How Moving Affected my Development

A few weeks back, I wrote a blog about moving and listed out the different places I've lived. Now, I've been living in the same house for over fifteen years and we're just moving into a house addition that we started six and a half years ago. Life is good.

My mother hit that blog and asked some questions. What did you use as an anchor? In each new environment did you have something that made it home? How did the transient lifestyle affect your development?

Actually, I think these questions say a lot about my mother. Think about that for a second. You've lived in a small town in North Carolina all your life and you've never really traveled that much. And then you marry into the Air Force and find yourself trying to establish a different building as a new 'home' every one to three years. That must have been tough for her. It was different for us kids, because we didn't really have the 'roots' that having a single childhood home can give a person. We never knew better.

But the questions are interesting. I do think it affected my development. I like for things to be in the proper place. No... you don't understand. I really really really like for them to be in the proper place. It's an obsession, really. When I bring something new into the house, I don't just set it on the kitchen table and leave it for some other time. I have to figure out at the VERY least which room it goes into. And when I visit someone, I have to carve out my 'place'. The chair I want to sit in and where my bag will go. I get nervous and uncomfortable if these decisions can't be made quickly. And I have to wonder if it's the OCD affecting me or if it has something to do with the 'transient lifestyle' of my childhood.

When I took my first job as a computer programmer, it was a huge leap for us. I had managed a Blockbuster Video and managed a temporary labor company, but this felt different. My first day as an actual professional. Well... they were not as ready for me as much as I was ready for them. They hadn't prepared a cube for me yet or gotten me a computer.

My new boss just asked me to leave my stuff in her office and help the Sys Admin move some furniture for the day. I was an internal mess. No place to be. No spot my own. No area to carve. I can't start building my own little systemic, OCD routines and processes if I don't even know where I'll be sitting. It was a very awkward first day to a brand new career.

That night... that very same night... my son was born. Three weeks early. TOTALLY leaving the plan in shambles. So my second day I called out. Not a stellar first week on the job for my good ol' brain and heart.

My anchors are just about what you would expect. Move as many times as you want, comics are sold everywhere. At least in the seventies they were. I do remember the frantic rush to figure out which channels were assigned to which TV stations at every new house. And the giddy joy that came with learning the local afternoon TV programming. The Archies and Popeye and Batman in New York. Starblazers, Spider-Man and Battle of the Planets in New Hampshire. People that lived here in Martinsburg all their lives always ask me about Ultraman and Speed Racer. Sorry, those shows didn't air in the areas where we lived. I never caught them.

I briefly touched on the marking of time in my moving blog. When you move every one to three years in your childhood, you begin to mark time based on what house you were living in when the event happened. Robyn was born when we lived in Plattsburgh, New York. My first Legion comic was in San Antonio, Texas. My first fist fight was in Fairfax, Virginia. My first pushing-on-the-playground incident was in Rochester, New Hampshire. First girlfriend was at summer camp at Hilltop, Pennsylvania.

Well, now that I've lived in the same house for fifteen years, I've seemed to lose the ability to mark time at all.

There were certain things I keep 'waiting' on with my oldest son. "When he's a teenager, I can expect this." - that sort of thing. He's thirteen! Teen-ager-dom has begun! When I turned thirteen, we had lived in twelve different houses. I keep waiting for some major 'thing' to happen that I can use to mark Ashton's next stage of development. As if the turning of birthdays wasn't enough. I have to keep logically comparing his development know to where I was at his age.

So yeah, the constant moving did affect my development, I think. And there's a part of me that keeps expecting a move again. But now that we've lived here for so long, made this house a home, stretched it out and then stretched into it, I just can't picture moving again for a very long time. If ever.


Thanks,
DCD