Bitterroot by Susan Devan Harness

Author:Susan Devan Harness [Harness, Susan Devan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, FAM004000 Family & Relationships / Adoption & Fostering, SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1086-9
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

12

Too White to Be Indian, Too Indian to Be White

Fort Collins, Colorado, Spring 2004.

I am at Dr. Williams’s office; she is the most recent in a line of therapists I’ve seen. Her space is comfortable: the furniture consists of one couch and two overstuffed chairs, upholstered in lush fabrics of browns and golds, as well as three heavily shaded lamps that throw subdued and delicate shadows on the softly hued, textured, saffron walls. New Age music floats in the background, and its tinkling bells, waterfalls, and birdsongs work to embed themselves into my subconscious, to the point that I am nearly unaware of their existence. I’ve chosen the brown chair instead of the couch, needing to be in control of my personal space—you know, the one that’s about an arm’s length away? I imagine that when the therapist arrives, she will come in, note where I sit, and then write that placement on her pad of paper, where it will become a clue, a guess, a sign, a definition. I inhale, filling my lungs; I exhale, pushing out my anxiety. I close my eyes and feel my pulse moving rhythmically, frantically, throughout my body. In curiosity I place my fingertips over the veins in my wrist. Yes, the rhythm matches the one in my ears.

This is the fifth therapist I’ve seen in twenty-four years. They don’t last. Or rather, I don’t. I never saw any of them for more than two or three sessions. They talk about things that don’t fit or that I discount. Really? Exactly how does adoption fit with PTSD? Or they give me something, a word, a phrase, a diagnosis that grants me enough absolution to scuttle away believing that now I have the key for feeling better, for feeling cured. The last one I’d seen was Dr. Bernard, a marriage counselor who had helped Rick and me through one of our roughest patches, a barren area that had been scrubbed clean by the dysfunctional patterns each of us had grown up with. Suddenly, in the midst of his career taking off and me raising our two sons, our life’s puzzle pieces became frayed and rough, no longer fitting neatly together. Perhaps they never had. Perhaps we had simply learned how to work around them. But we realized that working around them wasn’t a good strategy when only a few connecting threads were left, two of which were our children. With each argument, each blowup, each collision, our marriage boat took on more water. That’s when I got a recommendation for Dr. Bernard. It took us eight sessions and a lot of work, but we were able to climb out of the abyss in full survival mode.

Except I was still unhappy—not with us but with me. So I saw her one-on-one. By session three her frustration with my inability to reach down into the depths of my soul was explicit. “What is this?” she asked, her voice tired as she waved her hands around her eyes. I couldn’t explain the tears that ran in an unstoppable stream for several minutes.

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