Family may be hard to define in this day and age but you know it when you see it at the Youville Centre

by Ron Corbett
The Ottawa Sun
February 18, 2008

It's three days before Family Day and I'm walking through the front door of the Youville Centre in Sandy Hill, wondering what the word family actually means in this day and age, glad for the holiday and everything, but what are we celebrating?

I looked it up before leaving for the centre. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, our new holiday is meant to celebrate "a group consisting of two parents and their children living together as a unit."

It's a definition that floors me because it rules out a lot of families. Extended. Single parent. According to Oxford, you're not a family.

The Merriam-Webster definition seemed better, although it still left me scratching my head. Family, said Merriam-Webster, is "a group of individuaIs living under one roof and usually under one head". Good definition, but is your sister in Victoria no longer part of the family? One roof, one head seems a bit harsh.

So I'm wondering all this - "meanwhile, I'm still thinking" to quote the great American poet Chuck Berry - as I walk through the front doors of the Youville Centre. I'm pretty sure not everyone in here is going to meet the dictionary definition of family.

The Youville Centre was established in 1985 by Sister Betty Ann Kinsella, who thought Ottawa needed a place where young, single mothers could continue their education. She started with a donated building on Melrose Ave. and $5 in her bank account.

Sister Kinsella was prophetic about the need for such a service. Today there are 48 mothers between ages 15-21 enrolled in classes at the Youville Centre. In the daycare centre are 55 children between the ages of two months and three years (several of the Youville graduates still have a child at the daycare).

Basically, the Youville Centre lets young mothers get a high school diploma. The classrooms are on the top floor of this former schoolhouse, the daycare centre in the basement. Classes start at 8:30 every morning and attendance is exemplary.

"These girls put a lot of work into improving their lives and keeping their families together", says Caterina Pace, one of the co-ordinators at the centre. "Most of them take it very seriously."

Maybe that should be part of any definition for family - something you have to put some work into.

Anyway, I'm thinking about this when I meet my first student. Her name is Kyanda Gorman, 18, mother of a toddler named Ttreyvohn and she's been coming to the Youville Centre for more than a year.

She was a Grade 10 student at Glebe Collegiate when she became pregnant. She didn't want to believe it at first, until her mother told her to stand sideways one day and then said they were going to the doctor's the next morning. She believed it after that.

Her father was upset when he heard the news. Her parents are divorced and when her father found out he refused to speak to her, although he relented and took her to her first ultrasound. Things were better after that.

"I always knew I would keep the baby", she says. "Not once did I want to do anything different."

Originally from Nova Scotia, the teenager says she might go back one day. Both her mother and father have gone back. She has no family (there's that word again) in Ottawa except for her son. She lives with the boy's father, who also is a high school student.

Funny thing, although you would think she had plenty to worry about, Kyanda showed no signs of it. She laughed often, was polite and well mannered, said she was looking forward to graduating from high school and after that she would go to college.

"I want to be a youthworker", she said. "l am definitely going to college. Nothing is going to stop me".

So what sort of family is this? Is there a head, a permanent address, parents who aren't children themselves? Yes, there can be problems with dictionaries, and literal definitions.

I talk to another student later in the day, Megan Brown, whose father had a stroke last month. He's still in the hospital, although he comes home on weekends and she looks after him.

She's 19, by the way. Will graduate this year and then she's off to college as well. She has already applied at Algonquin.

"I want to be a journalist;' she says. "I think I have a lot to write about.'

A teenage mother looking after her stricken father. Yes,' I think she might have a few stories to tell. And she comes across as so smart, so confident, I tell her about my dilemma with Family Day.

"What is Family Day?" I say. "I don't even know what we're celebrating."

She doesn't say anything, and so I go a little further.

"What do you think a family is?"

And she thinks, takes the question seriously, until she finally answers:

"A family is people who help each other, support each other and they do it because they love each other. Love is the definition."

Yes, she might just have a story or two to tell. Happy Family Day, whomever you celebrate it with.