At Home

Chris was born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore where she acquired her love of people, diversity, and life-long learning. Immersed in a community of respectful, multi-cultural people of many faiths — Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and others — she came to appreciate the power of diverse points of view coming together in collective intelligence to yield highly effective results of all kinds. Chris lived in England for ten years, and moved to the US in 1980. With her husband, Colin, she has raised two sons, Peter and Nicholas, and now makes her home in Westford, Massachusetts. Chris continues to learn and grow through her lively everyday curiosity about all people everywhere.

Life Partnership

Christina met her husband, Colin more than forty years ago at the University of Essex. They were both studying in the Computer Science department. Thanks to a mutual friend they had their first date two years later, and have now been married for more than thirty-five years.

These many years together have given her an unusually rich store of experiences covering the myriad ups and downs of marriage — through changes of job, home, and country, having children, being out of work, facing illness and injury, struggling through the questions of mid-life, becoming empty-nesters, and renewing commitments to each other.

Today, Christina continues to thrive as she embarks on what she calls her third and most triumphant act.

Parenting

Christina started her family more than ten years into a successful career as an engineer. Her varied experiences are as a parent, in a two parent-working family; as a working mother in a predominantly stay-at-home mother environment; and as a very early pioneer of flextime and flexplace work schedule juggling. She made the tough career decisions that enabled her to put her children first, while contributing fully in the corporate world.

She has two sons who are now in their twenties, both thriving in their lives and in their chosen fields of work. Her experiences as a parent are based on a deep certainty that children arrive whole, and need us to see them that way, treat them with that respect, and to create environments and opportunities for them to unfold. Our greatest strength as parents lies in knowing ourselves well enough to truly SEE and LISTEN to our children … from birth!

Family Relations

Christina has a very large and diverse family scattered across England, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Australia, New Zealand, and in the US. She has a brother in California, a sister in England, and her mother who used to live in Malaysia and is now in California. She has always worked happily and hard to stay in touch — writing, calling, and travelling extensively. In the recent years, Facebook and video Skype have made a lot of connections a great deal easier!

Along with the happy times, she has fully lived the difficult times — caring for her father, at home, during the last four months of his life, the loss of her parents-in-law, surfacing and resolving family conflicts and undiscussables, and continuing to enjoy and support her mother who is in her late eighties. She has faced and made the many tough tradeoffs between career and family to balance the conflicting needs of growing children and aging parents.

Through all of these times Christina has done her best to stay present, drawing on deep reserves of energy, faith, and love, remembering to ask for help and learning from mistakes along the way.

Global Family

Christina possesses an unshakeable innate sense of connection with all people everywhere — she has never met a stranger! Perhaps this is something naturally and deeply inbred through her K-12 years growing up in the egalitarian multi-cultural republic of Singapore. How can it not be, when her five immediate neighboring families were Chinese (Taoist ancestor worship), English (Christian), Gurkha (Hindu/Tibetan Buddhism), Arab (Muslim), and Persian (Zoroastrian)!

She is an interested and active neighbor, creating community in the neighborhood, as well as staying connected with a large, diverse, and globally scattered network of friends-who-are-family all over the US and the globe. She is dedicated to, and has vast experience of staying in touch, communicating and strengthening bonds of family and friendship no matter the separation of space and time.


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