The dependent mother
Joy Harjo's mother ended up married and divorced very early so that Joy's life was shaped by a youthful and angry mother who was frugal against her will. This led to a serious anxiety about money because they could no longer have the lifestyle that they used to afford. Meanwhile, Joy is just gaining consciousness. Because of the trying times of the post-Trail of Tears era and because of feminist issues relating to supporting oneself with child, they suffer incredibly until finally a suitor comes along to marry Joy's mother and help them.
The gamble
One might say Harjo's mother is forced to gamble romantically. She cannot pretend to know enough about someone without the time to date them and fall in love, but with a child in the home there's really not enough time for that anyway. Plus the money issues are urgent, and there's this very strong, handsome man who seems like he has the funds to help, and he's offering a perfect solution to their problems—in the end she takes the gamble. In the end, she turns up badly because the man is an alcoholic and a poor excuse for a husband or father.
The breaking away from home
The tension buiding up around Harjo's home is leading somewhere crucial; namely it is leadly Joy to an ecstatic rejection of the past and a sovereignty of self. Because her hands were bound for so long, prohibited by her alcoholic father from doing artwork around the house, she now is like a slingshot, swinging from one extreme to the opposite extreme. In the liberal explosion of self, she is opened emotionally to a whole world of new experience, and as if the universe were magnifying those tendencies, she runs into a hippie crowd and starts experimenting with hallucinogens and marijuana.
Becoming the hippie
The archetypal value of this story cannot be overlooked, because it has an important allegorical value that the living memoirist understands and comments upon: a true hippie coming from an abusive, conservative home is introduced to drugs while studying art in school during the late 1960's and early 1970's—this is a living testimony of a real life hippie! And how does she feel about that movement? She feels this allegorical moralism: Yes, that wild exploration made her a true artist, but it also led her to back into the same bad habits that led to her mother's poorly timed pregnancy. She herself became pregnant and repeated the same cycle that her mother manifested.
The karmic cycle of life
From these allegorical associations in tact, the reader can back out from the memoir, taking it all in at once. Comprehensively, what is the major thematic argument of the text? It is rooted in the duality of the memoirist's sense of karma; she is similar and different from her mother. She is also a mother of a poorly timed child with an explosive temper and a bad streak of picking the wrong mates. That part is repeated, which is like a karmic repetition—now Joy's own child will have a chance to break the cycle. Then again, Joy broke the cycle of meaninglessness by observing the beauty of herself and by waging an artistic war against self-hatred.
