On the Road Again
As I struggle with my
conflicting drives to move and not move—an epic battle of instinct versus
rationality—I find myself thinking about an episode in my life I chose to write
about in my book Military Brats, in
the chapter titled “Military Brats as Nomads”:
For
six weeks in October and November of 1978 I was a supremely happy young woman. With the sole exceptions of my wedding and the
births of my children, all of which occurred long afterward, I still rank that
time as the most ecstatic of my life.
But virtually no one I knew then understood that.
It was
not hard to see why. I was drained from
my parents’ bitter divorce after thirty-four years of marriage. My own love relationship had recently
ended. There had been an exhausting
union battle at work. About the only
really good thing in my life right then was the newspaper job I dearly
loved—and to everyone’s shock, I had just quit.
There was no new job lined up, and I had very little money. On the face of it, my actions were
inexplicable, my attitude surreal.
But I
had been seized by a need to move on that was so overwhelming it eclipsed any
sensible notions of sticking out the usual cycle of job queries. More than anything else in the world I wanted
to get out of
I
packed my yellow Honda Civic with the few things I considered really
important: clothes, dictionary, camera,
a portable typewriter, a box full of my newspaper clips. Then I hit the road, headed north under clear
blue autumn skies, a stack of maps beside me and no particular destination in
mind.
Ah,
the exhilaration of it! The past was literally
behind me, the future literally down the road.
I could turn the car—and my life—in any direction I chose. Every road sign signified a new opportunity,
a whole new world of choices and decisions, all of which I would make
myself. As I drove along, happily
pondering whether I should make my new life in
By the
time I reached the Pacific in mid-November, I had fifty bucks to my name. I was worried, but still sure I could pull it
off; I had always known I could survive anywhere, make the best of it. That was a truth I’d learned so long ago it
was as much a part of me as blood and bone.
Only
much later did I realize just how classically military brat that was, and how
my odyssey revealed both the best and the worst of rootlessness.
As an Army
brat, I was so used to moving, to breaking camp one place, setting up in
another it had become the natural rhythm of my existence. In
Happy? Yes, I was happy—I was going home. And home for me was the comfortable
familiarity of constant change and an uncharted future. For me, a modern American Bedouin, life on
the open road, destination unknown, was as delicious as a long drink of cool
water in the searing desert. It was
freedom.
Or was
it? For there was another side to it
that was not free at all: a fatalistic
side in which my wanderings were not so much an exercise in autonomy as an
offering up of my life on the altar of fate.
It may have looked as though I had taken control of my life, but in
effect I had put myself in limbo, awaiting circumstances themselves to make my
choices for me—a striking re-creation of my life on the altar of fate. It may have looked as though I had taken
control of my life, but in effect I had put myself in limbo, awaiting
circumstances themselves to make my choices for me—a striking re-creation of my
life as a military brat. How long could I keep driving—until I got sick or
injured? Until I was sidelined by an
accident or breakdown? Until I ran out
of money, as I ultimately did? I drove
for six weeks, bouncing from city to city in my glorious dance of delusion,
about as autonomous and free as the ball in a pinball machine.
~
Now a lot of years have passed since I lived that episode,
and even since I wrote that passage and in the succeeding pages went on to
analyze what was really going on, and compare it to what I heard from my
interviewees. I have to say that I
understand the instinct to move, or to hit the road, a lot better than I did
back in 1978, thanks largely to the process of researching and writing my
book. But I also have to say that the
idea of packing up my car—again a Honda Civic, coincidentally, although now a
hybrid and not yellow—with just the minimum I need, and hitting the road with
destination unknown, is just as sweet and tempting as ever. I’m not going to act on it, at least not to
that extreme, but I think part of me will always yearn for it.
Last year, on the first military brat cruise (see organizer Marc
Curtis’s Military Brats Registry site, http://www.military-brats.com
), I met a brat and his wife who had really and truly taken the leap. They had both retired from their jobs at the
earliest opportunity. They'd given a lot of
things to their grown kids, put a few things in storage. They sold their house. Then they bought a mobile home and embarked
on a life of non-attachment, driving no more than 150 miles a day, staying here
or there for a few days at a time, heading out whenever and wherever they
please. They visit friends and
family. They sightsee. They park the home and take cruises. They go wherever the mood takes them, and they make
sure not to acquire things as they go because they just don’t have room. They
have no plans to stop any time soon.
I find that so appealing!
Or I think I do. Would I really like floating around as an outsider full
time? Would I really enjoy coming back
to a cramped mobile home every night? Would
I miss community involvement, and recognizing faces at the local coffee shop?
Would I end up feeling like a Hovercraft unable to land?
What do you find yourself feeling as you read the book excerpt above, or the story of the constantly traveling couple?
--Mary
I generally get on line at work, and so I don't have time now to do justice to _all_ the emotions etc.
But what I _think_ is of the first time I got any validation for my experience as a brat from academia. I was in an anthropology class at Caltech, taught by our one and only anthropologist, Dr. Thayer Scudder:
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~tzs/
He was an expert on the Gwembe Tonga, a people who live in what is now Zambia, who had been forced to relocate when the then (1950s) North Rhodesian colonial government decided to build the Kariba High Dam and flood out their home in the river valley.
So, Dr Scudder was also an expert in "relocation stress syndrome." He identified a syndrome (which I don't remember now, this class was during the mid-1980s, and online searches have only found rather vague ones, such as here:
http://www.figt.org/conf2004/tranrep.php
)
of characteristics of people who are forced to relocate (or even maybe anyone who moves, willingly or not). And I identified with it right away; what aspects I didn't recognize in myself I saw in my sisters and brothers, and my mother, and maybe even in Dad too.
It doesn't matter that we were used to it; adapting to handle a stress is not the same thing at all as making it irrelevant. Relocation stress is a simple fact of our lives. The institutions of Fortress life may help us handle it, but they don't magically wish it away.
As for me, I've pretty much reacted by becoming a stick in the mud. I enjoy seeing new places and experiencing new things, but I have zero impulse to pull up stakes and start over somewhere else.
And yet if I imagine it, it is kind of appealing, to just wander from place to place.
In my own experience, every move of course had a very well-visualized destination; the moves were never experiences of freedom in the sense that we didn't know where we were going. My Dad's USAF career in fact had us staying in some places for 3 or even in one case 4 years in a row, and often returning to places we had been in before.
I was not one of those brats who quickly made friends and fit in. As far as school went, when I returned to Tyndall and St John's Catholic school in 6th grade after having been elsewhere for 4th and 5th grade, my experience was "your friends have forgotten you, or at least don't want to commit to being your friend again soon, but your _enemies_ know just who you are and how much they hate you."
But every time I've ever moved since, my destination has been very well defined, even when it was a place I had never seen before. (And that move was a mistake!)
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I had no idea there was such a thing as a "relocation stress syndrome." Thank you for bringing it up. Can you write back and spell out some of the characteristics of the syndrome? I see your web site references--and plan to look in on them--but please do write again and describe the typical indicators of relocation stress syndrome for those who do not choose to follow the links you've provided.
Mary
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Dear Mary and friends,
I have had very little luck finding useful references on the Web to the syndrome. Most of what I turn up are actually academic papers which require subscriptions I don't have access to.
It seems that a lot of the discussion was in the late 1980s and early '90s. One reference is to a paper, #64321 on this page:
http://www.academon.com/lib/essay/71_9.html
Its abstract remarks that "In reviewing archived issues from several Nursing Associations whether they are Psychological, Life Sciences or Sociological, dating back to 1995, it's remarkable that little coverage of Relocation Stress Syndrome exists. Moreover after reviewing 390 different references from the various associations one finds that the problems of Relocation Stress Syndrome are addressed more along the line of attempting to define this malady as a mental illness."
When I cross-referenced the term with "military" I found a lot of rather gung-ho claims in various resources for dependents that suggested that the syndrome could be "beaten" or "prevented."
As I recall from Dr. Scudder's discussions about civilian populations relocated en masse, there was no way to "beat" it. Realization that people _do_ react, physically, to relocation is very helpful in the sense that acknowledging any inevitable fact at least means you aren't alone in your craziness, and that preparations are in order. Necessarily, any group of people who must relocate frequently will have evolved ways of living with it. But to pretend it doesn't have to happen is like trying to skip the stages of grieving or soldier on working through a bout of flu. People often do have to soldier on and they can, but having to pretend it isn't happening to you because you are so tough and special merely adds new problems.
Obviously military culture does deal with it, but I think as much by denial (and thus compounding problems, but in a way that is accepted) as by allieviating it. The fact that wherever we went as brats in a sense our "home"--the only one we knew, was there with us--family still there, another base still there, the mission still there--was a help of a kind.
Here's a DoD "Instruction" from 1990, "Relocation Assitance Programs," which mentions it by the way in point 5.6.1.7
http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/text/i133819p.txt
I think I'll do some library research tomorrow.
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Thanks for this, Mark--and thanks in advance for anything else you turn up. The other day I checked out the links you provided, and did some searching on my own. What I found seemed to be mainly about relocation of senior citizens to nursing homes. I imagine that since the early 1990s, that's been one of the principal ways the syndrome has been applied. But there must be a great deal more out there. Very likely it is in libraries, since much of the discussion would have predated wide use of the Internet.
I'm very interested in this--and I think you are right on target when you say that it is not useful for DoD to put out materials that suggest the syndrome can be "beaten". It is much more useful to develop a thorough understanding of the syndrome and make that understanding available in print for reading, discussion, and as a sp[ringboard for further research.
I'm going to check out your other links right now.mary
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Now THIS in an interesting Blog. I'm a 49 year old Navy Brat, son of a Navy Brat, and I've just recently started to look for possible explanation into what I believe is a sad legacy of bratdom. I was a shy MB, my mom would have to kick me out of the house, telling me "Go make friends!" Of course, eventually, you would make friends- very close friends with kids on the base just like you. The only problem being that usually just as these frienships blossomed, your Dad got orders. The next thing you know it's 4 am and you are driving across country. The strange thing I recall is that you never heard from or attempted to contact your friends again. I think... as an emotional defense, in order to stop the grieving, they soon became blank to you. In 79, my Dad retired and my folks moved to Scotland. I moved out to Washington State. No surprise, is it, that that defensive reaction kicked in, and I have had very scant contact with my family in the last 30 years. I have lived in Seattle now for 27 years.. and after about 20 years, I suddenly realized that Seattle is "home". You'd think I'd be free to develop and maintain close relationships. Experience would indicate otherwise.... I think that... after a certain period, even though no one is moving away, I end my friendships, and my guess is that I do so in order to mitigate the risk. I'm thinking it may be that inner military brat defensive mechanism gone amok. On the outside you would think that I am an affable friendly funny easy to yak with person, and I am... but somewhere deep inside (where it's a secret to me), other forces are acting. And even worse legacy is that now I'm wary of even engaging in close relationships in order to protect other people from my pattern. That's not good!
I've come to these conclusions on my own (after considerable examination of my past), so I suspect... they may be all wrong. I may have just been a weird kid who turned into a weird adult! Albeit a weird adult trying to evolve beyond a self induced (Military Brat induced???) legacy of inner loneliness.
It would be nice to know if there are any other MB's that this sounds familar to, or not. If so, I may be on the right path, if not, I have to look elsewhere.
I'll keeped tuned to this blog, thanks, Mike in Seattle.
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Mike, thanks for finding and commenting on this blog. It's all about our brat programming--strengths, problems, reflexive behaviors, attitudes. I found your comment very interesting. You are certainly describing a familiar syndrome.... Those who have read my book Military Brats know that the behaviors you describe are detailed there in depth. I just noticed that although this blog is housed on a subsite of Brightwell Publishing, there is no easy way to get to the Brightwell Publishing main site from here. I'll fix that right now, so that you and future visitors can visit that site and find out about the book, the documentary film based upon it, and other books about military childhood.
Mary
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