This is one of the things I'm hoping for for our country, that in stripping everything from us,

we learn who we are, what is important to us, and we work our asses off to return to a place

where we can hold up our heads high again.

Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host Lee McGowan. Let's get into it.

I'm recording this New Year's episode from my hometown of Toronto, the city where I was raised and the country that gave me the perspective on America I still have to this day. I'm recording it

from a rental house.

This is not my childhood home. This is not the place where I grew up and became a person.

Believe me, I wish I could do this podcast from beside my mother's tree and her beautiful white

living room in the house that I was raised. But unfortunately, after my mother's sudden death in

2018, everything I thought I knew about the security of my life,

about who I was, about how my family worked, fell apart around me. In the wake of my mother's death,

I discovered that few things in my family were as they had seemed, and that in many ways I had been

living in a kind of mirage, that when my mom died, disappeared, that the safety and comfort

I had always taken for granted were in many ways due to her, and without her, they were gone.

I'm telling you about this, not because I just love sharing personal difficult stories about

my life, I already told you about my terminal diagnosis back in November, but because I've

learned that

we can extrapolate so much about the big picture from small picture things, that sometimes

a deeply personal experience can have universal lessons, and someone else's trauma shared can

offer insight without others having to experience the same pain.

Now I'm not sure how many of you have lost a parent, or how many of you have lost a beloved

parent, because those are two different things.

...