Much is made these days of parents who keep their children trapped in molds that have more to do with the needs and ambitions of the parents than with those of the child. This is that story, only in reverse.

It has taken a lifetime, and a pandemic, for me to learn to love my dad for the man that he is and not for the man I've imagined or needed him to be.

Pif’s in labour.

The pre-dawn text lights up our shoebox of a bedroom. I roll off the side of the bed so as not to wake my husband, grab my work clothes from a hook on the back of the door and get dressed in the living room to the light of the Christmas tree.

Let it be a girl. Please, let it be a girl.

WHILE ON VACATION in Egypt, I stepped into a kiosk brimming with religious items for Muslim pilgrims: framed pictures of the Kaaba in Mecca, Quranic texts etched on marble, woven prayer mats. A collector of devotional paraphernalia, I picked up a string of blue prayer beads.

The proprietor, an elderly Muslim with a henna…

"'I don't believe in cancer.'

"I imagine Jeremy saying this in lower case, the way he writes. Though I would have been less surprised had he said, 'I don't believe in God' or 'I don't believe in healing dirt.' After all, this road trip to a pilgrimage site in New Mexico where the earth is said to have curative powers wasn't his idea."

At breakfast, in the glass-towered city of Vancouver, five-year-old Abigail looks glumly at her half-eaten bowl of cereal.

"What is it, honey?" I brush the bangs back from her face.

She lets out a big sigh. "I wish I wasn't white."

As a 12-year old I had the usual enthrall with horses typical of my peers. My horse phase was short-lived however and soon the horse poster in my bedroom was replaced with a poster of ABBA.

It wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I thought of horses again. On Abigail’s 12th birthday I decided that she should learn to ride.

The Stories of Samson and Unist’ot’en Resistance

This is the account of a storytelling event that brought together an Eastside Vancouver church and a First Nations community in British Columbia’s central interior. More importantly it’s the account of a 10 year old boy named Graeme who, for a moment, stood on the stage between two culturally and spiritually diverse stories and had the courage to allow each of them to speak to his own.

Not wanting my awkwardness to be apparent, I sat as close to the back of the sanctuary as possible. A few empty pews separatedme from the rows of fidgeting children, all of them wearing the burgundy cardigan of their school uniform. Seated shoulder-to-shoulder in orderly rows, the youngsters, with their pentup energy, were kept from spilling out into the aisles by teachers strategically positioned at the end of pews.