Life Changes So Fast, Part One: The Quiet Before

Content note: this reflection includes gentle references to family separation and childhood change. There are no graphic details in this piece.

Life changes so fast.

I think about that often when I look back on the earliest parts of my life. Not because those years were perfect, or untouched by the things that would come later, but because they held a kind of softness I still find myself reaching for.

There was a before.

Before the fear had a name.

Before I knew how quickly a home could become unfamiliar.

Before I understood that safety was not something every child got to keep.

That before lives in small memories. Some of them are mine. Some of them have been handed back to me through stories, photographs, and the way my body remembers what my mind cannot fully hold. A baby does not understand the world in timelines. A baby knows warmth. Voices. Hands. Smells. The feeling of being carried.

For the first few years of my life, I lived in a multigenerational home. Four generations under one roof. My great-grandmother, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and me. I was the baby of the family then, the smallest person in a house full of movement, noise, routine, and care.

I was not raised in the culture in the way people sometimes expect when they hear I am Haudenosaunee. My grandmother was a devout Baptist, and our teachings did not always come through ceremony or formal language. They came through the everyday. Through food. Through showing up. Through the quiet responsibilities people carried for one another without naming them as teachings.

Love did not always announce itself.

Sometimes it was a full plate.

Sometimes it was a blanket pulled over me.

Sometimes it was someone watching me while someone else worked.

Sometimes it was being brought along on a trip because that is just what families did. You went together. You figured it out together. You made room.

My grandfather, Bubba, was an OPP officer. That is a complicated thing to understand now, with everything I have come to know about policing, systems, power, and Indigenous life. But as a little girl, I did not know those complexities. I knew the sound of his boots. I knew the steady way he moved through the house. I knew he made me feel safe.

He had a quiet kind of love.

Not loud. Not overly sentimental. Not the kind that always had words attached to it.

But it was there.

In the way he slowed down for me. In the way he let me tag along. In the way his presence made the world feel less frightening. Some people make safety feel like a room you can step inside. Bubba was like that for me.

One memory has stayed with me, though I am not sure how much of it is memory and how much is story stitched together with feeling. We were in Ottawa. My grandmother was working, and Bubba and I were walking near the river. I was small. The kind of small where the world is mostly legs, hands, sky, and sound.

I remember calm.

That is the clearest part.

The water moving beside us. The air feeling open. My hand in his. The sense that nothing bad could happen as long as he was there. I do not remember what we talked about, or if we talked at all. Maybe the quiet was the point. Maybe that was the gift.

A quiet walk.

A steady hand.

A child who felt safe without knowing how rare that feeling could become.

My grandmother’s work at the Prison Arts Foundation meant she travelled often. I understand now that she was doing meaningful work, helping people create beauty in places marked by confinement and hardship. As a child, I did not know the depth of that. I only knew that sometimes we went with her. I knew the rhythm of being packed up, brought along, carried between places.

There is something beautiful about being included before you understand what inclusion means.

That was part of the quiet before too.

The feeling of being part of a household where everyone had their role. My aunt and uncle were teenagers then, fifteen and sixteen, old enough to have their own lives but young enough that I probably interrupted them constantly. I imagine I was annoying at times. A baby in the house changes everything. A toddler changes the sound of a home.

But love grew anyway.

They became my first companions in laughter and mischief. There are stories of them putting me under laundry baskets to keep me from running wild. There were games, silly songs, marshmallows, teasing, and laughter that filled the house in ways I can still almost hear.

My uncle became “Adie” because I could not say Adam properly yet. There is something tender about that kind of childhood naming. The way little mouths remake the world. The way families keep those names long after you have grown up.

I remember him pushing me in a little swing outside. I would yell for him to go faster, and then, when the swing rose higher than my courage, I would shout, “Too fast, Adie, too fast!” That memory makes me smile because it holds so much of what childhood is supposed to be. Trusting someone enough to ask for more. Trusting them enough to stop when it becomes too much.

That is such a simple thing.

And such a big thing.

To be able to say, “Too fast,” and have someone listen.

My aunt, too, was part of that softness. She would brush my hair, sing, tease, play, and help make ordinary days feel full. I was surrounded by people who were still growing up themselves, and yet they made room for me. They did not have to love me the way they did. But they did.

Great-grandma had a quieter presence. I spent afternoons with her while my grandparents worked. We played board games. We ate snacks. We watched TV. She moved slowly, but there was something grounding about her. Elder love does not always rush. It settles. It lets you be. It teaches patience without calling it a lesson.

I think my love of board games started with her.

Those afternoons at the table. The counting. The waiting. The small joy of rolling dice or moving pieces. The way a game can become more than a game when what it really offers is time together.

The house itself was alive with ordinary sounds. Jackets on hooks. The washer humming. Cassette tapes playing too loud. Dishes being moved around in the kitchen. Someone coming in. Someone going out. The smell of toast, wood polish, perfume, food cooking, and life happening.

It was not a perfect life.

I do not want to make it sound untouched by struggle.

There were already layers. There were already adult worries I could not see. There were already histories moving beneath us. But for a while, I was held by something larger than myself.

A house.

A family.

A rhythm.

A collection of people doing their best with what they had.

When I look back now, I understand that this kind of care matters. Not because it erased what came later, but because it gave me something to remember. Something to measure safety against. Something to return to in my mind when I needed proof that I had once been loved without fear attached to it.

That matters more than I can explain.

Because when life changes fast, it can convince you that the new reality is the only reality. Fear can rewrite the past if you let it. It can make you believe you were always alone, always unsafe, always waiting for something bad to happen.

But that was not true.

There was a before.

There was laughter.

There was Bubba’s hand.

There was Great-grandma at the table.

There was my aunt singing and my uncle pushing me too high in the swing.

There were board games, snacks, blankets, trips, and the soft chaos of a busy home.

There was care before there was fear.

And then life changed.

Not all at once, maybe. Not in a way I could understand then. But the shift came. My ma came to take me with her, and the house that had held me had to let me go.

I do not remember all of the details. I do not remember every conversation or every adult decision that led to that moment. But I know the feeling around it was heavy. I know my aunt and uncle were angry. I know people in the house were upset that my grandparents did not fight harder to keep me.

But I also know my grandparents were afraid.

Afraid of losing their daughter.

Afraid of creating a fracture that could not be repaired.

Afraid that if they held too tightly, the door home would close completely.

So they made a choice that came from love, even if it broke something in them. They let me go, hoping that love would be enough to keep the path back open.

That is one of the hardest things I have come to understand about family.

Sometimes people make decisions that hurt because they are trying to prevent a bigger hurt. Sometimes love looks like holding on. Sometimes it looks like letting go with trembling hands. Sometimes it looks like silence because no one knows what the right words are.

I wonder about those nights.

I wonder if Bubba sat quietly after I left.

I wonder if Grandma kept herself busy so she would not fall apart.

I wonder if my aunt and uncle felt betrayed by the adults around them.

I wonder if anyone knew how much that moment would shape everything that came after.

Probably not.

Life changes so fast that sometimes we do not know we are standing at the edge of a before and after until years later.

At the time, it may have looked like a child going with her mother.

A normal thing.

A family thing.

A hard thing, but not necessarily a dangerous thing.

But my body knew something was shifting.

Even if I could not name it.

That is the strange thing about childhood. Children may not understand the reasons, but they feel the rupture. They feel the room change. They feel the way adults stop speaking freely. They feel the goodbye beneath the goodbye.

That was the end of the quiet before.

Not the end of love.

Not the end of family.

But the end of a world where I felt held from all sides.

For years, I would try to find my way back to that feeling. Back to the kitchen, the river, the board games, the swing, the warmth of being someone’s baby. Back to the version of myself who did not yet know how quickly safety could disappear.

I think that is why those early memories matter so much.

They remind me that my story did not begin with fear.

It began with care.

It began with people who loved me.

It began with a home that tried.

And even though life changed fast, even though everything after would become complicated, scary, and heavy in ways no child should have to carry, that quiet before still belongs to me.

I get to keep it.

The softness.

The laughter.

The river wind.

The swing.

The hand holding mine.