Justin Bieber - Justin Bieber - First Step 2 Forever, My Story

My parents broke up when I was ten months old. Shortly afterwards, my dad started working on construction jobs out of town. Mom basically worked her butt off at whatever job she could get to keep a roof over our heads. We lived in public housing, and there were no luxuries at our little apartment, but it never occurred to me that we were poor. We had each other, which was everything we needed.

While Mom was working, I went to daycare, but I also spent a lot of time with my grandparents. I had a room at their house, and Grandma painted it blue and white with Toronto Maple Leafs stuff all over the walls. There was never any question about it: I was into hockey from day one, and the Maple Leafs were my favorite team.

Every summer, Grandpa and Grandma took us up to Star Lake, where they rented a cabin that belonged to the rod-and-gun club. Grandma’s brothers and sisters would come, and Grandpa and I would go fishing with Grandma’s dad. Being French Canadian, he didn’t speak English, and Grandpa didn’t speak French, so there wasn’t much conversation going on. But that’s a cool thing I learned from fishing: sometimes you don’t need conversation. Ha ha.

I spoke both French and English from the time I was little, so I could interpret when needed.

“I’d really love to have a nice girlfriend”

Grandpa would say, “Ask him if he’s hungry.”

And I’d go, Avez-vous faim?

Great-grandpa would nod enthusiastically. Mais oui, j’ai très faim.

But, for the most part, they both knew the important words. Fish, poisson. Boat, bateau. Water, l’eau. Thanks, merci. You’re welcome, pas de quoi. I have to pee, j’ai envie de faire pipi. What else do you really need to know to get along?

“Fishing’s not something you have to talk about. It just happens,” Grandpa says, and it seems to me that a lot of things in life are that way. I mean, think how nice it is when you can hang out with someone and not have to fill up the air with small talk. I hate being on a date where both people are working too hard to come up with stuff to say. You know it’s working when you can just chill – listen to music, watch a movie or whatever – without feeling like you have to force the conversation. It should just be natural. When it’s working, there’s room in the air for both people to say things that matter. Scooter gave me the smartest dating advice you could ever give – to a guy or a girl – just listen. And that means really listen to what the other person is saying instead of using that time to come up with your next clever remark.

Anyway. Yeah. Quiet mornings out on the water. There’s not much of that in my life anymore. I’m going at light speed 24/7 – and I love it. I’m grateful for all the blessings and opportunities that have come my way. But I will say that when I was little, I longed for a “normal” life with a “normal” family, and there’s no way that’s ever going to happen now. There’s a circus going on around me everywhere I go, which makes it hard on my family sometimes. I’d really love to have a nice girlfriend, but she’d have to put up with all that. You won’t hear me complain about how my life is going, but I hope someday I’ll be out on Star Lake with my own grandkid, reeling in brown trout and telling stories about how all of us would get together by the fire pit in the evening, everybody laughing and talking at once, the same way we did at Christmas dinner.

Our tradition was always to gather at Grandpa and Grandma’s house early in the afternoon. She’d have the tree up and decorated with all the usual ornaments dragged down from the attic. People would start showing up, and by dinner time there was quite a crowd gathered. And not just the usual grandparents, kids, grandkids. Our extended family is really – well, I guess “extended” is a good word.

See, my mom’s biological father died when she was a baby, so Grandpa is totally her dad, but technically he’s her stepfather, who married Grandma when Mom was two, which is how my mom actually ended up with a half-brother and a stepbrother both named Chris, because Grandpa already had kids from a previous marriage. It would suck for her stepsiblings and their kids not to be with their dad/grandpa at Christmas, so Grandpa’s ex-wife and her husband come with their kids, plus cousins on this side, and step-sibs on the other side, and after a while it’s pretty complicated trying to keep track of which cousin belongs to whose aunt, or who’s the stepson of the great-uncle, or the grandkid of the step-aunt – and you end up realizing it really doesn’t make any difference.

We’re a family.

We all have Christmas dinner, and I’m telling you, my grandma puts up an awesomeChristmas dinner. Turkey and gravy. I wish I could have a trough of that stuff on my bus after the show. (We all work up an appetite during a performance.) It’s the best. We all eat until we’re about to roll over. Then we play this gift-exchange game with dice. Everybody shows up with a gift. If you’re a girl, bring a gift for a girl; if you’re a guy, bring a gift for a guy. That way there’s the right number of each. You take turns rolling the dice, and, if you roll doubles, you grab a gift. If you roll doubles again, you get to grab somebody else’s gift. There’s always a lot of horsing around and teasing, but nobody actually gets mad because you don’t know what’s in the package anyway, so why would you care if your gift gets stolen? You get another turn, and the game keeps going until everybody has a gift. Then we all open our gifts and end up trading anyway.

That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have. If this particular gift isn’t what you need, maybe that gift over there works for you, and, meanwhile, the first gift is exactly what somebody else needs. You can’t always get what you want. But, if you’re lucky, you get what you need. And I was lucky. Along with a lot of other blessings, I got my family – just the way they are. And now my extended family extends even wider to include Scooter, Carin, Kenny, Ryan and Dan and a lot of other people I’ll tell you about a little later in this book.

“That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have”

I wrote the song “Down to Earth” a few years ago, and I was really excited to record it for the My World album. It’s a huge fan favorite. So many people feel where I’m coming from. It doesn’t need any spectacular stage effects in the touring show; the best thing I can do is just sing it straight from my heart. I’m not afraid to show my emotions; if you love someone, you should tell them. If you think a girl is beautiful, you should say that. Usher says some songs work best when there’s a sob in the singer’s voice. You gotta let that deep feeling come through. And that’s how I felt about this song. Sometimes the emotion of it is enough to bring tears to my eyes.

No one has a solid answer.

We’re just walking in the dark.

And you can see the look on my face,

It just tears me apart...

So we fight through the hurt

And we cry and cry and cry and cry

And we live and we learn

And we try and try and try and try

“‘Look for the good,’ Grandpa says”

At the end of the day, families are what they are. If you feel like a freak because you don’t have a normal family, I’ve got news for you: pretty much nobody does. In fact, I don’t know if there’s any such thing as a “normal” family, and if there is, they’d probably be the most boring people ever. Or the scariest. Seriously, it would be creepy to even have dinner with the Perfect Family. The whole time you’d be thinking they can’t be this perfect, they’re probably holding the butcher’s knife under the table ready to kill me, or they’ve got a mailman chained up in the basement or something. All families – even the ones that seem perfect on the outside – have their issues to some degree. What counts is how you handle it.