That Year

Three years ago my husband and I took an opportunity to work on a community development project. At least that is how it was described to us. We were going to work with youth from a semi-remote First Nation community.
It was an exciting time for our family, we moved our then two year old daughter, our dog and a few of our belongings from our 4 level split in the suburbs to a 12x60 trailer on the reservation. The next 12 months were perhaps the hardest of my adult life. We faced a lot of obstacles and I was completely unequipped to fully deal with them. Firstly, there was our living situation. For 6 months I felt totally unsafe and worried constantly about the wellbeing of our young daughter. What had we done? Was the salary and the experience really worth the toll it was taking on us? In 6 months our new “home” was broken into 6 times. Once right at the beginning of our stay when the culprits broke in and stole all of our electronics, throwing our clothes from one end of the trailer to the other. The majority of weekends we tried to leave the community, get a breath of fresh air and center ourselves for the next week but inevitably we would come home and find a window smashed, our food eaten and a mess in our home. We started taking our televisions and anything deemed valuable with us when we left. I worried about what people would be doing with access to our trailer all weekend. Did they spit in our food? Have sex on our bed? I felt violated every time and then had to face the very community (and likely the very culprits) on Monday morning when I returned to work. There was also just the general sense of uneasiness I would feel if we happened to stay for weekends. Sound travelled easily from one end of the community to the other. We would hear parties but be unable to discern where they were. I am sure we heard gun shots once or twice. For the first month I don’t think Hubby or I slept a wink, we were on edge. We were also strategically placed on a busy trail that people frequented on their quads. Who had decided this was an ideal place to put us? Quads would rip by our trailer at all times of the night. The trailer, like most, had the bedrooms set up on either end, with the door in the middle. After the first night we decided there was no way our 2 year old could be at the other end of the trailer. What if someone came through the door? We compromised and either all squished in the bed or Hubby slept alone on the other end. I can only imagine how stressed he was, having to carry the idea of “protector” with him. In what was surely a budget saving move we were given a real “home” to spend the next 6 months in, a teacherage, just outside the reserve. And by outside I mean, a few steps onto the municipal side. Yet it was quiet and peaceful. A completely different world.

And then there was the work. We were sold on this opportunity as a chance to get down and dirty and work in community. Although neither of us are exactly novices when it comes to community work, and working in First Nation communities (Hubby is Cree and I am Metis). We were excited in the beginning, this program was supposed to be innovative, we could build some of our skills and if it worked maybe bring it back home. The “program” was a disaster. I know pilot projects need work but there was basically no program at all. We faced barrier after barrier in our attempts to pull together curriculum, overcome technology issues and make the course work. It seemed every person involved in the project had been sold a completely different story on what its goals and objectives were.  I had a serious distrust of the person who put it all together.

Not that it was all bad. I certainly loved the people in our program. I still do.  But it was a lot to handle all at once. I remember coming back from Christmas break. I was feeling good, I’d had some time away, gotten to see family. I was re-energized. And then we did our welcome back sharing circle. I gladly shared a few of my Christmas stories and then my students started, among 15 of them there was not one happy Christmas tale. Most of it was parties gone awry. I left the circle feeling depleted. And this was a lot of my time spent with my students. One step forward, ten steps back. The drinking, drugs, sexual abuse, physical abuse. The stories would rip my heart out on a regular basis. I stopped feeling and frantically prayed every weekend that none of them would die in a car accident or an overdose or a beating. Thankfully, none of them did.

The isolation was a killer too. I’m a loner. I have only a few close friends, though I am working to get better at it. But we were so isolated. Who could I talk to? I met no one that I could connect with. I remember playing outside with my daughter (because really what else was there to do) when a local mother walked by with her two young children (think under 5). She was swearing something fierce to them, something to the effect of “don’t be so fucking stupid”, followed by about 10 more f-bombs and more put downs. I took my daughter inside.

When we left the community I was but a shadow of myself. Although, I’ll admit, when I got there I think I was at 60%, maybe 50% on my weakest days. There was a lot of pieces of myself that I needed to work on. Maybe the work just sped up my eventual fall. When we left I found myself at my weakest point. Way down in a place I have never been before. I would love to write a narrative about how I went and lived in the bush and was transformed by ceremony and a return to the land, but the truth is that part came much later. When we left I was 6 months pregnant with my second daughter and I was beyond exhausted. Instead of building my relationship with my husband parts of it had been ripped to shreds. I hated everything to do with the community and started to question whether or not I really wanted to continue to work with Aboriginal people and communities. Up till then that had been my one goal in life, my north star. But did I really want to ‘waste’ my time and my energy? It was a lot to think about.

I tried to continue mothering my daughter when I got home but all I wanted to do was stay in bed. I was spent, emotionally and spiritually. And I was incubating another human being. It took me at least a year to get back to feeling 50%. Building on that I found a really awesome therapist and I started connecting to my spirituality. Although I was raised Catholic, church didn’t appeal to me. Instead I found an incredible Shamanic Healer, Mentor and friend whose ceremony and programs have helped me immensely. And here I am. Three years later, (it’ll be exactly three in March) and what a world of difference there is in my life. I am still struggling with some parts. I find marriage and mothering to be hard work. As is finding my “path” in life. I used to refer to our time away as “the worst year of my life” but now I frame it as “transformative”. I still have a lot to process from that time and I haven’t completely gotten over how painful parts of it were. But I’m working on it.
When I started to put myself back together I realized how far I’d put myself on the back burner. Meditation, prayer, smudging, ceremony, friendship and therapy keep me grounded. This is my story. My story of finding myself again, or maybe it was for the first time, and then trying to keep a sense of being centered as I navigate motherhood, marriage, my career and my life.