The Military Brat Blog

Memories and Words

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:54:14 GMT

Since I wrote the entry “What the Cat Doesn’t Know,” about my childhood impressions of France when my father was stationed there in the early ‘60s, I’ve heard from plenty of brats. Of course: A great many of us spent extended periods in other countries, and were profoundly impressed—or shocked!—by what we found there.

Readers, I want to challenge you to send in the specifics. Write your own recollections of overseas life. Keep it on the brief side, but feel free to write in more than once. Tell us your memories of what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted…. Tell us where, and when, and how old you were. Tell us a story about something funny, odd, mysterious, frightening, embarrassing, beautiful. Let it live again. You know how, in civilian contexts, you learned not to talk about those experiences for fear of being labeled a snob or a braggart? Well, this is a safe venue. We are free here to tell our exotic stories without incurring criticism. Everyone here here will “get it,” and your story, no matter what it is, will give each of us the gift of prompting recollections of our own young, impressionable selves long ago, overseas.

Once I got in trouble for using that word. I was 22, living in Richmond, Virginia, and needed to sell my car before taking an open-ended trip to Europe. I placed an ad saying my car was only two years old and must be sold before I went overseas. The first guy who came to see it was a retired Marine who still sported the haircut and the ramrod posture. He brought his teenage son along—the car would be for him—and he seemed surprised when I turned out to be female. He asked for my husband. I said I was the one selling the car, and would he like to see it? His face turned purple up to the roots of his vertically-charged hair.

“You’re not military?” he snapped. I was surprised.

Then he blasted me.

“That’s deception!” he roared. “You said overseas in that ad. No one could read an ad with that word without thinking you’re military! You deliberately lied in order to sell your car!”

I was blindsided, speechless and unable to defend myself. I even felt guilty. Of course, in those days, not long removed from my particular military family, I had a strong tendency to feel guilty about absolutely everything. It must be my fault. I may not have known it was wrong, but it was still wrong, and I did it. I am guilty. I should be punished. The idea of rejecting the accusation and arguing back never even crossed my mind. I submissively folded in the face of his attack, as though I accepted the premise that overseas experiences are the sole domain of uniformed service members, and I, as a mere child living in Europe, had encroached on that domain and stolen something.

Of course, if someone, Marine or not, barked the same thing at me today, I would know what to say. I would be calm, but I would say:

It’s my word too. I lived it. I earned it. As the child of a career Army family, I served too, in my own way, just like all members of military families. The overseas experience is part of my heritage, and I will not degrade that experience or that service by disavowing a word that comes as naturally to me as it does to you.

So there. Thirty-odd years late, I know, but so there anyway. The difference between that humiliating day in 1974 and now--the result, of course, of much hard work--is this: Knowing where I come from. Knowing who I am. Owning my cultural identity.

So in that spirit, brothers and sisters of our far-flung tribe, send in your stories! Own that experience! Share it!

Overseas, overseas, overseas, overseas, overseas!!

Invisible Tribe

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:13:39 GMT

Last week a long-held dream of mine came true.

Finally, 16 years after my book was first published, I had the opportunity to address a gathering of clinical social workers who assist military families. Turned out the opportunity was due—of course—to the efforts of a military brat: Kitty DeLapp of Virginia Beach, who is herself a clinical social worker. I didn’t even know the idea had come from her until I got to the conference. Thank you, Kitty, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you also to the organizing committee of the Eastern Virginia chapter of the Virginia Society for Clinical Social Work, for being receptive to her suggestion.

It was on Friday, October 26 (which, fittingly enough, also happened to be Pat Conroy’s birthday), that I gave the all-day workshop to about 50 or 60 people. Now only the participants themselves—only two of whom happened to be brats—can say if what I had to impart was something of value that they can use in their practices. But I can tell you that from my side of things, it felt like a need requited to take the messagedirectly to the very people who are in the best position to help parents and children now navigating the challenges of life inside the Fortress, as well as adult military brats in need of clarity about their own lived experience.

The message, of course, is that it makes a huge difference when the care provider has an in-depth understanding of the military-as-culture. I don’t mean the military as a corporate culture, which is how the Department of Defense sees it. I mean culture in the anthropological sense—a culture with its own characteristic beliefs, values, and behaviors. I mean a culture that molds its children in its own image. I mean a culture whose shaping power is so great that we, its children, feel its effects our whole lives through.

I find that there are a lot of people out there in the civilian world who assume they already know everything about the military community. I’ve also found the exact same thing among military brats and military parents. And who can blame any of them, civilian or military? How were they—and we—supposed to see the military in any other way than it had always been perceived? But, based on my research, there is absolutely no question in my mind that the military is as much a culture in the anthropological sense as any other.

It’s easy to see how the truth of the military as a root culture could be overlooked. As cultures go, it is truly bizarre: No geographic center. No defining ethnicity or religion. No language of its own. (Unless it’s…Acronymish?) And to top it off, it is a culture that by and large is carried by the children but not by their parents, the vast majority of whom did not grow up in the military themselves. Those parents are very influenced by the military, but their formation occurred elsewhere—and they regard their stay in the military as an important but temporary phase of their lives. For brats, it is different. You can take the brat out of the Fortress, but you can never, ever take the Fortress out of the brat.

(Entry continued below image from my family's 1946 Christmas card; my brother David, age 6, is at top gun turret.)

Because of the extreme mobility of military life, and because none of the adults know to cultivate an understanding of how the children are shaped by the Fortress, children grow up blind to their cultural roots. This is a tragedy. The fact of the matter is that the only way we can change what needs to be changed in ourselves is by bringing it to the conscious level, and the only way we can value what should be valued is by bringing it to the conscious level.

When I set out to research and write Military Brats, back in 1985, I wasn’t even sure there was a book there to be written. I’d seen the movie “The Great Santini”, then read the novel, and what I had was a question: Was it just coincidence that the Marine family depicted was so much like my own (Army infantry) one? Or, contrary to what I’d always believed, did all of us military brats have roots of a kind? Did we come from a “Somewhere” that had been invisible to us? It only took a few interviews for me to see there was a vast expanse of iceberg stretching down beneath the waters.

The next five years of research and writing were tremendously therapeutic. My ghosts were laid to rest. The depth of understanding I gained from those shared stories empowered me in my personal life, and years later, I continue to learn. Ideally, I think the understanding we brats stand to gain from examining our Fortress roots gives us, finally, solid ground to stand on—and, after the clouds have cleared, a way to see the humor in it all.

That’s the benefit for us brats, the progeny and inheritors of the Fortress, from sharing stories, learning about our legacies, and reflecting on it all. But the benefit for therapists is different. I believe that for therapists, a rich understanding of the military-as-culture is the tool they’ve been missing. It helps them know what to look for, how to better read their clients, how to question their own assumptions about military culture, how to better advise military parents, and how to empower military kids with self-understanding. It all comes from studying the part of the military brat story they didn’t know before—what happens to us after we grow up, and how it all connects to our childhood inside the Fortress.

Thanks, Virginia Society for Clinical Social Work, for letting me have my say.

Quest or Consequence

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:51:53 GMT

Here’s one kind of classic fairy tale that I bet you remember:

Typically, there is a rare and desirable prize—the king’s daughter plus half the kingdom, for instance. Typically, the requisite task seems deceptively easy—for example, answering a single question for some evil hag, monster, or supernaturally powerful knight. Guess right, and you win fame, fortune, and happiness. Guess wrong, and you lose everything. Typically, a great many give it their best shot, only to fail and die forgotten and ungrieved.

I remember one such tale—of the Evil Hag variety, I think--where the question is, What does every woman want? I love that story. First of all, the question isn’t bad. More people should ask that question. Come to think of it, maybe it would be a good idea to require every potential bridegroom to nail this one before the marriage license can be issued. Knowing the right answer would have to come in pretty handy, don’t you think?

The other thing I like about the story is that every bold fellow who steps up to the challenge is just sure he knows the answer. Oh Sisters out there, how not surprised are you about that? Have you ever known a guy who would admit to not having a clue? Of course, in this story, every poor sucker who trots out his perfect knowledge of what every woman wants—a husband, gold, a castle, many children, a long life, whatever—is rewarded by the witch triumphantly crowing, “Wrong!” and zapped on the spot. Then along comes our hero, who, after observing his hapless competitors for a while, prudently goes off to seek counsel from those wiser than himself. When the old hag puts the question to him, “What does every woman want?,” he is able to answer, “What every woman wants is to be right.” The old hag then claps one clawed hand to her forehead and crumbles to dust. Presumably—although the story somehow never satisfies us on this point—the hero goes on to wed the princess and become the considerate, respectful, and emotionally secure husband she has every right to expect.

But some similar tales of quest and consequence involve truly absurd questions with none of the practical applications of the story above. I remember one where the wicked queen’s question is, What did I say nine years ago? The hero of course, bizarrely, gets the answer right. It’s very hard for that story to make sense, unless you make the evil being a politician.

Oh man, you’re thinking to yourself. This Wertsch woman (that’s Wertsch, not witch) has gotten way off task. How the heck can this review of life-or-death consequences for nearly impossible questions be tied in to the military brat experience? Okay, okay—point taken. But there is a relationship. In fact, I have an impossible question for you:

What does every human being want?

The question, please understand, is not a genderless version of the one above. Nor is it about basic survival--let’s assume the criteria for basic well-being have been met. Now how would you answer that question? Your answer has to ring true for every human being in the world who is of normal intelligence and reasonable sanity. Think about it for a little while, because I’d like to know your thoughts on the subject—and I’m about to trot out my own theory here.

I believe that what every human being wants, no matter gender, ethnicity, age, or economic circumstance, is to be significant.

What each person considers significant, of course, will vary; some would say wealth. Others, power. Still others, good works, or terrorist acts, or wise parenting. While there are obviously many variations, the common denominator would be that every single one of them yields a feeling of personal significance—the person has made his or her mark, and has therefore justified his or her existence.

Now here’s my spin. I speculate that whatever answer most folks would give to that question would be strongly reflective of the culture in which they were raised or which they have subsequently adopted—because it would have something to do with what they understand is valuable. I have no proof of that, but it’s just common sense. That doesn’t mean that people find it easy to figure out what constitutes the best route to a feeling of significance. But in some cultures—some very intense and exacting cultures—the answer to the question of the best way to harvest a feeling of significance is practically second nature.

And that, Brothers and Sisters of the Tribe, is the notion that ties tales of quest and consequence to my eternal theme on these pages, military brat cultural identity.

I believe that because of where and how we were raised--in that foreign country called the U.S. military, so very alien to American civilian society—all of us grow up knowing the answer, and that answer is serving a cause greater than ourselves. This notion is so much a part of us that we have no memory of learning it. It is a kind of deep knowledge that for us has always been there. It sometimes comes as a surprise to find that many civilians don’t seem to know this, or at least not in a way we recognize.

Or am I on the wrong track? Do you have a different answer to the impossible question, What does every human being want? Or even if you agree with my answer of “a feeling of significance,” do you disagree that for military brats universally, the answer is service? Write in. Tell us.

What the Cat Doesn't Know

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:22:51 GMT

The fact is, if my father hadn’t royally pissed off his commanding general in the twilight of his career, I would never have discovered—some 40 years later--the surpassing weirdness of the giant orange tabby cat now stretched massively across the expanse of books and file folders next to my computer.

I promise that by the end of this entry, you will understand what that means.

You will also know why there are two shelves’ worth of mysteries near my bed that—I guarantee--no one else in my book-loving, genre-exploring family will ever voluntarily open.

My father, you will need to know, was a gifted infantry officer afflicted with an ungovernable temper. There was an argument with his equally temperamental and vastly more powerful boss. When he should have shut up and dealt, he didn’t. The end result was that he missed promotion and was ordered to take an assignment far removed from his infantry talents. The next three years were misery for him, and I really don’t think he managed to pull anything positive from the situation. But in that funny way life has of tossing in one variable that winds up changing everything, at least for someone, those three years of agony for him were a godsend for his daughter. I was transformed in that time. I have lived a different life, with different attitudes, interests, and priorities, than I might have otherwise. And I am deeply grateful for it.

My father’s unwanted assignment took us to Paris, France. I turned 10 on the sea voyage to Europe, and 13 shortly after we sailed back. It was the early 1960s. France was not the sleekly modern, wealthy place it is today; the phone system was spotty, the tap water undrinkable. Television broadcasts only took place from 6pm to 11pm. The vast majority of the population did not own toothbrushes. Men relieved themselves in hideous pissoirs right there on the pavement; you could plainly see their pant legs and shoes below the metal screen, and hear them at their foul business, the acid stink of which saturated the air for a full block in every direction. Metro stations and pedestrian tunnels smelled the same way. The streets of Paris, even in the most exalted arrondissements, saw relatively few elegant French women in silk dresses and perfumed furs—but every street had its poor workers in bright blue jumpsuits, reeking of garlic and harsh cigarettes. I vividly remember the legions of old widows, garbed in black from head to toe, with frail, stooped bodies and faces ravaged by history. They were everywhere toiling under unwieldy loads or begging with red, cracked hands. Sometimes we had to carefully step around one of them sprawled dead drunk on the sidewalk. France had not yet recovered from World War II, let alone its long failed struggle to keep its colony in Vietnam—the bitter end at Dien Bien Phu had taken place just a few years before, in 1956--and now it was embroiled in war again, against the revolutionaries seeking independence for Algeria. The president of France was a tall and arrogant military man, General Charles de Gaulle. Ours was John F. Kennedy, whose sympathetic stance toward the Algerian revolution made Americans extremely unpopular in France.

I can remember how shocked I was that French people willingly ate smelly, oozing cheese; that despite the fact they had no dishwashing machines, they seemed set on dirtying as many dishes as possible in the course of a single meal; that meals went on forever, and sometimes the entrée was horsemeat; that waiters went out of their way to make life miserable for their customers, even the French ones, and this was normal. Hotel rooms had something right there in the middle of the room that looked just like a toilet except for the faucet handles, only it was not a toilet—the real toilet was inconveniently placed in its own room, down the hall--and I could not for the life of me figure out what the heck this ugly non-toilet was good for. French people drove small, finless, astonishingly ugly cars, like the lightweight “tin can” Deux Chevaux and the pointy, squashed-looking Citroen, and they drove them like maniacs. Traffic jams were vastly more entertaining than in the United States, because there was always the possibility that one driver would take umbrage at another, and both would jump out and shout insults while shadowboxing, neither of them ever landing a punch. When French people conversed, it sounded like they were underwater and didn’t realize it.

France was Alien. France was Other. At the beginning, when I was 10, I considered it hardship duty. That first year, when I was in 5^th grade at Garches Elementary, the DoD dependent school, my Girl Scout troop went on a field trip to downtown Paris, where part of the American film about the D-Day invasion, “The Longest Day,” was being filmed in a studio. We met two of the film’s superstars, Red Buttons and John Wayne. I remember John Wayne smiling at us like an indulgent grandfather and asking, in his amazingly John Wayne-like voice, “Well, so how do you girls like it, living in France?” I jumped to respond, desperately wanting his acknowledgment and approval. “I HATE it!” I yelled, thinking it was the most patriotic thing to say.

Little did I know that within six months, everything would change. I decided I really wanted to learn French. My parents wanted this, too. I was enrolled in a French school, L’Ecole Internationale, in St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris. It was a very large (at least in my memory) French public school, but it was also known as SHAPE School because of the large portion (maybe 20%) of military kids from NATO member countries who attended in the days when SHAPE (I know I don’t need to tell you that’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) was located in Paris. I spent the next two years at that school, for the French equivalents of sixth and seventh grades.

It was an extremely challenging experience, and picking up the language was the very least of it. The basic educational format hadn’t changed much in 300 years. We learned by rote memorization and recitation. Built into the top right hand corner of every desk was an inkwell with bright purple ink, and we would dip in our pens and copy into our daybooks (cahiers du jour) what the teacher wrote on the board. Our handwriting had to be the exact reflection of his; no individuality was allowed. At the end of each day, the teacher collected the books and we were graded on our neatness and mimicry. Our teacher, Monsieur “D”, a corpulent, perpetually angry man, had black hair combed straight back from his forehead. His eyes were coldly blue. He never smiled. He wore gray pants, a navy cardigan sweater, a shirt and tie, black well polished slip-on shoes with small tassels, and thin, silky looking, unAmerican gray socks. In every gesture, every word, every penetrating look, he was powerful. No, that's wrong. He was immensely powerful. No. He was God Incarnate—all gods, from every culture, collapsed into one massive, searingly dangerous presence. He was possessed of all authority, all rectitude, all knowledge, and, therefore, he was naturally entitled to use any means of punishment he could conceive in order to discipline our unruly, worthless, ignorant selves and bring us into the clear light of Order, Truth, and Unquestioning Obedience.

That’s how it came to be that on my first day in his class I found my head the target of a piece of chalk hurled by Monsieur “D” (even now I hesitate to use his real name here lest he or his dark minions come after me) when I was unable to answer his question. It was January, and he knew perfectly well that I did not yet know one word of French. But that was nothing for Monsieur D. I also saw, on many occasions, how he disciplined others—especially little Eric Gregoire, the only black child in the class, who was small, skinny, quiet, and from Martinique. Of course, like the other French kids in the class, he spoke French perfectly, but he could never please Monsieur D, who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in yelling at Eric, picking him up by one ear, well off the floor, then throwing him down and dragging him, still by one ear, to the back of the room where the sobbing boy was made to sit under a table until class was dismissed.

Even my rearing under a ruthless Army infantryman with an ungovernable temper and an alcohol addiction did not prepare me for that.

But I survived, and I learned French, and the next year I had the big kid privilege of changing classes, with many subject-specific teachers, only two of whom were hate-filled and dangerous like Monsieur D. Somehow, along the way, without even realizing it and despite the more distressing aspects of the experience, I internalized something of French culture that changed me forever. The same kid who felt it her patriotic duty to “hate” France in 5^th grade, had become, by the end of 7^th grade, a kid who felt both American and French, who treasured every moment in France, and who was not at all ready to go back to the States when the time came to do just that.

I always thought I would go back to France to live, because an important part of me needs to do that. I even tried twice, in my twenties, but could not find a way to work legally. My life took another path, a good one, but it has never involved living in France. So I live my life in the U.S., and I try to find ways to feed that part of me that longs for immersion in French culture. I go to French movies. I visit French web sites. That stack of books by my bed is all French novels, mostly mysteries, which transport me like no other reading matter. When I really want to memory-trip, I pick up one of my 20 or so mysteries by Georges Simenon, because many of them take place in Paris of the early 1960s—the Paris I knew and can picture vividly.

One thing I do not do, ever, is trot out my French in a French restaurant in this country, or in any other public situation. That seems showy to me, and elitist. Unfortunately, in the U.S. French still has a strong connotation of snobbish elitism—and I have such a visceral revulsion for elitism that I will go out of my way to avoid validating it, even if that means actively hiding my French when I really shouldn’t, and even if it means missing opportunities to meet and make friends with French people. It’s a truly painful dilemma for me, but if I haven’t resolved it in all this time, I suppose it’s unlikely I ever will. Maybe that’s one reason I still long to live in France—that’s the only place I would be free of this dilemma, the only place I could express this hidden part of myself without shame.

What, on balance, did I gain from those childhood years in France, besides a taste for French mysteries and an unrequited desire to go back?

I learned the deliciousness of being an outsider.

I learned how a foreign language is an open portal into another world.

I gained a keener sense and appreciation of my own Americanness, even as my perspective became more global.

But most of all, I learned to love the contradiction of belonging/not belonging, of orientation/disorientation. I like being slightly off balance culturally. I like the incongruities my childhood years in France bred in me. I cherish the active curiosity it gave me about other cultures, other ways—and the tolerance that goes hand in hand with that.

And when on rare occasion I have the chance to walk freely in another culture, and I find I can, at least mentally, ‘disappear’ into it for a while, all senses alert, all channels open…. When, in the course of such a stroll I sense that a decision to go down this bustling side street, or that one, could lead to adventure…. When everything, through the lens of another culture, seems lit up and worth noting, and even the most mundane object takes on an exotic cachet…. Well, it’s at times like these that I feel most alive--and that’s when I thank my lucky stars for my foreign immersion as a child, and for the profession that sent my father to a place where his daughter could lose herself in another culture and gain a much richer perspective to inform and guide her the rest of her life.

However, I still have that little problem of needing to indulge my French side in secret, which is how I discovered the flipped-out weirdness of my cat. You see, one morning at the kitchen table, realizing I was alone in the house, I took the opportunity to, as it were, scratch my cultural itch. As one is wont to do in such circumstances, I decided to whistle the “Marseillaise.” No sooner had I begun than I heard a squeal of cat protest from the next room, followed by a heavy thump as our (very large) cat hit the floor. As I whistled on, the cat jumped up on the table and began pacing back and forth, swishing his tail angrily. I continued. Suddenly, with flashing amber eyes, he leaped straight for my face and boxed me on both cheeks with his paws. I couldn’t believe it. He’d never done anything like that in his life.

My family didn’t believe me when I told them, so to save my honor, I again launched into whistling the “Marseillaise.” This time the cat bit me on the elbow.

Since then I’ve tried whistling other tunes, but the cat doesn’t react. It’s only the “Marseillaise” that drives him to maim his owner.

This was disconcerting to me for a long while, for two reasons. First, I know my cat really loves me. If he only knew why I feel compelled to whistle the “Marseillaise”, he would surely indulge me. Second—and most importantly—his behavior threatened to undermine a useful theory of mine. I believe that all cats are French, and all dogs are American. Their behavior makes that obvious. So how could a cat possibly hate the “Marseillaise”? It was unthinkable.

Then it came to me. Of course! My cat is not culturally confused at all. He is as French as they come. The reason he hates the great rallying song of the Revolution, the most rousing and beautiful of all national anthems around the world, is that, of course…my cat is a monarchist.

If I ever get to return to France, I plan to pack the cat. We're heading to Versailles.

Cultural Amnesia

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:17:00 GMT

Recently, scientists have found that amnesiacs have difficulty imagining the future.

I read this in the thought-provoking “Findings” feature of a Harper’s Magazine (my favorite magazine in all the world), which every month publishes a kind of collage of research findings of all sorts to top off the issue.

I don’t know what scientists take away from this finding. Nor does it really matter to me for the purposes of this blog. What interests me is the way that finding resonated for me as a military brat.

Amnesiacs can’t recall the past, so they can’t imagine the future. I'm supposing this means that past lived experience provides a kind of mental scaffolding on which we build our projections of the future. If the “scaffolding” is missing, as in the case of amnesiacs, maybe it is not possible to map out a tentative future because there is in effect no mental record of a map of the past.

An amnesiac, it follows, would have to live very much in the moment. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Isn’t that something we brats learned to do, to survive?

Now of course I am not saying that military brats can’t mentally recall the past we have lived. But the finding does raise an interesting question concerning the effects of our peripatetic childhoods. What kind of mental “scaffolding” of past lived experience are we likely to have? What does the typical scaffolding of a childhood spent in the military culture look like? Wouldn’t it be a bit of a structural oddity, thrown together from an amalgam of found objects, mismatched parts, and pieced-together bits? There would be no overall design, no solid, consistent structure. While our hodge-podge scaffolding might not collapse, it wouldn’t exactly inspire confidence as the underlying support for building a vision of the future, either. It is such a thrown-together, chaotic affair, it doesn’t suggest a convincing blueprint for what the next phase of building should look like.

In other words, I’m wondering if the many moves experienced by military brats growing up make for such a crazy quilt of lived experiences that, on some level, we have unusual difficulty figuring out our long term life possibilities and planning accordingly.

I noticed this among the brats I interviewed for my book, who seemed to live life in a rather reactive mode, responding to events rather than planning a path forward. I already put this idea out there, in the “Legacies” chapter (see pages 351-354). There I tied it to what I call a distorted relationship to time. I refer you to it, because it does have a lot to do with this blog subject, but the point is that it all comes down to the same thing.

Whether we call the problem a flawed perception of time or an incoherent set of lived experiences, it can be traced back to moving many times at a young age. This would not apply to a civilian family that is unsettled early on but then stays tied to one place after that. It applies to families in which children grow up with the understanding that no place is forever and there will always be another move. A childhood set against a backdrop of transience may be the key factor in a compromised ability later on to project the future for ourselves.

Long term planning. It’s challenging for everyone, but I suspect it comes more naturally to rooted civilians. I say this based on a great many interviews and conversations with brats, and on examining my own life. We brats are good for planning a couple of years out, but after that it gets really tough. If you are a brat who figured out at a young age that you wanted to follow a path through medical school, or law school, or graduate school of any kind—and actually stuck with it--stop and give yourself a big pat on the back. There are a whole lot of us out here who just couldn’t get our thoughts around so long a timeline.

One of the manifestations of cultural amnesia is a kind of passivity. I recall, for example, the words of an Air Force general’s daughter I interviewed for my book. She accepted each childhood move as it came, but was never one to go out and seize her opportunities. “I figured it would all be decided for me, so I didn’t have to make a decision. I had a tendency to wait and be overcome by events. And I know I have a pattern of that now.”

Wait and be overcome by events.

Isn’t that what amnesiacs do?

One from the Heart

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Mon, 28 May 2007 12:09:00 GMT

Some Memorial Days, I feel good. Those are the ones where I stay focused on the positive feeling that comes from giving our veterans the respect and gratitude they deserve. The ones when I feel I pay my dues of honoring memory and sacrifice, and go on to enjoy the bright sunlight, the breeze, the food and fellowship.

I’m having trouble this year. I am honoring our vets today, and I am remembering, respecting, thanking. But I’m not finding it easy to then go on with what I’m expected to do, which is to compartmentalize my feelings so that I can enjoy the sun and the breeze and make my contribution to food and fellowship.

We’re in the fourth year of a bad war in one country, the sixth year of an unstable and worsening situation in another. We’re losing good people. Our returning veterans, whether career military or Guard/Reserve, are suffering wounds both physical and psychological. Their families are under enormous emotional and financial stress. I am not making a political statement with these words. I do not believe in using this blog, which is for all brats regardless of political persuasion, to advance one political perspective. I am merely stating what we all know to be true. Military service is dangerous and the cost to those brave men and women who volunteer, and to our whole society, is incalculable. Today I’m hurting for our warriors and their loved ones, and I know you are as well. But hurting, passively and silently, is not helping those who need help.

Last year on Memorial Day Weekend I wrote a blog which was inspired by a public radio broadcast, “The Soul of War,” on the American Public Media program “Speaking of Faith.” This year, it was rebroadcast on Sunday morning, and I listened again, printed out the transcript to study. Chaplain John Morris, the guest interviewed by host Krista Tippett, has served in Iraq and continues to work with National Guard and Reservist veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point in this rich discussion, he spoke of the importance of rituals that can help both returning warriors and the communities to which they return. I quote from the transcript:

Maj. Morris: …we don’t have a lot of rituals, and we need one for this…. In Medieval days, in some parts of Europe, the priest would go with the soldiers, raised from the villages to go fight, and you know, hear their confession prior to going to battle, give them last rites, and send them to war. So that’s a very stark psychology. ‘Hey, you may die, so we need to make things right with God.’ Then when they came home, they were stopped before they entered the village. Stripped off their clothes that they had fought in, bathed, heard confession again, celebrated the Eucharist, and then allowed back in the village. Now, what were they saying there? ‘You know, there needs to be some business done with God and with the community prior to allowing you to rejoin us. We need to leave the old out here.’

[for the full transcript of the interview and other info, go to

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/soulofwar/index.shtml]

There are a lot of things our society has not thought through. A lot of energy is misdirected, a lot of needs go unmet—and this is true for our service people and their families as well as for other sectors of our society.

I’d like to make a small suggestion to my brother and sister brats out there. Memorial Day should be a meaningful day for us, meaningfully observed. I would like to recommend adding a compassionate dimension to our individual annual observance. One way is to make a financial contribution to an organization that helps veterans and their families. If you already do so, thank you. If you are interested and want to know where to donate, you might go to the web site Military.com, and look over their extensive list: http://www.military.com/benefits/resources/support-our-troops#4. There are many excellent options. This year I picked the Unmet Needs program of Veterans of Foreign Wars. This program helps financially stressed military families cover expenses, and 100% of your donation goes to the family since VFW already received a large corporate grant to cover all operating expenses of the program for five years.

A monetary contribution may seem a small thing, but it provides real help. On a day more known for road trips and picnics, it is a gesture of respect and appreciation that comes straight from the heart of compassion.

And it makes it easier to enjoy the sun and the breeze.

Chipped, Cracked, and Gloriously Imperfect

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:16:20 GMT

Are you familiar with the NPR series called “This I Believe”? Each Monday on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” we hear a short essay by a listener about a guiding belief or idea. In the year or so since the series began, we NPR enthusiasts have heard a wonderful array of personal convictions.

Well recently, while I was driving home from the grocery store with bags of Gatorade and frozen popsicles for my son who’d begun his Christmas vacation with stomach flu, I asked myself what I would write about if I were so inclined, understanding that most of the super-important convictions have already been covered. To my surprise—for I had expected to be stumped-- an answer popped into my head immediately, and it was not at all what I would have predicted.

It was the title of an essay: In Praise of Imperfection.

The next thing I realized is that this is most definitely the choice of a military brat.

It’s taken 30 years of adulthood for me to embrace the beauty of the chipped, the cracked, the smudged, the not-quite-right. This is to say nothing of Tasks not quite finished, Ambitions not yet realized, Personal Failings not yet completely addressed. Thirty years, the length of an entire career, is a long time. But it does not strike me as an unreasonable length of time to undo the programming of my youth.

The spoken directives were uncompromising and unrelenting: Give 110 percent of yourself, 100 percent of the time. Your ‘best’ is not enough—go back and get it right. Of course there are very good legacies from this, and I would not wish to overlook or undervalue them. The inculcation of high personal standards is one of the most valuable things a child can develop, and I like to think it has been the guiding star of my professional life. It’s a kind of idealism that is at the core of my political convictions as well: the belief that all labor, when well and honestly done, has dignity and should be respected. That was definitely part of the warrior values that were implicit in the Fortress. Every single military kid ever born got a good healthy dose of this, and to this day I think it is one of the key values we carry and one that too often contrasts with what we find in the civilian world.

But perfectionism-as-problem is another creature entirely. It’s a very dark thing. I tend to think that for us brats it was more the unspoken instruction, the perceived expectations that had the insidious effects—especially, it must be said, in the context of the exacting environment of the Fortress itself: every inch of it polished, trimmed, whitewashed, and aligned, with perfect right angles, and inhabited by beings who were starched, pressed, buttoned-up and spit-shined, every one of them. You have to admit, that was different from the civilian world.

On top of that, for many military kids (though thankfully, not all) this was combined with a flesh-and-blood parent who was perpetually demanding, angry, and withholding of praise. That becomes a trap in which the child, desperate for parental approval, is made to live in a perpetual state of unworthiness.

In my book I quoted a clinical psychologist and Air Force brat I called Sarah, who said that perfectionism was one of the biggest problems she sees among her mostly female clientele, many of whom were military brats. “Most of the women I see are super conscientious and responsible,” she told me. “They have superegos that will not quit. If they make mistakes, they see themselves as ‘bad.’ The tendency for women perfectionists is to focus on being the ‘perfect person.’” Or as one of my other interviewees put it, it’s like living on a treadmill that never stops.

Sarah came to believe that the military background contributes heavily to the development of perfectionists. She said, “The rigid boundaries of behavior [in the military] are so contradictory to the way life ought to be. In the military things are divided into right and wrong, good and evil, life and death; there is no middle ground. That’s the message.”

But the middle ground is the most interesting, enriching, and creative place to be. Endless perfection is boring. Endless unworthiness is a devastating dead end. The middle ground is where you try, and fail, and learn the gifts of failure. It’s where you create, experiment, expand upon, modify. It’s where you can follow an idea or a vision, where you can choose to live life out of balance for a while to learn from the challenges it brings. It’s where you allow yourself to choose.

I understand why the Fortress must be a place of high and exacting standards, with penalties for imperfection. It can’t be any other way. But it is not healthy for those of us who as children were socialized into that environment, to carry perfectionism forward as the impossible goal, the endless refrain of self-reproach.

Consider the hidden hubris in perfectionism: the idea that perfection is possible. It is because of this that the Amish (and the Shakers before them) deliberately weave an error into each weaving, or sew a mistake into each quilt. The imperfection is the human signature, an acknowledgment before the world that we offer our best effort in an attitude of humility, embracing our fallibility. So when a military brat castigates himself or herself for some imperfection, there is, paradoxically, a kind of arrogance embedded in those self-condemnations. A healthy self love, it follows, involves learning to shed that angry voice, to love our error-prone selves, to cherish the insights won through failures and wrong choices.

I read a story in the New York Times yesterday about Jun Kaneko, a Japanese sculptor living in Kansas who makes gigantic ceramic statues. They are so large, they take a year to air dry, after which they are bisque fired to give them a lasting hardness. Sometimes these huge structures, the products of long planning, much material, and a tremendous amount of work and patience, emerge from the bisque firing with large cracks. There were a few like that in the studio when the New York Times reporter came to visit. But, the reporter wrote, Mr. Kaneko “was hoping to salvage these by incorporating the cracks as decorative elements, an approach he related to the Zen concept of Sabi, the embracing of flaws.” As I understand it, the idea of Sabi applies to objects that are irregular in shape, and somehow flawed. In their imperfect being, these objects allow for reflection upon impermanence, humility, ambiguousness. It is an aesthetic principle which encourages reflection, intuitive insight, and a kind of holistic experience of the object which would be impossible if the flaws were not there.

When I was in Jungian therapy some 25 years ago, I would write down all my dreams and discuss them with my analyst. I remember vividly the dream that clearly marked my therapeutic victory: There was a powerful vampire who had been terrorizing many young women, but especially me. He lived in a magnificent home that resembled a white stuccoed Roman palace, with a great deal of marble, a central interior courtyard, and many beautiful and priceless art objects. I’d had dreams about him before, and each time I had been unable to fight him off. But this dream was different. I was filled to bursting with a righteous anger, and I unleashed its full fury on his house, knowing he was inside. The force I released, like an unstoppable tornado, destroyed him and reduced his house to rubble. It was hugely satisfying, but the dream didn’t leave it at that. After the dust settled, I explored the ruins, knowing that I was fully entitled to keep anything of value I might find. To my great joy, I found a gorgeous Chinese enameled vase, more than waist high, from the Ming dynasty. Incredibly, in this scene of total destruction, this vase was completely intact and in perfect condition. I set it carefully in a safe place, as some unseen observer commented from the background that this vase was a priceless treasure, and I had done well to find it. I continued to poke around, and a short time later found its mate: a second huge Ming vase that clearly was meant to go with the first. It was a complete set—what a miracle. Then to my dismay I noticed the long crack going up the side of the second vase. It wasn’t about to fall apart, but it was clearly damaged. What a shame, I thought at first. But then the unseen observer spoke, confirming my next thought: No, it is not a shame. The crack makes it even more valuable.

I’ve been thinking about the gifts of imperfection for the last few weeks, ever since that night I was driving home fro the grocery store. It must have been somewhere in the back of my mind when, last night, I cast about for some bedtime reading and picked up an old copy of Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship, by Jungian analyst Thomas Moore. Probably, therefore, it wasn’t just coincidence when his words on page 41 leaped out at me:

“Another problem with the idea of self-improvement is that it implies there is something wrong with who we are. Everyone wants to be someone else, but getting to know and love yourself means accepting who you are, complete with your inadequacies and irrationalities. Only by loving the soul in its entirety can we really love ourselves. This doesn’t mean that we can’t hope to live a fuller life or become a better person, but there is a difference between self-improvement and the unfolding of the soul. In the latter we don’t take on an attitude of perfection; rather, we draw closer to those things that we feel as imperfect and let them be the openings through which the potentiality of the soul enters into life.”

The Physics of Rootlessness

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:56:34 GMT

Recently I read the memoir Istanbul by the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He grew up in one neighborhood in that city, and even now lives very close by. The whole book is an ode to rootedness, but I remember one small bit, just a sentence or two, more than anything else. Its very foreignness stopped me cold, and not because it was Turkish, but because it was so intensely rooted I was stunned by the contrast to my own experience.

I imagine Pamuk would be very surprised that such a mundane snippet of childhood would affect any reader as it did--all he mentioned was that he and his cousins played a game as they walked the familiar streets to and from school. One kid would point to a storefront and they'd all shout out the succession of identities of that place over the years they'd known it: Shoe repair! Pharmacy! Bakery! Bookshop!, vying with one another for speed and accuracy. Somehow that snippet captured for me the essential difference between their luxury of rootedness, and my own childhood in 20 different neighborhoods. Rooted people can pick a familiar place and expand their memories backward like an accordion, gathering up all its past incarnations and sweeping them forward to inhabit the spot again in a moment of shared recollection. It's as though their rootedness allows them to inhabit a different dimension: space-time, to coin a phrase.

Maybe that's the difference right there. Rooted folks get to live in four dimensions, while we transients are limited to three.

Maybe that's how they are able to stay in one place so effortlessly: they're used to using time as an organizational tool. How useful that must be, to have people, places, and experiences all organized behind you through the medium of time. By contrast, I the time-challenged transient, mysteriously tethered to one city for the past 11 years, find staying in one place absolutely exhausting. I am amazed at how much more complicated life seems, when lived experience in one place starts to pile up on itself. It's so...untidy!

Part of my longing to move, I feel sure, is just this need to simplify everything and start fresh in a more orderly and organized way, taking in new information and people-connections in nice manageable bits and sorting them out as I go. The way things are now, I want to lodge a protest with someone, somewhere, if I only knew who. (Who's in charge here, damnit! The military brat wants to know!)

I'd say, What do you mean I have to remember people and keep track of the interactions I've had with them over the past dozen years! Don't you think that's a little much??? And what's this about having to keep the same identity the whole time, huh? Come on! What if I'm sick of it? Can't I just box it up, well-used and frayed about the edges but still serviceable, and take it to Good Will for a tax credit? Don't you think we've gotten the use out of the thing by now? I mean, yes, I accepted this duty assignment and have fulfilled it to the best of my ability, but you can't keep extending the tour of duty like this...forever...can you??? Aren't there enough rooted people out there already, without indulging in this kind of back door draft???

If anyone out there has a lead on who's in charge in this messy civilian society, would you please let me know? I think I'd like to lodge a complaint in the name of the Young Turks.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:02:00 GMT

In the early 1980s, Czech author Milan Kundera wrote a highly-acclaimed novel called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As soon as I could, I bought the English translation and started to read. It was a good novel, a story of modern angst, Communism, the search for meaning, relations between men and women. I liked it, but as I finished it I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, though that had nothing to do with Kundera’s artistry.

It was the extraordinary, magnificent title of the book that had really grabbed me from the first. I identified with it, at once and forever. The title seemed to promise a literary mirror into which I’d instantly wanted to gaze, hoping to see myself more clearly. I’d begun to read with the anxious hope that Kundera’s book would dangle some revelatory insights before me, or at least raise some compelling questions like signposts for me to follow. But the novel went off in another direction, and I was left standing at the crossroad.

Decades later, that title still haunts me. I love it. It is one of the most perfect phrases I have ever heard. I can’t imagine a more eloquent encapsulation of yearning and powerlessness, hope and despair, beauty and insubstantiality. In those four words there’s enough meaning and mystery to feast on for a lifetime.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the phrase that recurs every time I reflect on my untethered life, my world without a geographic center, my unquenchable urge to move again and again without end.

Unbearable. Lightness. Of Being. What does that conjure up? Floating…free of gravity…the perfect vantage point to observe or to describe what we see below…a beautiful freedom of movement, without logic or end…the very essence of mutability, the very essence of potential, the very essence of unhindered thought…but, fatally, doomed forever to be a wispy fog incapable of completing its evolution into a substantive, permanent form. I think there is a Greek myth about this…what is it?

We military brats have lived dozens and dozens of places, few of which remember us, and we have known tens of thousands of people, few of whom hold us in their thoughts. We are incredibly adaptable. We can transform ourselves to a large degree, to become, for a time, what others wish us to be. We are good at this, almost shamanic. We grow up learning to pick up and shed accents, slang, manners of dress and attitude and behavior. We are quick studies at mirroring the people around us. We are natural actors, disappearing into a new role, then shrugging it off like a discarded silk caftan pooling in iridescent folds about our feet, already forgotten, as we reach for a completely different garment in which to lose ourselves.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being describes how I feel most of the time. It is familiar to me in the way I imagine Homes are to people with roots. It is unbearable, but obviously it is also quite bearable. It is light and unfinished, and yet oddly permanent. I suffer in it, but I don’t really dislike it. It is what I know.

The Problem with Not Moving

Mary Edwards Wertsch — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 15:07:00 GMT

When we moved halfway across the country to Saint Louis 11 years ago, I really patted myself on the back. I’d applied all my accumulated moving skills in a masterly way, and the uprooting and transplantation that resulted were a tour de force of planning, organization, and efficiency. If there were an Oscar or a Grand Prize or a Nobel for The Perfectly Executed Move, then Baby, I woulda been a contendah.

It was about six months later that I began to realize something was amiss. It wasn’t a problem with Saint Louis, which we liked a lot. It wasn’t my husband’s new job or our sons’ new school—all that was working out wonderfully. This was supposed to be our “last” move, the place we were going to plant ourselves for the duration, the place that would most shape our children, and that they would come to think of as Home—and we were still sure that we’d made the right choice. But I sensed I was carrying an odd feeling that I couldn’t shake.

It’s very hard to describe, but the closest similar sensation I could think of was the feeling you get when you ‘re exploring a city and suddenly realize you’re all turned around; you’ve confused north and south, east and west, and can’t seem to snap out of it and get your bearings. Looking at a map almost confuses you more. I could see it was a feeling of disorientation that I had, but the odd thing was that it had nothing to do with geographic orientation. As time went on and my familiarity with the region kept building, the feeling did not go away.

One day about two years into this, it came to me. Army brat that I am, I’ve moved so much in my life—20 houses or apartments growing up, 23 more since then—that, as any brat knows, moving is second nature. No breakthrough insight there, to be sure. But this move was different from others of my experience, because it was intended to be the last one. The final stop. There’d never been one of those before. And I saw that the feeling I had was not a spatial disorientation, it was a time disorientation.

It’s comical, really—and I had an almost cartoon-like image pop into my head. All my life, I’d managed in some sense to keep ahead of my past. It was as though my past kept getting forwarded from the last location, but by the time it arrived I’d moved on again. Picture a dented, beat up parcel, with addresses crossed out and others hand written all over the top, shrouded pathetically in one of those plastic bags furnished by the postal system, finally arriving at a house that turns out to have a sign nailed across the mail slot:
Too late, she’s moved again!

But here in Saint Louis, I’d come to a screeching halt. Picture a grimacing cartoon cat, racing furiously, skidding in on his heels, raising clouds of dust that swirl around him, enveloping him in a fog.

That fog was my past. My swirling disconnected bits of past, stupidly sweeping in around me in unsettled confusion. I did not feel assailed by specific memories—there is nothing specific in this feeling, only a dumb vagueness that presses in and lets me know it’s out of place. And after 11 years, I am no less disoriented.

It doesn’t bother me all the time, but it is still there. I wish there were a way to straighten out my time in a nice, linear way. Put some discipline back into it. The past needs to go to the back of the line, damn it. It’s not supposed to come railroading in here and bunch up like this. My future is feeling very unsettled, and my present is downright pissed off.

I suspect this is part of what‘s feeding my insistent need to move. I want to slip out of here quietly while my past isn’t looking, and get enough of a head start that I can string it out behind me again--so far behind that the past will be forced back into its normal mode, trying blindly to catch up but never quite making it. That way, my present might be able to get on with things, and my future will finally come into focus.