What’s Right in America

               By Vera E. Christensen

            Perhaps it is a mid-life crisis” that is pushing me to extend the limits of home and cajole husband and three teens into traveling America in a motor home.  (Although, as a friend assured me only a few years ago, “Dear, you are not middle age.  You’re a lot older than that.).

            Well, ok, I’m 53 and I would have to live to be 106 in order to be middle aged! Therefore, let me start over:  Perhaps it is “burn-out” that is pushing me to extend the limits of home and cajole husband and three teens into traveling America in a motor home.

            I am a therapist (like in “mental health counselor,” “Licensed Clinical Social Worker”) in private practice.  And…I’m drained.

            Sometimes, my emotional boundaries grow thin and bits of other people’s lives seep into my own.  The anguish can become almost overwhelming.

            Along with a variety of other people, I work with foster kids.  Kids that have been taken from their homes because they’ve been abused and neglected.  Most often, these kids were born to teen moms that just wanted a baby to have someone to love them.  So, I counsel the abused kids when what they really need is a mom and dad…and a home where nobody will give up on them.

I try to talk my husband into letting us be their family.

            He says, “No,” like how my mother used to say when I’d bring home stray dogs and cats.  She knew the work involved.  She knew that she’d be doing the work.  My husband, like my mother, sees the realities.  He is much more objective than I and knows that it takes a lot more than love to heal extensive wounds.

            So, I pull myself together, sewing up fissures in my emotional fence and return to my office.  If I can avoid the pain within a wounded soul, I can remain strong.  But then, if I do not look into the soul, I cannot be a healer.

            I work at being strong, at not allowing my heart to break when the 3-year old tells her caseworker that I am her new mommy.

            I work to be strong as I am caught between the crossfire of parents bickering over and blaming each other for the problems of their children.

            I work at being strong as I counsel the couples that have become strangers and are no longer interested in formal ties of marriage.  They either do not see or cannot see the pain in their children’s eyes.  I try to explain to them that if they do not work out this relationship, they are surely doomed to repeat the same scenario with someone else.  They do not see.  It is “hard” and they want “out.”

            I work to be strong as I counsel the soldiers who are being deployed to Korea, Turkey, Kuwait…Iraq.

            And sometimes, even though I use the same relaxation techniques that I teach to others, my emotional boundaries become weak, and their pain enters into me as if we are the same.

             So, I am escaping with those that I feel most comfortable, most secure with.  Yet, I am only a “semi-nomad,” and my family is definitely rooted where we are.  We will keep our permanent home and neighbors, and trees and gardens that we ourselves have planted.

            This will be our business—our family business—traveling America in a motor home to do interviews with other families.

            How are they surviving amidst the media that drowns out our voices, with the message, “Me, Me, Mine “ (Beatles), and if it feels good, “just do it.”

I want to know how the intact families did it. How they continue to do it.  How the soldiers (and the wives and the husbands) say No to infidelity and continue to commit to the vision of a family despite loneliness and confusion and life’s crisis that challenges one’s identity.

How do they do it?  How do we do it?  My own little family, my own flesh and blood and spiritually awakening beings that come and go in this home fighting individual battles, yet still remaining ONE?

            My escape with my family is a search to find what is good and holy in a very fallible world.  My escape is also a search to find what is good and holy in us and what binds us together. 

            …on the road again, I just can’t wait to get on the road again…

            Oh, we’ll come back to our stay in 1 spot home, to my counseling office…Because at mid-life, with a husband that I adore, and 3 exceptionally bright and compassionate teenagers, we have many more roads to travel.           

But for now we’ll talk with family folk that we identify with and keep the interviews coming of what’s right with America.

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Mar.22 - Final draft of site complete. Mar.26 - "What's Right In America" Nov. 22 - New Updates for The Cove