While the older brother tries to convince his mom that the toy inside is worth the expense, the younger sibling in the cart begins to yell loudly and bang his head on the handle of the cart, flicking his small fingers against his forehead and ears. All of the family members stop and begin to try to calm him down; the little girl gives him his toy car, but he only throws it in frustration. The older boy concentrates on finding the thrown car among the packages of coffee across the aisle as the mother begins to push the younger boy forward, giving direction to her older son to catch up after he finds it.
The movement of the cart wheels no longer fascinates the youngest boy. The eldest returns to his mother’s side knowing that the shopping trip has to be completed fast before his brother hurts himself. As the family rushes through the corridors of food, all eyes are on the boy screaming from his seat in the cart and the two children are now alert to the orders given hastily from their mother as she rushes to get into line to pay for their groceries. She tries to occupy her younger son’s fists and scratching finger nails only to have her hair pulled as her youngest lets out a scream. The two older children stand behind their mom and hear the judgmental whips of words against her as the other consumers comment on her parenting skills.
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Autism is a communication disorder of the nervous system. This scene played out every month for years as I raised my autistic son and his older brother and sister. The stressful was normalized as the youngest had more power to organize the family unit than I did as its head. Every day was a creative effort for all of us to stabilize the effects of his frustrated behaviours while enjoying the joyous personality and experience of having such a spirited child. While these negative experiences tend to be discussed and talked about more easily than the positive ones, these children are exceptional as they become the teachers of the adults who come into contact with them; they give space for the extraordinary to be known through disrupting the confinements of our social judgments.
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The Halloween pumpkin lights were lit and I checked each bulb to make sure they worked. My youngest son sat on my left as I worked with the electricity when suddenly I hear a “crunch” of glass. I look over and never expect to see my son eating the small colored light bulbs. Immediately I pry open his mouth to find no blood, not in his mouth or on his hands. I am confounded; how is it that my son does not bleed? I thought of the nature/nurture debate of psychological and medical discourses; my son did not learn how to bleed. I watched carefully for the next few days as I changed his diapers and found no blood in any form.
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I first became a mother at the age of seventeen, an uneducated single parent living below the poverty line within a very ethnically-complex family unit. As an Irish Canadian woman, I sired: Matthew - Irish/ScottishCanadian; Dawna - Irish/nakawē (Saulteaux First Nations); and, K.C. - Irish/nēhiyaw/nakawē (Cree/Saulteaux First Nations). Mothering my oldest child was easiest in the sense that he is male, white, intelligent and friendly – all the privileges valued within contemporary social settings. Matthew adjusted to school life and, as much as welfare limits allowed, participated in extra-curricular activities. Currently he is twenty-one years of age and has completed high school and one and a half years of university -- when he realized that university was destroying his love for reading he left university to complete a marketing program from a technical institute. He is a strong, well-adjusted contributor to society within the recognized social norms and expectations.
Unlike Matthew’s educational pursuits, my daughter’s journey was complicated with some physical and intellectual challenges that made school life difficult; at nineteen years of age Dawna completed high school in adapted programs. Issues with school and medical services were compounded when she reached sexual maturity and recognized her two-spirited (lesbian) orientation. She deals with the judgments of not only the patriarchal and heterosexual gaze, but also the colonially-constructed racial attitudes in all aspects of her life.
While Matthew receives privilege in his male body, K.C. does not since he is physically recognizeable as an autistic First Nations person. When he was seven, I had to transfer guardianship to social services to keep him physically safe, the hardest action I ever had to initiate when he could have remained in our house, in the love of our family, if the resources, financial and otherwise, were available. Instead, my child became a commodity within the institutional system rather than an active member within his original family unit. I had to watch all the services I needed go to the foster family rather than my own.
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Smash!!! I jump up from the couch, book falling to the floor and begin to sprint the stairs up to K.C.’s room where he naps. Halfway there my oldest calls me to the front door and I race outside to see my youngest stand up from where he fell, frightened but unhurt. He rushes into my arms shaking, scared by his fall from a second floor window. I look up at the broken glass of his room and unzip the sleeper I had clothed him in backwards; this way he could not play with his feces and mess up the walls of his room. The only mark on his body after his fall is three small teeth marks from the zipper on his back. He begins to walk away from me and I notice a limp.
I finish cleaning up the glass in his bedroom and board up his window after I phoned for a babysitter. I take K.C. to the hospital and, while the doctor does not find anything in the x-rays, he was concerned with the limp K.C. had. Just in case, they casted his foot and send us home where I take him to his room.
It is not often that I see K.C. scared so I decide to check and make sure that K.C. has learned a lesson from this experience. As I move him closer to the window, K.C. leans forward towards it without any fear. Sure enough, my fears rise as his seem to dissolve and I knew that the next morning I would have to locate some form of plexiglas for his room. I lay down beside him to settle in for the night.
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I entered university as a mature student with pre-formulated research questions and agenda based on my experiences as a mother of a multicultural, multi-intellectual family. My sociological and crosscultural experience in mothering highlights institutional hypocrisy; mothering each of my three children provides me opportunities of comparison that allow me to see gaps within the propounded belief system advocated by each of the mainstream institutions and their actual operational systems of practice. With each of my three children grounded within different social locations of identity and need, I have had to deal with each Canadian socio-political institution in a variety of ways that show the different handlings of different people.
Hypothetically, we as Canadians purport to live within a multicultural society infused, individually and institutionally, with value codes that honour cultural diversity and all peoples’ human rights to respect and dignity. In the creation of a Canadian identity this is the primary social asset that marks Canadians as different from our southern
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I received a call about Dawna’s relationship with a female classmate in high school. My daughter and her girlfriend were warned multiple times about public displays of affection. I immediately talked with my daughter, just as I would talk with my son in a heterosexual relationship, about learning to be discrete, a practice that I remember is hard to do within the hormonal confusion of teenage relationships. Dawna pointed out that heterosexual couples were not targeted with phone calls at home or being stopped in the hallways and publicly admonished as often as her relationship was. Hearing both sides of the story, I decided to go to her school and observe both the behaviour of the students and of the faculty. Sure enough, on the front yard of the school teenage heterosexual couples were fondling and manipulating each other in sexual ways. The next day I went into the school by a side door while classes were in session to watch students in the hallways as they changed classrooms. I observed heterosexual couples as they leaned into each other, held hands, kissed openly and enjoyed other signs of affection without being interrupted by the teachers and administrators who moved alongside them.
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This hypocrisy is more easily recognized and conveyed than racial or gender discrimination since these latter forms has become socially unacceptable. Discriminatory acts are not so easily recognized when they move from explicit acts to implicit attitudes that motivate “politically correct” conduct. Discrimination against sexual orientation is rather recent in public debates; reactions tend to be explicit and raw, whereas time has implicitly adapted peoples’ attitudes to curb outright reactions to patriarchal and racial discriminatory practices. Instead, the patriarchal and/or racial gaze is ever alert to find an alternative excuse to react against others; institutions are no exception. These are even more damaging to individuals when multiple oppressive beliefs are at work behind “expert” judgments.
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K.C. was asleep upstairs, a rare treat that normally allows me to catch a nap. Not today since I had to find out why my older children did not come home for lunch. The phone is cold and heavy in my hand as I digest the fact that my two older children have been picked up at school by the child protection unit.
I dial my mother at the farm in Craik and, through my gasps and sobs, inform her of the apprehension. Yes, K.C. is fine here at home, but the other two were taken to social services. She tells me she will meet with me right away to take care of this.
I sit down at the kitchen table, head in my hands. So many emotions stir while thoughts and questions race through my mind. I am relieved that my kids are safe and frustrated at my powerlessness to face this situation. If I was such a bad mother and my children were in jeopardy, how is it that they never apprehended my youngest who could not talk and was at the most risk for abuse? How is it that so many hours went by without any notice of the social workers’ actions? My mind races as I watch the clock and cry by the phone.
My mother arrives and picks up where I left off; she phones social services and begins a verbal onslaught that, as the mother under investigation, I did not have the power to attempt. She receives answers as she threatens them with law suits. She excuses herself from the phone with the promise that her lawyer will soon call them. Never putting the phone down, she has a lawyer hired within five minutes.
In no time we receive a call that my mother can pick up the children. An appointment is set for the next day, when the older kids were in school, to discuss the concerns Dawna’s kindergarten teacher had raised and additional issues that arose from the social worker’s talk with my children in custody. My mind runs over the few exchanges I have had with Dawna’s teacher; I remember the surprise when I met her and introduced myself as Dawna’s mother and she first discovered I am white. The November meeting was called to discuss why my daughter was not wearing socks with her sandals and I explained that it was still warm outside. To prove my point, I lifted my skirt slightly to show her that I was still in sandals and would not ask my children to do something that I was not doing.
This current situation must be bigger than not wearing socks to school. I found out the next day that the children were apprehended because of a bruise Dawna had just above her knee on her inner thigh. I had noticed the bruise and knew how she had received it; she played street hockey with her older brother and his friends and had been hit by a stick. The nets were piled under the front window and stood testimony to my story.
Yet the discussion moved from the original incident to other concerns and I sat on the stairs in my house feeling small and afraid. I held onto K.C. as the social workers, my mother and the lawyer discussed the issues that needed to be attended to. My mother was emotionally responsive for me since I had no fight, no power within me to attend to anything except K.C., distracting him to keep him from losing it with all these people in our house.
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While many of the welfare issues raised were valid concerns that needed to be addressed, they did not warrant the procedures used. If asked I could have forwarded the same issues in the perspective of living them everyday as a single mother of three children with two hands and one attention span. Living with autism had consequences that rippled into every aspect of each family member’s lives and formed the crux of this situation. Many needed services came from this awful event; I received parental training and specialized instruction from the Autism Resource Centre, as well as respite hours to have time with my older children. I also used some of the respite hours to simply sleep and take care of myself; I moved from a welfare mentality and began to take correspondence courses and volunteer in the community of
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One morning at 5 am, K.C. breaks a lamp in the living room of our three bedroom townhouse. I am concerned for the safety of not only my family but for the families in the adjoining units and I phone to the Regina Fire Department Chief and tell him the situation. I ask him if I can place a lock on my autistic child’s bedroom door. His tone is compassionate as he informs me it is illegal to lock a child in a room and, if a fire did break out, I could be charged with manslaughter if anything happened to him. He continues in a sympathetic tone to acknowledge that my situation is unusual and requires a win/loss analysis – he addresses the rules within the “normalized” social structure while giving me room to make informed choices.
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When K.C. was seven, I could no longer keep him, or my other family members, safe from the frustrations of his physical outbursts. One Thanksgiving weekend I phoned the Child Protection hotline and asked that they remove him from my house. He had smeared feces on the walls of his bedroom and was throwing himself against the walls, furniture and floor. His forehead was bruised and no amount of deep pressure or restraint calmed him.
I was on the phone giving all the particular information when I mentioned that he was autistic. Suddenly the tone of voice changed and the woman on the other end told me that I would have to wait and phone my case worker on Tuesday as they could do nothing for him. It was Saturday night when I hung up the phone, severing my only life cord as his screams and head banging continued unabated.
I rushed K.C. to the emergency room with his forehead swelled and bruised from his outbursts. I had to keep him away from the concrete floor in the waiting area while also protecting myself from his attacks. My bottom lip was cracked where he had thrown his head back and two nurses came and escorted us into a room. Velcro straps restrained K.C.’s hands and feet while I brushed the hair back from his forehead, my tears mixing with my son’s as I thought of my two older children waiting at home with the babysitter.
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For two or three weeks I stayed in the
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The complexity of my family unit did not simplify when I fell in love with my partner over five years ago; my life became more multifaceted when Rick Favel, a nēhiyaw (Cree First Nations) oskāpīwis (Elder’s Helper) entered my life. His ceremonial lifestyle provides a holistic healing setting within a cultural context for my two younger children. While Matthew was already a teenager and preparing to meet the world head-on, Dawna found an anchor in the traditional ceremonial ways; she received the most social benefit as she learned to be an elder’s helper just as I did. Together we received teachings that empowered us as women while also giving us lessons on the diversity of gender and two-spiritedness not found within mainstream Canadian beliefs.
K.C., on the other hand, found a cultural heritage that accepted his disabilities as a gift from the Creator which allowed him to be more in touch with the spiritual realms, as compared to “normal” people who had to work to gain this connection. At sweat lodges, K.C. was recognized as “speaking with the Grandfathers,” his mumbled sounds and squeals of delight gifting smiles and laughter to all around him. At these lodges K.C. is usually the first person in the lodge for every round. At the end of one sweat, when the pipe was “put down,” K.C. returned into the lodge to continue his joyful chatter. As my older children always said, “He talks to angels rather than to us.”
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K.C. rolls around on the gymnasium floor oblivious to the activity around him as the lodge maker, Harvey Ironeagle of Pasqua First Nations, begins to sing. My son perks up, his attention focused on the drumbeat. This is the first of four singings that lead to the summer’s Big Lodge, otherwise known as a rain dance or sun dance. The ceremonial bundle was completed and the feast finished; K.C. had his fill of bannock, berries and soup. He pops the last bite of cookie into his mouth as the first headman moves towards the drum. With a direct look towards me he suddenly stands up and awkwardly runs toward the front of the assembly where the lodge maker and headmen sit.
I start to feel anxious at K.C.’s sudden movements and feel helpless to stop him since I am sitting on the women’s side of the gym. I could not go over to the men’s side where K.C. was and I begin to look for someone to intervene on my behalf. The lodge maker tells me to leave K.C. alone. He stands up and addressed the whole crowd, introducing K.C. as a special child who lends great honour to this ceremony. Rick gives me a pleased look as K.C. sits down between him and Elder Robert Cappo (now deceased). Both of these headmen make room for him in the area past the pipes where most people cannot go.
K.C. laughs and jokes and gives the old men and helpers a great time. The women around me smile at K.C.’s attentive interactions with the old men. I marvel at the eye contact he initiates, the touches he instigates and the presence of my child who usually is trapped within the cocoon of autism.
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nikwīmē
nikwīmē is a nēhiyaw (Cree) word for “my namesake.” To receive an Indian name is an honor because a spiritual ancestor of the nēhiyaw people comes forward to guide and protect the individual in their daily life. This name also comes with the responsibility to live appropriately, fulfilling one’s purpose and honoring one’s gift of life given by the Creator.
i tremble,
not knowing how to follow her example;
the seed within calls
i do not know how to cultivate it;
i cower in shame,
the presence of nikwīmē
flows through me, around me,
envelops me in her largeness;
i know not how to walk
humbly in her footsteps.
wāpiski-mōstōs iskwēw
My kwīmē who conducted the naming ceremony is Harvey Ironeagle. He also was the conduit for the Indian names for two of my three children. Together as a family, except Matthew who had already moved out on his own, we went to Pasqua First Nations to
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K.C.’s long term support workers were on holidays and he was staying at a respite home I was not familiar with. I double checked the address written on a torn piece of paper to make sure I was at the right doorway. I pressed the doorbell and the door opens with a warm welcome from a young fair-haired lady who called for K.C. as she motioned for me to enter. She hands me his backpack and shared an incident where she had seen me before with K.C.; she then thought I was another respite worker and never dreamed that I was his mother. I acknowledged the truth of my being the white mother of my special Indian child as I lead K.C. towards the truck. My emotions stormed at the consideration that most people would not naturally assume I was K.C.’s mother.
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This identity confusion of my being a mother never happens when I am out with Matthew, my eldest white son. This incident opened my eyes to the social judgments towards the racial threshold my family transcended. I became aware of public reactions that occurred when I walked with my teenage two-spirited daughter. I talked to Dawna about K.C.’s respite worker and she explained her experience of the primary responses from her friends and teachers when she introduces me within her social network. With a laugh and a glint in her eye, she shared how she has become accustomed to the responses, empowered rather than hindered by the shock value when she introduces me to everyone.
Social judgments are the avenue for my daughter to gain even more power through her ability to perplex people with their own assumptions; the “shock value” is increased when strangers do not know I am her mother but can see by her actions that she is a lesbian. Never shy, she openly shows her affection, increasing the havoc of some people’s judgments since they do not assume she is my daughter.
She opened my eyes to the illusion of our multicultural Canadian social personality. While I had believed in a multicultural Canadian identity, my native daughter’s eyes were always acutely aware of the mythic ideal.
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“We do not agree that sweat baths are beneficial for K.C.. It is proven that, like hot tubs, they may have him take epileptic seizures.” The social worker immediately authorized the social services’ interview room with her words of status and power. Her privileged presence within her institutional framework almost negated the seven years of university training I have; I was temporarily lost in my past, returned to the welfare attitude of powerlessness I had felt as a mother in relationship to the largeness of institutional authority. I caught myself and acknowledged silently that I was a federal scholarship recipient writing her masters dissertation. Besides, this meeting was never arranged around the topic of sweat lodges, but arranged to request overnight visitation rights.
I questioned: “And what sources are you using to speak with such definitive proof?” She looked up from her paperwork with surprise and repeated that there are many reports to support “their” position.
“Such as? Where is the paperwork that backs up your position? Let me read the results for myself. Is this your knowledge or someone else’s?” She admitted that it was the psychiatrist who specializes in autism. I refreshed her memory about the authoritative stance concerning autism with my experiential knowledge. “Around ten years ago there were no authorities in
My partner also addressed this issue from within his own cultural authorized stance. The meeting extended to hours until the social worker, in frustration, pointed to her paperwork and questioned his Indian status: “No where does it say he is Aboriginal.”
I was shocked. Not only do I hold the memory of filling out the bubbles that represented the family tree associated with my son, I also pictured his fair brown skin, dark hair and eyes and asked, “Have you seen my son?” I know she visits him regularly and was genuinely concerned for him, but I was shocked at the implication this challenge had on my son’s identity within social services and his care as a human being. Gathering myself I asked for her pad of paper and began to write all the Indian kinship that infused my son with his social and biological beingness.
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This meeting was arranged to discuss overnight visits with my son, an issue never once discussed in over three hours. This experience once again highlights for me that parenting Aboriginal children in
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As a mother, I draw on the strength and tenacity of my Irish ancestry and the wisdom and connections of my nēhiyaw (Cree) extended family to raise my children. The bones of my ancestors are the Celtic heritage I give my children while the nēhiyaw legacy provides the breath of meaning for my whole family to understand the world we live in and to create their future as Canadian citizens. While there is not many Irish Elders to learn old ways from (my older relatives are deceased and the younger ones living in
These previous key-hole narratives of situations that occurred within my family raise pertinent questions for consideration within the study of motherhood. These experiences show Canadian attitudes, prejudices and discriminations that concern racial, intellectual and sexual orientation which intersect within the activities of mothering today’s children. These stories demote the multicultural ideal of Canadian citizenship to a goal yet unachieved. These vignettes highlight the complexity of family dynamics in contemporary society and calls for a paradigm shift, a conceptual move away from the use of dysfunctional labels of deviance towards more transformative classifications that consider the gifts held by such exceptional children. It is these children who have the power and strength to show us how to grow out of our prejudices, transcend our discriminations and mother our children with genuine concern for the diversity in Canadian identity.
