Strangers for Ancestors #9: My country 'tis of thee ... state of hypocrisy ...
The images on the outside are two large monoprints I made in 1991 during the Gulf War while a student at the University of Oregon; the middle image is of me at three with my mother.
This is a bonus repost from a blog I wrote a year ago, July 2022
July 4, 2022
I started writing this last Saturday - 4th of July weekend - while I was working on a grant application for a project that has everything to do with the origins of the United States. My mind kept drifting, thinking about my mother and how my earliest understanding of the U.S., starting as an infant is so intertwined with my relationship to her, and that perception hasn’t changed much since.
My mother, Betty was a proud Canadian, and never became a U.S. citizen. Rather, she would renew her green card every 10 years. She often spoke of how much better Canada was because of its socialized healthcare and education, its unarmed police force, and its rejection to support the U.S. in the Vietnam War. And our family benefited from those policies – one of my father’s brothers moved to Canada when he was drafted into the Army and still lives in Vancouver today, and when I needed surgery, we went to stay with my grandparents in Alberta.
As my father recounted in his audio memoirs recorded for our family before he passed, speaking of his experience living and working at Fort Lewis in Washington state, serving as an attorney in the military in the sixties:
Betty had a horrible time adjusting to the military, she was Canadian, she didn’t like the military, and I was constantly getting calls from my commanding officer … “They were lowering the flag by the headquarters building last Thursday and your wife drove right by and didn’t stop and get out and put her hand on her heart like ALL good wives are supposed to do.” She was aware it was expected of her, but she was defiant. And if I wasn’t defending Betty’s conduct, I was defending Dougal’s (our Basset Hound) conduct, because he was getting in trouble all over the place. Betty and Dougal were Sargent Sweeney’s nemeses.
I hadn’t heard that story until I listened to my father’s memoirs after his death. It reminded me of the fierce, bright, fun anti-U.S. spirit I knew my mother to be in the early years of my life, when it was just her, my father, me, and Dougal.
I adopted my mother’s disdain for the hypocrisy of the country south of the Canadian border early on, and I credit the fiery spirit I saw in her at that young age with the origins of my own. She was also the person who introduced me to diversity and equity as values to respect and honor. Every night at bedtime, my mother would sing me the song Jesus Loves The Little Children and while simple, she was using the tools she had to teach me to embrace diversity and her efforts did have a profound impact on me. When I asked what the colors signified, she gave the examples, “red could be tribal Indian children, like Mo (my Inuit baby doll); brown could be children from Mexico; yellow could be children from Okinawa, where your aunt and uncle live; black could be children from Africa, or like Corey (on Julia); and white is like our family.”
Julia with Diahann Carroll and Marc Copage
Every week we would watch the show Julia which featured Diahann Carroll playing a single mother (her son was Corey, and in roughly first or second grade), who worked as a nurse. Julia’s husband had been killed in the Vietnam War. While it was considered unrealistic at the time because of its middle class portrayal of an African American woman, it presented a strong Black woman who could hold her own and then some when it came to wit and knowledge in conversations with the white doctor she worked with, she was able to support and care for her young son, and she had fabulous style. I loved Julia and she was my first Barbie Doll. Julia (my doll) was the conduit for my introduction to racism. My mother arranged a playdate with another little girl in the neighborhood; I brought over my case that included Julia and her various outfits. When we were sent outside to play with our dolls, I took out Julia and the little girl pointed at her and said, “You’re Barbie is ugly … ewwww”; without thinking, I grabbed her classic blonde Barbie away from her and threw her in a pile of dog shit that was sitting in the yard and yelled “You’re Barbie is ugly.” She started screaming and crying. I and Julia were swiftly escorted away, and I never saw that little girl again. I was told I was right in my thinking, but wrong in throwing her doll in the dog poo. I’m still on the fence on that one.
These are the memories of my mother I treasure and hold close. Over the years as I watched her assimilate and become more ‘American’, I longed for her confident, vibrant spirit to return.
While I believe the culture of the U.S. and living in a conservative state (Montana) had much to do with who I saw my mother become, I also think her unplanned and unexpected pregnancy five months after giving birth to my first brother was the beginning of the end for the woman I first adored as my mother. On more than a few occasions, often after she’d been drinking, or arguing with my father, she’d be in tears and reference that experience as the source of her pain and unhappiness. The birth of my first younger brother had been far more challenging than their experience with me. I had been a relatively easy child to care for; a good sleeper, I wasn’t fussy, I liked spending time alone and didn’t need to be entertained, and I developed language skills early, providing endless entertainment for my parents with my observations of the world. However, my first brother caught pneumonia in the hospital after his birth and ended up being monitored in the ICU for several weeks, which likely contributed to him being a fussier baby, who would cry often, and needed more attention. So, for my mother to learn several months later that she was pregnant again, was devastating. Adding fuel to this fire, was that my father was also struggling with this situation, though not communicating, and spending more time working, or out drinking with his friends, and not supporting my mother. A classic American story. Tragically, their relationship, and our family’s declined over the next eight years and never recovered, leading to a multitude of regrets and misfortunes in each of our lives.
Many years later as an adult, I asked my mother if she would have gotten an abortion if she could have. She struggled with this question because of everything implicated in the honest response she ultimately gave, which was ‘yes,’ she would have. It pained her to think about my second brother not having been born, yet she was also aware of how traumatic the impact had been and how hard it must have been for him to have listened to her recount on many occasions that he had been a ‘mistake’, and while often delivered in jest, it did have repercussions.
It’s hard for me to grasp the current national assault on women and girls, people of color, ecosystems - basically any living being who isn’t a white man with power and money, but it’s in no way surprising. The United States has always codified pain and suffering in the service of powerful white men to keep them pulling the strings. Sure, those of us who aren’t the puppet masters, and who don’t want anyone to be, get thrown a bone every now and then to keep us believing change is possible. But here we are - women and girls without control over our own bodies, our ecosystems destroyed daily, and mass murders with assault weapons at least once a week … and there’s lots more coming down the pipeline … and those puppet masters are howling with glee.
But we must not lose hope!
Yes, you did read that last sentence laced with sarcasm, because honestly, I don’t know anymore. I know I won’t stop being who I am … a huge thorn in the side of patriarchy, white supremacy, ecocide - and its fuel - capitalism. But I think we’re looking at the realities once presented as somewhat mythic dystopian futures in stories such as The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler), and Almanac of the Dead (Leslie Marmon Silko) and we’ll see where those powerful visions take us over the next year, five, ten, and onward. I don’t think anyone will be celebrating 2076 - that’s my prediction for the future. And it brings me back to my mother and the two greatest gifts she did bestow on me: 1) the belief that the United States is rooted in a vicious, violent hypocrisy that is the antithesis of democracy and the teachings of Christ; and 2) a fierce defiant spirit that would speak truth to power.
I feel blessed that I was able to see glimpses of my mother’s inner world at least a handful of time before her death in 2015; these were few and far between, but they were precious. I also have boxes of cards and letters from her, expressing more of her vulnerabilities and her appreciation for having the opportunity to live vicariously through me, and always noting that I must never stop being an artist or pursuing my adventures and dreams. One of the last memories I have of my mother is after she had been admitted to hospice (she had been diagnosed with Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, I will write a longer series on this, with a much different conclusion) and could no longer speak and barely move. While I was sitting with her and rubbing her hand, I began singing the songs she would sing to me as a child. I started with Where the Buffalo Roam and when I got to Jesus Loves the Little Children, tears began flowing down her face. This was my final goodbye to her, coming full circle to a place I knew we both held sacred between us.
While my mother did end up another casualty of the mythic ‘American Dream’, I appreciate that in her own way, she held onto a remainder of her fierce, independent spirit by denying U.S. citizenship and remaining a proud Canadian until her death. It was her final ‘fuck you’ as she defiantly stepped on the gas and drove by laughing as they lowered the American flag into its grave.