THE TIES THAT BIND US

The other day I was talking to some of the Ladies here in my small town and one of them asked me a question, she looked at me very seriously and asked “so what is it like to have over 4,000 living relatives?”

I could not answer immediately; I had to think about that one. I was adopted away from my biological family when I was a baby and grew up without them. So when I turned 40 I started to search for them and within 45 minutes I was talking to my oldest sister. I was so shocked to find that my family had really missed me and thought about me an awful lot. This euphoria was very short lived and so began my journey home.

When I arrived home to my Native American Indian reservation, I found that I actually had over 4,000 living relatives. I found them in 1992 but did not travel home until 1998, so they had time to find out about me, but of course my sisters for some unknown reason did not tell anyone about me and actually tried to hide my existence. So in March of 1998 when I arrived at the Lummi Nation reservation in northwestern Washington State, many people were very surprised to find out that I was actually related to them. The news that one of the lost birds (Native children who had been stolen by the government at birth to be raised by white people) had actually found their way home was a miracle. There was no fanfare, no welcome home dinner, no polite introductions, or any of that stuff. I was on my own and so I went around trying to fit in and finding a new and unknown relative at every single step.

To say the least it was very nerve wracking, and exciting and at times confusing, but there were many times in the next 8 years that I would find ecstatic humor in the things that we all did. Like the time when I was at the college and one of my younger cousins came rushing in and tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned around she said “oh you’re not my Mom!” I smiled and said “No your Mom is over there.” I had at least five girl first cousins that if you stood us in a line and looked at us you would think that we were all the same person. My husband used to say that if he did not recall what I was wearing that morning that he would not even recognize his wife. I might mention that my mother was one of 19 children and my father was one of 14 children, so I had a lot of first cousins, because most of the Aunties and Uncles had 6 or more children. Then of course in Native families if you are a first cousin to someone that person is like another sister or brother, so by the way I had over 480 first cousins, plus my own 6 brothers and sisters; 5 of whom I share with my mother and a brother shared with my father.
I really consider myself very fortunate that I was able to reunite with them especially since I was 48 when it happened. Yes, I did miss not knowing my parents nor did I meet many of their siblings and missed the grandparents but from what the family has told me about history I missed the years of pain and sorrow because there has always been a huge problem with drugs and alcohol on the reservation. I also feel that because of the reservation is the reason there are so many members of the family in one place.

The life that many of them have been raised has been tough and poverty stricken but the beauty of their spirits have continued to pass on in themselves and in their children. I also feel that when I returned home I found a part of me that I never knew existed, the spiritual me. Not the religious kind but the side of me that can feel and hear my ancestors and relatives who watch over me daily. I did not actually know my parents but there are many parts of me that came specifically from them, and those things I can cherish. My father was quite a jokester and many times we will be riding in the van and something in the very back will move or slide even though we are not doing anything but driving on a flat straight part of the road, my husband and I will look at each other and I will laugh and say out loud “hi Dad!!” I also have found that my mother loved to have beautiful clothes and really enjoyed to be colorful and in that respect I find that my wardrobe is filled with bright colors and patterns that are to some might be considered loud and garish but I know that my mother would have encouraged me to be a bright colorful person.
I also learned about my heritage and accomplished several things while living at home. I went back to college because some accused me on not belonging to my father’s family because I was not as smart as he was, so I proved them wrong. I graduated with honors in Environmental Science with a specialty in Habitat Restoration. Then there were those who said I could not fish as well as any of them because I was not raised there, so I set out to gather up all of the no-good boats that people had in their yards, fixed them up and registered them and found my cousins to crew them and ended up with the largest privately owned Native fishing fleet in the United States, and even made a profit. After that rarely did anyone tell me what I could or could not do again. I also found many of my cousins who really cared about me and got to know them much better. This is the way that family is supposed to be, but unfortunately my own siblings did not understand and would not accept me in any way. So life goes on and rarely does that change who you are inside and what you can be to the world.

In the last few years though I have realized that many of us at our ages have had our lives and are now settling into a serene and restful time of our lives and handing the reins of power and changes to the younger generation. I do not have the energy that I once had but I see that same boldness and focus in many of my younger cousins, something that many might see in their own children. Not having any children used to bother me, but when I was home and had the opportunity to get to know my cousins children and love them, I became less depressed and less lost about not having my own children. I only worry now because we have moved so far from them and I wonder who will help us when we become much older and cannot do for ourselves as much. But I find the rewards do outweigh the anger and sorrow that my own siblings relish in and that they are very much missing out on being part of my life, but you cannot make people like you and you can only hope that life is not so rough on them. As I enter into the life that I have always wanted and complete my journey in the next 30 or 40 years I will always remember the time that I spent with them and the love that we shared. My parents would have been very proud of this daughter, and in heaven they are looking down and seeing that I am, at last, ok.

 

BEGINNING MEMORIES

As a child I grew up thinking that I must have been hatched under a cabbage leaf, since I did not resemble my parents in any way. One day they sat me down and explained that I was adopted, and that they looked at all of these beautiful children and they choose me. How lucky I should feel that they took me away from a loving family, and saved my little Native butt from the bad ole Indian reservation. Little did I know but I had already realized that I did not belong to them and that I was definitely found under a cabbage in the garden.

I remember playing in a huge green yard with a giant tree and I would hide from the sun in the shadow of the trunk of the tree. Thinking I was safe from who knows what. A few years later I had a visit from a lady who came into the yard and played in my wading pool with me. She sat down in the water and gave me a little green frog, and told me that no matter what that frog would always protect me that someday I would want to know where I came from and who I was, and the little green frog would tell me. A while later my adopted Dad came out and talked with the Lady, although I could not hear what they were saying or understand any of it, and then she left. As she walked along the fence I watched her and just before she went out of sight she turned and looked at me with sparkles on her cheeks and waved good bye. I always remembered her, but when my Dad found the frog he took it away. Many years later I realized that was my real mother and that she was trying to leave something with me to find my way home.

It was a long time before I knew or understood what adoption was or how I was involved in it. But once I understood I was very angry with my adopted parents for not telling me who my real mom and dad were. It would not be until the age of 48 when I would find out about my family and find my way home to them. Until then I only had the lies that the adopted parents had told me. They said that my real parents did not want me and that they gladly gave me to them because they did not have any children. Somehow I did not believe that and years later I found that it was true. Until then I would have to survive on my own with my own guts and hope that there was still someone there when I found my way back to my real family.

My real family consisted of 5 brothers and sisters, 420 first cousins, and numerous nieces, nephews, and Aunties and Uncles.  My parents had passed on by the time I found them and so I was never able to reconnect with them.  Of course with a reunification there are always good and bad, and you take what you find and leave the bad where you found it.  I did learn much about my people and I understood why when as a small child I would search out mud puddles to splash in no matter how dirty I got.  It was because my people were from the area of the beautiful and spiritual Puget Sound off of the Pacific Ocean just west of Washington State. 

For centuries my ancestors had followed the paths of the wild salmon and halibut and had gathered the shellfish like clams and oysters.  There are a group of islands in the sound that are known as the San Juan Islands, that include old camp grounds like Orcas Island, Lummi Island, Waldron Island and others, these were where my ancestors of the old days would camp and troll the waters of the sound for catches of many kinds of fish.  On these Islands they found groves of stands of berries that were also collected for the winter use for the tribe.  They were known as the “Salmon People”, but other nations and were Nomads of the Sound, as were many of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.  They are part of the Coastal Salish and are today known for their carvings in cedar and the baskets that are hand woven and are still used today, as they were passed from generation to generation.  One of my most prized possessions is a small basket woven by one of my Aunties.  Another is made from cedar bark by one of my Uncles and is used to scoop the water out of a canoe.
 
There are the things that I found when I made my journey back to my beginnings and met those who I would have grown up with had I not been taken from my family.  In the 1950’s thousands of Native children were stolen from families just because the societal issue at the time felt the children would be better off in a home that provided acceptable provisions for them instead of leaving them to live in the rough and unorthodoxed conditions of their families.  Many families began naming their children with unusual names in hopes that this would prevent them from being taken or stolen by the Child Welfare Agents or the government agents of the time, as the government was trying to decrease the numbers of tribal members by taking the smallest of them and placing them in non-Native homes to be raised as a white child in hopes that they would never return to their families and be lost forever.  There are many children who were adopted and have never reunited with their families but I was determined to find out who and what I was. 

I have always believed that I am the kind of leader that shows or teaches by action and not by lecturing.  I have tried all of my life to set an example of an honorable and compassionate person and hoped that others might follow my lead.  I always wondered if that ever made an impression on anyone and while discovering my familial roots I found the answer to that.  I had been living on the reservation for many years, and had kept my chin up and my hopes even in the darkest of times.  Though poverty and loneliness I would still hold my head up and smile in a pleasant manner. 

One day a cousin of mine came up and sat down to talk to me at a Thanksgiving gathering the tribe was having and all of the members of the tribe were in attendance.  He asked if I remembered him from when I first arrived home and I told him I did, that he was the man who drank a lot and ended up in desperate situations and troubles.  I asked how he was doing now, and he answered that his life had changed.  He said that he had been sober for the past two years and was again living among his family at their homestead with his daughter and her children.  I wished him well and told him how proud I was to hear this news.  He then looked at me and smiled, and told me that it had been because of me that he had given up the drinking.  He told me that he watched me for a long time and noticed that even when I had the same problems as everyone else I did not take up the bottle or the crack pipe.  He said that he figured if I could do than he could do it too, that he said was what gave him the incentive to go to rehab and change his life.

Thus my long time question was answered and that is true about life, wonder and the answer will come.  If in your life you believe that you are living with hope and love and you continue to walk the straight line of your path your rewards will be obvious to you.  Life is a long journey and a great learning experience for all, even for those of us that were once lost we can always find our way back.  With that conviction comes great strength that can sustain your life and love forever.

 

FREE LUNCHES

Life can be exciting and rewarding, but actually life is just a long learning experience that many of us just do not understand.  When things go wrong we have to find someone to blame, but when things go right we hold that as one of our successes.  When you are growing up you do not think of the things that will be tough, or challenging to endure, you dream of the good times and the rewards that you will gain while you grow old.  I grew up dreaming like every little girl does about getting married, having children, living in a big beautiful house, and going to fantastic and beautiful places on vacation.  I never thought of the trials and tribulations that I would face or have to live through.  My parents while raising me never clued me into the problems of day to day life and neither did they ever tell me that things would not go the way they were meant to be.  They did what they felt was right and raised me with dreams and hopes for a wonderful life with good times and peace.  Little did I know what life had in store for me when I set out on that journey on my own.

I can remember when we first moved to Washington and the things that happened to us. They were devastating. We had decided a year before we moved there that we would not go unless one of us had a job. We saved money and we applied for jobs, and within that year I was offered a job with my tribe as the payroll accountant. I had 6 yrs experience with accounting and was thrilled that I would be working with my tribe. So we moved and the night that we left Ohio I became very ill, thinking it was just a cold we travelled on anyway. All across the country I just got sicker and sicker. We arrived at our friend’s house in Redmond a few days before I was to start my job and I started feeling better. So I thought maybe it was just nerves, after all I had never met any of these relatives, being adopted as a baby. I started my job and began getting sick again and about a week or so after I began working I met my real brother. He lived on the rez and so he asked if we wanted to stay with him at his house, which meant a shorter drive for us. Everything seemed so perfect and finally I was where I had been born, around my family and meeting new people every day.

After the first month or so I was so sick that I could hardly even drink water without getting very ill. I just kept thinking it was nerves. So my husband wanting to work at something decided he would build us an Espresso Stand and we applied for the licenses and permits and built on the other side of the reservation and got it running.

Then all hell broke loose. I disagreed with the Finance Director about putting a million dollar check for the tribe in his personal account for a long weekend and went to the health clinic and was told I had to stay home from work and they loaded me up on medication and sent me to my brothers. A month later when I returned to work, I found that I had been fired while on sick leave. So I started to help my husband with the little Espresso Stand, and my brother being a devout alcoholic got into a screaming match with us and we ended up leaving his place. We started to stay at the Espresso stand, sleeping in our car at night. The Veterans director offered us a place to stay in a building they had at the Stommish grounds. We had very little money and our life was so unlike what either of us had ever experienced. Soon things got worse and worse and worse. I was meeting many of my cousins but they were no better off than me. One of them suggested that we go to town and have a free lunch since we hardly had any money for food. We were getting food from the food bank on the rez but that did not go far, and most of our money went into supplies for the Espresso stand, where we hoped it would soon take off and we could get out of the rut we were in.   Our car had broken down and we had no way to get anywhere, so we had to rely on family who took pity on us to take us to town and help us get the supplies that we needed.  Times were very tough then and nothing like we had ever been through before.  We both thought that we were going crazy and that some day we would wake up for the horrible nightmare that we were stuck in and things would be all a bad dream.  We just kept on trying and hoping and praying for our life to somehow move in a good direction so that we could find our way back to a decent and healthy life without all the troubles that we seemed to be living in at that point.

We started going into town at lunch time and my cousin rode with us and showed us where to go.  We would go to a couple of churches that offered free lunches to those who could not afford it.  I began to notice that many of my cousins were at these places and that is when I first felt amazement at the fact that so many had this on their life schedules and only one of my cousins mentioned and made sure we got there to share in a decent meal.  At first I was very embarrassed because all the homeless and poorest of the poor were there, but the food was hot and healthy. After a while I began to look around and started visiting slowly with the other people around me. I soon noticed that many of them were like us, just down on their luck with no hope of getting out.  Oh there were others also who seemed to be making a living at being poor, and those who were hopeless lost in bottles and needles, but that did not seem to matter.  We all were doing the right things but things are tough when you are at the bottom of the barrel.

We finally got stuff going and years later we now live in Missouri with a home of our own and land we are buying. My health is better and what was wrong with me is totally another story. But my point of sharing this with you, is that you never know what is around the next corner. You never know what cards you are going to be dealt from the dealer in the sky, so if you can help out those who are in need, even if it is not Christmas. I learned a real lesson from that time that I will carry with me forever. Life is not a bowl of cherries but rather a road that we all travel and some do so in big beautiful new cars and some in broken down jalopies and some even walk.

 

 

 

Remembrances…

There are times when we as survivors of MST recall events that seem very odd or out of order.  The mind takes the memories of the trauma and holds them inside the brain and then releases them bit-by-bit.  The never come back in order of the way they happen and they rarely make sense at first.  Feelings surface and unaware as we are we react to them in a world that places importance on the reaction that we display.  When you are in a public place and feel an emotion that does not fit the moment that you are living, you will still react as normally as you can, but the reaction may seem to others to not fit in the moment that they see.  People have often said not to care about what others think and that sounds good but it is very difficult for someone with PTSD to not care about what others think.   The raw emotion that we all experience immediately after the original assault is so vivid in our minds that we often to not act appropriately.  Others see this and make comments and become standoffish and ignore us and we do see these things.  These are the things that mold our brains into being embarrassed or finding a way to take the guilt upon ourselves, I mean, after all if we were not acting so weird then no one would notice anything right???  It is those reactions that happen within hours of the rape or within days of the assault that will live in the victims mind forever, and with women in the military the whole thing is worse.  Even the reactions of those closest to you are changed and forever you feel if you do not hold it in and you just let yourself feel that everyone in the whole world will treat you differently. I know these things because I was treated that way.  The other women that I had went through basic training with and shared my life with for the preceeding years suddenly pointed fingers at me and told me to stop acting like a baby.  My best friend told me to stop trying to blame things on other people, just because I finally got what I must have wanted and then decided I did not like it.  She said you know the grass is always greener… Long before I ever knew what triggers were I would experience something such as a smell, or hear a noise and my mind would flashback and I would react.  It did not matter where I was or what was happening around me and when I would look around and see the others around me I could tell by their expressions that I had made a complete and total fool of myself in some way or fashion.  I began to withdraw from things and did not associate with anyone because I could not trust that I would not suddenly be somewhere else other than where I was.  I began to be extremely embarrassed and felt terribly guilty over what I did not know, but my mind said oh you must have done something, because normal people do not just react unless you did something first.  I stopped trying to explain and just let others think I was crazy and changed my own self into a double person.  The public me and the private me, one that everyone thought was the real me and the one that no one ever saw.   I figured out very quickly what people wanted to see from me and how they acted if I just acted the way they expected.  I began a journey in my life then that continues today and more than not people do not really know the real me.  I have a difficult time letting that real part of me out so that others can see, because I have held it in for so long.  My assault happened in 1974, which is a long time ago.  Many of us learn to live in a certain way as to protect ourselves from other people who either will act like we are totally bonkers or who want to be our savior, they want to tell us how to live and what to think and where to go and how to act, because otherwise we will end up embarrassing them.  The do not even think of our feelings or what we see from our own fantastic vantage point.  One example of this could be when people meet on the street and they say hello, how are you?  They really do not want to know how you are they are just being what they call friendly, but is it really?  You can even test this out the next time someone asks how you are just start telling them and you will see that they do not really want to know.   The life that we with MST/PTSD have to live is a mere existence of what we were meant to be, we are changed and different and there is no going back.  There are those veterans also that have PTSD related to combat and they think that we do not have the same PTSD.  The definition of PTSD is how a person acts when they have experienced a horrible or terror filled situation.  While I was watching the events of 911 unfold I told my husband that everyone in the country now has some form of PTSD, because the events of that day so horribly changed us all.  Whether we be in a crowd of strangers or with fellow veterans many just do not understand and seem to act like it is just something that we are doing on purpose.  The can see a broken leg or a missing limb and think that you must look like that to have a disability but we all suffer with an invisible illness and that does not let people believe that we are needy or that we deserve the benefits that we finally get from the VA.  I was told to forget it and just get on with my life and I tried.  For awhile it seemed to work and then one day my whole life just turned upside-down and poof I was not able to handle anything.  I now live with the things that I lost that day like short term memory loss, intrusive thoughts and an undeniable fear for who knows what. 

These are the things that wanted to share with everyone that if you cannot see someone’s disability do not assume that there is not one there, because it is.  When we finally did find someone like our therapists who kind of understood, we started getting help.  But it never goes away and we never will be the people we were meant to be.  I believe that we must be very strong to even consider fighting for ourselves and standing up for what we have become, because a weak person could not do the things we do.