Moving
For many people home may mean a place where they have lived for years and years. My husband ‘s family lived in the same small town for generations. He had the same friends throughout all of his school years before he left for college. His sister still lives in that same town. My husband definitely called that town home in the past.
Our family moved a lot. My mother often said the best way to clean was to move from one home to another every three years. As a very small child, we did seem to move about every three years. But when I was in grade school and beginning junior high, we moved every year for a series of years, and the moves affected my life negatively. Then, I thought her statement was cruel, but now I suspect she was trying to make herself feel more positive about the moves since the burden of packing and getting our family from one location to another was often mainly hers to bear.
My father was a college Mathematics professor and our early moves mainly tracked his career growth, one was connected to his desire to move his family out of the deep South to escape the discrimination that he and my mother detested, and the final moves reflected my parents’ desire to live where we children could flourish but be near extended family. This meant years of being uprooted for my brothers and me. I eventually had it all figured out: by the end of September I would have some people who would let me sit at their lunch table; by Halloween I would have learned enough to know what and who the other kids were talking about; by Thanksgiving I would have figured out the pecking order among the kids in my class and in most of the other classes in my grade; by Christmas I would be getting invited to birthday parties and sleepovers; by Easter I wouldn’t feel like “the new girl”. And the next September we would be somewhere else and I would have to start all over.
I was in second grade when the yearly moves started, and I was in seventh grade when we finally stayed put. I learned to make friends easily, but not to expect those relationships to last. I learned that people forgot you once you were no longer in their daily lives. And I learned to rely upon family only. My older brother fared worse than I. He was just finishing fifth grade when we began the yearly moves and was in tenth grade as we finished. He spent his most angst-ridden teen years moving, and he withdrew. Where my younger brother and I learned to make friends, my older brother began to spend most of his time working upon radios and other complicated electronic equipment. He became disinterested in his schoolwork, even though he had an IQ score that placed him as a genius. Because both of my parents had PhDs in scientific fields, they were at a loss as to how to handle a very smart son who was failing Latin and who didn’t care one whit.
The fact that our family was our only constant during those years meant that my brothers and I became close. We banded together to keep out the world. We both loved and needed our parents, and yet we resented all the moves. We did not understand their “adult thinking” or their reasons for uprooting the family over and over again. But for us, home became a traveling show. And I know that there are people who understand that in an even more profound way than I, because their lives have been even more uprooted than mine was.
Still, home is where your family is. This is true for all of us. And family actually is those people who love you enough to stay with you through thick and thin. My parents and my brothers were my constant. I knew that they would be there when my friends would not. My family was my home.