Changes
By Keiti | August 20, 2007
Ch-Ch-Changes, Don’t tell them to grow up and out of it
~Changes - David Bowie
I have friends whose memories run like home movies – a bit jerky, but pretty much intact. I, on the other hand, can remember hardly anything before I turned eleven. I remember bits here, pieces there, but nothing is streamlined. My mom or dad will mention something that happened and I won’t remember any of it, even with a prompt. I haven’t talked to any other military brats about this phenomenon, but I think I can hazard a guess that it’s basically the same for all of us. My first move was from Germany, where I was born, to Washington State, when I was a year and a half. I know this because I’ve been told, not because I remember.
The kicker, though, isn’t the inability to remember, but the fact that our history as military brats is being disassembled.
We rotated back to Germany when I was eleven. The elementary school where I cracked my head open and had to get stitches less than six months after I started. Closed. My one and only Junior High School (that was formerly a women’s prison). Closed. My first high school. Closed. The hospital where I spent three days over a tonsillectomy. Closed.
Five years of my life has effectively been erased along with countless years for countless other military brats. Even though I’ve technically been a civilian for 18 years (something I’ll never get used to – I will always identify with being a brat long before I identify with being a civilian) it doesn’t change the fact that it kinda sorta makes me feel like a non-entity; that my life is being erased with no input from me or any other military brat.
One of the things I’ve learned from brat life, though, is that things change. And change is good.
Sometimes.
Topics: Growing Up Army, military brats |