Terese Marie Mailhot: How I overcame feeling broken and dirty

From 18 to 21, I struggled to build a family. There were so many young couples like us: raising a baby on welfare or minimum wage, fighting, making up, and then vowing we would do better, only to have it all fall apart with a past-due bill or a thoughtless word. The verbal aggression, the struggle and the anguish were cyclical, and felt generational at times. Our fights escalated to the most awful words, actions, and reactions. It wasn’t long before I became pregnant again.

I vowed that the pregnancy would be a turning point. I enrolled in an educational program offered by my tribe, and my husband and I attended weekly couple’s therapy sessions. I felt myself growing from a stereotype into a woman with hope for an education, a steady income, and a husband who was willing to grow with me. The fights lessened and the bills started to get paid on time. All the progress was too much for me. I had acclimated to chaos after so many years in crisis, so I sabotaged my marriage at every pass. We started fighting again, and soon we found ourselves in a “domestic disturbance” so bad that the police threatened to take away our son if they were called again. My husband left to return to his parent’s house in the US, and I wouldn’t let him take our son.

It wasn’t long before my husband and his parents called social services, concerned about our child being raised in a “broken and dirty” home. The social workers were kind when they took my child from me. They didn’t assess the house, or ask my friends and family how I was as a mother. They simply came in and politely asked me if there was a place my son could go to until they were done investigating. Not knowing my rights, I let them take my son to my sister’s, where he stayed for several weeks before I was informed by my lawyer that my son was still legally under my care, and social services had no say over the matter. I wondered how a system could do this to a child. I wondered how many Native women they treated with such judgment, such callousness. I had done nothing, but was Native enough for them to assume I didn’t deserve my child. As soon as I brought my son home from my sister’s, my husband filed for sole custody.