Ottawa, Ontario, Wednesday, June 10, 2015
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It has been a pleasure to be associated with the Vanier Institute of the Family and its work. It was the Vanier Institute that first introduced me to the L’Arche community that provides such remarkable and rich family support at the neighbourhood level. I was actually at L’Arche Ottawa a year ago to launch the Listening Tour and I participated in a most engaging discussion about families there.
What a wonderful concept Jean Vanier had to bring people, with and without intellectual disabilities, together as a single family.
Families can indeed be made up in very many different ways. However, the constant you found during your cross-country listening tour is that love, support and care are fundamental to what family means, regardless of the cultural, economic or demographic background of the people you talk to.
I grew up in a small family consisting of my mother, grandmother and older sister. Every day I experienced those fundamentals of love, care, and support. But I also felt them from my neighbourhood community that became very supportive after my mother’s divorce. As you can well imagine, divorce was rare in those days.
Because of the warmth I experienced in my childhood I have made sure to offer the same to the young people I’ve met as an adult. To that end, I functioned as a mother to a young woman who had lost her mother to suicide. We all welcomed Line with open hearts and made her feel okay while her family was going through difficulties. Line Dubois enriched me, and my family. And now so do our 12 grandchildren – some who were adopted, as well as one little girl who has Down syndrome. All bringing out the best in each of us.
Often kids who come from difficult or fractured homes will hang around a school friend who has a happy family, particularly at dinner time. It doesn’t take much to set another place and let that lonely kid know he or she is welcome.
I would say families are the fabric of our society and the lonely kid is like a loose thread. We can’t take over another person’s child but we can make a child feel okay while a family is going through difficulties.
I would also like to share with you the profound way in which I recently understood the fundamental importance of family on becoming an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission led by Justice Sinclair.
The Commission heard thousands of Aboriginal Canadians recount their stories of being taken away from their families and put in residential schools. Let’s take a moment to reflect on that – on those children who were separated from their parents, and the devastating consequences of not growing up in a family.
One of these many consequences being the difficulty for residential survivors to be good parents themselves.
I was moved to tears by what I heard and this made me realize even more how families are at the heart of our society and have such critical importance for each and every one of us, no matter what definition of family we use. In the end, love, care and support matter immensely.
Let me end by wishing you all rich, inspirational and insightful conversations about the family for the benefit of all Canadians. And congratulations to the Vanier Institute for bringing us up to date on the modern family. You have done and are still doing important work.
Thank you.
