Sheila R. Wyatt


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Welcome to my attempt at organizing my thinking, studies, interests, and life.  As this is a work in progress it will probably change frequently.  My goal is to record or document the process I make as my life grows and changes.  A place to keep track of things, be able to recall them, and share them.

 

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.