When love is not enough

Many years ago my mother had a baby, and that baby was me. My mother loved me with her whole heart.

Then she had a miscarriage.

She and my dad were older. They wanted more children but they were afraid they wouldn't have any.

So they applied to adopt. The social worker asked them if they cared what race the baby was. They hadn't even thought about race. "No," they immediately said. "Why would race matter? We will love this child no matter what."

Not long after my mother had her second child, a charming and smart little Okanagan boy who she loved with all her heart.

Then my mom gave birth to their third child, a boy. And she loved him with her whole heart.

Then came my baby sister, from Tsawout First Nation, a girl who was lively and generous of spirit and my mom loved my sister as much as any mother loved a child.

But the town we lived in was racist in ways we white people didn't even see. While one teacher put my brother on an accelerated math programme until she ran out of worksheets, the next told my mom she was letting him-with his reported IQ of 140- run the projector-because he wasn't clever enough to do math. Another claimed my brother had no friends. Yet after school and weekends and holidays our house was full of little boys- boys he played hockey with and went to cub scouts with and wrestled on the Sunday School floor with. He took a stick to the face in a hockey game when he was a teenager and waited for hours in emergency until his white parents showed up. He argued with a teacher who told him he wasn't an Indian. 

My mother raged and ranted. 

My sister's first teacher insisted she was hyperactive and should be sedated. Other teachers had low expectations of her- she was only a native after all. She was bullied and called a squaw. She was told what saints her parents were for adopting an Indian. Many called them her "foster parents".

Again my mother raged in ways that only a mother can rage. How did people not see the brilliance of her children? How did people not recognize their gifts? 

And time went on and things did not go so well for my brother and sister. Still my mother loved them with her whole heart. She loved them when she told them they were adopted. She loved them when she explained their birth mothers loved them but they were young and couldn't care for them and so they had given them, in love, to a home that could provide them with the things they could not. She loved them when she told them they were of indigenous descent and that was something to be proud of. She loved them when each of them told her, in turn, that they were going to meet their birth mothers. She loved them when each of them moved away to live in the communities that were theirs by birth. She loved them when she met their birth mothers. She never feared they would love her less- only that the families they found would not embrace them.

But ...one day she said to me, "Your dad and I love your brother and sister. When we adopted them, we knew we would love them. And we do. We thought love would be enough to make up for any hardships they had in their early days. We thought love would counteract any problems they might face. But now I see, love is not enough." 

My mother knew, despite the deep and abiding love she had for her children, love was not enough.
Love was not enough to battle racism.
Love was not enough to help them deal with the dichotomy of being First Nations kids raised in a white home.
Love was not enough to make up for years of institutionalized discrimination.
No matter how much she loved them, love was not enough to make up for them being taken from their communities.

My sister says "Love was enough, I was able to come home from the racism and know that I belonged and that I was loved because I was ME." But my mom didn't see it that way.

That is why I am passionate about education for reconciliation. For my brother and sister.  For all the kids who were made to feel small because of the colour of their skin. For all those who felt invisible because their history was not acknowledged. For those who were not allowed to tell their own stories without fear of humiliation. For every kid who grew up believing they were worth less than another. And for my mother. For mistakes that cannot be undone. For unintended consequences. For all those who lived with the guilt of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. 

The colour of your skin

I was four. Mom said we were going shopping. We were going shopping for a doll for me.

I already owned three dolls, See-See, Susie and Freckly Face. My parents had this adorable habit of letting me name my own toys.

But back to my story. A new doll? That I could pick out myself? What?

We went to Kresge's and the Co-op. The local toy store. But none of the dolls we saw would do. We were looking for a "special" doll said Mom.  Finally we found it in Woolworth's.  This one, she says. I was dubious. She had no clothes. But she was pretty.

What are you going to call her? Mom says. Chocolate, says I. I was a kid. What did I know? My mom must have thought, well, there's a lesson in cultural diversity gone wrong.

Freckly-face, See-See, Chocolate, and Susie

The year I got the doll, my parents adopted my brother. My mom didn't think she could have more kids and my parents wanted more. The social worker asked them if they would consider adopting a child of a different race. The question threw them. They hadn't thought about it. Of course, they said. What difference would it make? 

So my brother was adopted. He was my brother. I never thought about the colnour of his skin. Except in summer when my skin burnt red and his was golden brown. I didn't think much about his race or even what "adopted" meant. We were family.

In Dawson Creek in the early 1960s, there weren't many people of colour. I suppose the special doll was my mom's way of showing me there were people in the world who didn't look like me because in my world,  among the Jenkins and the Dixons and the Jorgensons and the Baliskys and the Connellys, there were just a tiny handful of families who weren't white. Except for the indigenous people like my brother and sister who didn't look like me, but somehow didn't seem "different".

There were the Asian  families. Mr. Mah who owned the Mile Zero Cafe and always gave my Dad whiskey or "special Chinese tea" when we went for Chinese food.Bing Mah who owned Bing's furniture.Japanese Mr. Seto who owned Seto's Studios. Mrs. Parmar from Pakistan who taught grade 4.

The native kids certainly weren't as exotic as the Hamiltons. Mr. Hamilton, the story went, was an American working on the Alaska Highway who fell in love with a local lady. Herbie Hamilton was in my grade. Phyllis Mounce was my age too. She was adopted. They were our token African Canadians.  Everyone wanted to be their friends to prove they didn't care about skin colour. We were so proud that we did not discriminate against Herbie and Phyllis and the Mahs and Mr. Seto. In the heat of the civil rights movement, we white Dawson Creek kids knew we weren't like our U.S. neighbours who were the kind of racists we saw in the photos of riots and protest marches in Life Magazine.

We studied cultures and customs of people all over the world, but we never talked about our native classmates as having a unique way of life or their own spiritual beliefs. We knew their ancestors were here before our ancestors but we didn't wonder much about how they lived. They were just like us, weren't they? Except in Dawson Creek in the 1960s, we didn't go to their houses and they didn't come to ours. We were just kids. We didn't wonder why they were poor and we were middle class. We didn't wonder why by junior high their numbers dwindled. Or that by high  school, there was just one. Lorna Laboucan, whatever happened to you? 

I'm not a kid anymore. The things I never thought about back then haunt me now.