My family and I visited a beach one long weekend, an hour's drive east of Toronto to Woodbine, when my mother felt like reigniting our bond as a family again with present mother, daughter, and son. There, I laid on the pristine sand with my headphones plugged in like a beached whale, unmoving. 

I watched my sister run near the water, bare feet, sandals strewn carelessly against the sand. My mother stood beside me, taking in the breeze.

I saw the lightness of her skin on the edges of her hairline, the porcelain glow on the utmost ridges of her ears, underneath her neck, and beyond the swarthy, harsh patches of skin. It contrasted against her light sundress and white gloves. She wore them everywhere after her hands developed eczema after leaving Shanghai, a symptom she blamed on the contrasting humidity. The air here is dry and unforgiving. I looked at my hands buried in the sand and back at hers in the limelight, and got embarrassed by the difference.

At that moment, I felt like we were a proper family —a dad even, a proud parent, sitting beside my mother. This is the life we built in this promised land. I think back on how many birthday presents I missed saving up for a laptop, how many times my parents told me it's not your responsibility to parent your sister, and how different the lives my sister and I lived. And I think about the impermanence of human relationships: that one day you are fighting, screaming, throwing each other out of the house, and the next day you’re family again. Memories of grandma spoiling us as kids. She has dementia now, and can’t remember the past we shared and the stories she told me; just like how I couldn’t remember them as a child. Is this love? Kinship? An endless cycle of drama and forgetting? It’s like we forget all the bad times we had together, scrape it under the old family canvas, just to repeat the same mistakes tomorrow.