A MOTHER'S WORK

Printed in The Family Post: Spring Issue 2002

by Jaqueline Keeler

    One day, as I was struggling with the buckle on my daughter's car seat, I realized that I was ready to go back to work. I can't say what in particular cued me in to this. It was a moment I had always assumed would come and then it would be time to take the next step. Motherhood in the early 21st century means eventually going back to work to help pay the bills, however, I was feeling a bit grumpy that day, and I thought I would challenge the moment a bit. So, I asked for a sign. Silently, I vowed that if there was anything in the newspaper, conveniently left on the floor in front of the carseat, that exactly matched my skills and interests then I would begin the process of reintering the job market.

    And there it was. A position with an American Indian non-profit. The job description sounded challenging and exciting, but my past experience and deep personal interest in serving the Native American community would/could make this a welcome continuation of my career in the non-profit field. It was located in town, so an easy commute from our home 8 miles away. And they needed someone with exactly my qualifications: non-profit management experience and a bachelor's degree. Well here was the sign if there ever was one. There is that saying, be careful what you ask for, you might get it. Well, here I got it. Now, the ball was in my court.

    After some avoiding, I dredged up my last known resume off the hard drive of our computer. How it had gotten there, I'll never know, as we had upgraded our computer since I had last updated it. Going to the folder, conveniently named by someone "Resumes" I stumbled on a Pandora's box of old life experiences on Microsoft Word going back to 1994. The most recent bore the date 1999. I felt like one of those people who wake up to find themselves in a time warp. What year is it? 2002? How had three years gone by without me even knowing it?

    Well, to make a long story short, 1999 was the year I got pregnant. I had a great job producing a documentary for a production company in Los Angeles. I was living in the Bay Area, so the job required that I fly down to L.A. for a couple of weeks every month. It is true that distance makes the heart grown fonder. It was hard being apart from my husband, but it made being together electric. And after several months of the job, I found myself pregnant. Then, the public television funding for the documentary ran out and I was unemployed and showing.

    I made one last trip to Los Angeles in my fifth month for the premiere of the film. By this time, I was huge, but I did not yet resemble a chiclet like I would a few months later. So, when I stood up in the theater on Wilshire Blvd to receive my applause as the producer, a hush went through the audience. "Ooh, she's pregnant. How beautiful." At that moment, I once again felt that vulnerability one feels during pregnancy. I wondered at the role that my body had thrust me into as a living symbol of well, life. It is something that every woman must think about, but it had an even more profound effect on me under the gaze of this audience. In some way, the survival of American Indians despite the odds, brings out a mixture of grief and gratefulness in most Americans I meet. Our story is one of those stories (and there are many the world over) that seem to connect people with their own well of humanity.

    I remembered how I had insisted that Hank, the editor/assistant director keep as many of the clips of the children of those four families in the final cut of the film. These scenes brought home the joy that the children brought to their families. In Lakota Sioux tradition (and Nakota Sioux my father's tribe), children were never hit and regarded as thinking beings. And it is this calm way of relating to children and the children's buoyant that was the most beautiful thing about the film. I wanted to show another aspect of American Indian culture to the world besides the alcoholism and the poverty which is depicted in the film. Because, it is with these positive fragments of the people we once were that we will begin to piece together a better world for our children. And that world begins in the circle of relationships my father's people call the tiyospaye the circle of tipis a family onced shared on the open plains. I realized in that L.A. theater that even before I was a mother, I had been thinking like one. And being a mother was the furthest thing from my mind six months before sitting in front of the AVID editing machine for hours on end watching these family's lives over and over again.

    As I began to contemplate finding childcare that sinking feeling returned. I wondered at how my grandmother's had done it. They had both worked, not having a choice really. My mother was, now that I thought about it, probably the first woman in the known history of our family to not work. But even that is not entirely true. She was active in the community and managed our family's finances like the accountant she had trained to be. My father might have been the wage earner, but he had to get her approval to spend a penny. This is probably a product of my mother's traditional Navajo upbringing where a man is said to own only his saddle and jewelry. In this matrilineal culture, even the horse belongs to the wife. For my mother, an active supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970's, feminism was a step backwards. While I was growing up she filled my ears with stories of women who had lost everything in divorce and had no credit rating to start over with. Meanwhile, she helped immigrant women start businesses in our community. I think her example taught me that women and motherhood need to be financially respected and protected as they were in traditional Navajo culture. This was while she stayed home and raised us. In the midst of all her activism, she turned down a request to run for mayor of our small town. I always wished she had taken it, but I guess she knew where her the well of her strength came from: in the quietness of her own home, the tempo of our teenage lives and the solitude of her garden at dawn.

    My father's mother worked because she had to feed her seven children. Like many Depression-era husbands, my grandfather abandoned the family when he felt he had no chance at a role as a breadwinner. Raised in a well-to-do mixed blood Nakota family, she carried not only the difficulties of poverty, but the disapproval and scorn of her relatives in the small town where she lived. She took menial jobs cleaning floors for women she once went to school with. It was hard for her, but she now lives her golden years in a beautiful house she bought and paid for herself surrounded by an adoring family. My father honored his mother last summer by putting on a giveaway at the tribal pow-wow. Here our family gave gifts that we had collected all year to the community in my grandmother's name. In his speech, my dad recalled how my grandmother's example of hard work had always been his example when he worked all those years to keep me and my sisters in a nice home with everything we needed. He remembered how she had always been there for us attending every graduation and birth. The regard she had for her children in everything she did is demonstrated in the regard her descendents have for themselves and for her.

    Shi ma saani (my mother's mother) also worked. She worked on her own ranch in the traditional Navajo-style wearing heavy velvet dresses dripping with silver and turquoise jewelry on horseback with her newest baby tied in a cradleboard to the saddle. The ranch ranges over thousands of acres of land beginning with the low level juniper scrub in the foothills of the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, Arizona to the blazing desert mesas along the Little Colorado river on its way to the Grand Canyon. She wove rugs from the wool that she cleaned and carded from her own sheep. These rugs were sold at the trading post and brought in the little bit of hard cash that the family needed to buy necessities like coffee and flour. Self-sufficient during the depths of the Depression they took great pride in sharing their humble fare with the poor, hungry Okies that streamed through their ranch on their way to California. I look at my grandmother today in her late 80's, when she takes down her long black hair from her traditional bun is the hair of a young woman, thick with hardly any gray in it. She's in her 80's, but her active lifestyle seems to only have kept her strong into old age. Shi ma saani speaks very little English and the only phrase I ever recall her saying to me is, "Get a college education." Shi chei's (my mother's father) favorite phrase is, "Where's the restroom?"

    My mother always told me that in the Navajo way it is the woman who determines what the home will be like. Growing up outside the reservation, I saw her being Navajo in a world that was not Navajo and yet, holding a strong vision of how the world should be she kept her people and the Dineh (what Navajo's call themselves) very strong and alive for us. It is a vision that I hope I can hold for my daughter as well.

    Sometimes, when my daughter is asleep I notice how tiny her hands and arms are. It is amazing to me because she is such a huge presence in my life --and very busy rearranging my house with those little, chubby hands. My life since late 1999, has been entirely in service of her every need. Now, I can see how to take the next step, through the example of my mother and grandmothers' lives, how a mother's work can include the whole world outside the tiyospaye in which her children must live.