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My Cultural Identity
I was born in Big
Springs, Texas, and my parents always tell me that it was
during a terrible sand storm, of proportions I have not
experienced except for that very day. My father was an air
force pilot and he was an instructor there at the base we
were living on. I don’t remember anything about it. My
younger sister was also born there a year and a half later.
Neither of us recalls anything other than the stories that
were told to us about this time in our lives.
My father was also
born in Texas and my mother in Virginia. The language
spoken at home was of course English; I’d like to call it
American, knowing the differences between the two, and
especially between the northern and southern versions of
it. We didn’t live in Texas long so I don’t think I picked
up an accent, but did fall into some of the drawl whenever
we were around those relatives in whom it was so
predominant. We moved to England, after a year in Germany
and a year in France, when I was young. I started school
there when I was 4 years old. I mention this because of the
influence it had on my language. I attended a British
school down the street from our typical country English
Tudor manor, a lucky find for my father. I got to wear the
uniforms of spring and winter, including a tie, which I
loved to learn how to put on. After a year of school there
we moved back to the states, to Maryland. This is where the
language comes in. I hadn’t known it, but I had picked up a
British accent and was ridiculed at my new school for it. I
was also younger than anyone else in my class because the
kids start school in England much younger than they do in
the US.
I cannot describe a
neighborhood, or a particular school. My memory is not as
good as it used to be, or perhaps I’ve tended to block it
out. We moved almost every 1 ½ to 2 years. I tend to
remember school in a chronological fashion without too much
attachment, maybe not holding in too much of it, knowing
that it wouldn’t be there for long. I don’t remember any
childhood friends except for a few from high school.
Because of my
father’s job as an Air Force pilot, we were never in one
place long. My parents divorced when I was 8 years old and
all four of us children and my mother returned to California
to live so we could be close to her parents. Until that
time she didn’t work outside of the home, though she had
worked before getting married. She went back to work and we
spent our days with a procession of babysitters ranging from
crazy old ladies to crazy young teenagers. I use the word
crazy there to intensify the differences of their charge and
yet the similarities of its affect on us. I was the oldest
of the 4 children, my youngest sister only 1. I look back
on it and don’t know how my mother managed to get through
that time. She was attractive and began dating, ultimately
looking for that someone who was going to help her take care
of 4 children. In actuality all that 4 children did was to
keep them at their distance.
My father was not
an absent father, but he didn’t live near to us. He went to
Vietnam sometime in there and I don’t remember even being
concerned that he was away in a war. Strange when I look
back on that, how separated we really were. I have always
said that my father was there for us and still believe it,
but during those early years it was a financial position and
we would see him once a year when he would pick us up in a
car borrowed from my grandparents in California and drive us
across the desert southwest to see his family in Texas.
It’s there that we were indoctrinated into the realm of
Southern Baptism; complete in its public baptisms, amen
bothers, and humiliation. Here is where we learned what
were supposed to be our family values, honesty and effort.
When I was 13 we
all moved back in with my father. He was married to his
second wife, who didn’t really want us, and we found that
out pretty quickly. We got reassigned to California and
moved there within a couple of months. Both of my parents
have been married 3 times and my father’s third wife moved
in with us soon after we arrived at Edwards Air Force Base.
After two years there we moved back to Germany. By now I
was in high school. We had attended church every Sunday on
whatever base we were stationed at and the clergymen were
always of different denominations so my exposure to religion
was from various points of view.
My father always
told me that I could be whatever I wanted to be; there was
never any discussion about being female and the limitations
that would hold. I didn’t discover those until a much later
time, even recently. I continued to believe that a woman
could do anything a man could do. I cannot pinpoint an exact
event or space in time where that viewpoint changed; it was
rather a slow, discreet process. It’s not that I ever tried
to be or do what a man would be or become. I think it
materialized more in the treatment of myself by men.
I think of myself
as adventurous, kind of old age spiritualistic, skeptical
about relationships, adaptable and forgiving. I believe
that my upbringing instilled these qualities deeply and some
have been hard to rearrange. To fit these into Hidalgo’s
three aspects of culture is challenging. Concretely, the
things I could touch, the artifacts, would be the geographic
locations themselves, the doctrines of the various churches,
and the stepmothers and stepfathers. Behaviorally, in
response to those, I learned how to live in other places,
among other cultures and religious beliefs, not to be afraid
of them, or of changes in them. It built a sense of
self-reliance. It’s all I could count on. I suppose that
in itself is the abstract. All of these characteristics are
based on that. I can do them all alone. The abstract, as I
now see it, is what has been the most difficult to
rearrange. Especially, realizing that I don’t want to do
everything alone, don’t have to. I always thought that I
had to. |
