Heart Berries: A Memoir(8)

I found myself staring off during group, which made the counselor, Terri, prompt me for my story.

“I look for external validations of worth, and I always end up crazy over it,” I said.

“It’s good you can acknowledge that,” Terri said. “How long have you been doing that?”

“My whole life. Isn’t that what we learn as children? To look for affirmation in the external? Our fathers and mothers?” I said.

“Some children are taught self-esteem from a young age,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

There’s a girl with tight braids who posts up against the wall at group therapy. When Terri asks her to sit down, she says she doesn’t want to. She says that she has to be here for seven full days, no matter if she behaves or not.

Terri explained self-esteem and its function, and I blame my mother for not saying these things. My mother wasn’t big on esteem for herself, let alone trying to foster that in me. I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another. It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism.

Mom did teach me story, though, along with Grampa Crow. She knew that was my power, and she knew women need their power honed early, before it’s beaten out of them by the world. I know what you’re thinking, Casey, again with my mother? Yes, unfortunately that’s the biggest part of my work in this place. The therapists seem to think she’s a link to my betterment. I think she did the best she could with the tools she had. The therapist said that’s making excuses. Sometimes she had to lock herself away from the world, that’s all. I have fond and bitter memories of her. I can’t imagine what she’d think of me being here. My mother would have laughed at me. She’d have rolled in laughter and thrown her head back at my misery.

She believed in subversion and turning things upside down. She mocked everything. My desire to be normal or sincere made her laugh.

“Men will never love you,” she said once. “They’ll use you up, and, when you’re bone dry and it’s your time to write, you’ll be alone without a goddamn typewriter to your name.”

She had a lot taken from her. False starts took something out of her, and then having children and getting married, and then divorced. All the jobs she had—and then there was the work at her desk, and the several books she wrote.

I feel like my body is being drawn through a syringe. Sometimes walking is hard. The gravity of Indian women’s situations, and the weight of our bodies, are too much.

Even Mom’s cynicism was subversive. She often said nothing would work out. She often said that trying was futile and still dedicated her life to other people through social work. When she was unemployed, she rallied for social justice. She did things that required hopefulness. She made a name as an angry Indian woman who could consent and disallow things. Indian women are usually discouraged from that basic agency. Not to say that she wasn’t betrayed and hurt.

I remember well that I had to take care of myself. When I was a child, and I was as restless as I am now, I walked along the walls of our home, waiting for someone to come home and feed me or bathe me or take me outside. The phone rang once, and it was the unemployment office. I told the woman that my mother was at work. I thought lies were good when they made someone seem good. The strange thing about poverty is that maintaining a level of desperation and lack of integrity keeps the checks rolling in.

Days after I picked up the phone, my mother lost her unemployment. She screamed until she cried, and then said that if we didn’t eat it was my fault. I know, just like I know with my own child, she was sorry the moment the words escaped her mouth. The difference between her and I, as mothers, is that I don’t have a sense of pride with my son. He is a small king. Still, he is as unfortunate as me, but at least he hasn’t had to be home alone or starve. I have fostered love with compliments and carrying him, even when he grew to be half my size. I prepared meals and spoon-fed him. Children are teachers in a way.

My mother’s burning ceremony was irreverent like her. We had plates of smoked salmon and the things our grandparents liked to eat, ready for the fire to take, and I heard someone joke they would put some wine in for Karen. The fire exploded across the lawn, and people said that it was Mom. It was that night I felt compelled to resist all the traditionalism of my mother, because I’m not sure how it served her children.

She hated alcohol and stopped drinking before I was born. She was a pipe carrier and fasted alone in the mountains anytime she had to. She built a sweat lodge by herself. She taught my brothers how to keep a fire and taught me how to prepare a feast. She spent years of my life waking up with the day to give thanks to the river.

I never understood her commitment to living well. It seems innate that I am fucked up. I think I have the blood memory of my neurotic ancestors and their vices. Her work seems as important as my work, to acknowledge that some of my people slept in, and wasted their lives, and were gluttonous.

For her burial, my brothers and I walked her ashes in a cedar box from the church to the grave. Dogs lingered behind the party. My aunt says at every funeral, there are some cultures where women are paid to wail—are revered for wailing better than others. There is a culture that makes crying a virtue and a gift.

It felt like Mom’s funeral lasted a year. It felt like one long winter, where my family told every story of hers by memory, as if we were being interrogated. My mother’s spirit loomed over us, imploring us to avenge her death, but there were too many culprits: from the government, to the reservation, to her own family, to whoever hurt her the very first time. I saw in pictures that between thirteen and fourteen my mother changed. That culprit, and then all our fathers, and the men who said they were down for the cause and then abandoned it, like they did their children—those men killed my mother. Even the sweet lovers who gave her hope are the culprits of her pain.