My story is not so extrodinary, except in the way that life is extrodinary if you just open your heart to it. I grew up in Newfoundland, learning most everything I needed from playing with my siblings, my cousins and trailing with my mom around from errand to errand on early Saturday mornings. When I was old enough to think I knew something about the world, I thought it would be fun to explore it. I spent a year, and several summers, living and working around Europe. I studied languages, world politics and law at McGill and decided that my call in life was to ‘change the world’ (haha…pretty lofty, no?). Hence leaving behind my childhood dreams to wow the world with my dancing, singing and acting (none of which, it seems, I have much of a talent for…except living room dance-athons). I think the world should be grateful for this.

It was in the field of Aboriginal law that I decided to make my mark – fitting because of my Inuit heritage. Here is where I really began to grow up. Through my work I understood the extreme ego of the university student studying human rights. To work with a community that is extrordinary simply for having survived centuries of directs attacks on their culture, language, emotional, psychological and physical survival, a community that struggles with overcoming hundred year old scars, almost insurmountable battles at every front. To work with such a community (and there are hundreds of them in Canada) and think that YOU are what they need? Humility is an important lesson. I now have very few visions of grandeur for myself. I have some skills and if one of these Aboriginal communities thinks that they could use them, that is amazing for me. Change comes internally, even if the damage doesn’t.

Through all this, I met a man. A man who is patient beyond my comprehension, and so comfortable with himself he openly knits little baby clothes and it doesn’t even register to be anything but proud when people say ‘you knit this?’…i.e. but you’re a man and manly men don’t knit. We fell in love and love being silly together. We married and made the most beautiful person I could ever have imagined.

Again I learn. Every person changes the world just by being in it. A new soul joins humanity and, as a mother, I can help shape how she lives in it. I am changing her world, and in this way I am changing the whole world. I want to give her everything. Although this everything has nothing to do with things or money.

A friend told us the other day about a couple who will send their friends to a rich private school. Not for the education, but for the contacts and network they will develop with future movers and shakers. This is what they value and they want to pass it on to their children. You will do anything for your children, after all. It made me question what I value and what gifts I want to pass on. I want my children to grow up to be empathetic, compassionate, warm people. I want them to find more value in the miracles of the forest than in a network of money makers. I want them to ache for the pain of others – human or not. I want them to be happy in their skin and confident to look outwards and beyond themselves and explore and trust and share…share all they have with anyone who needs a little love, compassion or maybe some homemade mittens.

Catherine Dandeneau Fagan