American Made: The Heart of a Healer

By Dr. Rachell Anderson

In an effort to help with the care of her aging mother, Dr. Anderson retired from her professorship and closed her forty-year-old clinical psychological practice in a northern city and returned to live in her hometown on her family’s rural farm in the Mississippi Delta.

Culture shock and struggles to overcome forced her to reflect on

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643457956

Dr. Rachell Anderson

Having grown up on the family's cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, Dr. Anderson spent 50 years learning, teaching and healing in the field of Clinical Psychology in Illinois. When she returned to the farm after retirement to help care for her aging mother, she continued to write and help others to do so. In addition, she serves on a number of boards, volunteers clinical hours at the Church Health Center in Memphis and write Family Matters Articles for a number of publications. The Intervention is her 12th book. Visit her website at http://www.drrachellanderson.com/

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Contents

A Woman to Remember

A Lifetime of Learning to Listen

Occupational Hazards

Sitting in Silence

The Heart of a Healer

Domestic Tranquility

Here’s to a Beginning

As the Orange Peel

Days of Reckoning

It’s Complicated

Coming Apart at the Seams

Irreconcilable Differences

Fraying Around the Edges

The Crazy Times

Trials and Errors

Leaping Before You Look

On Whose Shoulders?

More Than Meets the Eye

Should Old Women Wear Skinny Jeans?

My Own Tomatoes

Foot on the Ladder of Determination

Chapter 1

A Woman to Remember

From Steven

My mom is hot. Not in the way you’re thinking. No self-respecting son would think of his mother that way. No, what I mean is the heat she generates as she puts one foot ahead of the other and quietly pushes to make the world a better place.

Born just after World War II to poor rural farming parents in Mississippi, my mother grew to be an amazing lady. She told me she grew up believing that in American, with hard work and persistence, every child could grow up to live a successful, productive life. The more I learned about her home state, the more miraculous I found that way of thinking.

On her parents’ farm, the ’49 Ford tractors replaced mules that were used to till the land and harvest the crops. Electricity replaced kerosene lamps in most homes, most black children were in schools (even they were segregated and held in churches), and the Civil Rights Movement was moving right along.

By 1960, when she graduated from high school, she thought the sky was her limit. The United States was on the verge of a major social change. People who had been ignored and discounted began more forcefully and successfully to assert themselves for the rights for which their tax dollars already paid. My mother believed in the environment of possibilities and believed she was free to choose the life she wanted to live and thrive and had dreams to be all that she could be (even though she had to leave Mississippi to get it done.)

In college, she joined the lunch counter sit-ins to demonstrate for equal access under the law. And laughingly, she claimed to have lead demonstrations against the college rule forcing female students to wear hats and gloves to Sunday evening vespers. The United Methodist Church which the college was affiliated was open to the request. No more hats or gloves were required for all female students.

The State of Arkansas, though, was not unbending when married and pregnant, she completed her coursework in teaching and applied to the school district to do her student teaching. By law, no pregnant woman was allowed to work in the public school classrooms. This ended her hope for a career in teaching but not her resolve the challenge unfairness and to help others.

Her first professional job was as a counselor in the Juvenile Court in Oklahoma, helping young girls and their families figure find a better footing in the world. She loved the work, found her calling, and began studying for a master’s degree.

While the war in Vietnam was raging, Mom had married her college sweetheart who, as a second lieutenant in the US Air Force, was sent to Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong. When he returned, the marriage lasted just eight months. She said, Son, I can’t begin to tell you how he had changed, and it wasn’t the life I’d chosen for myself.

She readily embraced President Kennedy’s admonishment: Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. When we moved to Illinois, we kids trekked along every Wednesday as she volunteered to meet with parents who abused their children in a crime-ridden neighborhood to help them find a better way of dealing with their children.

My mom said she wanted America to commit to cultural and ethnic pluralism so well stated in the constitution. Family pictures tell the story of her changes.

As progressive victories for African Americans toward civil rights, and she married my father, she embraced the black is beautiful movement, she threw away the straightening comb, styled her hair in an Afro, and made a series of dashikis which she sewed and wore as her main style of dress. She attended the March on Washington in 1963 and my father, along with my brother and sister, was in Washington, DC, to witness the Tent City occupation. She embraced pacifism, environmentalism, joined the Unitarian Universalist church and a counter-cultural lifestyle, and radical politics that had us eating tofu, TVP, and vegetarian meals. Before the first Earth Day in April of 1970, she was already focusing on the dangers of pollution to the environment.

Knowing she’d be in the labor force for most of her life, my mother joined the women’s movement to fight for equal rights for women. She took my eight-year-old sister with her to bear the banner for National Organization for Women (NOW) march on Washington for equal pay for women. Women were earning $.59 for every $1.00 a man of equal standing made. The right to obtain an abortion was achieved, but the equal pay initiative was lost in the subsequent anti-abortion shuffle.

With a husband, three children, and running a full-time clinical practice, my mother continued her education and her activism. And her America continued to change. And so did her personal life. So many needs were illuminated.

By this time, she had established herself as a credible, steadfast person who cared about people in need and could be counted on to help people to heal from their emotional pain. Her new title, single parent, occurred after many years of marriage and put her back in the dating game. I have to admit, I often wondered what motivated her. Her suffering was rarely long lived. When I, the youngest child, started college, my mother enrolled in a doctorate of psychology program, began teaching at the university, and continued her clinical practice and her activism.

It was a sad day twenty years later when my mother, Dr. Anderson, retired from the university and from her practice and moved back to her home state of Mississippi to help care for her aging mother. But that has not put an end to her sizzle. There is no rocking chair on the porch of the retirement home she built on the family farm. Writing, teaching, organizing, going to church, seeing patients, and serving are all in the mix. When I call, even at her age, she