Growing Pains

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.” - Mahatma Gandhi

My family is growing. My wife and I have one son. He is 25 now, and working on his Master's of Anthropology at the University of Toronto in our basement. We host international students, and this year we only have one daughter, Jiwon, from South Korea. She got marooned here during Covid, so she also spent the summer with us. Then in January, one of our past students, Nick, returned home to live with us during the week with his girlfriend and their puppy. His girlfriend has an internship at the local university during the week, and they head back to the city for the weekend. Our house is full during the week.

Life isn't perfect, it rarely is. We had a lot of growing pains this fall as we adjusted and got used to our new student from South Korea. She is a unique personality and took some getting used to for my wife and son. Now that we are all used to each other, we have learned to appreciate the good and bad in each of us, but it was a bit of a roller coaster for a little while.

This is life. Good comes with the bad, and vice-versa. Fights and conflicts are natural. We can try to avoid them all we want, but at times it will all come out. I'm the type of person who tends to wear my heart on my sleeve. People usually know where they stand with me. If you think that I don't like you, then you probably are right. If you think that I like you, then you are probably spot on, too. I'm not good at hiding things. My wife and son are the opposite. They have a harder time showing their emotions, and see more importance in holding things close to their chest. This is probably why so often I feel the soft kick of my wife's foot under the table when I am telling stories. Probably, we balance each other out. We must be doing something right, as this year will be our 29th anniversary.

Whether you like to hold things close to your chest, or whether you wear your heart on your sleeve, it doesn't really matter. Conflicts happen. There is no avoiding them. They are a normal part of life. We are all different, with different experiences that brought us to where we are in our lives. Different triggers for what we like or dislike, what irritates us and what pleases us, and different ways of expressing our thoughts and our feelings.Our family is growing, and we are learning to accept different people with different backgrounds, cultures, and ideas about the world. We sit around the supper table eating sometimes Korean food, Dutch, Canadian, Chinese, or Japanese. Some things we like, some things we don't. Some nights I eat too much, other nights, I make due. But, I am richer for it, either way. We are all richer for it. Our divisions don't have to permanently divide us, our arguments don't have to define us, our differences don't have to separate us. Diversity is our strength. pEACEoUT thom

"We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same." - Anne Frank