When people hear that we are in the military, they ask one
of two questions. How many times have
you moved and where? How many times has
your husband been deployed? The
deployment question isn’t the focus for today, so I’ll answer the moving
question. We have moved four times, and
have lived in Colorado, Turkey, Maryland, and Spain. We moved twice before that, but that wasn’t
military related. We are getting ready
to move from Spain now, but we have no idea where we are going. That leads directly into my 10 pros and cons of moving in the military. Since I believe in the compliment sandwich
when giving someone bad news, I’m going to do this the same way.
1. Pro – You get to see wonderful places.
We have lived in two countries
outside of the United States. We have
traveled as much as possible while overseas and seen some amazing sites. Traveling is one of the perks of moving all
the time in the military. You can travel
without being in the military, but if they are already paying to fly you across
the ocean, then it’s easier to take advantage of that fact and see everything
you can while you’re there.
2. Pro – You get to reinvent yourself over and
over and over.
Some people might not like this
aspect, but I love it. I think it makes
life a little easier. If I’m starting to
feel bogged down with doing too many things or saying yes to too many things,
then moving to another state or another country really solves that problem for
me. I know there is a definite downside
to this and I’d like to explore that and talk about it more, because it’s also
one of the things I think I miss the most about my life BM (before the
military).
3. Pro – You become resilient and know how to
survive anywhere.
After the first few times you move
and start your world over, you become more comfortable with the whole
process. You learn that you can survive
almost anywhere if you can find a commissary.
Just kidding, and if you don’t know what a commissary is, I’ll talk
about that later as well. You learn that
almost everything can be done using google translate and there really are nice
people everywhere who are almost always willing to use their limited English
and your limited “whatever” language to help you get where you need to be.
4. Con – You almost never know where you’ll
live until you move to the new place.
This is the bind we’re in right
now. Not only do we not know where we’re
going to live, we don’t even know where in the world we will be living. All we know is that at the end of the summer,
we will be packed up and moved out of Spain.
We are awaiting word any day now on where they will be moving us to, and
you’re lucky (or not), that I’m planning to document it for you every step of
the way. About the actual move
though. We can look for houses online
and we can even find wonderful people wherever you are moving who will go
around and take pics of houses for you, but there is something to be said for
walking through a house that you want to buy.
We can wait until we move there to start looking, but we only have a
limited number of days to find a house.
There are quite a few rules in the AFI (Air Force Instructions) that we must
follow for housing, and one of them is that if they have a house available for
us, and we decline that house, then our days are numbered to look for a
house. So, it becomes a time crunch for
some people. We are planning to buy our
first house with this move, wherever that may be, so stay tuned to see how all
this house hunting from far away works out for us.
5. Con – Your mail never knows where to go or
how to find you for months at a time.
When you live overseas, it takes a
long time to get mail. That’s just a
fact of life. Something from amazon that
would usually take two to three days, takes two to three weeks to get here. Then add on to that when you move from the
states and give this address as your forwarding address, then when someone
sends you something, it goes to the place you lived before, and then is
forwarded to your new overseas address.
That just adds a few extra days on to it. Now let’s say we’re getting ready to move
back to the states, and so we give them our forwarding address. Now the mail comes to Spain, and then has to
be forwarded back to the US. So, what
took to to three weeks to get here now takes to to three weeks more to find us at our new
location. It’s why we were all so happy
when bill paying became an online thing.
It saves us a lot of headaches.
6. Con – You have to learn to make new friends
all the time.
This isn’t such a big deal for
about half of the population because half of us are extroverts. The other half of the population… the
introverted… are not so lucky. I have
taken the personality tests, and I am close to the middle of this scale. I fall into the extroverted side though, and
as I’ve gotten older and more comfortable with who I am, I’ve embraced that
extrovert a little bit more, but the making friends thing is still hard for
me. I can’t imagine the level of
loneliness that someone feels when they first move to a new place and they
aren’t comfortable going anywhere without someone they know. I try to reach out to those people when I’m
no longer the new girl myself because I know it must be hard. I can say that I’ve met wonderful people at
each of our assignments, and I do my best to keep in touch with them, but it
just doesn’t happen as much as I’d like.
It is a purposeful act to keep up with what’s going on with them. We are still all growing as people and
unfortunately, we are no longer growing together. It is the thing I dislike the most about this
life we’re living. I crave a group of
friends who see my kids from infancy to adulthood. Who walk with me through every stage of my
life. I want to see someone else’s kids
grow up and share those experiences with them.
This thought alone has the power to make me want to quit this military
moving life and just curl up in my bed and cry.
7. Con – You sometimes have no idea what
people around you are saying.
Languages are just hard. Y’all, I’m so glad that English is my first
language because if I had to learn to speak English with all our weird rules
and the way we pronounce things and spell things, I’d just quit and throw all
my English books away! People around the
world amaze me with their ability to learn English. They will say in completely flawless English
“My English is bad," and then proceed to answer any and every question I have
about what I need or where I’m going.
I’m just blown away. It also makes
me feel very inadequate. We lived in
Turkey for nearly two years. Almost 24
months, and I can say hello, count to 10, and ask how are you? And THAT. IS. ALL! When I found out we were coming to Spain, I
was kind of excited about the prospect of learning more Spanish. I only needed one more class in college to
have a minor in Spanish. My entire
senior year Spanish class was taught only in Spanish. She never spoke English to us, and I still
managed to pass that class. So, I
thought I was good. I’m a pro at
duolingo (this is an amazing language app, so get it!!) so I thought I’d be good and not have a
problem. Well… my Spanish teacher must
have been speaking very slowly! Actual
Spanish, spoken by actual Spaniards sounds like they are racing to finish their
sentence before they run out of breath. They speak so quickly and in the region we live, AndalucÃa, they have a
weird little sound they put on some of their letters, and then they cut off the
ends of a lot of words also. So, what
I’m trying to say is… I feel like I know nothing! All the Spanish I learned helps me to read
anything and everything over here, but an actual conversation is nearly
impossible. “Lo siento. Hablo Español un pocito.” I say this before anything else… it
means. “I’m sorry. I speak a little Spanish.” They smile and then speak to me like they are
talking to a toddler. Which I love, and
then… after I’ve stumbled my way through three sentences that cannot even sort of
be considered grammatically correct, they will say “English?” and then we just speak in English. My Spanish experience is complete!
8. Con – Your children grow up never really
knowing how to answer the question “where are you from?”
I experience this as an adult when
I ask people where they are from and they’ve grown up in the military. There is just a long pause and then some form
of explanation that I’m sure they’ve shared tons of times comes out of their
mouths. Some version of, “well, I was
born ____, but we moved a lot in the military” or “my grandparents lived in
_____ , so that was considered home”. I
wish for my kids to have the same roots that I have. I lived in the same town from the time I came
home from the hospital as a newborn until I went away to college. I had most of the same people in my
graduating class that were in my Kindergarten class. I can’t understand this life, and yet I’m
inflicting it upon my children. It all
goes back to the same problem of connecting with other people. They have to constantly be the new kids and
while it does make them strong, it also makes them sad sometimes. And that makes me sad too.
9. Pro – You learn that family means people
who aren’t related come together to help each other.
I am very close to my family. My momma and my daddy were wonderful parents,
and they are now wonderful grandparents. I grew up just down the street from the house my mother grew up in, and
spent a lot of time with my grandmother. I lived a few blocks from my dad’s mother also and saw that side of the
family all the time. My parents each
have three siblings, and between those six siblings, only one of them moved away from
my hometown. So, there are a lot of us
in that one place, and I feel far away from them a lot, but especially when they
get together for birthdays and holidays.
But the one thing I have learned in the military is that people who
aren’t related to you at all can become your family. They don’t know all the cool things you did
as kids, or any of the embarrassing stuff from your childhood, but they support
you just the same. I believe people
excel at this ability anyway, but it is never more apparent than in a military
setting. When the only people you have
to rely on are the other military people around you, it makes you more
responsive to helping other people out.
You know what it’s like to move to a new country and not have your car
yet, so you stop more often to offer families a ride in the same
situation. You know how hard it is to
cook while waiting for all of your household goods to reach you, so you are
more willing to bring food to new families.
You have to get to know people pretty quickly when you move a lot, and
you learn that those people become family.
Just a unique family in their own way.
10. Pro – You learn that home is truly wherever
you are all together.
With all the foster children that
we’ve had in and out of our home and now the guardianship that we have and the
future adoption that we have planned, our little house never seems to look the
same. We have moved children in and out
and no one year seems to ever look the same as the one before. One thing has stayed consistent. We are a family. If someone lived with us for only 4 months,
as our youngest foster daughter did, or if I gave birth to someone and they’ve
been with us forever, it doesn’t matter.
They are part of our family. It
started with just me and Ron and we knew from the very beginning that we wanted
a big family. To him, that meant three to four kids, but I knew what it meant to me. I
wanted a house full, and I wanted them to keep coming. My views haven’t changed at all, but his
have. Just last week he told me that a
sibling group of three for adoption sounded perfect to him. Meaning we will have 6 kids! He didn’t even blink at that. Maybe 17 years of being married to me has
just worn him down! That’s probably not
it, but maybe! He and I have just always
known that we would move around, and so we’ve tried to create memories and
routines that can happen no matter where we live or what our house looks
like. We still do the same things around
the holidays and it makes our house a home no matter where the physical
location is. Just being together is what
makes it our home. No matter what.
I hope you enjoyed a glimpse at moving in the military and
how it can be both good and bad. Let me
know about any topics you want me to explore or explain and anything else you
might want to know about the military.
Have a great week!
*Please note that content in guest blogs is not necessarily shared by the station manager (i.e. Wendi!)
No comments:
Post a Comment