Battling Our Upbringing
What did our parents teach us that we need to undo?
I confess that I had a mostly sheltered and protected early life. Raised in a small white community, my family was surrounded by other expats from Britain. They started a cricket club; my dad played rugby, and everyone went to the local Anglican church.
No one was (visibly) gay, or Black or much else that was different; the most significantly unusual friend I brought home from school was a girl from a family who went to the Catholic church and there was another child who my mother said was adopted. Whatever that meant. A homogenous and boring group surrounded us all. And most people probably liked it that way.
There were demographics of poverty that separated people in town; by the time I was born, my parents were scrambling their way out of it. They owned a tiny wartime house when I was small, and later something bigger.
Eventually, we moved to a different community. A larger house where my parents installed a swimming pool in the backyard. As is often the case by the time we took possession of this four-bedroom home I was the only kid left. The older ones were long gone.
This town was more mixed
It was a closer suburb to the city and some of the immigrant families weren’t…
