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Running head: MAKING HOME
Making Home: An Autoethnography of a Military Brat
Robert Jamaal DowneyUniversity of Massachusetts
428 Reservoir Dr. Weare, NH 03281(603)264-6656
[email protected]@gmail.com
Making Home: An Autoethnography of a Military Brat
America’s involvement in an increasingly globalized world demands constant military mobilization, for both the servicemember and her/his family. These displacements bring about different conceptualizations of home and belonging during pivotal stages of identity formation in military brats. For those that were constantly on the move during childhood, a sense of belonging and home prove more elusive. Severing ties one adds another variable when trying to define the self, since defining self is always in relation to others. Where do we brats call home? Does a military brat struggle with belonging? Do military brats identify with the concept of home as a traditional geographically rooted civilian? My goal is not to provide answers, rather to evoke feelings that have often been silenced and call attention to our social experience and complicated identity. This is an autoethnographic representation of the military brats who were identified through self-declaration, surveys, interviews, and observations of web group forums. Based on the questions posed to military brats by civilians upon their arrival in a new setting, it is well understood that civilians view home differently. Findings suggest that military brats conceptualize home not as a rooted and established geographical position. Home and belonging are bounded to relationships. This hybrid text of creative nonfiction, poetry, vignettes and statistical data as a mirror for understanding the military brats’ social positionas a group with particular kinds of experiences.
Making Home: An Autoethnography of a Military Brat
There I was again, shuffling down the aisle, making sure to stay inside the perimeter of the green lights; the same green colored lights that accompanied the runway as it continued into the horizon. It was dark, darker than midnight if there is such a thing. My mom pointed me in the direction of the middle seats. This time there were five seats in the middle row. I knew something was different—this was not the ordinary size plane we had taken to puddle jump around Europe from base to base for one of my many medical appointments. I would never see my beloved dog Asia again. I would never see Spain again. This was not my first move, nor my last. It was, however, the first move that I remembered so vividly. The feelings of exile and banishment still bleed warm blood. Do I consider Rota, Spain my home? Unfortunately, our next stop in Newport News, Virginia, would not be our final stop, nor the next one, or the oneafter that.
What is a Brat?
I’ve been called a brat for as long as I can remember. While
most children might object to the term brat, but I have
always felt an obligation to own it; wear it as a badge of
honor to show the world how resilient I am; to show the
world that even though my parents were service members, when
a parent joins the service, the entire family joins.
This is true of many military brats. The term military
brat has been widely used to describe the children of
military members and can be traced back to the British Army.
BRAT was the acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler,
or in other words, the family members that accompanied
military members to their next post. The wives of the
service members detested this term; the children had no
choice in the matter and since most often children are seen
but not heard. We have turned the once negative term into a
signifier of confidence. Us brats have come up with a
plethora of meanings to the acronym brat: Bold, Responsible,
Adaptable, Tolerant; Brave, Resilient, Adaptable,
Trustworthy; Born, Raised, And Transferred. The military
brat community at large recently took down a civilian
organization that attempted to rebrand children of service
members as Children Heros of Attached Military Personnel
(CHAMPS) (Bushatz, 2014). Although civilians think of the
label brat as a bad thing, as someone spoiled with material
riches, we brats have appropriated the name to mean
something more: that we are spoiled with experience riches.
Other brats asked share similar feelings:
Osha: [The term military brat is] absolutely not derogatory. Actually, I have always loved the term. It is endearing and I would like to have a bumper sticker proclaiming it!
The adopted symbol of the military brat is that of a dandelion due to its ability to spread with the wind and
flourish where it lands—a diaspora of sorts. Who didn’t blowa dandelion into the wind?
Mobility and Identity
A major aspect of mobility is the connection—or lack there
of—not just to people, but also to places and spaces that
are established during the construction of our identity.
These connections generate a sense of belonging, the way a
thread is woven into a tapestry. Feelings of comfort and a
general sense of well-being come forward in the minds of
people whose relationship to the social fabric around them
has not been torn. The purpose of this paper is to exemplify
how the data manifest itself through difficult experiences
of estrangement by showcasing prominent experiences of
military brats—experiences that are hard to quantify in
statistical data—coupled with numerical evidence that links
mobility and a lack of childhood well-being.
Belonging
Military brats have an eclectic view of what it is to be
American. This is due to their multiple bags of culture that
reference. Third culture children that have spent an
extended period of time during their developmental years,
outside their parents’ culture of origin (Pollock & Van
Reken, 2001). These children might have been born in the
United States of America, with American parents, but are now
living outside of the country. Therefore, their concept of
what it means to be American is in constant flow — it’s as
if they are defining an experience they have never been
through but told they are the very definition.
Within continual mobility, children acquire small
individual bits of their many multiple cultural experiences,
at the expense of not fully belonging to a single culture.
In this sense, third culture children take the various
cultures they have experienced and combine them into a
distinctly unique hybrid culture that is only recognizable
to those who have also endured the same hardships and
experiences. The same can be said for military brats that
move multiple times within the nation due to the vast array
of cultural regions inside a singular United States. One can
imagine the difference between Goose Creek, South Carolina
and Manchester, New Hampshire. Essentially, I argue that one
does not have to physically live outside of United States in
order to experience a sense of third culture—that someone
can live within the borders of the nation and still feel
like an outsider. The notion of liminality arises (Turner,
1964); the lack of ability to fully own one culture when
living within many different layers of cultures forges a new
culture that encompasses the multiple cultural experiences.
Finding a place to belong among all these moves can be a
difficult task.
According to Hagerty (1992) whose major career
accomplishment has been the creation of a theory of Human
Relatedness focused on a sense of belonging, belonging is
defined as:
a sense of personal involvement in a social system so that persons feel themselves to be an indispensable and integral part of the system... belonging is an important component of identity andobject relationships. As the child grows, he develops a sense of belonging not only to the family, but to the community, the nation, and a cultural group. (173)
For those that were constantly on the move during childhood,
a sense of belonging and rootedness prove more elusive.
Severing the ties one has established in a specific place
can add compounded variables that are not present in a
civilian’s life when trying to define the self, since
defining self is always in relation to others (Easthope,
2009). These effects are most prevalent in children because
their identities are formed through their interactions with
civilian children and adults.
Children experience mobility for a variety of reasons:
parental employment, economic hardship, divorce, or death.
Families move in pursuit of better economic opportunities,
school systems, closer family ties, and for other related
reasons (Tucker, Marx, & Long, 1998, p. 114). Mobile
children must rely on their parents to provide proper
support and coping skills to effectively lead their children
into zones of comfort and familiarity in unrecognizable
places. Many times parents are not properly prepared to deal
with the situation at hand, much less provide the needed
time and structured support for their children.
Children are also more susceptible to the effects that
come with persistent movement due to their maturation
process and the changes they will naturally go through as
growing human beings (Adam &Chase-Lansdale, 2002). High
rates of mobility have similarly negative effects on
children and adolescents that include issues of social,
emotional, and educational functioning, as well as acute
stress that can affect children’s sense of security which
also play’s a role in their future decisions as adults.
Children’s feelings of comfort and security are deeply
defined by their perceived connections, availability to
their main attachment figures, and the possible threat that
these established bonds may be taken away provoke profound
feelings of anxiety, anger, and despair.
Detachment from place can be as powerful as breaking
the connection between child and parental figure. Children
often are in search of “an arena of comfort involving
continuity in at least some spheres of their lives” (Adams &
Chase-Lansdale, 2002, p. 802). The stability of a constant
singular physical home may offer such an arena of comfort,
whereas “disruptions in the physical home may be especially
problematic when they occur in conjunction with the
normative developmental changes and challenges of
adolescence” (Adams & Chase-Lansdale, 2002, p. 802). The
stability that is produced from remaining in one place
throughout the developmental years of childhood can provide
a solid base from which productive and self-confident
identities can emerge. The absence of such stability
negatively compromises children’s well-being (Jackson &
Mare, 2008).
Places, Spaces, and Belonging.
In her study on native Tasmanians that left and returned to
Tasmania, Hazel Easthope discovered “the relationship that
people have with their physical environment and the ways in
which they understand that relationship through different
conceptualisations [sic] of place are important aspects of
identity construction (on both an individual and a group
level)” (2009, p. 76). Identities then present themselves as
a mask of sorts depending on your surroundings. A person can
define who they are by the place that they occupy. Pico Iyer
(2003) describes, “I have a wardrobe of selves from which to
choose…to be an Englishman in New York" (Eidse & Suchel, p.
14). Although Iyer’s concept of selves is very optimistic
given his affluent lifestyle, the flexibility between the
intersectionality of identities is relevant to all. One
person might be quiet and reserved at home but become an
extrovert once they leave their country and safety-zone. The
fluidity of the self insinuates that identities are dynamic,
positional, and a hybrid of the past and present locations.
Effects of Mobility on Military Brats: Raw numbers
The dynamics established above are especially true of
military families. “Periodic relocations are a basic fact of
military life. The Department of Defense (DOD) reports that
every year, about one-third of all military members make
permanent change of station (PCS) moves. In addition, such
moves may involve the members’ dependents and household
goods” (DOD, 2010). While “mobility is high among Americans
in general; 18 percent of Americans move annually,”
(Wertsch, 1991, p. 250-51), military families move on a two
or three year average. For civilian children, “most of these
moves are normally within one locality, in proximity to
friends and relatives” (p. 251), whereas military families
can move across the world. In these times of constant moves,
“family and furniture are about the only things that stay
the same in a military family’s life” (Sloan Work, 2009, p.
3). Of the roughly 1.4 million active service members and
over eight hundred thousand reserves, roughly 43.2% and
43.1% respectively, have one or more children (Sloan Work,
2009, p. 1). These numbers are staggering when the
disposition of identity formation in children is assessed
with relation to mobility. There are nearly 1.8 million
children of active duty, National Guard, and reserve parents
(National Military Family Association, 2008, p. 1). More
than six hundred thousand military children are of middle
school and high school age. In all, over one million
military children attend public schools (p.1).
Although deployments are nothing new, since the
terrorist attacks on September, 11, 2001, the ensuing War on
terror, and conflicts in the Middle East region, many
parents have been deployed to combat areas, some on multiple
tours, others for months or more than a year at a time
(National Military Family Association, 2008, p. 2). “Fifty-
one percent of spouses who have recently experienced
deployment were separated for twelve or more months, with
the majority of soldiers being deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan” (Sloan Work, 2009, p. 2). The stress that comes
with constant and long deployments by a military member can
cause detrimental issues to an already tense marriage and
family. The negative correlation of deployments does not end
with the well being of children. While the enlisted and
officers with the Air Force experience a higher rate of
dissolving marriages upon returning from deployment, more so
than other branches of the military, enlisted members of the
active Army, Navy, and Marines have a subsequently lower
risk of marital dissolution the longer the deployment (Sloan
Work, 2009, p. 3). Although forty-nine percent of spouses of
military members reported their oldest child has coped very
well with a parent being deployed, twenty percent report
very poor coping. Ten to twenty percent of spouses observed
serious to very serious issues with the oldest dependent
child’s reaction to deployment. These issues include “fears
about what could happen to his/her parent, sadness, lack of
concentration and aggressive behavior” (Sloan Work, 2009, p.
8). All relationships are under tremendous stress during
constant mobility and deployments: child to self; child to
parent; child to place; parent to child; parent to parent.
Children are only collateral damage in this never-
ending cycle of uprooting and transplanting to different
regions by their military parents. By the young age of
eighteen, a military brat will say good-bye to more
significant people than the average person will in a
lifetime (National Military Family Association, 2008, p. 8).
While some children enjoy the allure of different countries,
people, and smells of the nearly five hundred bases that the
United States operates around the world, others say moving
is one of the toughest parts of military life (National
Military Family Association, pg. 13). The stressors that war
brings do not end with the parent.
Clearly the link between constant mobility and its
effects on identity formation is of great significance in
the lives of military children. This project gives life to
these theories by showcasing lived situations that exemplify
precisely the effects of mobility on military brats.
Why Autoethnography?
The way in which scholarly debate has taken shape in the
world of academia is under close scrutiny. Traditional
styles of education question the validity of narration and
lived experiences in academe and hold that personal
narratives are not an effective means of pedagogy and
epistemology due to their subjective nature and emotional
connections. What some scholars fail to realize is that the
use of narrative allows researchers to highlight social
reality as a “layered phenomenon that requires subjectivity
based on personal experiences and intuitiveness as
interpretive guides for study” (Aguirre, 2005, p. 150).
Some criticize the author of personal narratives for taking
or choosing a side. It’s generally believed that personal
narratives are too subjective and that credible academic
writing is objective. What these scholars omit is that
every aspect of their objective work is a choice made by
them: the topic they choose to study, the way they draw
their inferences from their statistics and procedures, and
the language they employ, are all conscious choices made by
the objective sociologist (Aguirre, 2005).
Autoethnography challenges the traditional ways of
knowing and feeling in the academy and brings forth a new
understanding of scholarship through analyzing lived
experience as valid knowledge. Autoethnography offers
agency to those that are academically marginalized due to
their social position, or lack of validated scholarly
cultural capital, by giving voice to those once unheard.
Narratives express experiences that changed the individual.
Just as the original experience changed the initial
individual, their story is also an experience for the
listener. Once a narrative is heard, accompanied by the
many mutually shared feelings, emotions, hopes, desires and
despairs, the listener cannot unexperience those sensations
—a jury can never truly strike from the record an honest
line from a witness despite the judge’s orders.
“Traditional ethnography, as a representational act,
would require the separation between locality and
positionality” (Alexander, 2006, p. 157). Autoethnography
connects subjective stories to theory. Autoethnography
identifies that the researcher brings to any project
their own lived experiences, morals, and expectations. By
recognizing the personal/cultural baggage that I bring to
my insider relationship with military brats, I am more
aware of the ways I might subjectively represent, without
reducing the value of objective theory.
Autoethnography is the means by which positioned
subjects comment upon the social character of what they know
as positioned subjects. By using autoethnography, I am
pulling the audience into our story. It allows you to feel
our story, live our story, and to think within the structure
of our story so that you can apply the lessons learned to
your own lives in order to create change for us and with us.
It is making connections from our world to yours in an
attempt to have it make sense on any level. As Wall
explains, “the characters that the stories feature, the
roles that they play, and the connection of those stories to
the larger social context reveal the ways in which family
stories can both create reality and be portals into a realm
of greater sociological understanding” (2008, p. 39). More
than anything, autoethnography brings forth a new
perspective that, once you experience it, you cannot, you will
not, be able to forget the feelings that this new vantage
point offers; one cannot undo seeing a horrible car
accident, nor can one undo the beauty of seeing a
hummingbird suck nectar from a bergamot blossom.
Autoethnography brings a new level of self and social
awareness that is not obtainable through other means or
other forms of research. By situating yourself as a
character in the story, your gaze turns inward. By doing so,
by digging deeper into our own power, privilege, and the
connection between the two, we are able to decode how to
handle the military brat with better understanding.
It is my hope that civilians might better utilize the
experiences of military brats and the life they have seen,
rather than dismissing their experience as mere stories. I
hope that civilians understand the turmoil and stressors
that accompany military brats as they continually uproot
from place to place. I hope the mainstream better
understands the difficulties that are associated with a
sense of detachment and a yearning for belonging.
For this project I used a combination of my own
personal experiences coupled with other brat participants in
anticipation of our story as a group might carry more weight
than a standalone narrative. The methods used were surveys,
interviews, online chat groups along with follow up
interviews. I identify the points, “of intersection and
divergence between what Lionnet calls the ‘individual
(auto-) and the collective (-ethno-) where the writing (-
graphy) of singularity [can and] cannot be foreclosed”
(Alexander, 1999, p. 310) by grouping the reoccurring
themes that emerged. By doing so, I unpack the hidden
meanings of home and belonging for my military brat
participants. I as a brat define a sense of belonging and
home less in traditional terms of place, space, and
location, and more so in feelings and connections. I have
used autoethnography to incite feelings of connection to
relationships and nonconcrete entities, as opposed to
merely invoking geographical identification.
Mobility and Belonging
Listen to the song of the reed, How it wails with the pain of separation:
Ever since I was taken from my reed bed My woeful song has caused men and women to weep. I seek out those whose hearts are torn by separation For only they understand the pain of this longing.
Whoever is taken away from his homeland Yearns for the day he will return ("The Song of the Reed - !Rumi - tribe.net," 2007)
It was previously thought that the identity of a person
was prescribed, or prearranged by their place of birth
and/or the social status of their parents, an assumption
that binds the relationship between identity and place. In
this manner, “Identities were understood to be a matter of
human nature, predestination, and fate” (Easthope 2009,
p. 63). Many believe that in a world being challenged by
modernity and shaped by globalization, attaching a
predetermined identity or social position to a place of
origin is outdated (Dawson, 2011, p. 9).
Engrained into Americans is the idea that constant
movement is equivalent to increasing affluence and social
rank. This phenomenon has its inception steeped in the
history of colonialism and beyond. Upon arrival to America
in 1831, de Tocqueville acknowledged that a person will
“carefully construct a home in which to spend his old age
and sell it before the roof is on. . . . He will settle in
one place only to go off elsewhere shortly afterwards with
a new set of desires” (Oishi & Schimmack, 2010, p. 981).
This phenomenon is as present today as in times past:
Equating family moves with individual betterment and social improvement is deeply embedded in the American ethos. The United States is a nation thatwas colonized, settled, and transformed by waves of immigrants moving across and dominating the land. Maxims such as ‘Go West, young man’ glorified relocation as a characteristic of success and social improvement. (Wood, Halfon, Newacheck, & Nessim, 1993, p. 1334)
To be in constant movement is to remain on the cutting edge
of civilization and modernity if one is affluent. Forced
constant mobility is not a decision made by the subject,
but is linked to a lack of resources. “Despite increases in
numbers of people migrating, the fact is that even in the
modern world approximately 98% of the world's population
fail to relocate permanently beyond their place of origin”
(Dawson, 2011, p. 5). Others move in order to survive,
totalitarian governments, civil wars, and the shifting
borders of a modern world generate moments of survival that
force individuals and groups to move without the benefit of
privilege.
A major aspect of mobility is a connection, or lack
there of, not just to people, but also to places and spaces
that are established during the construction of identity.
My data suggest these connections generate a sense of
belonging, feelings of comfort, and that a general sense of
well-being comes forward in the minds of people whose
relationship to the social fabric around them has not been
broken or disrupted. Through continual mobility, the child
acquires small bits of the multiple cultures that he/she
experiences, at the expense of not fully owning a single
culture. The notion of marginality arises; the lack of
ability to fully own one culture when living within many
different cultures forges a new culture that encompasses
the many fragmented understandings of culture. Finding a
place to belong among all these moving pieces can be a
difficult task.
The search for belonging is nothing new. For those
lucky enough to have remained in the place of their birth,
belonging might be something that is not sought after, yet
cherished. Other people’s lives have been subjugated to
constant moves that sever the established bonds forged
between subject and surroundings, subject and family, and
subject and objects (Wertsch, pg. 250). This pattern can be
detrimental to the fluidity of identity formation, if as
Premdas (2011) suggest identities develop from group
awareness and this group consciousness begets a sense of
belonging from said interactions with a group. The tension
that is created by the lack of a customary social fabric
that includes relationships to and with people, places, and
objects can be overwhelming as one searches for something
indefinable, the undescribed that is essential to survival
as proposed by Maslow (1943).
A sense of belonging may reside within, but it can only
be achieved through physical and social connections. New
types of modern global travelers, or as Pico Iyer (2003)
calls them “resident aliens of the world, impermanent
residents of nowhere” raise questions about the plausibility
of ever forging such connections (Eidse, pg.10). These new
global trotters gallop around the world in search of many
things, mostly long-term employment. As they burn through
petrol and frequent flier miles, leaving their last home
behind for their future home-to-be, their kids are in tow.
Military brats are just the same. All of these kids are
merely collateral damage as their parents and loved ones
navigate from military base to base, college campus to
campus in search of tenure, or overseas to follow the only
opportunity for corporate promotion. Such mobility wreaks
havoc on the identity of the child’s sense of belonging for
many years to follow. This project can be synthesized to
incorporate all mobile children.
Importance of School
But mom, you told me that this was the last place we would ever move! You told me that I would graduate from Stratford High like Alyssa. Why are we moving AGAIN?
As I finished my sentence I could feel my face getting
flushed. The walls seemed to be closing in on me, like the
many times before.
Why is this happening again when you told me it wouldn’t happen anymore? You are my mom and I trusted you. Now you go and do this.
In 1994, I had just gotten settled into the 9th grade and
established some good friendships on the assumption that
this was my final destination that I could finally call
home, having been there since 1989. I let my wall down and
allowed others to penetrate my often-high boundaries, but
off we went to another location. I had become third chair
tuba (out of 7) in my high school marching band; the only
thing I cared for so much. My sister, being four years my
senior, had blazed quite a path through our local high
school and laid the groundwork for a really fun time for me
as Alyssa’s little brother. All of my moves prior didn’t
matter. All I knew was that everything I had expected was
about to turn upside down.
You can’t do this to me. I have a life and this is my home. I am tired of this. I want to graduate from Stratford and you can’t stop me. What do you mean we have to move again? And Alyssa gets to stay? I’m not moving anywhere!
For the military brat, mobility has a major influence
during such a pivotal time of identity formation. Nearly
ninety-five percent of military teens do not attend
Department of Defense schools and are situated among
civilians, regularly. The average child can expect to
change schools roughly four times between kindergarten and
graduation. In contrast, military brats attend an average
of 10.5 schools before graduation (National Military Family
Association, 2010). Most recently researchers have only
focused on “instability, disruption, or chaos in the home
environment as potential influences on child well-being”
(Adam & Chase-Lansdale, 2002, p. 792). Emotional-behavior
problems that could affect a child’s school performance are
twice as likely for the child who moved three or more
times, compared to the child that does not move (Tucker,
Marx, & Long, 1998, p. 71). Tucker, Marx and Long also find
a negative correlation between the number of moves made by
children between 4-7 and 12-15 and their high school
graduation rates (1998, p. 71). The military brat is a
perfect example of a child that experiences these specific
situations. I went to 9 schools K-12 which included
enrolling in four high schools in four years.
In such an era of globalization and ongoing wars, these
phenomena must be explored. The purpose of this paper is to
exemplify how the above data manifest itself through
difficult feelings of estrangement by showcasing prominent
feelings of military brats—feelings that are hard to
quantify in statistical data.
Home/land Belonging
One major aspect of a home/land is the feelings of
security and comfort that can be described in one word:
belonging.
The rootless children of warriors grow up with confused and incomplete notions of what it is to
belong—but they know all too well what it means to be an outsider, and that in fact becomes as much of a social role as they are likely to experience. It is the first and perhaps greatest division between themselves and others. (Wertsch,1991, p. 305)
This confusion manifests itself as a search for anything
other than feelings of outsider-ness. The search can lead
some down a path of isolation or perhaps finding said
comfort in substance abuse by following the role model of
their parents. In 2008, binge drinking among military
personnel was more than double that of US civilians
(“DrugFacts: Subsance Abuse in the Military National
Institute on Drug Abuse, 2013). For others, this constant
search to find a place in the world only highlights all the
differences that military brats embody.
As Premdas (2011) suggests, “To belong is
simultaneously to include and exclude, to establish a
boundary, even though this line of demarcation may be, as
Barth noted, fluid and situational social constructs that
are ‘subjectively held categories of ascription and
identity by actors themselves” (p. 813). Belonging is
always dependent on the gaze of the other which means the
brat is constantly straddling the line between trying to be
accepted and trying to exclude others in order to be
accepted—between gazing and being gazed at. “Identity
formation and sustenance is relational, often oppositional
and conflictual” (Premdas, 2011, p. 814).
The answers to questions about belonging always are
difficult to pull out from a group as independent as most
military brats. This independence comes from traveling
alone between different countries at 6, tube rides in London
before driving, and all else that comes from living abroad
at such young ages. Feelings of insecurity begin to form
when I start to internalize and identify the lack of
belonging that I have experienced. Anxiety and uncertainty
suddenly replace the sense of mission that dominated our
lives under military command.
In a world transformed by globalization, the sense of
belonging that is vital to one’s sense of identity,
community, and nationhood is being challenged on all fronts
and requires a deeper comprehension of the multiple layers
in play in order to understand how central a notion of
belonging is to people’s lives (Anthias, 2006). For me,
these feelings of belonging have always been relational.
Due to the multiple moves and different cultural/social
situations that brats are faced with regularly, we
generally understand the binary definition of belonging:
acceptance granted by the other, acceptance given within.
However, as constant border walkers, we realize that reality
is not in simple binaries—we embody grey-zones, the betwixt
and between (Diversi & Moreira, 2009).
Every time I walked into a new school, I was always
bombarded with questions: What’s your name? Do you have any
siblings? Whose classes did you get? But the most troubling
one I always found difficult to answer was the simple
question: where are you from? When someone asks me that
question, as a military brat, I’ve always had to feel out
his or her motivation, see what kind of person I was
talking to, and how deep into the story I wanted to go. I
usually would said the last place I had lived. In Goose
Creek, South Carolina, I was from Newport News, Virginia;
in Memphis, Tennessee, I was from Goose Creek, South
Carolina, etc. Where I was from was always relational to
where I currently stood; never a static location.
Some civilian kids would then further ask if I was
born there, too. Again, another tricky question that is not
easily answered by many brats. My answers always sparked
more questions from them, not my intended response which
was to stop the interrogation. When I would return the
question, I would always get a simple stock answer, “I was
born at the hospital down the street; I’ve lived here all
my life.” Answers to simple questions for civilians were
not so simple for me. For some, the question where are you
from? is answered by a diversion of the truth as a self-
preservation method. It keeps others at a distance so as
not to become too close to someone because they or we will
leave at some point anyways. For others, the answers always
tied back to being a brat.
Kristen: If they ask me where I am from and I don't want to talk to the person,I pick a random "safe" or boring state (like Kansas), one that won't bring up too much discussion and we can quickly move on. If the person seems like an ok
person to talk to (and I have time) I will explain that I'm a brat and proceed to talk about all the cool places I've seen, lived and traveled to! If it's a fellow brat, I will simply say "I'm a military brat" and they understand that that means I have no idea how to answer that "simple" question. Daddy was in the army, so Idon't really have a home.
Aaron: I usually pick the spot closest to where I am geographically. In the statesI'm from Florida. Europe, I'm from Germany. Asia, I'm from Japan. It seems to give people a comfortable reference point. Of course, unless it's another brat. But then, they usually don't ask that question. It's usually, "where are you stationed" or "where are you living," not "where are you from."
For others, giving a standard answer that links the brat to
a military upbringing allows the brat to remain somewhat
aloof, while easing the gaze and anxiety of the other and
providing answers that fit into the categorical
differentiation that many people need to make in order to
feel comfortable. In this instance, where I am from has
no relevance; we are sharing questions and answers to
comfort each other, or as the brat has felt, I am giving you
answers to appease you about this stranger that recently
deployed into your neat world.
Nice to meet you. Where are you from?
I wish I could say home was the geographical position of mybirth, with its salt-filled sea breezes and curvy rock-lined cliffs.
Every time I see those tall rust red pillars I remember a story that was often told- you have walked across that bridge.You were born only a few miles from it. But this is not home.
I wish I could say that home was where I remember huge barrels of olives. Olives stuffed with everything imaginable-anchovies, whole garlic cloves, and of course, my favorite,pimento. And Torremolinos with its huge Ferris wheel.Or those mean red-butt monkeys on that Big Rock. Mean monkeys.But this is not home.
I wish that home was the place I caught lightening bugsin mason jars with my sister every summer night and set them by my bed, hoping to secure a natural nightlightbut they never survived.Or the Fourth of July celebrations with sparklers,as we ran wild with the grass filling the cracks between our toesand the fireworks overhead.Beach trips every Sunday. Jellyfish or not. You mean that wasn’t home?
I wish that home was where I began to open my mind to the atrocities that had occurred to my people.I stood on that marketplace road.I imagined the human chattel shuffling to and fro not knowing that— they were me, and I them.The old oak trees that lined Boone Hall Plantation, you know, the one from North and South,as the moss hanged from the trees like my ancestors once did.It is the strength of those kin that I rely on to drive me forward. History.
I knew I had been here before, yet it was not home.
I wish that home was where I currently reside. Snowy winters warmed by hot coco and blazing fires,Summers filled with sunlight and the smell of damp trees asthe night tries to evade its maker. Autumn’s canvas like quality and cool crisp air scented with apples and pumpkins. Spring’s promising eternal hope for something better, despite all the mud. But this is not home.
I wish I could locate my home to a place I have been. To a place I can find on a map.Home is a place I can never purchase a ticket for my return, although I return daily.My home was everywhere, but is nowhere.
Where are you from intertwines with our understanding of
home/land. For me, where I am from is different than my
home. The term homeland illuminates many different
definitions. The initial compulsion is to link homeland
directly to a physical territory or land. The established
notion of homeland is “commonly depicted as a sacred place
filled with memories of past glory and bathed in visions of
nobility and renaissance” (Levi & Weingrod, 2005, p. 5).
For us brats the term home is often ambiguous and has
several meanings. When asked, participants answered:
Sherry: it is hard to answer! Usually I say all over, my dad was in the military. I let ‘m wonder!
Tom: Easy: two part, truthful response: birth place, then every place - that's our story and life.
Since the mobile child cannot claim one specific area as
home, home then is situated in memories and becomes
detached from physical locations. Yet one cannot discount
the value of physical stability to identity formation for
children. “Stability of the external (social, physical,
cultural) environment has been seen as important for
maintaining coherent identities, while change in the
external (social, physical, cultural) environment has been
seen as important for identity development” (Easthope,
2009, p. 77, Italics added). When this stability is
affected, the mobile child finds new means to establish
connections and creates their own home; this time home is
located in connections to nonconcrete entities, such as
relationships to the people around the child. The
contemporary person in a search of their own personal
identity realizes that their old homeland constantly
resembles a fragmented area of exile that disputes “the
very center of its gravity in a sea of new global
contestations” (Premdas, 2011, p. 812). This is precisely
when the military brat clings to relationships rather than
a geographical location of home.
Bob: My home is with family. Family is big. That is something I’ve picked up on from my parents. But where I now live the connection goes back five-six generations. I value that feeling of connectedness. Both my parents were born in New Hampshire. The reason I moved here was to become connected to my family’s history and heritage. At this moment I’m already here. Home though, is beyond the physical location. It is wherever you can feel a sense of being connected.
Home for me has always been difficult to imagine. For Bob,
his move back to New Hampshire was not due to his own
connection to the physical location. Rather, due to his
parents’ connection with the state, he felt a greater
affinity to this geographical location. It is worth noting
that Bob has remained in New Hampshire as he raised his
children, and now his grandchildren, perhaps in order to
provide a place of stability in the future generations of
his family. I moved to New Hampshire in 1997 and have not
left.
It always felt that as soon as I was establishing
myself in a community and starting to lay down roots, I
was ripped up out of the soil and transplanted to a new
place to start all over again. At that point, home was
always where I had just come from. When I do this, I feel
that I am not giving myself, experiences, and life lessons
any justice since I am leaving out all the places that I
once called home. For me, home is not a single space, place
or relationship, but rather an algorithm and combination of
time spent, established bonds, and memories that tie
external relationships with physical places that connote a
feeling of belonging. As Hazel Easthope suggests, all these
multiple variables, “brought a new dimension to ideas about
identity formation and social action, a dimension which
understands identity to be created both internally in the
mind, and through the body’s interactions with the
outside world” (Easthope, 2004, p. 130).
While the military brat is constantly on the move, the
endless fragmentation is overwhelming and new visions
emerge. “Our identities are incomplete, relational, and
hybrid as well as constructed in relation to place and
mobility,” Easthope reminds us (2009, p. 75). For the brat,
the many fluctuations in the equation of identity
formation, combined with a physically unstable life, leaves
the child on a lifelong quest to find out who they are,
what home is, and how one can feel like they belong.
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable
condition” (Baldwin, 1988, pg. 92). I ask you, where are you
from and where is your home?
Making Home: An Autoethnography of a Military Brat
There I was again, shuffling down the aisle, making sure to stay inside the perimeter of the green lights; the same green colored lights that accompanied the runway as it continued into the horizon. It was dark, darker than midnight if there is such a thing. My mom pointed me in the direction of the middle seats. This time there were five seats in the middle row. I knew something was different—this was not the ordinary size plane we had taken to puddle jump around Europe from base to base for one of my many medical appointments. I would never see my beloved dog Asia again. I would never see Spain again. This was not my first move, nor my last. It was, however, the first move that I rememberedso vividly. The feelings of exile and banishment still bleed warm blood. Do I consider Rota, Spain my home? Unfortunately, our next stop in Newport News, Virginia, would not be our final stop, nor the next one, or the one after that.
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