Daughter

I grew up really close with my mom. Not only did we share similar features of warm brown eyes and hair, petite frames, and sensitive skin, but our youth was similarly dampened by insecurities, bullying, and loneliness. There were often times where I felt no one else really understood me other than my mom. She stood up for me, empowered me, talked sense into me, and cautiously trusted me as I grew into myself. We set out on month-long trips to Europe in my teens and early twenties, just the two of us town-hopping and bonding over our love of the coastal Italian lifestyle and simple balcony dinners made of baguettes and fresh tomatoes. There’s both a craving for newness and longing for comfort simultaneously existing inside of us. We are sensitive, judgemental, hospitable, caring, and extremely tidy homebodies who love deep conversations and hate disappointment. Prone to car sickness and hives, we hide our discomfort under a veil of high pain tolerance and fear of being a burden. Both the youngest daughters of our families, we possess perhaps the most strong resemblance out of everything else - an overwhelming, overflowing amount of love for our fathers.

My grandad was a really great man. Living in Ireland, I didn’t get to know him as well as I wish I did but I hold close the memories of his long trips to Canada in the summers where I got to see just how much my mom really loved her dad. She worried about him endlessly when she wasn’t near him and treated him like a king when he came to visit. New clothes, new teeth, new hearing aids, day trips to the mountains, a trip to Vegas and Palm Springs, as much Guinness as our fridge could hold. Him and my dad shared the same birthday (something my dad was used to after having to share his birthday with two other siblings growing up) but my dad didn’t mind because he, too, loved my grandad like his own father. Once it was time for my grandad to fly back to Ireland, my mom would cry for what felt like a whole 24 hours, as if an actual piece of her also boarded that flight. They’d talk for hours on the phone, despite the time difference, about every topic under the sun, my mom speaking so loud into the phone that it’d wake us up on Saturday mornings. I reflect now and think what a beautiful sound to wake up to. I wish I could go back and soak it in.

When I was twenty, my mom and I were in the store picking up last minute items for a trip to Italy when we got a call that my grandad was in the hospital. She and my dad had driven to Vancouver and were bunking with my brother and I in our one-bedroom apartment. I don’t think I ever thought about what to do when this moment would come and, in hindsight, I wish I knew then what I know now about how much my grandad meant to my mom so that I could have shown up better for her. By the time we booked flights, we got another call that he had passed away. My mom sat on my bed later that night crying as I hugged her. She said to me, “I’m so happy you’re here with me. I don’t know where I’d be without you.” It’s a moment I think of so often because I don’t think I was mature enough to understand the depth of loss and heartbreak that my mom was feeling. I always wish I could go back and comfort her more, give her more time and space to process, be more patient and nurturing. We flew to Ireland for the funeral, and then went on our trip, which felt a bit weird to do but it might have been just what my mom needed. I’m so happy we had that time together. It took a good couple of years before she could talk about him without immediately welling up. If I think about how grief is simply love with nowhere to go, my mom really did have so much love for her dad. Years later she can talk about him with such joy and tell his stories with laughter, with the odd cry on special occasions. My mom showed me how to be a father’s daughter and how to value, cherish, respect, understand, and love my own dad.

As I get older, I start to see more and more of myself in my dad. In my childhood, he was always more reserved with his emotions so I don’t feel like I ever knew if we shared anything more than our curly hair and noses. I look back now and know he was stressed, living in fight or flight since his own childhood, pushing himself to always provide for his kids the life he didn’t get to have. I never appreciated the full depth of my dad’s history and only knew of the wild fun stories he chose to tell, intentionally excluding the hard truths to spare us. He’s a fighter, is what I can say now. He’s kind, generous, thoughtful, welcoming, protective, defensive, proud, and a phenomenal story teller, inventing a whole world of bedtime stories for my brothers and I to fall asleep to. He has single handedly renovated all three homes he and my mom have owned, even to this day. Give him a problem, share an idea, show him your Pinterest inspiration, and he will find a way. He will always find a way. Give him an address, ask him to drive you to all your friends’ houses to hand deliver birthday party invites, plan a road trip to California, and he will reference the million routes he’s memorized to find his way. He will always find his way.

When I was in high school, my dad was diagnosed with primary progressive MS. Both brothers had moved out so it was just my parents and I, them working through a life altering diagnosis while I was likely in my room regrettably finding refuge from high school drama. I remember moments walking in on whispering conversations that stopped when I entered the room, overhearing voicemails from doctors that my parents listened to while hovering from either side of the kitchen table. I don’t remember being explicitly told what was happening or what it meant, things just gradually became known without really being talked about. With such little knowledge of MS, I remember naively going to my high school biology teacher and asking him if he could explain MS to me while I cried in his empty classroom. His reaction, one that I have encountered many times since, left me feeling like maybe this was a lot worse than I thought. I went home “sick” and cried to my dad, him telling me that he’ll be just fine and that he didn’t want me to be worried. It was a weird year as I had to decide what to do for university. With a couple of acceptance letters, I was torn between staying near home to be close to my parents or moving to Vancouver to study and “chase my dreams”. My mom told me to choose Vancouver, though I know it wasn’t what she really wanted. They packed me up and drove me to school where I’d spend the next 4 years perpetually with one foot in my world and one foot in theirs, feeling in moments so far, selfish, lonely, grown, responsible, free, independent, lost, found, and inspired. One moment I’d be intentionally picking research paper topics that allowed me to learn more about MS and how to improve quality of life through diet and movement. In another moment I’d be lost in my own reality, stressing over my own things, succeeding in my own way, living my own life, and feeling really weird about it. I worried about my dad when I wasn’t near him, and yet felt so normal as soon as we were together. 

I won’t go into every detail about my dad’s entire journey with MS, as it’s not mine to share, but over the years of trying drug interventions and pain medication that left him feeling loopy and not himself, his neurologist stopped helping him. He told my dad that he needed to just accept that he would be wheelchair bound in a handful of years, a definitive, case-closed statement that I don’t think (or hope) would fly today between practitioner and patient. He washed his hands clean of my dad and moved on. Hearing this didn’t cause my dad to sit still, however. Instead, he and my mom set out on a journey to find and try other forms of care and treatment on their own. They were going to find a way. After trying physical therapy, detoxing, diets, and naturopathy, my dad found a bit of a stride with MS from stem cell therapy that he traveled to California for. From needing two sticks at the beginning to using one after his treatment, his energy was up and he felt optimistic about his reality, which I think both helped us all in our processing of the diagnosis… and yet equally made it difficult. Because my dad was really dead set on finding a cure, through spiritual healing or through a new scientific development, it’s been hard to be honest and vulnerable, or ask questions and raise concerns, at the risk of sounding negative or dismissive to his search for something that worked. Add to that the constant searching on my own time for the one path to a cure we may have somehow missed over the last ten years, the custom meal guides, exercise plans, supplement orders, health professional searches, books, and podcasts, all to try and provide my dad with more info, more options, more support. It felt like my dad’s MS was my MS, and I wanted to fix it for him with every ounce of my being.

In May 2022, in some twisted fate, I received my own diagnosis with relapsing-remitting MS. It was no longer my dad’s MS that felt like mine… I now had my own. Following two years of isolated flare ups, a slew of MRIs, and a fun existential crisis, I knew my fate after my second flare up in May 2021. After all the research I’d done in the past to understand my dad, I knew what I was looking at from the very beginning but I didn’t want to admit it. Maybe I could be the lucky one who just had psychosomatic symptoms… so I sought out health care professionals who appeased that theory while I waited for a neurologist’s opinion. It was all just to buy myself some time before I’d have to face the truth and enter into what I thought MS was - something that gave you just three years until you’re in a wheelchair and caused people to dip their heads in pity and sadness when they heard the news. It felt unfair to me, to my partner, to my family. We’d already been through this once, why again?

As I processed my diagnosis over the last year and a bit, I kept coming back to my dad. I couldn’t think of myself without thinking of him and pulling from his experience to make sense of my own. When I met my new neurologist who broke the news to me, through my tears I asked her how I can get my dad in to see her. If there was anything that I got, any knowledge I learned, any exercises I did, any life change I tried to help me through this diagnosis, I wanted my dad to have it as well. I learned a lot about trauma, the connection between the mind and body, the impact of unacknowledged hurt, and the damage of built up pressure, fear, insecurity, and pain. My dad and I do not have similar backgrounds, and I thank him and my mom for that. His dad was a man I’m happy to not have any memory of, but I ache knowing what my dad went through as a child and making connections to how his trauma may have manifested physically as he got older. I learned so much from reflecting about my dad and have made a lot of effort in trying to identify and nurture past trauma of mine that caused harm and damage to my own body. The correlation between stress and disease is so evident and it took two MS diagnoses in my time to really understand the importance of identifying hurt, releasing pain, and caring for the parts of you that carry that weight.

One thing my diagnosis gave me that I am so appreciative of is an overwhelming capacity for empathy, especially for my dad. He is a really beautiful man who has come a long way, with a history so complex and a heart so eager for peace, understanding, and acceptance. We have our differences, of course, in our politics and opinions, as many parents and children do, but we have more similarities I see now than just our curly hair and noses. While the obvious one being an unfortunate disease, it’s one that speaks to our softness, our gentle hearts that get easily wounded yet long to reconcile, even when too proud to admit it. With sweet tooths like no other, we optimize for comfort and familiarity when it starts to feel like too much and use humour to make all scenarios more palatable. We’ll watch the same movies and shows together over and over, laughing like we’ve heard their jokes for the first time, our smile lines beside our eyes becoming evermore deep and similar. With a knack for rolling our sleeves up, whether to make sure the dishes are done even at 2am or to fix something that others would rather hire someone to do, we'll find a way to get it done. We will always find a way through our fatigue, pain, numbness, stiffness, and whatever else we’re dealing with to show up everyday, whatever that might look like for us.

I understand my dad on a level I never have before because of MS and all the things I’ve learned and unpacked on my own journey. Him and I are in this together, forever, because, like my mother, I am my father’s daughter.