Navy life for kids in military families is a given, not a choice.  You’re born into it and then sink or swim as you navigate a childhood filled with temporary homes.  Most military kids don’t really straddle the fence: either they loved military life and are excited to serve themselves (or are open to marrying a spouse who serves), or they hated the transient nature of moving so often and can’t wait to actually set down roots somewhere.

I moved a number of times during my childhood, but none were quite as transformative as the last move I would make with my family before going to college.  To say that I was unhappy when I learned that we’d be moving right before my senior year of high school would be an understatement of epic proportions.  I begged to stay with a friend for my last year in high school, but nothing would convince my parents to allow me to remain behind.  I would be packing up and shipping out along with the rest of the family…no ifs, ands, or buts.

I was so focused on the timing of the move that I didn’t ask a lot of questions about where we were heading, so it wasn’t until we arrived that I grasped the enormity of the change I was facing.  Apples to oranges doesn’t even begin to describe the 180-degree turn coming my way.

We left a large military community in Virginia Beach where I was attending a local high school that had approximately 1,600 students enrolled.  My dad was to be stationed in Boston, and mom’s research in the area led them to buy a house in a small New England town south of the city called Cohasset.  They have a combined middle/high school, and I joined a graduating class of about 115 students.  115 students!  I couldn’t even process this after coming from a school where you could get lost changing classes.

Another intimidating fact about my new home: most of the kids had lived there all their lives, usually in families who had been living in the town for several generations.  (At the risk of being cliché, it was the kind of place you might find families who trace back to the Mayflower.)  Also fun?  The girl who’d moved there in the 9th grade was still considered the “new girl.”  I figured this would pretty much render me invisible for my senior year of high school.  I don’t know if I was really as insignificant as I felt, but it was a rough transition for me.  I floundered as I tried to find a place to fit in among these kids who’d grown up together and known such a different life from mine.

I’m about to make BrightSide proud by recounting the ways living in Cohasset had a positive effect on my life.  (See, BS?  You are rubbing off on me!)  Yes, it was an incredibly small school, but that also made it impossible to be just a number.  You couldn’t hide in that place, and this made it more likely that people would notice talents in me, things I might not have discovered otherwise.  I’d been a soccer player all my life but the coach there approached me about the track team, and I discovered that I loved sprints and running relay.  I wrote a paper for my English class that caught my teacher’s eye; he praised my natural voice in the scene and encouraged me to try my hand at writing plays. His mentoring helped me develop into a better writer and I was able to complete my first play, winning an award in a statewide writing competition.  This new interest in writing for stage performance inspired me to join the drama club, opening another new world to me.

Now maybe I would have discovered these interests on my own if I’d finished high school in Virginia Beach, or maybe I would have remained anonymous, one of hundreds of graduating seniors looking to make good grades and go to a decent college.  I’ll never really know.  But the nature of the military brat is to look at what was accomplished during our moves and consider the learning experience so, as BrightSide would say, it looks like I gained more than I lost that year after all.