Family

(Courtesy of Charmaine Traynor-Ruitenberg/ Mark Kelly)

To my birth mother: ‘I’m not searching for who I want to be anymore—I’m discovering who I am’

‘Thank you for your love and bravery,’ Charmaine Traynor-Ruitenberg writes to the woman who gave her up for adoption

(Photograph by Carmen Cheung)

An ode to my work-from-home dining table

Pandemic life happened here: work calls by day, home-cooked meals by night, a baby’s first delightful laugh. And now it’s hard to imagine having to leave.

Julius Morry (left) with his son, Jeff, in his longtime basement workshop (Photograph by Skye Spence)

To my dad, an art restorer: ‘You have operated a one-man hospital mending shattered souls’

Julius Morry, writes his son Jeffrey, taught him that the only meaning of possessions is the one we ascribe to them

Penner (left) with Crystal McMahon, her birth mother (Courtesy of Brittany Penner)

A letter to my first mother: You did not raise me but I consider you my mother still

‘I now realize I was never unwanted, but rather imperfectly loved by imperfect people,’ writes Brittany Penner to her birth mother

Carol and George with baby Jeff in 1951 (Courtesy of Penguin Random House Canada)

‘I think that my father murdered my mother.’

Jeff Blackstock unravels the story of his mother’s death in the 1950s and lays it in the hands of his father, who at the time was a Canadian diplomat

Andrew Scheer’s parents were frugal, but he grew up solidly middle-class

The Tory leader sets his stories of childhood without much money against Trudeau’s ‘vast fortune.’ But the two might have quite a lot in common.

The Markles aren’t a mess, they’re a mirror

Scott Gilmore: Any family put on the royal pedestal would be found wanting. The truth is, the Markles are actually very average—they are us.

Who does more housework? Here’s the dirt on who does what

As the man of the house I want to do more—I really do. So why haven’t I? Here is what’s really needed to fix the family imbalance

Lock up your daughters

‘How To Save Your Daughter’s Life’: lock her up

A criminal profiler advises keeping a tight rein on girls

Women’s educations impact families

But perhaps not the way you’d expect

Why it’s not your fault you can’t stand your sibling

Psychotherapist Jeanne Safer on toxic brothers and sisters

If you leave me, can I come, too?

How one mother coped when her daughter left for school