For most of my life, I always saw my grandmother, my "Gema", as "old school". She doesn't really seem like she believes in independence, she thinks women should wear their best dress to Church, and says I look like a "boy" when my hair is down. I would tell myself that she's from a different generation and that she doesn't understand a lot about how society has changed since the 70s and 80s.

My grandmother is from a small town in a very small country, Macedonia. It's gorgeous there, but they are always about thirty years behind western society. When I went for a month in the summer of '05, I distinctly remember one of my great uncles owning a stove from 1945. There was also a local witch doctor in the neighborhood that I went to when I got sick that summer. Needless to say, my grandparents didn't move to Canada until the late 1970s, possibly early 1980s, so that mentality has stuck with them throughout the years.

This mentality would get under my skin growing up. Every time I visited her in Toronto or she came to visit us, there was always some type of issue between us or her between someone else in my house. I loved her, but when two people grow up in two completely different ways of life and culture only to be tightly bound by blood... it can be understandably difficult to get along.

My grandmother came to visit again early this fall as school started. We somehow got onto the topic of parenting. I had always seen my grandmother as strict and overbearing, but the more we talked about how she had raised my dad and my uncle, the more I began to understand her in a way I had never really grasped - or wanted to grasp for that matter.

"A child needs their mother," she told me, "Your Dedo (grandfather in Macedonian) and I helped your father with whatever we could and we had little money. We still helped. Even when you were born, we helped. That's what the parents do."

Every day that weekend, my grandmother would warm my little brother a croissant for his breakfast sandwich. She would drink her coffee and clean the house. No one asked her to, but she wanted us, her grandkids, to feel comfortable. She would fight with my brother over brushing his hair, give him a bath every other night, and she made us all her homemade chicken noodle soup and bean stew twice that weekend - not because it was convenient, but because it would fill our stomachs.

I am all for independence and doing what's best for yourself. I am for working women in this modern society, but as we grow and eventually become mothers, let's make sure we learn from those before us. Let's continue weekly homemade meals whenever we can, letting our kids come in bed when they're scared, and never be too tired to play with them. Let's remember to provide for them as much as we can.

It's not about being a housewife, it's about being a good parent. A child needs a good parent to grow properly and beautifully.