Claims to be Christian - Yeah, right.

Wilson went to stay with Misty. Well, that would be that. Shirley, remarried, had recently left her husband and was homeless as well. Not only were she and Joy living there, but Cheri, her little girls and Junior too. Wilson would be under the same roof with his ex-wife and all their kids and grandkids. A remarkable situation; they were one big happy family again. He wouldn’t need my babies and me. Also, with the amount of drinking and smoking going on there, it wouldn’t be long before he got started and that would be the end of his talk about sobriety and Christianity.

Wilson not only stayed sober but he kept coming around. I started letting him watch our kids while I was at work. For two weeks he courted me. One night he picked me up from work and took me to our old restaurant - just like we used to. When he dropped me off and drove away, I felt as though I’d been on my very first date ever with him.

One day I called home from work. "Wilson, I forgot my medication this morning. I just don’t feel like I can cope. Could you bring me my medicine?”
“Sure, I’ll be right over.”
But the medication didn’t help. It was my life I hated. How could a drug change that?

After just two months, I left ‘bitter’ BetterLife and went back to the family-run nursing home where I had felt more comfortable.

“Shirley is going back to live with her husband in Detroit and Joy wants to move in with me,” Wilson said one day.
I sat down. How could Joy “move in” with Wilson? He didn’t have a place. I knew I was asking for trouble again, but I really did love Joy. “Well, I guess you both could come here.”
Joy and Wilson moved back in with me on March 16. I explained to Steph that I had to do it for Joy’s sake, but she didn’t believe it. We argued and Steph moved out. Troy also went back to Salmon Lake and stayed there.

I enrolled both Joy and Andrew in swimming lessons at the YMCA. While they were in class and Haley was in the nursery, I worked out in the weight room. I was there partly to get back into shape after having a baby, partly to build myself up in case of another attack by Shirley.

Joy reported that the family from the Rez rolls joints on their coffee table. Four- year-old Andrew joined in, “I stole some cigarettes from 7-11 for them. They wanted me to smoke one.”
“And Mom,” he confided, “Rose is Louis’ girlfriend. They were in the garage and she told him to put his hand in her pants.”
I felt sick. Rose and Louis were both nine-years-old.
Standing on our sidewalk with Andrew, I pointed from one house to another.
“I don’t want you to play over there or that house either. They do bad things over there. You are not to go inside the house across from them, or play with the kids over at the red house. And stay out of that green house, too.”
“But Mom,” Andrew objected, “then there’s nobody left to play with!”

Elmer and Marcia came to visit relatives in Salmon Lake, then came down to the city to spend a couple nights with us. Having them physically in front of me was reassurance that they really existed. Seeing them was like nourishment.
“Why don’t you move on out to west?” Elmer cajoled.
“I’m buying this place. Where would we live out there?”
“There’s plenty of places.”
“Well, if we did go Wilson would have to find us a nice house first.”
“Well, don’t be so high on the horse. Sometimes you have to accept something not so good for awhile if you want to make a better life. You might have to accept living in a trailer or something.”
Later, I spoke to Marcia. ‘What happens if I quit my job, drop this house, go all the way out there and then Wilson starts drinking again?”
“He really is a Christian now. I know; I saw him crying on his knees on my living room floor. I was there.”

I still didn’t think I loved Wilson and didn’t trust that he was really going to stay sober. And I most definitely didn’t believe he was really a Christian. But I knew I wasn’t happy being a single mom trying to buy a house I didn’t like in a neighborhood I hated. I also knew I’d have to be evening charge nurse for awhile. When Andrew started school in the fall, I’d never see him.

I also knew I was an angry, bitter woman and if I kept going that way - my heart filled to the brim with hate - I’d end up like some of the bitter, old women I had worked with in the nursing homes. I decided moving couldn’t be worse than living here.

We sat around the dinner table with Mickey, Joy and my kids. We made a commitment to each other that we were going to stick together and move as a family. Grandma and Grandpa were having their 50th wedding anniversary and later that summer was my class reunion, so we decided to wait and move in late August, before school started. I’d have to prepare the house for sale and hire a realtor.

The Wedding Reception

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Working with my sisters to ready the yellow canopy and set up the tables, my stomach was tied in knots. I wanted very badly to have my relatives believe my life was normal. I suppose I assumed that because I lived on the south side, they couldn't see my day to day life and had no idea what kinds of things were going on. I wanted to preserve this illusion that was probably much more mine then theirs.

My cousin arrived with the beautiful three-tiered cake she had made and set it on the white tablecloth. As nicely dressed people began to arrive, Wilson still hadn't shown up. I welcomed my family's neighbors, friends and relatives and accepted their brightly wrapped gifts with a smile. Everything looked beautiful.
"Wilson will be here soon," I told everyone.

But while I smiled, I was in pain, unable to keep my mind off of what I knew was happening in my home.

Wilson showed up an hour later, very drunk. Elaine, arriving in her own car, carried the chili and, followed by her children, went on down to the party. Mickey smiled encouragement to me. Wilson stumbled out and went on down to the gathering. His four older children followed. Joy was wearing the pink dress and bonnet I'd bought her the Easter before. Dale was drunk too, but saw my shame and refused to get out of the van. I picked up Tammy's baby girl, the one Tammy had said she'd named for me, and took Dale's family down to introduce them. I was unable to even look in Wilson's direction.

Suddenly Wilson grabbed me and pulled me over to dance around the canopy.
"This is a traditional wedding dance," he told me, slurring his speech as he stumbled along.
I could feel my face burn hot as everyone watched. When he finally let me go, I hurried into the house, humiliated. Eventually, Wilson and his crew left. A few of the guests came into the house to say good-bye. Others just left.

Bobby took Mickey, Andrew and me home. No one was there when we arrived, but beer cans littered the floor and their contents stained the living room rug. The empty boxes they came in were stacked five feet high in the kitchen corner and Burger King wrappers littered the stairs.

I looked around; initially more exhausted and dejected than angry. Bobby waited a few minutes, not saying much of anything.

"Look," said Mickey, "Wilson's pulling up."

I looked out the storm door. Wilson was trying to parallel park in front. He had a group in the van with him. Wilson looked up and saw me in the door. He quickly turned his wheel toward the street and drove away. Now I felt the disgust and anger - at myself just as much as him.

"Fine then. The reception is done, and I’ll be d----- if most of them are going to stay another night."

Bobby left and I started cleaning. Soon Elaine came for her belongings. I had no problem with her. She had tried to help with the day and had planned on driving back that night anyway. But Dorothy was with her.

"I paid $12 for the chili's hamburger," Dorothy demanded, "Pay me back."

"I didn't ask you to spend your money."

"Give me the $12 or I'm taking Mickey back with me."

I paid her and Dorothy climbed into Elaine's car and left.

Misty, Dale and Tammy stayed. I didn't mind Dale and Tammy, but I didn't want to take care of Misty anymore. Wilson wasn't there and I didn't want him coming back, so she might as well go too. I was through taking care of his problems.

"Where's those clothes you took? I'm tired of you owning into my stuff!"

"I didn't take your d--- clothes!"

"Get out and don't f------ come back!"

She ran to the phone and called her mom. After speaking to her quickly, she hung up and came back.

"My ma's coming to get me and when she gets here, she's going to kick your a--."

"Let her come."

Dale, Tammy, and Mickey sat quietly in the living room and said nothing. After Misty threw some things into a bag, she stood at the door and waited for her ride. As I stood at the top of the landing, Misty looked up at me and swore,

"You dumb, f------ b----."

"Least I finished school," I said as I turned and walked into my room.

Misty's mother pulled up in front and honked. Misty grabbed her bag and left.
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And When They Were Older, They Would Not Depart From It

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In February 1986, because Misty was angry with her mother and didn't want to live there, and because Cheri wouldn't let Misty live at her place anymore, Misty moved in with us. We made it clear this was only on condition she straighten up and go to school. We did our best to help her. We first tried enrolling her in the Catholic high school her best friend was attending. We took her for an entrance exam, but she didn't pass.

"I'm sorry," the administrator told us, "we'd like to take her but her comprehension scores are way below our requirements. We simply don't have the necessary facilities to help her. I'd advise you to take her for testing."

At the Community College, Misty tested at the third grade reading level.

"Take her home and encourage her to read as much as possible. There are also some reading programs that you could enroll her in. They do cost a little, but if you can afford it..."

Running out of options, we enrolled her in an alternative school down on Lincoln Avenue. I encouraged her, told her she was beautiful and surprised her with a rose on her dresser for her 16th birthday. I took her portrait to a modeling agency. Louise Nelson saw the portrait and told me she thought Misty was very photogenic.

But living with Misty wasn't easy. She wouldn't do anything she didn't feel like doing. The only time she would do the dishes without a fight was on my payday.

_________________________________________________________

On Halloween I took Joy and Andrew with me to a party at the Crisis Nursery. I'd sewed Joy a "Strawberry Shortcake" costume. Andrew I made into Mickey Mouse. I found a ruffled slip for Joy and black tights for Andrew at the nursery. I was able to get all kinds of accessories for children at the Crisis Nursery, from clothing to diapers to baby bottle nipples. Some of it was given to me, some of it I stole. Funny how upset I was with Misty's thieving but thought nothing of my own.

Stealing from the Crisis Nursery at night wasn't hard. I worked with only one other person and all I had to do was wait for that person to fall asleep. Then during my normal duty of restocking from the basement, I would take extras out the side door to my car. Some of it I stored for my own use, other stuff I took up north and gave it to Dale and Tammy for their three kids.

The small one bedroom tract house they now lived in was part of a quadroplex originally built to house an elderly person. Not being high on the list of tribal government cronies, this apartment had been given to Dale's family until another home opened up.

The house was usually littered with clothing and thick with cigarette smoke. They never had much food, and the kids slept on the floor wrapped in dirty blankets. I brought them toothpaste and toothbrushes from the nursery every time I came, and then usually went out and bought other little things they needed such as toilet paper. Sometimes I'd help Tammy take the blankets and stuffed toys down to the launder-mat. At night, I curled up with the kids on the floor and slept.

While sitting on the hood of the car outside Dale's house one afternoon, Lila told me she would die soon and had already chosen her casket.
"There is no reason to live," she said while looking at the ground.
"What about your two kids?" I asked.
"No one needs me."

___________________________________________________

Back home, Roland called the alternative school. Misty had been going a month or so now and we wanted to see how she was doing.
"She hasn't been here."
"What do you mean? We drop her off every day!"
"She hides behind the door until you leave and then takes off."

After a particularly bad day with Misty, I urged Roland to go on a drive with me. As we went around a lake, I told him I could not marry him if I could not start saying no to his family. He wanted to get married, I guess, because he told me then that I could start standing up for myself.
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Being Raised to Die

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Wilson began working at an upholstery shop on the northeast side. It didn't pay much, but he was glad for the work. I was surprised how little trouble he had getting up with the alarm.


We signed Joy up for ballet classes in the suburb near my Dad’s. Every Saturday that fall, I dropped her off at class and went to do laundry at my dad's. We also signed Junior up with a gym near his house and paid for his and Cheri's piano lessons at the Park. In addition, Wilson and I attended most of Junior's floor hockey games and were proud when Cheri won an award in tennis.

But Misty wasn't a joiner. She had briefly been in Girl Scouts, but never asked to be part of any other program, never indicated any special interests, and we, deep into our own problems, never thought to help her find some.

Misty, like Cheri, started her real trouble after leaving elementary school and beginning junior high. There being several elementary and junior high schools in our large city, kids moving to seventh grade often found themselves surrounded by a whole new group of children. I often wondered if the pressure of a new school and the change in peer group at such an insecure age had anything to do with the troubles inner city kids had. Maybe junior high kids should be kept with the same group of children they'd gone to elementary school with, rather than shuffling the children as you would a deck of cards.

Because of Misty's truancy, the school district was now picking her up in a van every day from her mother's house and taking her to a special school. But the costly effort had no effect on her uncooperative attitude or interest in learning.
_________________________________

An Asian gang had jumped Savannah and Yvonne’s girl, Marci. Marci had gotten away, but Savannah was left. She had been gang-raped. Only thirteen, Savannah was already drinking heavily, had left school, been beaten several times, been stabbed in the throat, and had had clap (gonorrhea). I tried to get Savannah into treatment. The hospital was ready to take her, but no one in the family would help me to get her there. At the duplex Annie and Savannah were staying at with other people, (Candis was in the custody of her dad at the time.) I tried to talk Annie into helping me with Savannah.

"Well Savannah don't want to go, and if Savannah don't want to go, I can't do nothin," Annie said.

Busy at the kitchen table trying to hack a dirty cast off a little boy’s arm, she stopped a moment to take drag on her cigarette. I didn't know who the boy was. The son of the person Annie was staying with I guessed.

"Well, could we just trick her? Just tell her we're visiting someone?"

"Na-e, she won't fall for that," Annie said as she worked.

It was clear I wasn't going to get any help, so I gave up. After all, these adults were heavy drinkers and living homeless, transient lives themselves. Savannah was only a kid and wasn't near as bad off as they were, so in their minds, I was silly to suggest she needed help.

"By the way”, I said gesturing toward the boy. “How come you don't just bring him down to the hospital and have them cut that cast off? It would be easier."

"Nae, his mom don't want to bother with that."

More likely she didn't want to sober up for it or was hiding from social services.
__________________________________

One day, as I came into Wanda's duplex, Julia jumped up from the table in confusion, looked frantically around for a place to hide, and then ran into the basement. She had been sniffing paint and didn't want me to know.

Wilson and I began to talk about the troubles all the teenagers were having and wondered if there was something that we could do to make it different. For a little while, we even bandied around the idea of running a home for Indian kids. At the time, the Native American community in this city was predominately located within a two-mile radius. It was estimated there were approximately 15,500 Indians in the area. According to statistics, Native Americans had a higher infant mortality, lower education attainment, higher unemployment rates, greater incidence of poverty and disproportionately higher chemical dependency rate than other people groups in the state. Statistics said that 40% of this state’s Indians had a serious problem with alcohol, as opposed to only 8.5% of the rest of the state population. It was considered the single most serious problem Indians faced because it contributed to the three leading causes of death in adults: cirrhosis of the liver, suicide, and homicide.

And many youth were following their parents’ path.

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Wilson Began Using Again -

Wilson began using marijuana again after about two years. I joined him. He always knew where to go to get it. Sometimes he got it from Shirley. Most of the time he went to the tribal housing project. I usually waited in the car, watching him as he disappeared between the white buildings for fifteen minutes or so while he went into one apartment or another. I never followed him into the projects, but occasionally I went with him into the house of one of his other dealers and stood just inside the door while Wilson, laughing and talking, did business with his friends.

One place, the home of a young man and wife, was always dark inside. Children were sitting on the couch, amid blankets and clothing, sucking their thumbs and watching TV. The guy would be bagging the weed on a kitchen table cluttered with beer cans and ashtrays. When he was finished, he'd weigh the bag on the small scale. We wouldn't stay long and I never remembered their names.

The weed wasn't important to me at first. I joined Wilson just for something to do. I was working jobs that lasted a month or two at a time. (Well, I either walked away from the jobs or was fired.) Sometimes Wilson worked too, along with visiting the blood bank twice a week. He was also still trying to go to school. But primarily he and his family taught me how to use the welfare system. We made use of food stamps, General Assistance, fuel assistance, and picked up free cheese and butter once a month when the government offered it. In addition we picked up free food and clothing at various churches. With each program, we told the staff whatever we had to in order to get what we wanted.

"If you want to get anything, you have to lie about it," Wilson’s family told me.

I was willing to use other people’s resources rather than my own whenever possible, but when I did have a job it bothered me that only my money was used to buy groceries. Wilson frequently saved his plasma money for a bag of marijuana. But as time went on, I began to want Wilson to take his blood money for that purpose. I also knew I was getting extremely lazy. The marijuana made Wilson lazy too. He dropped out of school. It bothered me that we were getting that way. It felt ugly, and only fed the loathing I already had for myself. Off and on, I quit smoking with him.

Our relationship was getting stormier and stormier. Wilson was quick to temper and I felt as though I was walking on eggs all the time. He wasn't physical with me, but he could get very hostile, giving me the silent treatment for up to a week if I made him angry. I never felt that I had any freedom to say "no" to him or his family.

Many of our arguments had to do with his two older girls. I was missing things and suspected the girls had taken them. At one point, I found my mother's engagement ring, which had been stored safely in my jewelry box, hidden in the dirt of a houseplant. But Wilson wouldn't admit there was a problem, preferring to blame me for the missing items.

The weekends with the kids began to take a toll. For the most part they just refused to listen to me. After I scolded little Joy for jumping on the bed, she ran to her dad screaming and crying,

"Beth beat me up!"

Later, in the car, this same innocent child with big brown eyes leaned over to me and whispered,
"my Ma's going to kick your ass...."

When Misty was given a prescription lotion to apply before bed, I told her to bathe first, then use it.

She immediately went to her dad, "Do I have to take a bath? Beth said I had to!"

"Nah, you don't have to take no bath!"


And despite asking the girls to clean their area before leaving on Sunday evening, I inevitably spent that evening picking up toys from all around the apartment, sweeping up the kind of dirt four children always leave behind, and restraightening the spare room.