'I boo-booed. Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect... except Mom'

Sometimes when my father speaks to me I feel like I'm in Angela's Ashes. And I do mean the film adaptation because God knows the Irish aren't a literate people. My father immigrated to Canada well over 35 years ago but his brogue remains incredibly bawdy and potent and consequently, he cannot pronounce anything with a soft 'th' sound (i.e. Nathan Lane), the words 'feces', 'prostate' or the name of his wife of 32 years.

A few winters ago I was sporting my father's Celtic Football Club scarf that he picked up for free as some sort of pity prize as a runner-up in a Win a Trip for 2 to Dublin! contest. Every time I would wrap it around my neck before leaving the house he would stop me at the door to give the same incoherent lecture: 'you have to be careful wearing that in certain parts of the city because if a Protestant saw that and didn't like it, he could beat you up'. Thanks for your concern, Dad, but in reality, I am more often persecuted for being read as 'visibly queer' rather than for my Irish heritage.

Due to the unfortunate combo platter comprised of my genetic makeup, short stature, baby face and the fact that I have grown from a tomboy into a lesbian, I never had a chance, basically. I understand I have agency in how I choose to manage my appearance but, let's face it: I'm An Ugly Girl. By some lesbian beauty standards, I guess I would weigh-in as average, but I've never been Top 5 material. I have the neck of a football player on steroids, a ladystache that still persists after seven rounds of laser hair removal at $200 a pop and residual acne scars caused from four years of Lithium treatment. The times that I have worn makeup in my life have always been met with the same response: 'you look like a drag queen'.

It's because of how I look that makes it okay that I've been gay bashed on more than a few occasions. I must have deserved to have pieces of trash picked up off the floor of that subway car and hurled at the back of my head to a raucous chorus of 'faggot'. I know I deserved my mother's initial reaction when I told her as soon as I made it home, 'maybe that wouldn't happen to you if you would shave your legs'. And it would be inevitable that my father would call up the employees only Toronto Transit Commission phone number to report that six men in their early twenties had encircled his only child and thrown garbage at her. Only he would omit the key element - the hate speech, because he was 'embarrassed' to tell his former co-workers that his daughter is gay.

Despite having enough seniority to refuse shifts, my father deliberately chose to work Christmas morning year after year with the TTC to escape from my mother's marathon crying sessions. Instead of listening to traditional Christmas carols, like 'Silent Night' or even 'Jingle Bell Rock', we listened to 'Unforgettable', a duet between Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie on repeat for hours after I finished opening up my presents from Santa. It was understood that this song represented paying our respects to her late mother, my late grandmother. This ritual was repeated back-to-back for so many years that eventually the vinyl not only warped but our Zenith stereo cabinet from the 1970s also deteriorated from frequent use. To this day I can't listen to that song without crying as I was socialized to believe that was the only acceptable response.