"He's holding his breath," says Mom. 

"Who is?" I ask, not really paying attention. I'm sitting in her Grand Bend dining room, where family pictures, decked out in a mishmash of dollar-store frames, adorn the walls.

She points to an old photo. "My father, in the picture. He's holding his breath so he doesn't breathe on me."

I'm not sure whether Mom was told this by her mother Alma—here in that same picture holding Mom as a baby—or whether Mom's made an assumption because her father Valentino has his mouth closed and looks rather serious. And though he doesn't appear robust, he also doesn't seem like he's dying of tuberculosis. Mom says he had it even then. That was why he held his breathe so Mom wouldn't get it. That is why they had gotten married. Apparently they weren't married when Mom was born. (Something to do with him being Catholic and having an inconvenient wife back in Serbia.) And that is also why they spent money they didn't have at the photographer's studio in Montreal.

This is the only family portrait Mom has of her and her parents. Within the year, Valentino was dead.  Alma went off to work as a live-in domestic for a series of rich Westmount widows and Mom was placed in a foster home. And though Alma visited Mom from time to time, Alma did not raise her. Mom never had the family that that photo represents.

When Alma died in the early '80s—having spent the last five years of her life in a Montreal old folks home slowly deteriorating—Mom inherited all of Alma's old photos of Finnish relatives. Mom didn't speak Finnish and couldn't read the accompanying letters. And I'm not sure Mom knew who most of the people in the photos were, but she kept all the letters, and she framed all the photos and put them up everywhere. To them she added her own photos of us kids and our kids, and her on holiday, and her posing with a drink in restaurants, as if to say: "I do so have a family. I do. I come from somewhere. I belong somewhere."

And she would casually say about this Finnish cousin or that one, pointing to a blurry face on a black-and-white photo: "See that chin. See that hair. You look just like her, Nancy. It's amazing."

I would nod and agree, but I didn't really see it.

Until, in my mid twenties, I took a trip to Finland to visit the remaining relatives.  I came through the arrival doors at the Helsinki airport to see an old woman plastered up against the glass wall waiting for me. It was my Great Aunt Ertta and she looked exactly like her sister Alma. I recognized her as family in an instant.