Category: FAMILY

i’m telling mom.

i’m telling mom.

by Joanne ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

tattle
There are exceptions to every rule though, right?

I told my mother tonight.

We were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table having a good girl-talk gab session. We haven’t had one of those in a while. We were talking about Donte’s death and the funeral Saturday. Mum mentioned that while it was sad, it was still nice that Auntie Thelma still had four other grandchildren to love.

“And I don’t have any,” she said, half-jokingly.

I figured that was as good a time as any to drop my bomb.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked. She nodded, and I could tell she hadn’t the slightest inkling of what I was about to say. Read more ›

short and sad.

short and sad.

by Joanne ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

wpbfa9990a_05
RIP Donte Isaiah Smith. September 20, 2004 – July 25, 2013

My cousin Heather’s little boy, Donte, passed away today – just a month and a bit shy of his ninth birthday.

He’s been ill the last few months, so it was kind of expected. The family lives in Barbados, but come up to Toronto every year to visit relatives, grandparents, cousins, etc. Heather seemed to know that this might be Donte’s last trip to Toronto. She hinted as much to me, but never expanded on her hunch. And I didn’t pry.

Donte wasn’t your average nine-year-old; after he was born, he developed an encephaly, which doctors attributed to a possible stroke in-utero some weeks before his birth. It wasn’t even detected at the time, because he looked “normal.” Complications arose a few days later. By then, it was too late to do much to help him. Donte had already suffered massive brain damage, and doctors advised Heather to take him home and love him for a few weeks, as he wasn’t expected to live beyond that, anyway.

Read more ›

naming conventions.

naming conventions.

by Joanne ♥ 1 Comment


Perhaps Phoebe’s on to something…

Long before we decided to become parents, the boy and I talked about names for our children. We figured we should be in agreement before the actual event, so as not to leave our future kid in a nameless purgatory. However, previous discussions found us unable to come up with anything mutually inoffensive.

It is Portuguese custom to name children after relatives (living or dead), and early on I suspected that if we were to have a boy, he would want his son to bear the name of his deceased brother. Far be it from me to be the bitch who denies such a poignant request (more like declaration, but whatevs), I have agreed to this, with a few stipulations. Since I am not Portuguese, and would like my baby to have a first name that my Bajan relatives could say without butchering, we would have to give the boy a relatively Anglo (or at the very least, pronounceable)  first name.

“He could have his own first name, and your brother’s names as the middle ones,” I offered. The boy seemed okay with that, pointing out that we still had to come up with a first name. “I like the name Sonny,” he said, tentatively.

Sonny… Read more ›