Casey Palmer: Canadian Dad

Casey Palmer is an amazing blogger, father to two, husband to one, second to none, and part of the Toronto Bloggers Collective.  I have had some interesting conversations with him over the last year and he has some amazing insights into being a Canadian Dad.

Casey my brother, welcome to my blog. I have been looking forward to discussing, faith, food, family, race, and mixed marriage. Let’s start by telling me something important about you?

Hey Jerry, thanks for having me! Something important. Hm.

The older I get and the more I write, the more I figure out what I’m really about as I carve out all the fluff.

Repping for interracial families when our individual cultures don’t always really get it. Or support it. Telling stories better than anyone expects, using all the resources I have to do it. I’m a perfectionist, I’m ambitious, I’m hustling… but this all looks more and more different the longer I keep doing all of this.

I love your blog. How did it start? What is it about? What is your message here?

Thank you very much!  I’ve tried writing different blogs over the years since I first started on LiveJournal in 2002. One about making extra money on the side. An art blog with a group of other friends. But nothing ever seemed to stick until I started getting into Toronto’s Twitter scene in 2010. Back then, I’d hit events five or six days a week, get around the city, and I wrote about them all so much that a blog just followed.

In fact, I almost stopped blogging when I was about to have a kid! As I’m sure most men feel the first time, they’re becoming a Dad, I thought it’d be their end of everything I knew. I was checking off lists, tying up loose ends, and getting ready to start a new phase in my life.

But when a friend pointed out that the number of Dad bloggers out there were few and far between, I stuck around and figured I’d tell my story since no one else was really doing it.

So long story short, what is my blog about? I like to say family, food, fashion, and faith. And travel. And tech. And all the other random things that make up my day-to-day life as a Dad trying to balance his family, his job, and a little something on the side. I’ve worked long and hard at it, and it’s still evolving, but I think there’ll still be plenty of stories to tell in the years ahead.

Casey, is race still an issue in the GTA in the 21st century? If so how?

kisses his teeth

You know, I really wish it wasn’t, but it most definitely is.

I mean, Toronto’s perhaps the most diverse city in the world, but we’re talking about a city that’s 50% people of colour in a country that’s closer to 20% overall. To put that in numbers, of the 7.5 million people of colour we have across the country, 1.5 million of them—a whopping 20%—live inside the 630.2 square kilometers that Torontonians call home. In a tiny space that’s almost a hundred-thousandth of the land, this country has to offer.

So as diverse as Toronto might be on the surface, there’s a whole lot of Canada that still influences it in a very different direction.

As a huge economic driver for our country, people come to Toronto to visit. They come here to work. Toronto isn’t a magical island where people of all colours and creeds can simply live in harmony, separated from the rest of the world. The complex fabric that makes our city what it is constantly shifts and reshapes itself, and we can never be so naive as to think that we live in a perfect post-racial utopia.

But, it’s home. It is a city where we have access to all sorts of races and people, and that’s what I want as part of what my children have around them as they grow up.

Race is an issue in the GTA just like it is anywhere else, but at least we’re slowly willing to have a conversation about it.

Talk to me about how marriage has changed you as a person?

I was a very different person when Sarah first met me in 2007, still deep into my art and unsure what exactly I wanted from my life. Before Sarah came along, I was just a shiftless youth whose only goal was to enjoy the here and now without even thinking about the future.

But more than eight years into our marriage, I’ve learned how to be responsible. I take care of my kids, keep our home somewhere we can be proud of, and do everything I can to measure up to the man Sarah expects me to be.

Marriage isn’t easy—you can go from being deeply in love to wanting to kill each other, but if anything, it gives you some solid insight into who you are and why you do what you do.

Fatherhood is an amazing experience. What surprised you about it? 

Hands down, the thing that’s surprised me most about fatherhood is how much more complete it’s made me in such a short time!

Life was good prior to having kids, but my priorities were all out of whack. Spending too much time at the office so I could meet intense deadlines. Spending more time out partying than at home with Sarah. Fatherhood’s been very grounding, and while I missed out on my pre-kid life at first, I eventually found that I got so much more from spending time with my kids, choosing the times I was away from home much more carefully because so much of it just wasn’t worth it.

I don’t know who I would’ve become without the responsibility of parenthood on my shoulders, but I doubt I would’ve been a better me.

What do you like about Toronto? What can become better about this city?

I’ve always lived in the Toronto area, with me moving into the city proper from Mississauga next door when Sarah and I married in 2011.

And I love it! There’s never a shortage of things to do; you can find Japanese, Mexican and Ethiopian cuisine all on the same block; and it’s woven itself so deep into my being that I couldn’t imagine anywhere else as home. Anytime I’m away from this city for an extended period of time, I feel the itch to come back. The smells. The sounds. The tastes. All of its part of my city, and you can’t find a place quite like it anywhere else!

But it’s not perfect. There’s homelessness everywhere. We got into the real estate market at a good time, but the cost of living here is prohibitive for almost everyone who lives here. It’s not an easy place to be, but I wouldn’t trade it in for the world.

And yes—the offer has come up before!

I know your faith is important to you. Help me understand a little about it and how you use it in your daily life?

I didn’t start going to church until Sarah asked me to in our first year of dating. Funny enough, she worried that I might be resistant to it, but deciding to go’s proven one of the best decisions I’ve ever made!

So, we currently go to an Anglican church—The Church of the Resurrection—and our family are all grown in our faith in the few years we’ve been there.

I’ve served on leadership. Sarah’s started a Ladies’ Night to bond with the women around her. We teach the Preschool Sunday School together, have lunches with the other members of our small group… we get up to a lot. But all that time with our fellow church folk manifests itself in so many other ways in our everyday lives. Like in the Bible studies we do with our coworkers on our lunch breaks. Or in doing what we can for our friends not because we expect something in return, but because it’s just the right thing to do.

I didn’t think this would be the road I walked down all those years ago, but I’m happy I’m walking it!

Give yourself some advice at 15 and 25?

15-year-old Casey Palmer. It’s 1998, and I moved from my third to my fourth year of private high school. My girlfriend at the time had moved on to another school, and I split my time between track, work, school, and volunteering.

My advice? Slow down. You don’t know it yet, but you’re a year away from a massive nervous breakdown, something you’re going to need nearly a decade to work through. You don’t need to accomplish everything under the sun to get on some 20 Under 20 or 30 Under 30 list—everything happens in its time… so take it slow.

Like they say, it’s about the journey, not the destination!

25-year-old Casey Palmer. It’s 2008, and I’ve started a fairly new career as a bureaucrat after finishing school and my time as a banker. I’ve just started dating Sarah, and I’m about to end my year at twenty-five with a stint being unemployed due to making an unwise career choice more for the money than anything else.

My advice? Pick yourself up, bro—this is not the end of you. It’s the first time you’ve been unemployed after twelve straight years of working, but I want you to know two things:

You’re about to get hired in a couple of months by some of the greatest people you’ll ever get to know, and

You don’t know it yet, but you have the capacity to build some very marketable skills. You only started your Twitter this year, and Facebook’s only a few years deep, but trust me—all that time you spend on the computer is going to change your life.

Keep working at your interests—they’re all going to come in handy eventually.

Mix marriages is a recent phenomenon? Tell me something funny that has happened in your marriage?

A story that I think best captures the difference in the Dutch and Jamaican cultures that Sarah and I put into our relationship is our first Christmas with her family, and a tradition the Dutch call “Sinterklaas”.

So just like we have Santa Claus and his elves over here in Canada, the Netherlands has Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet—a helper who helps him deliver the gifts in time for Dutch Christmas—or Sinterklaasavond—on December 5th.

Except… he’s a slave. At best. A white guy in blackface because he’s “dirty from all the chimney soot” at worst. And I knew none of this going in.

So, there we are on Christmas Eve with Sarah’s family, and her parents are doing another Sinterklaasavond tradition—handing out chocolate letters to the kids: the letters of our first names in solid milk chocolate. I remember it like it was yesterday:

Mother-in-law: “Here you go, Casey!”

Me: “Thanks so much, Mrs.—WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!”

You see, right on the front of the box was Sinterklaas… and Zwarte Piet.

365 days and one long conversation on blackface later, I found my future in-laws had changed brands—to one without the questionable potentially Moorish slave on the front.

Differences in culture. In experiences. In parenting styles. There’s so much we’ve had to navigate—and so much we’re still figuring out—but all that is an entirely different story.

How do you balance food, faith, family, and finance in the 21st century?

It’s said that we should approach illnesses through prevention rather than treatment, and I kind of feel the same way about money.

Many of us start thinking about budgeting and saving only after we’ve dug ourselves into a hole, desperately trying to see what we can do to get ourselves back out.

But I’ve never been the type to solve my problems through sacrifice—I’ve said that the solution to dealing with one’s financial constraints is to make more money, and that’s precisely what I’ve tried to do with the multilayered life I’ve built for myself.

It works like this—I treat my salary from my day job as family money, and anything I make on the side as my discretionary income so I can continue living my life the way I see fit. What this has meant is that I could still feed my family well while tithing to church and giving my kids every experience under the sun. It’s meant finding the capital to invest in my business without risking my kids’ savings accounts or our mortgage payments.

Does it involve more work? Yes. Am I learning to be smarter with money over time? Sure. But ultimately, I’m finding the path I walk lets me create my best work possible while also giving everyone I care about everything that they need.

And as a husband, father, brother, and son, isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?