Growing up a Brat

I'm a military Brat....a Navy Brat to be precise and I'm very proud of my "heritage".  Over the years though I've found people don't really get how different growing up a Brat can be. 

Probably the hardest question to ask a Brat is "where are you from?"  Honestly, I still have no answer to that question.  In my first 18 years I lived in 6 countries, 5 states, 15 houses and went to 13 schools in 12 years.  I not "from" anywhere.  I don't have a home town.

All that moving makes life-long friendships pretty difficult. Not only did I move constantly but so did all my friends! I always feel a touch of envy for people who have those friendships that have been around since kindergarten.  And it's not like Brats can go back to the home town for a visit and run in to kids we grew up with.


Brats have to adjust to frequent changes in country, climate and cultures.  We have to learn to live among different ways of life, in some cases even totally different schedules.  In Bahrain I went to school Sunday - Thursday. We also have to sometimes learn to deal with unusual living conditions...like picking the weevils out of your cereal to eat it.


As a Brat, keeping up with American pop culture could be a challenge and that was important.  Knowing what was "hot" in the US gave me a connection...helped me feel like a part of America.  It could be costly at times though.  The going price in Italy among us Brats for Bubble Yum when it first came out was 25 cents for a piece!  Hey, it was a premium product....kids only had it if a relative sent them some from the States.  I can remember on the visits to the States we didn't care about the TV shows....we just wanted to watch the ads to see what was new.


And yes, most of my childhood was spent without TV.  The countries we lived in either didn't have any English-speaking TV or it only had an hour or two a day for news.  I grew up listening to Jack Benny, Burns and Allen and The Shadow on Armed Forces radio.  Let's not forget Wolfman Jack and Casey Kasem either.  Radio was my connection to the world.


I think the hardest thing though was when I came back to the States for college.  I'd lived out of the country for 9 of the last 11 years at that point.  I felt like a foreigner in my own country.  I went from one day being part of the military community on a base to the next day being totally cut off from everything I had ever known.  I honestly didn't understand what my fellow students were even talking about half the time.  Heck, to this day a lot of pop culture references are totally lost on me.  I didn't understand their world view and I'm sure they didn't understand mine either.  I missed the military community.  I still do.


Growing up a Brat is not the easiest childhood but, with all that I gained from the experience, I wouldn't change a second of it.