I Blame Freud, Ford, Mom, And The DOD

[Topic for this cycle: Location, Location, Location]

Home, Sweet Home

Lately I begin to wonder if I might be stuck forever in my present location, unable to sell and unwilling to walk away from a home of twenty years. Disabled by the economy to buy before I've sold, and without a feckin' clue where to go from here. It's a situation that recalls the first joke I learned as a child: "If we had some eggs, we could have bacon and eggs, if we had some bacon."

Once upon a time, families lived within a buggy ride, at most, from each other because they had an undiluted awareness of the necessity of those primary ties. They probably did not want to be in each other's back pockets at all times, but they knew intimately and intuitively the cycles of need and longing for family that we all experience, and they were practical. Then, as a nation, we graduated from an agrarian society where we worked for ourselves and each other to a mechanized industrial society--first the precursors and then the progeny of Ford's assembly lines--where nobody really had our backs anymore.

Ford's Mother's couch, lovingly recreated to
his specifications to satisfy his yearnings for home.

In the same era, Freud introduced the family as the source of all our neuroses, a concept that took a generation to reach blanket acceptance in the US, to color all our thoughts about who we are and what could be wrong with us. And world wars taught us that our lives and our closest ties were subject to disruption at the command of our national leaders, lawmakers and the ironically named Department of Defense.

Freud's London Couch from Wisdom Quarterly

 Since then, we have all watched helplessly as the pursuit of education and a living wage has pulled our loved ones and ourselves all over the continent. Right up to 2008, Americans thought nothing of relocating to gain a promotion and then doing it again in two years for the next promotion. As a military family, we moved, bought houses, sold houses from one end of America to the other, averaging a move every three years whether we needed to or not and we thought nothing of it. It was adventure. We simply took to the roads and the airways to maintain our ties to family, to the extent we still had them. Whether at the whim of corporations or the military or whatever, we all moved and moved and moved again, a nation in constant motion.

I marvel to realize that I actually believed that I got along with my mother best when I lived in Alaska and she still lived at home in NC. I thought I needed to get away. From a perfectly nice lady, if a tad intrusive...very informed, fun, interesting, adored my kids...a good mother by almost any measure. Thanks to Freud and an out-of-town educational immersion in all things Freudian, I learned to focus negatively and almost exclusively on my mother's intrusiveness. When I met my husband, not the least of his many charms was that he had joined the Air Force and was seeing the world. I was so moved!--until retirement twenty years ago, when we bought what we thought of as a temporary house, where we've lived ever since. From here, we've watched our children move and move and move.

Shockingly, almost instantly, in 2008 the revealed whimsies of the big investment banks brought all our moving to a screeching halt. As if someone on the playground had yelled, "FREEZE!" We found ourselves frozen far from each other, unable to sell and buy, unable to take the time off for long driving trips (or, in my case, unable to tolerate them physically), and increasingly unable to afford airline prices. I speak for myself, here, and for at least two generations of middle class Americans. Many of us found ourselves longing for and needing family just when we could no longer get to them readily.

Now all those Twentieth Century ideals and philosophies of loyalty to the corporation, mobility in the service of self-interest, Freudian splitting of generations, and the never-ending demands of war begin to mean exactly squat-all to us. Those cultural icons are presently starting to smell, as all dying things do. And we are caught in the throes of massive cultural change and international recession, immobilized and puzzled at our loneliness. We are physically grounded, but psychologically and emotionally displaced.

Designs By Mom

For my part, I couldn't be more confused. I want to sell my house, but, when people ask me where I'm going, I feel stupid saying I don't know. Should I move to Nashville to be closer to my son? Will my daughter's Navy family be mandated to stay in San Diego or will they head toward Norfolk? Should I shoot for some spot somewhere in between Some Place and Some Place Else? Should I stay put in this All Sphincters Red State just because I know where my doctors are and how to get to Steinmart? Kind friends say try Tucson, try Wilmington, and I love them for it. Other kind friends wonder why we'd ever leave this spot. And we wonder if, in terms of our abilities to cope with stress, we might have just shot past our window for moving at all.

Listen to this. Tourism has been picking up locally this week and we had two--count 'em!--scheduled house showings all of a sudden--one for yesterday and one for May 1st. The storms that now regularly try to stamp out the South were threatening again yesterday, and ya'll know how I am about tornadoes. I'd been watching the news about my old sweet home in Alabama and grieving for beautiful Birmingham. I could make that Wundermap on weatherunderground.com prophesy in lurid color. So we called the realtor's scheduler and cancelled that first showing, which was set for just about the time all hell was due to break loose. We asked optimistically that the viewing be re-scheduled for the next day.

Thompson living room, Birmingham, AL, strangely untouched by the
tornado, despite extensive damage to nearby rooms in the house.

Somehow--by black magic, perhaps--the storm surrounded us, loomed at us, huffed and puffed but never actually threatened to blow our house down. Our little town might have had a teflon canopy. When we called the viewers to follow up on the re-schedule, we were told that they had settled on another house in our neighborhood! While I was preparing for tornadoes! What kind of people look at houses in the middle of killer storms? This house is used to careful people, thoughtful and prudent people, not impulsive vacationers who pay no attention to the news. Kismet? Karma? Shit happens? An unconscious resistance to change? Undeserved luck?

I blame Freud.