Moving In

Moving In


The roaches always came out the first night, skittering in the dark as we lay on our mattresses flung across the floor. Our belongings hadn’t caught up with us yet, the cardboard boxes following us from one duty station to the next, our identities neatly wrapped and taped up all over again. We had scrubbed and mopped all day, but the armored residents had been there longer than we had and they wouldn’t give up their territory without a fight.

It was the same on every moving day, a succession of agonizing upheavals for my siblings and me. New schools, new friends, new houses, a carousel of experiences that affected each of us differently, it seems. To me as the middle child (which may or may not have anything to do with it, I’m done examining that), a new dwelling whose walls echoed with the memories of dozens of previous tenants was one thing. A new school, however, was horrifying. Give me roaches any day, but all those eyes and then the whispers as I was introduced yet again as “the new girl,” my blue-framed eyeglasses giving them more to snicker about as I slunk to the designated desk? It was just too much for me.

I wonder if adults ever think about this as they traipse across the world fulfilling their dreams or sense of duty, dragging their children along with them like suitcases, bits and pieces of their lives spilling out along the way.

At first, I reached out to new friends, usually another girl who didn’t fit into the puzzle of her peers any more than I did. We would bond as best we could, misfits who stuck out like sore thumbs when all we wanted was to blend into the scuffed woodwork, unnoticed except by each other. By the time I reached adolescence, a minefield in itself, I succumbed to the pain and loneliness of leaving newly minted friends behind yet again. The attitude of “Out of sight, out of mind” cruelly slapped me down too many times to allow my life to remain open to such continuous horror.

I spoke little, either at home or in school, and wandered ghost-like through the hallways of high school. College was a blur of gymnasium-sized classes, but at least I wasn’t expected to participate other than to occupy a place on the seating chart. It didn’t really have to be me in the seat, and often it wasn’t, because I didn’t know who I was from one day to the next. I often changed clothes four or fives times a day trying to find out. My soul today yearns to revisit those lost opportunities for personal expression, the give and take of sharing opinions and glimpses into another’s heart and mind.

My days of silence are over, though. I have finally joined the flow of life rather than remain an obstacle around which it meanders. My own daughter grew up in one house, the tree in the front yard growing as she did over the years. The marks where she hammered wooden steps into its bark are still there, although she has moved on herself, a young woman now with her own life. I’ve managed to move on, taking the little girl on the mattress by the hand, the one who listened in fright to the demons skittering around her family on the floor whenever they moved in.