This article was sent to us by Elly M., a grown-up Army brat stationed at the Royal Air Force Wattisham in Suffolk, England. Do you have a story to share with your fellow military teens? Visit our writing page to find out how you can submit to Bloom!
I was an Army kid,
I grew up behind the wire,
Inside hangars and surrounded by helicopters.
Moving was my constant,
Countless boxes have held my tiny life inside their walls.
Long deployments and sweet homecomings were my whole childhood,
While others stayed, I left, but not really.
Wherever I went I had the Army, I had the connections back to my roots, back to past lives.
My found family.
A found family that had a mutual understanding that in the best case, we had two maybe
three years together before our next adventures.
Haunted houses of past lives shadow over me,
How many children do I share my childhood rooms with?
How many?
That number I'll never know,
But what I do know, is that they made it.
They got through the moves, the deployments, the sense of not really having a ‘home’.
They made it.
I made it.
Leaving camp for the last time I cried,
No more hangars, helicopters, or homecomings,
No more constants.
Life unexpected, the shadow of my childhood waving me off for one last time.