I spent years feeling like an outsider in Canada — until my children helped me see it as home

This is a First Person column by Magdalena Olszanowski, a writer and communications professor who lives in Montreal, and is part of a Canada Day series exploring what Canada means to people across this country. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

"What's so wrong with being Canadian?" my nine-year-old child asked me at dinner. "We're Montrealers. We're Canadian."

My skin crawled.

I always saw myself as a Pole living in Canada. Not a Canadian. I built this moat around me based on my experiences immigrating to Toronto from Warsaw, Poland.

My parents and I moved with a single suitcase in the dead of winter in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But my two children were born in Montreal and knew only this land as home — a stark contrast to the moat I had imagined for myself. My child sensed my conflicted feelings.

Around the time of U.S. President Donald Trump's re-election, my nine-year-old began questioning the antagonistic sentiments about Canadian identity they had grown up hearing in their own home. But this was the first time they'd ever questioned my feelings about Canadian identity so pointedly.

I fumbled through an explanation about how we as Polish-Greek Jews celebrate our bountiful heritage and its customs, but the justifications I had built up over decades were suddenly inadequate against a child's clear-eyed logic. If being Canadian was so wrong, what was I doing here?

Microaggressions in Canada

When I moved to Canada, I didn't know English. I didn't know about Canadian culture. I didn't know how cold it could get. Most of all, I didn't know how this country could ever be my home.

My welcome as a tween didn't help.

"You know what Polish people are called?" a classmate said.

"No," I said, narrowly opening my mouth to accentuate the "o" so as not to betray my hard syllable-timed Polish accent.

"Kielbasa," he said, rolling the 'i" and anglicizing the word. "Fat, juicy, stinky kielbasa."

Each harsh syllable reinforced the idea that I didn't belong here, widening the gap between who I was and who I thought I needed to become.

Despite growing up in a city teeming with immigrants and first-generation kids, it felt like being Canadian meant following a white middle-class lifestyle. Or carrying a name that never made anyone pause or stumble over syllables.

At 11, I insisted that my parents officially anglicize my name, only to return to my birth name a decade later.

I wanted so badly to fit in, yet I derided where I would be fitting into. My parents, filled with acculturation stress — the psychological strain of adapting to a new culture — weren't equipped to help me navigate this either.

But the contempt I held for the world I was trying to enter may have kept me from seeing my place within it. The moat I thought was widening between me and this country was actually filling up with the sediments of daily belonging.

Belonging to Canada

In 2011, when I moved to Montreal and later became a mom, the disconnect between identity and belonging started to narrow further. Quebec gave me an identity that eventually became perennial: an allophone mother.

I had to put in effort for Montreal's language and cultural differences to experience its bountiful offerings. This effort at understanding was the welcome I was waiting for when I arrived in Canada, now realizing it could only flourish with my tending.

In our yard, my daughter asks to plant flowers, so we do — native flowers such as wild bergamot, fireweed and yarrow. I choose the latter two, because they grow both in Warsaw's forests and along Quebec's roadsides.

We bike around with books to share with Les Croque-livres (little free libraries).

"Mama, I love our neighbourhood," my nine-year-old says, holding up an Elise Gravel comic they found tucked in a turquoise free library in a ruelle verte (green alley) near our home.

When I overhear them explain Orange Shirt Day to their sister over nalesniki (Polish crepes) with maple syrup, while they both don matching Every Child Matters shirts, or when they make up rhymes in Frenglish about the MPs on posters during election time, I realize this is what it means to be Canadian.

I'm the immigrant parent observing my children's fluency in languages I'm still struggling with, but they've shown me the many reasons that being Canadian is not succumbing to nationalism or bumper sticker cliches or letting the past wholly define me.

It's using my own experience of cultural erasure and alienation — being seen as a stereotype rather than a whole person — to teach my children about xenophobia and to fight against it. It's ensuring that Indigenous presence is never erased from our understanding of what it means to be Canadian.

It wasn't until that incisive question from my child that I realized that my efforts to fit in over the years were actually gestures toward building a more welcoming Canada for all. 

By participating in the historic Quebec student strikes, co-ordinating a "Yes In My Backyard Festival" for years, teaching Canadian cinema that foregrounds Indigenous stories and taking my children when I vote, I was helping shape a more inclusive Canada.

I've realized that belonging in and to this country can take many forms. Like plants, it relies on cross-pollination to flourish.

I'm grateful my children's fresh eyes taught me to embrace what was already blooming around me.

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