Meet our family!

Rebecca and I came from different worlds. I grew up in Toronto, which is the fifth largest metropolitan city in North America. It's the most racially and culturally diverse city in Canada and it's a great place to live, unless you're a white supremacist and you agree with Today's Parent magazine, which picked the monocultural, nearly 100% white enclave of Quebec City as Canada's best city, and ranked the two most multicultural and multiracial cities in the country (Toronto and Vancouver) at the very bottom. My parents were scientists (my mother holds a master's degree in chemistry and my father holds a doctorate in nuclear physics), and they raised me to be a rationalist. I myself am an engineer (BASc, University of Waterloo, Class of 1993), and I've been told that I definitely act like one. I leave you to decide what that means :)

Rebecca, on the other hand, grew up on her family's dairy farm out in the country. Both of her parents were deeply religious, and neither had any scientific background whatsoever. Her mother's passion was the church choir, her uncle was a preacher, and virtually her entire family was of the opinion that the "Big City" was a den of vipers. Non-whites were nowhere to be seen. Everyone knew everyone else, and she felt relentless pressure to conform to the social norms and expectations imposed on her by family and neighbours. She was terribly unhappy with her life there, and when she graduated from high school, she immediately fled to Waterloo, where she started studying for an Honours English degree. Her diary from 1989 describes an encounter with a recklessly aggressive engineering student, whose defining traits seemed to be hyperactive hormones and big city arrogance. Care to guess who that student was? Somehow, I managed to polish my act enough to win her over, and we were soon dating.

Few gave us a chance. We were so different, and her parents already hated me. They hadn't even met me yet, but Rebecca had told them my name so they knew I was of Asian descent, and that was all the information they needed to pass judgement (you can imagine what happened when they discovered that I came from Toronto, and later, when they discovered that I was not very religious). She received a letter from her preacher uncle, urging her to stop this foolishness. She was told that her church minister had joined her uncle in passing judgement on our relationship (and me) from afar. A passage was quoted from the Bible about how we were "unequally yoked", and we were told that it would be "against the will of God" for us to marry. Her mother accosted me and asked "why don't you stay with your own kind?" Her parents cut off her financial support. I began to pay her rent and her tuition, and we persevered.

In the summer of 1991 I asked her to marry me, and she said yes! We started saving up to pay for our wedding, but the pressure was relentless. Her parents discovered the name of the minister who was going to do our wedding, so they drove to Waterloo and convinced him that I was an unsuitable husband for their daughter because I wasn't religious enough. He called us into the office the next day and told us he had "concerns", but that he would still do the wedding. But when the date was only two months away, he suddenly showed the true colours of a religious bigot and announced that he would refuse to perform the ceremony. He knew full well that it would be nearly impossible for us to arrange a new chapel and a new minister on such short notice, and I have long believed that he strung us along for so long in order to deliberately sabotage our wedding plans. Rebecca was in tears, and we were left high and dry, with no chapel, no minister, and apparently, no hope of having the traditional wedding that Rebecca had dreamed of since she was a little girl.

They say that opposites attact, and maybe it's true. They say that trials will sever a weak relationship but strengthen a strong one, and maybe that's true too. Our trials only brought us closer together, and we pushed on. We switched the ceremony to the college's small dormitory chapel. We found a kind-hearted minister in the tiny nearby town of Breslau who was willing to do the ceremony on short notice. And on a beautiful summer's day in 1992, we got married.

In the years following that day, we've had two children, and despite her parents' dire warnings, I did not undergo a Jekyll and Hyde transformation into a disloyal, wife-beating monster. We even managed to forge a delicate peace with her parents after Matthew was born, although I have a long memory, and it's easier to forgive than to forget. Today, Rebecca is a full time mommy, and we're proud of that! The media constantly promotes the message that women are failures if they don't juggle motherhood and career, and the "social scientists" (a term I use with much reservation) have even gotten into the act, arguing that children are actually better off in day care. I have one word for that idea: Bullshit. The day a rented stranger can replace a mother's love is the day that Hell freezes over. We didn't go through all of that just to turn our boys over to rented strangers at the first opportunity! We sacrifice a lot to keep her at home for the boys' early years, but it's worth it.

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