Stiletto Sisterhood

Original Edition: Six| Redefining the roots of a family tree

Relationships with our parents are never easy, the constant shift of balance as we grow from child to teen to young adult can often be as tumultuous as a ship's deck while caught in a squall. That violent, heaving sway. Pitching you from one end to the other and back, sometimes threatening to toss you overboard altogether.

I love my parents and have been blessed with a pretty solid childhood, and yet having said that, even we had days where we'd fought, bickered and slammed doors on one another in frustration. Usually over something completely ridiculous that meant the world in the heat of the moment.

I'd always kind of envied those happy little families you saw on TV. The ones where they always seemed to laugh and smile and even when things got hard, they came together and ploughed through the obstacle together. Who'd celebrated each holiday with a host of loving aunts and doting uncles and a football team of cousins closes as siblings.

I'd never believed such a close-knit family was even possible. Until I met Caitriona.

Cait always knew she was adopted. Given that her father was a German engineer and her mother a literature professor, and both white as a blizzard, there was no hiding the obvious. Not that Cait's parents ever would have dared try. Their philosophy was and always has been forged in complete honesty.

One winter when I'd come out to visit Cait's home for the first time and I'd never seen a family more connected or more attuned to one another.

Perhaps because they hadn't tried to overlook her ethnicity, or whitewash her into a colour blind palette but had instead gone to considerable lengths and effort to include her native culture into their daily lives. To show her that they accepted and embraced who she was. Celebrated it with annual trips to Seoul where she had been born, took part in language classes as well as learned how to recreate traditional recipes at home.

(Side note: Mrs. Emerson makes one bad*ss beef Bulgogi Bibimbap).

What most people don't know about adoption is that the practice actually began following the horrors of the Second World War. When a large number of children were left orphaned, separated or abandoned by their parents, moved by their plight, families opened their hearts and homes across Europe.

But it was the Korean War however that led to a surge of international adoptions to span the globe.

The first time I'd worked up the nerve to ask Cait about it all, it was the second summer of the Sisterhood. We were walking down Yonge street in Toronto after spending an afternoon window shopping in the Eaton Center.

Laughing at my shyness, Cait looped an arm through mine and said, "In my room there was a sign above my bed and it said, 'you were not born in my body, but in my heart.' That's how I knew. That's how I've always known. And it's all been Ok. I'm Ok."

The profound weight of that statement strikes me as hard now as it had in that moment, and it is because of her I learned that family is determined by so much more than blood and genetics.

It's about connection, and sometimes those connections are forged between complete strangers and yet are no less fierce and honest.

vL