I’m aware of living in a multicultural country. The fact that I’m aware of it, is the point of my story. When one of my sons was 5 years old, he came home from daycare talking incessantly about a boy he played with that day. I was trying to decipher who the boy was, so I asked my son to describe him. He told me his name and then went on to tell me the colour of his pants, the sound of his laugh and the location of his “cubby” in relation to my son’s.

The next day I asked the staff to point out my son’s new friend. He was the confident, outgoing kid in the corner – with 4 other kids bouncing around him. Adopted a few years earlier from Sierra Leone, he was the only black kid at the daycare. Had my son described his skin colour, I would have known who he was instantly. However, it wasn’t the boy’s skin colour or accent that registered with my son as “different”, rather it was the sound of his laugh and the colour of his pants.  I love that.     – Erin in Vancouver