Friday, March 4, 2011

blue lakes.

I'm about to ramble.
Consider yourself
forewarned.


The other day I came to the conclusion that I have moved from one residence to another 29 times in my life. As I am 28 years old, this is an average of once, or so, per year. All my sisters were born in different states. And none of us spent more than the first year of our lives in the state we were born in. The longest I lived in a single house with my parents and sisters was 3 years. The longest I lived in a place that was specifically mine alone was 19 months.


It wasn't until in the last few years that all these different homes started to bother me. When I was growing up I thought it was kind of cool. Most of my friends spent their "whooooole lives" in one house, sometimes two. A lot of them never even lived outside the state. When I found out information like that, it was so foreign and "boring" to me. You've never lived in another state??? Only Oregon/Idaho/North Carolina/Maine/New Hampshire etc etc? Weird. But when I moved to Oregon to finish college, and to kind of start my own life, I realized that what I had experienced is not normal. At all.


I get a lot of questions, but the 2 most common is 1) Was your dad in the military? No.


And 2) Why?
Again, the answer to "why?" seemed normal for most of my life. Because my dad got a new job. Don't you have to move when your dad gets a job? Oh...


Whenever I would hear the news that I would be moving away and changing schools, I remember it being a really sad experience. I would cry a lot at the loss of my friends, and what my child/teenage brain new as familiarity. In another aspect, I think in some ways God blessed me with being a super awkward kid, and with being kind of socially dysfunctional. I was an extreme rule follower. I couldn't handle when "the rules" were broken. If I heard other kids swearing, or telling dirty jokes, or being mean, it would really bother me. I would have to tell my mom or a teacher. Also, I had too much body hair for a 10 year old girl to be having, which was sooooo awkward, and also I was a super dork. I know the dork thing is hard for most to wrap their minds around, but if you think I'm a dork now....oh my god. This dysfunction made leaving a couple different schools much easier, as I would get bullied, picked on, death threats (yes), other kinds of threats, etc. So naturally, when the time to leave came, I was not as attached, and sometimes happy to go. Ultimately (I assume) my parents saw that I was not really ever going to adjust. SO, private school for me.

This was where I literally reinvented myself. I became a basketball player, and I dove into it. I worked my way to being a valued, scoring team member that would start games, and finish them. This was the opposite of my 7th grade self that was thrown into a locker by the basketball team I was a part of. I built a reputation for myself that was "Don't even mess with me. I will chew you up, spit you out, and I'll like it". But that wasn't really who I was; I just needed to make sure I was never on the receiving end of torment again. Anyway, I digress.


In all the places I lived with my parents, there is one house that really sticks out. We lived (well, I lived) there the longest. We were there from my 9th, 10th, and 11th grade years of school. It was out in the country, as were all the houses we had. Most everyone of my friends and I lived out in the country. That's what you do in Idaho. In fact, there aren't street addresses the farther out you get. Our addresses were all "coordinates". The address of this house (the Blue Lakes house, which is the one pictured above) was 3624 N, 3000 E. This was my favorite house. There was field all around. Big trees to climb. An irrigation ditch (which they don't really have in Oregon) that we pretended was a creek, and that we were forbidden to enter. Which of course, we did. There was enough room for my sister and I to have our own room. My little sisters were babies, and they didn't care about sharing, so they did. It was the biggest house we lived in.


It was the perfect place. I would readily invite my friends over because my sister and I had the upstairs to ourselves. We could go up there and hang out. That way I wouldn't have to be embarrassed by the mess my little sisters would make, or how my dad would never clean up whatever he did in the kitchen. It was chaotic, at best. And my mom (when she was home, she worked at a Chinese restaurant nearly full time) was a very loud woman. Like, she was funny. But she was LOUD, and it really embarrassed me, as loudness and funny voices are not behaviours befitting a mother. Only my friends that I was completely secure with could come over. But I would run around the house cleaning up before they got there. There was only one bathroom, and my young sisters would always have toothpaste all over the sink. I hated this. Also, one of my biggest grievances is how my dad would lose the cap to the milk jug in the fridge. Where the hell did it go? How could my friends come over and see that there is no lid on the milk?? And WHY, dad? We always take it off anyway, he and mom would say, why does it matter, its in the fridge. Gaahhh....agitated now thinking about it...haha. Stupid.

But the house...the house was great. We took out old carpet. We peeled decades of wall paper. We painted. My sisters, my mom, and my mom's one friend, who had a daughter I was (still am) friends with. We worked so hard to make it ours.


I learned to drive while I lived there. I got my first job while living there. (At the restaurant my mom worked at). I experienced the death (for the first time) of my 2 favorite pets while there. These are just a handful of experiences that took place in those 3 years.


And then we left.

We went to a 3 bedroom manufactured home a couple miles away. My sister and I were back to sharing a room because my mom's dad moved in with us. Actually, it wasn't a "room" as in bedroom. It was a space partitioned off with a divider from the kitchen area. We developed a good hatred for each other there. But this house was so embarrassing. It was small. So small. It looked like a mobile home. But what can you do. I always felt different, but I could control how different people knew I was by keeping them away.


In all, I spent 9 years living in Idaho, and that is the longest streak of consistency I have. Even though there were school changes and house changes, we still had the same church. As I look back on that 9 years and think about all the different places we lived, that isn't really my focus. I don't feel uprooted and hindered. Moving was annoying, but it lost the power of trauma it once had. The thing that gave me any semblance of consistency was the church I went to. My mom and my sisters and I were faithful attenders. I was very involved; youth leadership, music teams, camps, every gathering, etc. My friends from church also happened to go to my private school, so we were really interconnected. The church is what gave me that grounded feeling.


It was a huge part of my life.


But then, because of me and my lack of wisdom and personal indiscretions, my mom left. And she took my sisters too. They were gone. It was really sad, and it really was because of me. BUT, fortunately it was time for me to move on, and on to Oregon I went, about 2 years later.


Then I grew up. Then I changed more.


Since then my family AGAIN changed states, and is now in Washington. But I'm still a real Idahoan. Oddly enough, I've almost lived in Oregon as long as I lived in Idaho. Soon enough it will surpass.


I'm not angry or bitter or whatever about all the "moving around" my family did. Yes it hurt, and yes it was really hard to reconcile as ok. But, it left me satisfied at a young age as far as travelling goes. I like to travel, and to see. But I don't neeeeed to do it. I don't have wild oats to sow, I don't need to be all over the world.


Also, I think that part of the pain experienced by continual up-rooting has helped me learn how to REALLY commit to something. I'm not going to just leave, that would be too easy. It also helped me to really value relationships that I have. I am deeply aware of the possibility of a relationship becoming temporary, no matter how committed. I might move, and they might be gone. I have never lived around family outside of the immediates, so to me gone is gone. It is strange to not live in the same area of the country that any of my relatives. But, I embrace this now. I won't just leave. In some ways this is a weakness. Sometimes a situation calls for turning and leaving. But I am compelled to stick something out until it literally dies, or I am completely defeated. As I have said before, I'm desperate for roots, but at the same time that desperation is a gift to me.


Someday I will really be able to appreciate what I have when its given to me.

1 comment:

desilou freebush said...

to fend off this deep feeling of nostalgia, i'm going to continue giggling about those lids to the milk. i'm almost positive gone the way socks lost to the dryer.

also, i am sending you an e-hug, since we know i don't do the whole hugging people in real life thing. <3