to nine people (on a good day). We had a septic tank, pumped water from an artesian well, and out in the dirt driveway sat an arthritic 1934 Chevrolet with lovely long fenders. Having a flower garden was something my mom referred to as “a waste of time, you can’t eat flowers.” We had a vegetable garden. Obviously we weren’t a Faith and Freedom textbook family. As if we weren’t far enough from perfect, my parents opened their newly finished home to more “family,” immigrating from Holland after WWII. By the early 1950s our family consisted of the nine of us and 14 of them, enjoying the good life in three bedrooms, one bathroom, on a septic tank, an artesian well and in a 1934 Chevrolet. Geez.

Family. It took me a really long time to get over the branding my brain endured from the vignettes on the pages of those Faith and Freedom readers. By the time I was about 10, I had stopped asking my mom if our grandma was ever going to put out the cigarette and bake me some pie. As far as grandpa was concerned, well let’s just say we didn’t ask him to fix our wagons or our bikes, for that matter. My grandparents, like my parents, were real people. They worked hard. I didn’t hate them because they’d missed the point about my needing only one brother, not three brothers, three sisters and 14 people who didn’t speak English. There wasn’t anything in my school readers about our kind of family home and I started to just “suck it up.”

After what seemed like an eternity (and was likely only a few weeks or months), those 14 people found jobs, a school for the kids and a place of their own to call home, and our home suddenly seemed more storybook than hostel. Those folks never stopped being part of our ever-growing family. They just stopped taking up space in our house. Before we had time to get back to normal, my Mom’s teenaged sister came to live with us. Our aunt was too much for our grandfather to handle. She was a normal teenager who liked to date, smoke, listen to music, avoid going to school as much as possible, and yak on the phone. Just when I thought our family had a chance of becoming more normal, Aunt Nina hit us as hard as Hurricane Hazel. The winds of the hurricane abated, but Aunt Nina endured. It wasn’t enough that she lived with us, but just after she graduated from nursing school, she met a handsome man and became an unwed mom. There certainly wasn’t a chapter about Unwed Moms in our readers. Jeez. Before long, we had yet another person living in our midst. A fatherless infant cousin.

And, so it was. Eventually, I stopped looking at my family with such a critical eye. Over the years, LOML and I have created and re-created our own definition of family. This year on Family Day, when we were so afraid of losing one “partner” member of our family, we are fortunate to welcome another member to the fold. Ain’t life grand? Enjoy your Family (whatever it looks like) Day this weekend.