Mother and daughter: Sitting on the CN Tower look out.

Growing up, we didn’t travel much - except for summer road trips to a family-owned property. My first plane trip came at the age of seven. From Halifax to Toronto, then to Orlando, Florida, where we would spend about a week at Disney World. It wouldn’t be until I was twenty-one that I boarded a plane again.

The CN Tower is a Canadian experience that most of my peers checked off their bucket list by high school. I remember feeling as if I were the only person who hadn’t been inside this tower. The older I got, the more annoying it became when it was brought up every year by those who often travelled to Toronto or by family members who lived there.

This year, I can finally say I did it. I rode the elevator to the top of the CN Tower and stood over the Rogers Centre as the Blue Jays played.

A simple act to reclaim my childhood.

Now I can say:

“Been there. Done that.”

While in Toronto, we leaned in not to what we, as adults, felt we wanted to do, but to what our newly ten-year-old wanted to do. Surprisingly, this led us into the Campbell House Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she could spend hours upon hours walking from room to room - especially Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms.

It’s so easy to ‘direct’ our children into what we believe them to be - but the magic of parenting for me is found when you provide the space for exploration, conversation and questions. It is within that space that you often see something within the child you are raising that you never would have initiated or led them to on your own.

The real Ace move I found here was being open enough to see the world through a pre-teen's eyes—specifically, the one I am raising.

pre teen in a sparkly pair of doc marten boots.

It’s been said that you are 100% who you are at your core by the time you're ten years old.

At ten years old, I was falling in love with the role and joys of ‘best friend’, eyeing boys who could hold intelligent conversations, reading stacks of books, writing lists, ideas, and story ideas on scraps of paper, and beginning to develop my love for films, music and playing an instrument.

It is an honour to be a parent of a ten-year-old, to hold space for their interests, whims and desires, and to learn that, in doing so, I am healing parts of myself that went unexplored.

Waiting in line for a Bryan Adams Concert : Roll with the Punches Tour

Doc Martens were not on my radar as a shoe option for myself in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Despite being popular and worn by all the cool kids in the grades around me, I was often relegated to hand-me-down shoes or directed toward more practical, feminine options. I eyed the girls who walked with confidence and recognized the quiet power these boots gave them. I even remember studying my young uncle’s Doc Marten shoes when he came in from university classes. The way he pulled them off without untying them, and the bold stitching they had.

Fast forward almost three decades, and the ten-year-old I am raising, who points out Doc Martens on our outings.

“I love these.” I would love to have them someday.”

Through her eyes, I realize how much I have resisted this option for myself. I had let myself believe that Doc Martens were a shoe for the edgy, grunge emo youth I never had.

Ridiculous.

When we sat down to order her first pair, I decided to pull an ace out of my sleeve and reclaim the ’90s pre-teen youth I might have had if being edgy and cool were welcome in the house I grew up in, and get my own pair alongside hers.

Together, we put on our boots and walked into her first rock concert, where we learned even more about her interests, passions, and her way of processing the world around her.

On the outside, these are just boots.
On the inside, for me, these are steps I am learning to take, one foot after the other, to understand who I and my daughter individually are at our deepest core.

Be it girly, grungy, or everything in between.

Ace of Spades for 2025 played to reclaim the 1990s grunge era I would have thrived in.