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When I graduate from Michigan, Ann Arbor will have been the longest place I have ever lived in my life. I have moved around for most of my life. Alabama, Virginia, England, Hawaii, Rome, Georgia, Idaho, Las Vegas, London, Outside D. C, Ann Arbor.
Some military kids have their parents retire when they were younger or their dad was stationed at one base for a long time. Not me. My family moved basically every other summer since I was in fourth grade but we also had to move in the spring due to how the military did assignments. We would move out of our house in March and then spend the next two months in a rental while we finished out the school year.
There were entire summers where the only people I knew were my sisters and parents. I didn’t have the technology to stay in contact with my friends that I moved away from. Every day was spent with my family.
One of the most distinct memories in my life is going to the Clark County Public Library with my mom and sisters. I was about to enter seventh grade so I was comfortably reading young adult novels for about a year. Clark County houses Las Vegas and its famous Casinos. Gambling taxes pay for public infrastructure like libraries. I had just moved from a small town that had not been updated since the 1970s and now I was driving past new modern buildings designed with environmental principles in mind. I don’t love modern architecture but I remember being struck by the difference in the world I was living in.
I checked out 14 novels for 7 days. I remember sitting in a butterfly chair next to my desk where I wrote my first ever full-length paper the year previously. It was days where we spent in the car running errands. I distinctly remember pulling into the parking lot and my mom telling me to grab as many books as I could because I had no responsibilities at this point.
Your curtains from your last house never really fit the new house so you have to buy curtain rods. It was going to be too expensive to move your twin beds so you have to go to Target to get new sheets for your queen-sized bed. I just ran errands and existed with my family.
Some things changed but some things remained the same. While we had to replace many things, there are some things we’ve never been able to part with. I call my house hodgepodge but in the most loving way. You have to make the furniture fit any house in different architectural styles. My dad has an antique bar that we’ve carted across countries and continents and I’m still not allowed to open.
My parent’s wedding china and silver are stored in an armoire we refer to as “The Coffin.” It also houses the Lennox Christmas plates and another dishware we use once a year but I think might be older than me because I can’t remember a time without. I literally do not know where The Coffin is from and how old it is but I know that it's part of the moving experience. You apologize to whichever mover is stuck moving it on their back.
We have blue wingback chairs that recline that are from my great grandparents. My sisters, when they were in high school 7 years before me, and I would come home on Friday afternoons and take our ritualistic nap. We all laid in them when we had our wisdom teeth removed. While objectively, kinda ugly, I have been fighting to have the chairs for my own apartment because of how long I have had them.
Internationally, you aren’t supposed to move food and this includes spices. However, if all of your spices are in a Nike Shoebox from the 1990s they might move them. The Montreal Steak Seasoning is in the back left. We threw away the shoebox during COVID.
No matter what happened though, we all ate dinner together at the table. Emily does drinks for everyone, it used to be milk when I was in primary school but we’re all lactose intolerant now, Rachel does utensils and I do napkins. We always have to have three things on our plates because that's what my Dad wanted. Even in the United States, we eat “international cuisine” in the fact that we all crave German and Italian cuisine because we lived there.
While my house was always full of love, it was also lonely. My parents operated as a unit and always have. I don’t understand how my dad exists without my mom and my dad brings some much-needed levity to my mom. They balance each other well. My two older sisters were always closer than I was to them. I was in elementary school when Rachel started high school and she carpooled with Emily. They ended up going to the same University and living in the same apartment building. They walked to classes together and studied for econ together when I was living on a different continent.
There is the benefit of structure in my family. My mom raised two neurodivergent children successfully which should be noted. But, any deviation from that structure is isolating. You want to read a book before bed instead of the
Toy Story 2 is centered around the fact that Andy’s family is moving houses and the toys are worried about being left behind. Every toy has a “moving buddy.” My mom would always joke to tell us to make sure that our moving buddy was in the car. I was my own moving buddy.
No one in my family has a childhood best friend. We all just spent time together. The people who know me when I was a local urchin running around barefoot down the street and now are all related to me. No one has really seen me grow and change and develop and been there for the whole thing.
I love my sisters but I was functionally an only child for my first two years of high school on a different continent. I had my parents but I felt like I became my own social unit. While isolating in high school, it felt like it was a dry run of college. I knew when I came to college that I would be lonely, that was not the surprising part. It was surprising that it came from not being understood not because I was functionally alone.
We are the extreme outlier in Military families. We moved in the spring most years instead of summer and we lived for 2, not 3 years. Most of the time, the youngest children in military families will live in the same place for middle and high school.
Even so, I am lucky in my family. I only went to two high schools and they were both really great high schools that prepared me for college. My eldest sister went to four. Two of those high schools were so academically rigorous that she would spend 8 hours a night doing homework it was unhealthy. The other side was criminally underfunded schools.
Going to two schools, especially in the context of COVID is weird. I have my friends from high school but that was only a year and a half with them. The people that would have been friends after school you never got to say goodbye to. I wish I had 4 year friends.
Now I’m here in Michigan. If you noticed in my introduction, I won't say where I am from. I have made a compromise with myself where I can give people the context of “I graduated from high school outside of DC” because I am not really from DC. I spent 18 months there but I don’t know the city or have a favorite spot to go to dinner.
At a large state school like Michigan, most of your peers are from in-state. So I don’t relate to anyone who grew up in the Detroit suburbs but I also don’t relate to the out-of-state kids who lived in one place their whole life. I can’t tell you the stories of my hometown as I really don’t have one.
It's isolating when someone asks you where you’re from and you don’t really have an answer. And I probably won’t for the rest of my life. My peers want to live in the city close to their families but my family is spread across the country and I was always told that it's one plane ride away.
I start every story with “When I lived in X…” or “Back in Y…” because it fundamentally shaped my experiences. Living in London is fundamentally different from living in the middle of nowhere Georgia. My experience in middle school in one of the most underfunded school districts in the United States is completely different from my experience in high school where my school district was well funded and I had incredible teachers.
I sell it in interviews that it gives me a diverse and global perspective but really it feels isolating. Yes, I love Greek Myths, Yes I read Percy Jackson but I got into it because I drove by a temple every day and read the Iliad in Italian. How do you explain that to someone and how different it is from randomly picking it up in the library that you can still go to?
Now, all my friends are planning to go abroad. Do I go abroad to a university 20 minutes away from where I went to high school in Oxford? I’ve already done the tourist sights and not to mention my family literally has an inside joke about the Stonehenge tour. It’s complicated because I missed out on ¼ of my Ann Arbor Michigan experiences due to COVID-19 but I have also signed myself up for a career that only really exists in North America even though I spent most of my life abroad. It might be my last time to really live in Europe, especially with the crackdown on Visas.
Ultimately, being a military kid shaped who I am and I cannot change that but I do wish it gave me the glue to relate to others and know their struggles, and have a hometown.
I just want to connect with people and I think a big barrier is an idea of not being understood. Being a military kid makes me feel like I’m not understood.
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