¶¶ My toughest parenting challenge has been finding out my younger son's diagnosis.

He has Fragile X syndrome.

It's a genetic condition which varies in severity.

It becomes worse with each generation.

So my dad has probably passed it on to us.

With my dad, his intellectual abilities are fine, but he's got Parkinson's-style tremors.

And the speaker was the cook and writer, Olia Hercules.

When Maria sent me the topic, uh, for this year's forum, Roots and Roads, I nearly fell off my chair.

I'd just written my, uh, family memoir called Strong Roots.

The memoir spans 100 years of my family history, and I was hoping to tell, uh, a Ukrainian story through the lens of a family.

Because we see the war, and we see the headlines, and we see news from this, almost kind of like a bit of a non-personal gaze.

And I really wanted people to learn our personal stories, and to really feel us, and to understand us, and hopefully to keep supporting us.

It's, we, we're now in the fourth year of this terrible war.

Yeah, the colors are wonderful.