Link to original post: [drupal=5291]The Big Move: Act 1[/drupal]
The Big Move: Act 1
I actually don't know what compelled me to write this blog thing but I guess it's a thing that I personally needed to do. I don't really mind if no one really reads this or if people comment or whatever since I am just taking the time to write something to get it off my chest that I have put off for years. Sorry if it turns out being a little long and rambly at time but eh. The more I write this, the more I realize this is just becoming my life story haha, oh well!
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I'll just start off by saying why I feel I am writing this. I have always kept in this thing for me in terms of whenever I move, I just tell myself to get over it and there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening. The fact is, what I have been telling myself is the most logical course of action to take which I have been telling myself siiiiince, about the third move? That would be the first "real" move for me.
Basically what this is going to be about is me venting a bit about moving and what happens during the times I'm in certain places. Some people know this experience and some people have never had the opportunity to experience this unless you count moving away to college which I guess is a big move but in a difference sense as I am coming to realize with this most recent move.
So I guess a good place to start would be the beginning of when I started to move, but to do that I'd have to go to a time where I don't remember a single thing for the most part, but eh I'll give it a shot.
I have been moving since I was born. I was born in a town in England where I lived there for a year then my parents and I moved to Maryland where my little brother was born (I was the oldest) and then within the same year, we ended up moving to Germany. I can't recall the town and all I really can remember is the fact that for a kid, I had a pretty sweet basement. I mean I find it a little sad my earliest memory is of this black carpet with shapes in different colors on it but it was just something unique. I also remember playing video games with my mother at that age in the time we lived there but very very hazily. After two years of Germany, we moved back to Maryland (different part) where my little sister was born and then we(By we, my parents) decided to live there for seven years.
Now this is where I had the stereotypical kid life in some sort of that sense. My parents dropped my brother and sister off at day-care for the first couple of years and I went straight into elementary school at this one public school which did not leave that much of an impression on my. The biggest thing I remember is that they let me skip ahead a bit but wanted to try and hold me back in kindergarten because of the fact that I couldn't skip...yeah hahaha. My dad loves to bring that story up in conversations from time to time whenever we talk about the past with acquaintances. "Can you believe that?! They tried to hold back my SON because he couldn't skip."
My dad is always the joking dad. I mean he is perfectly awkward and sociable in all the right ways if that makes any sense at all. He can be totally embarassing at almost all the wrong times but then he can be perfectly sociable when I really need him to be or he will just be nice to completely random strangers. My father is someone I respect as a man who has given up a lot for his family and just a good working, honest man. He can be goofy at times and that's just the way he is. I wouldn't change him for anything and love that man to death. Gets a little aggravating when he gives me the same lectures he has been giving me since I was like eight on how I should be able to clean my room or that I shouldn't blahblahblah haha.
But anyways, back on topic, my father would love to bring up that skipping story when I was younger and I love to jeer him about it saying how I can skip just fine now and would love to demonstrate it. Which is actually quite the site considering I'm like 6'4", but he just laughs it off with me and we have a good time. Elementary school didn't hold much besides that first like little crush that you have on like your best friend you just made for a week or so.
That is where I ran into my first, life problems, I guess I should say. Her name was Angela. I don't remember much besides the fact we were really close for a year in those grades of kindergarten and first grade. Of course there was those first feeling of "I like her" type deal that ended up in me being a little brat and picking on her a bit but the thing is she would come right back at me! If only I knew the future that would entail in terms of how women treated me later on in life! However, the thing I learned with Angela was the fact of divorce. I didn't understand the concept of what happened during that time but I remember going to her apartment and she was with her littler sister and her mother. My dad had told me not to ask where Angela's father was or anything of that nature and I obliged at that age because disobeying parents at that age was always like a death sentence. Angela was much more withdrawn than I remember at that time but she still had that adorable smile and we played while the parent's talk, which I can only imagine now was just the simple formalities that parents of children do in situations like this. After we left the apartment, that was the last time I saw Angela. I don't know what happened but that's the last memory I can recall of her and it kind of sucks it had to be of a moment like that especially when I am looking back on it now later on in life.
In the end, I finished that elementary school with being moved to another elementary school which was a private school. Not just a normal private school, a religious private school. Now when I was younger I didn't mind at all how it was or anything. The uniforms didn't bother me at all nor did I really care for the fact that I had bible studies or anything. The only thing I have to say that I hated was the fact that every thursday I had to wear ties. I mean, seriously, even today I still hate ties unless I get to fully dress up for it. We only had to wear ties on thursdays because that was weekly chapel day where everyone in the school crammed into the tiny little church we had and then listened to a sermon given from one of the teachers. I can't recall many of them but I do remember the fact was that if you were a fifth grader, you were the hot stuff of the school. You got to be a safety patrol member which means you got that swagtastic badge and sash with your own sign and then on chapel days, once a month you got to perform a skit with puppets which was probably the most fun. Except the fact the teacher was a little looney and had a collection of puppets that looked longer than her school book shelf in the classroom and she made everyone sing in the skits. However throughout the years getting up that point, everyone was in the same class and that was where I began to feel the fact that my teachers just did not like me as a child haha. I mean it sounds a little pitiful but it is truly what I thought and felt all the way up to even graduating high school that there were just some teachers that were not going to like me just because of who I was and the like.
Now I used to think it was paranoia but looking back on the way my teachers treated me, they really just did not like me. The biggest hypothesis I could take in deciphering why would probably be me being a really quiet kid when I was growing up. I was picked on a LOT when growing up. It was just something I was used to. I was the fat kid of class that always tried to fit in but would usually fall flat on his face in his attempts to gain some friends. I was just a lonely kid I guess because no one ever wanted to talk to me unless it was to jeer at me a bit. However, I kind of accepted that as a way that I was making friends and stuck with it. Even if they were making fun of me, at least they were noticing me. Looking back at it now....I was such a sad little kid hahaha! Oh well, life just moves on I guess and it all happened for the better. But yeah, the reason why I feel the teachers never truly liked me was because I was always quiet and when I was little I had a tiny bit of a lying problem because I would always get nervous when trying to formulate an answer while talking to them and then I'd end up in a bigger hole than I began. So my teachers thought I was just quiet, awkward, and a little bit evil...well maybe mischevious would be a better wording for that age group. I just remember being taken out of the classroom a lot or pulled after class for one of the infamous "talks" with the teacher about what is going on in class.
That is also where I gained a little drive to become a teacher. I wanted the be that teacher who stuck up for the quiet kids (because there were more than just me, yet we never really thought to socialize till about sixth grade) and also was a bit more fair. One teacher I remember had left a little more than the standard mark would be my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Shaffran. Now this would probably be the point in the story where I found a good role model in my life that I would aspire to be and also be able to model myself as a teacher later in life especially with the way this is going along. This isn't that type of story though as much as I kind of wish that it was one of those type of stories. In fact, I didn't like Mr. Shaffran at all. He was one of those high school football guys that made everything about sports and that's how he taught our class. He was a total jock and had the mentality that everyone should play sports and if not, then they probably should just sit and watch the others who were good at sports do things. You can probably guess where I ended up, huh? I didn't just sit there and just accept my fate at first. I definitely tried out football (well flag, after all we were a private baptist school who had really strict rules and no touching policies) and anything else in terms of basketball or whatever sport he tried to throw at everyone, but I was always subjected to being picked last on teams and also just stuck on the sidelines. I also remember that even in class, he separated our class into groups to sit with each other which was completely at random, but then we had to choose a name for our team....based on NFL teams. Now in today's society, I respect football as a sport and definitely can see the interest in it, but back then, I had no clue whatsoever and all the rest of the boys in my class had grown up being dedicated to certain teams and my teacher was a great football enthusiast so I just sat there and let everything else go about.
This thing kind of goes back to how my father was. He was a sports guy, hands down. He loved sports and played them throughout his life. His big one, however, was soccer which is not really popular in the united states, but pretty much popular everywhere else in the world. He also was a bit of a pro-skateboarder when he was younger too. I guess to put it simply, my dad was a cool kid in high school. He always told me of his misadventures with his brother and how his nose got broken from being in so many fights and just the way it went back then. My dad said that he was always thrown into every sport by his father so he felt he should at least try to do that with his two boys as well, but it never really worked out because me and my brother are far from being sports enthusiasts. We tried so many different sports from soccer to baseball to football to tennis to golf to basketball and so-on. However, none of them stuck. Well I guess soccer did throughout my life because I felt that was the closest way I could do "well" in a sport. I just liked being part of a team and being on the field.
Anyways, the reason why I say I really did not care for Mr. Shaffran was because of the way he would handle certain situations. I went up to him one time with my tail between my legs and a bit of a teary eye because I had been excluded from the playground games again for the upteenth time and wanted to talk to someone about it so I thought my teacher would be a good place to. I told him I had been being picked on by the other kids and he nodded his head to what I was saying and tried asking me what I could do to help myself out more. He told me that I should try getting more involved/interested in what the other kids were interested in. That happened to not be pokemon anymore and turned out to be doing sports. So I asked my dad to teach me about it but it went south. I went back to school and then waited for recess to begin so I could possibly talk to the other kids about the new things I felt proud of learning finally. However, when I went to try and talk to them, a group of them just laughed at me for trying to talk to them and messing up a few of the facts. Then they told me that the teacher had said that they had to be nice to me or try and be my "friend" and said it was funny that I had to go to the teacher to try and make friends. I didn't really care for fourth grade much.
Then, finally, after all I had been waiting for, fifth grade finally arrived! I was finally at the top of the elementary totem pole where the other kids would look up to me and I would be able to finally have a chance at things. Yeah...no haha. I realized the teacher was looney and had a very weird mechanic of trying to teach us certain facts about subjects. Her main subject of focus though was around either her puppets, her safety patrol, or whatever book she wanted to read us in class. I don't remember learning much in class because the most I can remember are those cloth puppets and safety patrol. The one thing about fifth grade that I can remember is that I found another little kid crush. This girl was the quiet girl in class that was friends with all the other girls but didn't say much of anything herself. We began to bond a bit over the fact that we had similar interests in reading books and we were both book worms. I remember that I was so happy when I got picked to be safety patrol for one, and then my station was next to hers. I never said more than two words to her but it was just the fact of being near that crush ya know? Everyone has one of those in their lives and knows the classic dilemma of it all. Still pretty much floated along by myself in terms of finding some people to talk to every now and then and trying to avoid the teacher's wrath nowadays. Thinking back on it though, there was one time that really stuck out in my memory.
One time, I was just sitting by myself eating my lunch like normal and then the usual "bullies" decided to have their routine fun with me, but I just decided to leave it be. For some reason they wanted to trade some snacks with me (I know this sounds petty and is probably biased as all get out, but my mother used to pack the best lunches at times and would always nail it on the head to what I wanted), but I didn't want to trade. So they asked me why and I said I didn't like salt and vinegar chips, which was the truth because I just didn't like the taste, but they kept pushing it and pushing it and finally in order to try and get them off my back, I told them I was allergic. Now that was a lie but it sort of just blurted out because I was just being pushed into that. Now I thought that would have satiated them but I was dead wrong on that accord. They actually decided to take vinegar and pour some onto the chips I was eating when I wasn't looking and then I got a rude surprise. I know kids don't know any better but looking back on that, if I had actually been allergic to vinegar, that could have been really bad! The teacher didn't even scold the kids for pulling that sort of thing. She, in fact, scolded me for lying about possibly being allergic to something. I mean, yes I get the slap on the wrist for lying about something that serious but the fact was that it wasn't the full story. Oh well learn some things from different scenarios.
So I "graduated" from elementary school finally and thought middle school would finally be my chance to succeed in being a bit better in terms of social stuff. I have to say, I actually was more successful and got a close group of 4 to 5 friends which was nice to have. That was nice to have because they were video game guys and also into anime at the time I was as well and semi-introduced me to it. The bullies still existed, but it wasn't so bad with having people I could go to afterwards and where they would semi-stick up for me too. Teachers still disliked me for some reason but I just took that as the norm of how things were. The thing I disliked was how the older kids would pick on me as well. I really did not care for lunch-time or things like that because of the fact that people had to mingle in that sort of thing. I meant some nice people though due to it. Some jerks, but every social event has those.
I do remember there was one teacher that I will always remember. She was this short, yet big lady and my first English teacher. She was my first middle school teacher and I had homeroom and first period with her which probably was why I had such a lasting impression of her. She was that one teacher who always tried to think she was fashionable so she would wear bright colors and have that sass in her step and the way she talked in order to gain attention which scared a lot of kids. She didn't like kids it seemed from the way she treated everyone and seemed that she wanted to teach older kids who were more "mature" for her. However, there was one thing she could never avoid from children. Because she tried to be "fashionable" she would always wear shirts/blouses that were too small for her but just enough to cover her when she was standing or sitting. However, she loved to write a lot on the chalkboard (anyone else remember those? I mean I loved chalkboards and the games we would play with them and how cleaning the erasers was considered cool, but now we all have smartboards or projectors or whiteboards but yeah, nostalgia eh?) so she would always try to reach the tippy top of the chalkboard to write even more notes to drown us in, but when she did, we all got a sight that would scare us till we die. I kind of felt bad for her, but at the same time not really. She was always incredibly mean to children and unfair a lot of the times. However, maybe we didn't know her entire story? I don't know. But that one lady was the first of a couple "evil English teachers" I would become familiar with in my school career. That's a tale for another time.
So at the beginning of sixth grade, I tried out for the soccer team. I really wanted to make my dad proud by making the team and also showing the guys that I could also be a part of the JV team hopefully. I worked hard by running laps around the track and also reading up on soccer terminology. The big day had finally arrived. The way the coach tested out to get his players was when we did a scrimmage match against another school, he tried us all out on the field and then made his decision. I remember finally being allowed on the field. What a great feeling it was! Trying to go after the ball, passing it with other teammates and just working for a common goal; beating the other team. I didn't do that well though. I was slower than most the guys due to my weight and also because I lacked the natural co-ordination the other kids did too. However, I felt I had done well enough to be possibly second string where I could still hang with my friends and have a good time getting better. Plus it was a small school so my chances were better here than anywhere. Before the list was posted, I was pulled aside by the coach and he told me that he would like for me to be the team's manager instead of playing on the field. At first, I was ecstatic! The coach picked me to be the manager and I would still get to be around everyone. The sad part was I couldn't play but I pushed that aside and decided to just look at the benefits of it all. The thing that I realized later on after a game or two as being manager....I was the only one who didn't make the team who had tried out. When I realized this, I was devasted.
My cousins had been going to the same school as I had been but they were always five to six years older than I was so by the time I was trying out for JV they both were on the Varsity team and they were both MvPs. That's the thing about that school, everyone loved my cousins. My one cousin was a heartthrob and my other one was the book smart popular type. They both became validvictorians of their school years which was a great acheivements and they were also on every sports team as a great player. So I thought I could be like them and make not only my dad proud, but continue what my cousins had started. However, I was far from that at the time. It was just not meant to be in terms of sports. I still tried but to no avail.
I ended up quitting being manager because I couldn't take the humiliation of it when the other kids were all on the team and that way I could just try to go back to floating through sixth grade anymore unscathed that I already had been in the beginning.
I made my way from 6th to 7th with making a new friend who was an exchange student and we got along really well. He was the first friend who truly acted like a friend. We shared the same birthday which was a cool way to connect with someone, but when it was our birthday, he actually put something on my locker without me even realizing and he also gave me this card which was would framed of my favorite football player (of like the 2 I knew, Peyton Manning) and gave it to me even though we were both Colts fans. It was such a kind gesture that was foreign to me I didn't know what to do. We continued to hang out and be loners together (besides the usual group of 4 that I would hang out with but we had a different schedule) and finally made my way to seventh grade.
Remember that cute little shy girl I had been crushing on in the 5th grade? Well that crush had still been there throughout middle school and I was finally in the seventh grade with that everlasting crush still there. With the confidence boost from my friend, I finally got the courage to ask her out. I had still been talking to her on and off for the past couple of years but never anything serious but when I finally owned up and grew a pair and asked her out, she said yes. I couldn't believe me luck! She said yes to a date! She gave a cute little blush and scurried off to her friends to tell that I had "finally" asked her out. I am seriously a dolt when it comes to people flirting with me and that is STILL something going on with me today hahaha.
Well we went on our first date and it was a success and I was finally beginning to gain more friends and I had a girlfriend. Yes, seventh grade girlfriends are pathetic and never really work out but hey I was young and in "love" as the expression goes. Things were finally starting to turn up a bit better for me finally and I finally began to shake the bullying problem I had with my friend group becoming bigger and soon enough, I knew everyone's name and had friends in classes. I finally wasn't alone and I couldn't wait for the years to come.
That's about around the time my parent's dropped the news that we were moving....to England.
End Act 1
The Big Move: Act 2 - England's Experiences
Now this is a little head's up, although this Act only takes place in a small time-frame, it is probably going to be lengthy but that's just a head's up because a lot happened here.
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The first thing that I can remember going through my mind for moving was a feeling of not understanding anything at all. I mean what was I to expect, for all I can remember, I have lived in that house my parents owned and gone to the same school and did the same routine I have always done. I lived near my family and I lived near things I liked to do at the time. I kept asking my parents "But why?" and I would get the same answer every time.
"Because we love trying new experiences and you'll enjoy it! Don't worry, honey, it's not as bad as it seems."
That would be what my mother would always say. She is such a kind woman at times but whenever she said those words, they always left a hollow impression on me because I never believed them. I guess that was the first time I didn't have full trust in my parents because how could they know what happened at the like? They tried their best to try and make the move pleasant but moving is a whole lot of non-pleasantries.
I guess my mother was used to it more because she moved around her entire life. I mean she had been born in Texas, lived in Washington state, lived in Africa, lived in England, and probably a whole bunch of other places before she went to Maryland after running away from home at the age of 16 from Washington state due to her parents being...well not-parents. I guess a little explanation can be given but it's just a sad tale and makes me understand my mother because she did not really tell me till I was in high school but she hated her parents and the thing is, her parents hated her. She was the one kid in her family who tried to work at jobs and do everything she could to do right but it never was enough for the way her other two siblings were held on a pedestal. My grandfather was just cruel to her and my grandmother was no better....just thinking about what she went through in that house makes me feel so damn lucky to have parents as great as mine. I really hate saying things like that because I feel what makes mine better than others and I don't like bragging about things because I just have a really low self-esteem, but I really do love my parents and would never ask for others. With all they have been through, I just can't help but respect them.
But I don't care for my mother's parents for personal reasonings because basically I know a bit of what my mother went through. My grandparent's loved to pick "favorites" and my mother wasn't their favorite and neither was I. They loved my brother and sister with all they could and showered them in gifts and the like but sometimes they would forget my birthday or send different presents to us three in a way that would just make me question things due to my age.
One thing though, made me realize this more for myself that my grandparents had favorites besides the little things that you could probably just brush off. A summer when I was little my grandparent's had invited me and my siblings out to their summer house to spend the summer with them. Of course we were all excited to go there and hang out and have some fun there and just get to have fun for a bit. However, I got a call from my grandparents a couple weeks before we were set to go. They told me that I would be going to a stay-away summer camp when I got there while my brother and sister stayed with them. They acted like it was the greatest thing and I did too a bit but on the inside I was bummed. I told my parent's what was going on when I went to their house for the summer.
I didn't go to my grandparent's that summer. I didn't mind that much because I had fun that summer with my parents and being an only child for the first time ever. I went to my first baseball game and I got my own room that my parents made out of a spare room. It made me kind of forget about it till later on in life. That was probably my favorite summer as a kid growing up.
Anyways, so my mother had grown up moving so I guess why that is why she was a bit "cold" in the fact of her kids not really wanting to move. Well, my sister was too young to really know what was going on/care and my brother didn't care at all. It was probably me who took it the hardest that we were moving because I had finally started making friends which is something that is just very hard for me to do and open up to people.
We began packing up the house and that was something I really wasn't there for that much. My parents decided to let me spend the week with my grandmother's house and enjoy some time with her. I love my grandmother very much. She's always been my favorite family member I guess if people have to choose that sort of thing. No matter what was going on in my life, she can always make me smile and enjoy things. Whenever I came over, she would run over to the store and make sure her house was crammed to the walls with snacks of all kinds of delight from junk food to soda. She always spoiled me haha. I guess in retrospect, I really shouldn't have been that upset about my other pair of grandparents because my grandmother made up for everything that I missed out on in those terms.
Her husband died while I was a bit young unexpectedly while going in for a routine hospital check which was a very sad thing to see. However, she still tried to hold that smile she always had. Nothing could take away the light she has. When I was growing up and being picked on in school, my grandmother knew the right things to tell me and would always be there with a present/surprise and I didn't even have to tell her I was upset. She would just pull something out from behind her or tell me to hop into the car. She was also fiesty! She actually taught me to play baseball before my father did and we played in her backyard which was like a field. We'd watch movies together and we'd play cards and all that sort of cliche things you did with your grandmother.
However, when I went over her house to spend the week with her, I didn't really know that would be the last time I would see her have that same spring in her step or be "herself" fully I guess. It was still a great week.
It wasn't so great an ending when I came back and I walked around the house to find it completely empty save for a few boxes here and there. I went straight to my room and everything was gone. And by everything, I mean everything. My parent's had let me paint my room whatever colors I wanted so I went with Green and Purple which was really cool for me and it also had a Scizor from pokemon since he was one of my favorite pokemon growing up for being so cool that my mother had painted on my wall in life-size form. But that too was gone.
Being in an empty house sucks.
The only thing that had stuff in it was my parent's room that had air mattresses on the ground for us to sleep in for the final night in the house. I just remember plugging in my cd player and listening to that throughout the night.
The next day we "moved" into a hotel for the next final days before we took the big flight over to England. We ended up leaving on my sister's birthday and I remember her being upset about that because my parent's had told her that she would get her presents in England and that it was part of the "adventure" to have her birthday on the plane. She pouted a bit at that, but didn't really say much more. I remember, though, seeing the cutest smile on her face when my parent's had got the flight captain to say Happy Birthday to her over the intercom and she was blushing so much I couldn't help but chuckle a little.
We ended up landing in England and you can only guess what the weather was like the very first day there. Cloudy and Rainy. That is a the most common weather in England I soon learned because there was rarely any sun on any of the days which made moving there just a tad more gloomy, but I just sighed and moved on to the newest place to live for the next couple of days. In England, they don't really have that many hotels in the towns and if they do, it is like one single really ritzy marriott and we were not paying the price for that so we decided to live in this apartment that my mother's job allowed her to get that is rented for people only staying in there for short times. It wasn't the greatest because I was back to sharing a room with my brother and then the entire house was entirely too small for all five of us, but we made due.
So many things were different there than they had been in America. There are the obvious ones like the accents, the weather, and also the opposites of driving on other sides of the roads, but some facts were just not common to me. In order to go to the grocery store or get dinner, we had to walk to wherever we wanted. For a kid, that was monumental because never really walking anywhere to go places and being used to driving to places just made things a bit hard on that. Plus there food was completely different than anything I've had before. All their soda comes at room temperature so if we wanted to have cold soda, we would have to wait a bit and then there is the thing about classical having to have fish and chips the first night there and now it is one of my favorite dishes to have ever.
Within the first week of being in England, we started school half-way through the school year. I was still in seventh grade and I was a bit worried about my first day of school at where I was going. That is probably one of the scariest feelings for me when growing up was trying to go to school and find the right places and always being way too shy to ask anyone if I was in the right place or for help. It also sucked because my first class ever in this new school was gym.
I have terrible luck haha.
The gym teacher was an old army guy so he had little room for remorse and was used to seeing kids fluctuate in and out of his class. So there I was in clothes definitely not fit for gym but still had to run laps with the rest of the class who came prepared. However, I didn't get my schedule till the very second I walked into the building that day.
Speaking of clothes, this was the first time I had ever been to a public school that didn't have uniforms and didn't have like a religion class that was mandatory. In fact, everything about the classes was different. Let me explain this a bit though.
I didn't go to a typical England school. They all have to wear uniforms and also have religion studies. Where I went to school, was on an american military base school. So it was like a little hunk of america in England. In fact the entire base was just a small like 5 mile piece of property sectioned off of America, it had a lot you could ask for in that place but everything was downsized and completely tiny. The school I went to was no exception. The class I transfered into had about 16 students in it as the full class-size. We never interacted much with any other schools because the closest american school was a good hour or two away. And guess which base was the smallest in the entire country? The one I happened to be at.
But yeah, so I went through classes shyly and not knowing any one at all. The kids were actually really friendly though and the classes I got signed up for were some I had never even known you could take in middle school like a Video Filming and Editing class. Soon enough, within the next few days, I was apart of the classroom "family" atmosphere the kids had developed with being in the same grade and being in the same position as the others in terms of moving to a new school and not knowing anyone. It was a very interesting concept that I cherish and I also did not like for later reasons.
It was nice to have an accepting environment at first. I decided to just relax the rest of the year since I only had a couple of months left till the end of the school year and then I was finally onto my last year of middle school. They say the environments are different in other countries because you have to "grow up sooner" which I can definitely see now looking back on it because not just me, but the other kids of that school got a taste of it in the next coming two years.
Near the end of seventh grade year is around the time I first dealt with the word, suicide.
I didn't know the person who had commited the action but it was really close. Right next to the school, there was a bowling alley where the kids would hang out and on the lucky days, we would have gym there for a fun day of bowling. It was literally 20 ft from the school and was connected to the gym so it made perfect sense for it. That year, the owner of the bowling alley decided to hang himself in a stall of the restroom and one of the officers of the base had to take care of things because the co-worker who had found the body had gotten a little too broken up about it. No one really expected it apparently. We did not really hear this news from our parents too in-depth, but actually our teachers told us what had happened. It was weird having teachers be so open with their students in these types of terms and conditions, but they said it was part of their job as teachers to embrace us for life matters so we all just nodded our heads and thought about what had happened.
However, at the end of the school year, me and my family made a surprise visit to the states. My parents just told me and my siblings that we were coming to see my grandma, but they stressed that she was not the same from when we last saw her. We all were a bit scared and worried at the sound of this till my parents explained the situation a bit more.
My grandmother had had a stroke. One day while she was sitting out in her sun-room alone with her dog, it just happened. Her entire right side of her body was now paralyzed and she could barely walk by herself at the time. It was such a sad sight to see. Her once booming body of energy was now this somewhat somber replacement of my grandmother. It took a lot out of me to see her like that. Her memory was a bit foggy and she couldn't really get out the right words to say at a time or so and would mix up our names with others, but at least she was still there.
One thing that made me happy though. She still had that smile. Although it was a little one-sided, the bright twinkle in her eyes and the smile she had was still there which was more than enough for me. I knew my grandmother was still there and would still be the same even if it killed her trying. She began to move about herself and then began to improve her motor abilities and soon enough she was back in her house trotting slowly by herself and her little pup. Of course, some things had to chance and she was still a bit slower in everything, but at least I still had my grandmother.
The rest of that summer flew by and I didn't do much but move into the new house that we would be renting for the next couple of years and then trying to hang-out with friends more. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Finally, I made my way to eighth grade. The year of school I would always black out in my mind and not really want to talk about. Though, I feel I need to write this down. So here goes nothing I guess.
Eighth grade year started off just like every other school year. The only thing is the adding of a new student or two and the lose of one or two. There was only one I really remembered was this girl named Leah. Me and her hit it off right off the bat and became pretty good friends. I hung out with my normal group of friends as the tag-along member because I was usually the quieter one out of the group and didn't mind following along with whatever was going on. The year continued and classes happened and just the usual normal melo-dramatic nothingness of school. Near the end of the year is when things began to spike up to a point of no return and where no one would really be acting the same way again for a long while.
And I just happened to get caught up in the center of it's gravational pull.
So let me just skip a few pages to get to the point where it all began. It's a bit fuzzy after trying to forget after all these years but the crucial bits are there. Basically to start it off, there was this kid in our class that just did not like me nor did he really care for anyone else in the class besides his two friends. (One of which he was dating and the other just was a close friend since forever) He began just with little quips under the breathe towards me and a couple of my friends and some just uncouth words but it didn't really affect anyone much because people just decided to avoid him for it. 'Cept this one kid in my friend group who would try and get our "groups" I guess if classification was need to hang out a bit and everyone was cordial in that sense except that one kid whenever he got the chance towards me.
Tension built, but as usual in situations such as this one, it was just pushed onto the backburner. And as it usually does, the point boils over and everything explodes. This ended up turning from a normal just dislike to a full-out involvement of almost the entire school.
The point of no return is a scary one, especially when things get really insane. The day that started it all was probably one of the worst days of my life, if not, the worst yet.
It was Health class and our teacher (who was also our Social Studies teacher) was absent for the first time ever and it was just another mom sub of a student who also went to the school in her place. We took our normal seats for the most part and people gravitated towards their friends in that set-up. I ended up sitting in front of the kid who didn't like my due to the way my friends ended up sitting and dispersing and I could tell from the groans I was getting from him and his posse that I was a bit unwelcomed. I just tried to ignore it and move on with my day and talk to my friends since there was no assignment.
However, he didn't like being ignored so he ended up kicking me from his chair with saying things like "I hate him. I just hate him." and I wasn't expecting it so it hurt a bit and the thing is, the teacher didn't see any of this from her desk so then he began to just flat out hit me in the back which the substitute finally saw because someone got her attention about it and decided that we both should be sent to the office. (Okay that is one thing I will never understand, how come the kid who gets hurts also gets sent to the office/also in possible trouble? That is something about schools I never got in those terms. I can understand if it was a fight but if it wasn't then yeah. Anyways).
I was sniffling a bit and I remember yelling at him in the halls as we were being escorted to the principals office *which was only 10 ft away from the class* and he was just grinning like he had won or something which just really set me off even more but I just bit my tongue because the substitute apparently didn't like the usage of the words "Burn in hell." which wasn't that bad considering the vocabulary most kids end up using in today's world. He ended up being put in the principal's office and I was sent to class again where I just wanted to sit alone.
When I got in though, the classroom had erupted because there was no teacher in the room and people were just gossiping their heads off. I just took a seat at the front of the class and decided to sit and sulk a bit, but someone came up to me with a smile asking me a very strange question.
"So what's my number? What do I rank?" he said with a weird smile. I just shrugged not knowing what that meant at all and at that time the rest of my friends came up asking me the same question which I did not get at all. Then the answer to my question finally arose with the girlfriend of the guy who had kicked me and the like. She acted as if she was being personally affected by all of this and that she had been the one to be kicked and said with a point of her finger towards me she shouted, "He's the problem of all this. He made a list of everyone on myspace that ranks the people in class as to whom he likes the best. He also is a sick pervert! All he does is look at women whenever they bend over and he makes me feel like a piece of meat and I'm tired of this."
That is where I just shut down. I am terrible in confrontational situations and being called-out or just things being said about me that aren't true at all. First off, I never had a myspace because my parents were weird about social networking at that time so that threw out the list thing and then the fact that I was a perv was just not true either. For one thing, I would never have looked at this girl. She was just....no in every sense of the word because well she wasn't the prettiest to put things nicely. Plus I guess to put thing simply, I wasn't interested in any of the girls in my class because I just felt more like friends with a bunch of them and just...complicated time in my life for that sort of thing which made that hold no weight at all.
However, the eighth grade me, didn't know how to retaliate or anything so I just broke down and just sat there tearing up without anything to do about it. There was no teacher, I was in a room of peers that all thought I was some sick freak due to rumours spread by that girl and her boyfriend and it was just...unbearable. A few of the girls of the class came over to comfort me a bit but the teacher soon came back into the room and tried to get me to move back to sit near that girl and I just told her I was fine where I was and she didn't push it. So she just went back to her desk and it all just moved slowly with whispers till class ended and school was finally out.
I ended up leaving the school alone and walking to my mother's office where she worked and called her down to the lobby to ask if I could just talk to her for a second. She knew something was wrong just by hearing the tone of my voice (she told me later on) and hurried down. She saw me sitting there with just a sorrowful look and she just hugged me and asked what had happened. I told her everything and then she told me to just go to the Youth Center (where all the kids would hang out after school since it was just close and had a lot of fun things there). She said for me not to talk about it with anyone which I told her I promised I wouldn't.
I made my way then to the youth center where my friends were waiting at the door about to go out to do something like go to the grocery store or something to get out of the youth center and they said I needed a cake to cheer me up. We were about to leave until someone new I hadn't seen before walked into the youth center. It happened to be the older brother of the kid who kicked me and he wanted answers to what happened from me. I told him I didn't want to talk about it, but the brother kept pushing it and pushing it and saying that it was all my fault because his brother would never do something like that. Eventually the dreaded manager of the staff of the people who worked at the youth center (which was like four people) came over with her mother hen nature and said that we needed to have a little "sit-down" to try and figure everything out. My friends soon left because she shot them an evil look to go away and then I was left alone with her, the brother, and the kid's girlfriend...again for Round 2.
My odds were heavily against my favour to say the least. It ended up just being them having a counseling session with me needing to admit that I was a bit of a perv and that it was my fault in the entire dilemma and I just didn't want to deal with it so I got up and left. The manager was near livid at this but I honestly did not care. I felt trapped. I just wanted to go somewhere else. I waited outside till my mother called and told me where to meet her to be picked up and when she saw I was still crying she became possibly the scariest human being I've seen in my entire life and from that day, I vowed, never to make my mother that angry. When she had heard what the manager had tried to do, her fingers flew on the dial of her phone to call the center. When the manager picked up, like she always loyally did, my mother let her have it.
My mother is known for her sassiness in our family but when talking to other people she is a very kind-hearted women which she normally is, we just tease her about being sassy. She was yelling into the phone about how could someone let that happened to someone in such an unfair manner without consulting the parents, or how in the world it was her place to do such a thing when the Youth Center was there for a kids to get a break from school and not have to deal with that sort of thing. When she hung up the phone, the next second within a blink, my father was already on the phone with her and they were discussing the entire situation. When I got home, my parents just told me to not talk about anything that happened at school tomorrow and just avoid the problem people. That sounded fine to me. I just went up to my room and tried to sleep everything that had just happened off.
If only that was the end...
The next morning, I went into school normally and everyone was still a bit awkward about what had happened but everyone went about normally. However, when I got into my usual seat in first period science, Leah was really tense and scared for some strange reason. I ended up talking to her about it and she told me that she had overheard the kid who bullied me and his girlfriend and that it made her tense as all get-out. She even decided to try and confirm it by talking to them a bit about it and from what she got, it seemed to be true.
He had written a kill list.
The name should be self-explanatory but I couldn't believe it and Leah was freaking out about it and we ended up talking about it all through the rest of class. She wanted someone to go with her to the vice-principals office to talk about it and so I went with her to make sure she was alright. I couldn't believe it. This was really starting to get serious from just classic bullying. We ended up just telling her and leaving for our next class. We just felt numb the rest of the day with the news of what had gone on.
The next day of school, he wasn't in school. Me and Leah were happy and we went into class as normal but all the teachers were very different. They were much more stoic and non-emotional towards us after what happened yesterday. When we got to English class, we were all given a new assignment. We had to keep a journal and write entries in it for a grade. Our teacher said she would not be reading these but she wanted us to write in it to "express our thoughts on anything we wanted" and she made sure to stress the word anything. Then our Health class was transformed into a "group therapy" session in which we would be writing letters and addressing them to the class if we wanted to. We had to talk about how certain things made us feel and everything.
We found out later that the authorites had been called in on the thing me and Leah had told the Vice-principal and they had down a complete shake-down of the kids room. We heard this from his "poor and heart-broken" girlfriend who was telling the story to all would hear because of how "wrong" it was.
Next what happened at the end of the school day, instead of walking outside to the youth center, my dad was waiting outside in his business suit he wore for work and ushered me to follow behind him quickly.
He told me that the police wanted to talk to me and the police station and ask me some questions about what had been going on. When that hit me, I couldn't believe something so serious was going on and that what Leah told me was actually true and everything was just rushing by so quickly I didn't know what to think. I remember getting really scared as I waited outside the hall for my turn and the person who walked out of the room with her father before I went in was Leah. She had been crying and gave me a quick nod before her and her dad left. Me and my father went in and discussed with the officer and I answered all his question regarding the "list" and he had told us what the girlfriend had been saying is true because they did do a search, but they were not giving any of the results out.
When I was leaving the office, more students from my class were lined up with their parents to go into questioning. I just went home for another night of restless sleeping. That was posisbly the worst 24 hours I had ever experienced in my entire life.
The next day in our first period, the principal walked into the classroom before we began class and told us that the kid would not be returning to school for the rest of the school year and that his base privileges had been revoked. Some kids gave a sigh of relief while the girlfriend just turned really angry. Hell hath no fury like a women's scorn. She just stomped away when the chance arose and slowly.
With that finally over, everything was slowly returning to normal and everything seemed a bit more pleasant now that everything was finally over. Everyone just began to "forget" what happened during that year. No one truly forgot but it was something no one talked about.
The rest of my time in England happened a bit rapidly with people leaving and new people joining in our class. We were finally in high school. Very different atmosphere than we were used to since none of us really saw each other that much anymore in terms of classes and when we didn't have the chance to hang out. Ninth grade year was going alright until one thing that changed things.
My mother began to become ill.
End Act 2: England's Experiences
The Big Move: Act 1
I actually don't know what compelled me to write this blog thing but I guess it's a thing that I personally needed to do. I don't really mind if no one really reads this or if people comment or whatever since I am just taking the time to write something to get it off my chest that I have put off for years. Sorry if it turns out being a little long and rambly at time but eh. The more I write this, the more I realize this is just becoming my life story haha, oh well!
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I'll just start off by saying why I feel I am writing this. I have always kept in this thing for me in terms of whenever I move, I just tell myself to get over it and there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening. The fact is, what I have been telling myself is the most logical course of action to take which I have been telling myself siiiiince, about the third move? That would be the first "real" move for me.
Basically what this is going to be about is me venting a bit about moving and what happens during the times I'm in certain places. Some people know this experience and some people have never had the opportunity to experience this unless you count moving away to college which I guess is a big move but in a difference sense as I am coming to realize with this most recent move.
So I guess a good place to start would be the beginning of when I started to move, but to do that I'd have to go to a time where I don't remember a single thing for the most part, but eh I'll give it a shot.
I have been moving since I was born. I was born in a town in England where I lived there for a year then my parents and I moved to Maryland where my little brother was born (I was the oldest) and then within the same year, we ended up moving to Germany. I can't recall the town and all I really can remember is the fact that for a kid, I had a pretty sweet basement. I mean I find it a little sad my earliest memory is of this black carpet with shapes in different colors on it but it was just something unique. I also remember playing video games with my mother at that age in the time we lived there but very very hazily. After two years of Germany, we moved back to Maryland (different part) where my little sister was born and then we(By we, my parents) decided to live there for seven years.
Now this is where I had the stereotypical kid life in some sort of that sense. My parents dropped my brother and sister off at day-care for the first couple of years and I went straight into elementary school at this one public school which did not leave that much of an impression on my. The biggest thing I remember is that they let me skip ahead a bit but wanted to try and hold me back in kindergarten because of the fact that I couldn't skip...yeah hahaha. My dad loves to bring that story up in conversations from time to time whenever we talk about the past with acquaintances. "Can you believe that?! They tried to hold back my SON because he couldn't skip."
My dad is always the joking dad. I mean he is perfectly awkward and sociable in all the right ways if that makes any sense at all. He can be totally embarassing at almost all the wrong times but then he can be perfectly sociable when I really need him to be or he will just be nice to completely random strangers. My father is someone I respect as a man who has given up a lot for his family and just a good working, honest man. He can be goofy at times and that's just the way he is. I wouldn't change him for anything and love that man to death. Gets a little aggravating when he gives me the same lectures he has been giving me since I was like eight on how I should be able to clean my room or that I shouldn't blahblahblah haha.
But anyways, back on topic, my father would love to bring up that skipping story when I was younger and I love to jeer him about it saying how I can skip just fine now and would love to demonstrate it. Which is actually quite the site considering I'm like 6'4", but he just laughs it off with me and we have a good time. Elementary school didn't hold much besides that first like little crush that you have on like your best friend you just made for a week or so.
That is where I ran into my first, life problems, I guess I should say. Her name was Angela. I don't remember much besides the fact we were really close for a year in those grades of kindergarten and first grade. Of course there was those first feeling of "I like her" type deal that ended up in me being a little brat and picking on her a bit but the thing is she would come right back at me! If only I knew the future that would entail in terms of how women treated me later on in life! However, the thing I learned with Angela was the fact of divorce. I didn't understand the concept of what happened during that time but I remember going to her apartment and she was with her littler sister and her mother. My dad had told me not to ask where Angela's father was or anything of that nature and I obliged at that age because disobeying parents at that age was always like a death sentence. Angela was much more withdrawn than I remember at that time but she still had that adorable smile and we played while the parent's talk, which I can only imagine now was just the simple formalities that parents of children do in situations like this. After we left the apartment, that was the last time I saw Angela. I don't know what happened but that's the last memory I can recall of her and it kind of sucks it had to be of a moment like that especially when I am looking back on it now later on in life.
In the end, I finished that elementary school with being moved to another elementary school which was a private school. Not just a normal private school, a religious private school. Now when I was younger I didn't mind at all how it was or anything. The uniforms didn't bother me at all nor did I really care for the fact that I had bible studies or anything. The only thing I have to say that I hated was the fact that every thursday I had to wear ties. I mean, seriously, even today I still hate ties unless I get to fully dress up for it. We only had to wear ties on thursdays because that was weekly chapel day where everyone in the school crammed into the tiny little church we had and then listened to a sermon given from one of the teachers. I can't recall many of them but I do remember the fact was that if you were a fifth grader, you were the hot stuff of the school. You got to be a safety patrol member which means you got that swagtastic badge and sash with your own sign and then on chapel days, once a month you got to perform a skit with puppets which was probably the most fun. Except the fact the teacher was a little looney and had a collection of puppets that looked longer than her school book shelf in the classroom and she made everyone sing in the skits. However throughout the years getting up that point, everyone was in the same class and that was where I began to feel the fact that my teachers just did not like me as a child haha. I mean it sounds a little pitiful but it is truly what I thought and felt all the way up to even graduating high school that there were just some teachers that were not going to like me just because of who I was and the like.
Now I used to think it was paranoia but looking back on the way my teachers treated me, they really just did not like me. The biggest hypothesis I could take in deciphering why would probably be me being a really quiet kid when I was growing up. I was picked on a LOT when growing up. It was just something I was used to. I was the fat kid of class that always tried to fit in but would usually fall flat on his face in his attempts to gain some friends. I was just a lonely kid I guess because no one ever wanted to talk to me unless it was to jeer at me a bit. However, I kind of accepted that as a way that I was making friends and stuck with it. Even if they were making fun of me, at least they were noticing me. Looking back at it now....I was such a sad little kid hahaha! Oh well, life just moves on I guess and it all happened for the better. But yeah, the reason why I feel the teachers never truly liked me was because I was always quiet and when I was little I had a tiny bit of a lying problem because I would always get nervous when trying to formulate an answer while talking to them and then I'd end up in a bigger hole than I began. So my teachers thought I was just quiet, awkward, and a little bit evil...well maybe mischevious would be a better wording for that age group. I just remember being taken out of the classroom a lot or pulled after class for one of the infamous "talks" with the teacher about what is going on in class.
That is also where I gained a little drive to become a teacher. I wanted the be that teacher who stuck up for the quiet kids (because there were more than just me, yet we never really thought to socialize till about sixth grade) and also was a bit more fair. One teacher I remember had left a little more than the standard mark would be my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Shaffran. Now this would probably be the point in the story where I found a good role model in my life that I would aspire to be and also be able to model myself as a teacher later in life especially with the way this is going along. This isn't that type of story though as much as I kind of wish that it was one of those type of stories. In fact, I didn't like Mr. Shaffran at all. He was one of those high school football guys that made everything about sports and that's how he taught our class. He was a total jock and had the mentality that everyone should play sports and if not, then they probably should just sit and watch the others who were good at sports do things. You can probably guess where I ended up, huh? I didn't just sit there and just accept my fate at first. I definitely tried out football (well flag, after all we were a private baptist school who had really strict rules and no touching policies) and anything else in terms of basketball or whatever sport he tried to throw at everyone, but I was always subjected to being picked last on teams and also just stuck on the sidelines. I also remember that even in class, he separated our class into groups to sit with each other which was completely at random, but then we had to choose a name for our team....based on NFL teams. Now in today's society, I respect football as a sport and definitely can see the interest in it, but back then, I had no clue whatsoever and all the rest of the boys in my class had grown up being dedicated to certain teams and my teacher was a great football enthusiast so I just sat there and let everything else go about.
This thing kind of goes back to how my father was. He was a sports guy, hands down. He loved sports and played them throughout his life. His big one, however, was soccer which is not really popular in the united states, but pretty much popular everywhere else in the world. He also was a bit of a pro-skateboarder when he was younger too. I guess to put it simply, my dad was a cool kid in high school. He always told me of his misadventures with his brother and how his nose got broken from being in so many fights and just the way it went back then. My dad said that he was always thrown into every sport by his father so he felt he should at least try to do that with his two boys as well, but it never really worked out because me and my brother are far from being sports enthusiasts. We tried so many different sports from soccer to baseball to football to tennis to golf to basketball and so-on. However, none of them stuck. Well I guess soccer did throughout my life because I felt that was the closest way I could do "well" in a sport. I just liked being part of a team and being on the field.
Anyways, the reason why I say I really did not care for Mr. Shaffran was because of the way he would handle certain situations. I went up to him one time with my tail between my legs and a bit of a teary eye because I had been excluded from the playground games again for the upteenth time and wanted to talk to someone about it so I thought my teacher would be a good place to. I told him I had been being picked on by the other kids and he nodded his head to what I was saying and tried asking me what I could do to help myself out more. He told me that I should try getting more involved/interested in what the other kids were interested in. That happened to not be pokemon anymore and turned out to be doing sports. So I asked my dad to teach me about it but it went south. I went back to school and then waited for recess to begin so I could possibly talk to the other kids about the new things I felt proud of learning finally. However, when I went to try and talk to them, a group of them just laughed at me for trying to talk to them and messing up a few of the facts. Then they told me that the teacher had said that they had to be nice to me or try and be my "friend" and said it was funny that I had to go to the teacher to try and make friends. I didn't really care for fourth grade much.
Then, finally, after all I had been waiting for, fifth grade finally arrived! I was finally at the top of the elementary totem pole where the other kids would look up to me and I would be able to finally have a chance at things. Yeah...no haha. I realized the teacher was looney and had a very weird mechanic of trying to teach us certain facts about subjects. Her main subject of focus though was around either her puppets, her safety patrol, or whatever book she wanted to read us in class. I don't remember learning much in class because the most I can remember are those cloth puppets and safety patrol. The one thing about fifth grade that I can remember is that I found another little kid crush. This girl was the quiet girl in class that was friends with all the other girls but didn't say much of anything herself. We began to bond a bit over the fact that we had similar interests in reading books and we were both book worms. I remember that I was so happy when I got picked to be safety patrol for one, and then my station was next to hers. I never said more than two words to her but it was just the fact of being near that crush ya know? Everyone has one of those in their lives and knows the classic dilemma of it all. Still pretty much floated along by myself in terms of finding some people to talk to every now and then and trying to avoid the teacher's wrath nowadays. Thinking back on it though, there was one time that really stuck out in my memory.
One time, I was just sitting by myself eating my lunch like normal and then the usual "bullies" decided to have their routine fun with me, but I just decided to leave it be. For some reason they wanted to trade some snacks with me (I know this sounds petty and is probably biased as all get out, but my mother used to pack the best lunches at times and would always nail it on the head to what I wanted), but I didn't want to trade. So they asked me why and I said I didn't like salt and vinegar chips, which was the truth because I just didn't like the taste, but they kept pushing it and pushing it and finally in order to try and get them off my back, I told them I was allergic. Now that was a lie but it sort of just blurted out because I was just being pushed into that. Now I thought that would have satiated them but I was dead wrong on that accord. They actually decided to take vinegar and pour some onto the chips I was eating when I wasn't looking and then I got a rude surprise. I know kids don't know any better but looking back on that, if I had actually been allergic to vinegar, that could have been really bad! The teacher didn't even scold the kids for pulling that sort of thing. She, in fact, scolded me for lying about possibly being allergic to something. I mean, yes I get the slap on the wrist for lying about something that serious but the fact was that it wasn't the full story. Oh well learn some things from different scenarios.
So I "graduated" from elementary school finally and thought middle school would finally be my chance to succeed in being a bit better in terms of social stuff. I have to say, I actually was more successful and got a close group of 4 to 5 friends which was nice to have. That was nice to have because they were video game guys and also into anime at the time I was as well and semi-introduced me to it. The bullies still existed, but it wasn't so bad with having people I could go to afterwards and where they would semi-stick up for me too. Teachers still disliked me for some reason but I just took that as the norm of how things were. The thing I disliked was how the older kids would pick on me as well. I really did not care for lunch-time or things like that because of the fact that people had to mingle in that sort of thing. I meant some nice people though due to it. Some jerks, but every social event has those.
I do remember there was one teacher that I will always remember. She was this short, yet big lady and my first English teacher. She was my first middle school teacher and I had homeroom and first period with her which probably was why I had such a lasting impression of her. She was that one teacher who always tried to think she was fashionable so she would wear bright colors and have that sass in her step and the way she talked in order to gain attention which scared a lot of kids. She didn't like kids it seemed from the way she treated everyone and seemed that she wanted to teach older kids who were more "mature" for her. However, there was one thing she could never avoid from children. Because she tried to be "fashionable" she would always wear shirts/blouses that were too small for her but just enough to cover her when she was standing or sitting. However, she loved to write a lot on the chalkboard (anyone else remember those? I mean I loved chalkboards and the games we would play with them and how cleaning the erasers was considered cool, but now we all have smartboards or projectors or whiteboards but yeah, nostalgia eh?) so she would always try to reach the tippy top of the chalkboard to write even more notes to drown us in, but when she did, we all got a sight that would scare us till we die. I kind of felt bad for her, but at the same time not really. She was always incredibly mean to children and unfair a lot of the times. However, maybe we didn't know her entire story? I don't know. But that one lady was the first of a couple "evil English teachers" I would become familiar with in my school career. That's a tale for another time.
So at the beginning of sixth grade, I tried out for the soccer team. I really wanted to make my dad proud by making the team and also showing the guys that I could also be a part of the JV team hopefully. I worked hard by running laps around the track and also reading up on soccer terminology. The big day had finally arrived. The way the coach tested out to get his players was when we did a scrimmage match against another school, he tried us all out on the field and then made his decision. I remember finally being allowed on the field. What a great feeling it was! Trying to go after the ball, passing it with other teammates and just working for a common goal; beating the other team. I didn't do that well though. I was slower than most the guys due to my weight and also because I lacked the natural co-ordination the other kids did too. However, I felt I had done well enough to be possibly second string where I could still hang with my friends and have a good time getting better. Plus it was a small school so my chances were better here than anywhere. Before the list was posted, I was pulled aside by the coach and he told me that he would like for me to be the team's manager instead of playing on the field. At first, I was ecstatic! The coach picked me to be the manager and I would still get to be around everyone. The sad part was I couldn't play but I pushed that aside and decided to just look at the benefits of it all. The thing that I realized later on after a game or two as being manager....I was the only one who didn't make the team who had tried out. When I realized this, I was devasted.
My cousins had been going to the same school as I had been but they were always five to six years older than I was so by the time I was trying out for JV they both were on the Varsity team and they were both MvPs. That's the thing about that school, everyone loved my cousins. My one cousin was a heartthrob and my other one was the book smart popular type. They both became validvictorians of their school years which was a great acheivements and they were also on every sports team as a great player. So I thought I could be like them and make not only my dad proud, but continue what my cousins had started. However, I was far from that at the time. It was just not meant to be in terms of sports. I still tried but to no avail.
I ended up quitting being manager because I couldn't take the humiliation of it when the other kids were all on the team and that way I could just try to go back to floating through sixth grade anymore unscathed that I already had been in the beginning.
I made my way from 6th to 7th with making a new friend who was an exchange student and we got along really well. He was the first friend who truly acted like a friend. We shared the same birthday which was a cool way to connect with someone, but when it was our birthday, he actually put something on my locker without me even realizing and he also gave me this card which was would framed of my favorite football player (of like the 2 I knew, Peyton Manning) and gave it to me even though we were both Colts fans. It was such a kind gesture that was foreign to me I didn't know what to do. We continued to hang out and be loners together (besides the usual group of 4 that I would hang out with but we had a different schedule) and finally made my way to seventh grade.
Remember that cute little shy girl I had been crushing on in the 5th grade? Well that crush had still been there throughout middle school and I was finally in the seventh grade with that everlasting crush still there. With the confidence boost from my friend, I finally got the courage to ask her out. I had still been talking to her on and off for the past couple of years but never anything serious but when I finally owned up and grew a pair and asked her out, she said yes. I couldn't believe me luck! She said yes to a date! She gave a cute little blush and scurried off to her friends to tell that I had "finally" asked her out. I am seriously a dolt when it comes to people flirting with me and that is STILL something going on with me today hahaha.
Well we went on our first date and it was a success and I was finally beginning to gain more friends and I had a girlfriend. Yes, seventh grade girlfriends are pathetic and never really work out but hey I was young and in "love" as the expression goes. Things were finally starting to turn up a bit better for me finally and I finally began to shake the bullying problem I had with my friend group becoming bigger and soon enough, I knew everyone's name and had friends in classes. I finally wasn't alone and I couldn't wait for the years to come.
That's about around the time my parent's dropped the news that we were moving....to England.
End Act 1
The Big Move: Act 2 - England's Experiences
Now this is a little head's up, although this Act only takes place in a small time-frame, it is probably going to be lengthy but that's just a head's up because a lot happened here.
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The first thing that I can remember going through my mind for moving was a feeling of not understanding anything at all. I mean what was I to expect, for all I can remember, I have lived in that house my parents owned and gone to the same school and did the same routine I have always done. I lived near my family and I lived near things I liked to do at the time. I kept asking my parents "But why?" and I would get the same answer every time.
"Because we love trying new experiences and you'll enjoy it! Don't worry, honey, it's not as bad as it seems."
That would be what my mother would always say. She is such a kind woman at times but whenever she said those words, they always left a hollow impression on me because I never believed them. I guess that was the first time I didn't have full trust in my parents because how could they know what happened at the like? They tried their best to try and make the move pleasant but moving is a whole lot of non-pleasantries.
I guess my mother was used to it more because she moved around her entire life. I mean she had been born in Texas, lived in Washington state, lived in Africa, lived in England, and probably a whole bunch of other places before she went to Maryland after running away from home at the age of 16 from Washington state due to her parents being...well not-parents. I guess a little explanation can be given but it's just a sad tale and makes me understand my mother because she did not really tell me till I was in high school but she hated her parents and the thing is, her parents hated her. She was the one kid in her family who tried to work at jobs and do everything she could to do right but it never was enough for the way her other two siblings were held on a pedestal. My grandfather was just cruel to her and my grandmother was no better....just thinking about what she went through in that house makes me feel so damn lucky to have parents as great as mine. I really hate saying things like that because I feel what makes mine better than others and I don't like bragging about things because I just have a really low self-esteem, but I really do love my parents and would never ask for others. With all they have been through, I just can't help but respect them.
But I don't care for my mother's parents for personal reasonings because basically I know a bit of what my mother went through. My grandparent's loved to pick "favorites" and my mother wasn't their favorite and neither was I. They loved my brother and sister with all they could and showered them in gifts and the like but sometimes they would forget my birthday or send different presents to us three in a way that would just make me question things due to my age.
One thing though, made me realize this more for myself that my grandparents had favorites besides the little things that you could probably just brush off. A summer when I was little my grandparent's had invited me and my siblings out to their summer house to spend the summer with them. Of course we were all excited to go there and hang out and have some fun there and just get to have fun for a bit. However, I got a call from my grandparents a couple weeks before we were set to go. They told me that I would be going to a stay-away summer camp when I got there while my brother and sister stayed with them. They acted like it was the greatest thing and I did too a bit but on the inside I was bummed. I told my parent's what was going on when I went to their house for the summer.
I didn't go to my grandparent's that summer. I didn't mind that much because I had fun that summer with my parents and being an only child for the first time ever. I went to my first baseball game and I got my own room that my parents made out of a spare room. It made me kind of forget about it till later on in life. That was probably my favorite summer as a kid growing up.
Anyways, so my mother had grown up moving so I guess why that is why she was a bit "cold" in the fact of her kids not really wanting to move. Well, my sister was too young to really know what was going on/care and my brother didn't care at all. It was probably me who took it the hardest that we were moving because I had finally started making friends which is something that is just very hard for me to do and open up to people.
We began packing up the house and that was something I really wasn't there for that much. My parents decided to let me spend the week with my grandmother's house and enjoy some time with her. I love my grandmother very much. She's always been my favorite family member I guess if people have to choose that sort of thing. No matter what was going on in my life, she can always make me smile and enjoy things. Whenever I came over, she would run over to the store and make sure her house was crammed to the walls with snacks of all kinds of delight from junk food to soda. She always spoiled me haha. I guess in retrospect, I really shouldn't have been that upset about my other pair of grandparents because my grandmother made up for everything that I missed out on in those terms.
Her husband died while I was a bit young unexpectedly while going in for a routine hospital check which was a very sad thing to see. However, she still tried to hold that smile she always had. Nothing could take away the light she has. When I was growing up and being picked on in school, my grandmother knew the right things to tell me and would always be there with a present/surprise and I didn't even have to tell her I was upset. She would just pull something out from behind her or tell me to hop into the car. She was also fiesty! She actually taught me to play baseball before my father did and we played in her backyard which was like a field. We'd watch movies together and we'd play cards and all that sort of cliche things you did with your grandmother.
However, when I went over her house to spend the week with her, I didn't really know that would be the last time I would see her have that same spring in her step or be "herself" fully I guess. It was still a great week.
It wasn't so great an ending when I came back and I walked around the house to find it completely empty save for a few boxes here and there. I went straight to my room and everything was gone. And by everything, I mean everything. My parent's had let me paint my room whatever colors I wanted so I went with Green and Purple which was really cool for me and it also had a Scizor from pokemon since he was one of my favorite pokemon growing up for being so cool that my mother had painted on my wall in life-size form. But that too was gone.
Being in an empty house sucks.
The only thing that had stuff in it was my parent's room that had air mattresses on the ground for us to sleep in for the final night in the house. I just remember plugging in my cd player and listening to that throughout the night.
The next day we "moved" into a hotel for the next final days before we took the big flight over to England. We ended up leaving on my sister's birthday and I remember her being upset about that because my parent's had told her that she would get her presents in England and that it was part of the "adventure" to have her birthday on the plane. She pouted a bit at that, but didn't really say much more. I remember, though, seeing the cutest smile on her face when my parent's had got the flight captain to say Happy Birthday to her over the intercom and she was blushing so much I couldn't help but chuckle a little.
We ended up landing in England and you can only guess what the weather was like the very first day there. Cloudy and Rainy. That is a the most common weather in England I soon learned because there was rarely any sun on any of the days which made moving there just a tad more gloomy, but I just sighed and moved on to the newest place to live for the next couple of days. In England, they don't really have that many hotels in the towns and if they do, it is like one single really ritzy marriott and we were not paying the price for that so we decided to live in this apartment that my mother's job allowed her to get that is rented for people only staying in there for short times. It wasn't the greatest because I was back to sharing a room with my brother and then the entire house was entirely too small for all five of us, but we made due.
So many things were different there than they had been in America. There are the obvious ones like the accents, the weather, and also the opposites of driving on other sides of the roads, but some facts were just not common to me. In order to go to the grocery store or get dinner, we had to walk to wherever we wanted. For a kid, that was monumental because never really walking anywhere to go places and being used to driving to places just made things a bit hard on that. Plus there food was completely different than anything I've had before. All their soda comes at room temperature so if we wanted to have cold soda, we would have to wait a bit and then there is the thing about classical having to have fish and chips the first night there and now it is one of my favorite dishes to have ever.
Within the first week of being in England, we started school half-way through the school year. I was still in seventh grade and I was a bit worried about my first day of school at where I was going. That is probably one of the scariest feelings for me when growing up was trying to go to school and find the right places and always being way too shy to ask anyone if I was in the right place or for help. It also sucked because my first class ever in this new school was gym.
I have terrible luck haha.
The gym teacher was an old army guy so he had little room for remorse and was used to seeing kids fluctuate in and out of his class. So there I was in clothes definitely not fit for gym but still had to run laps with the rest of the class who came prepared. However, I didn't get my schedule till the very second I walked into the building that day.
Speaking of clothes, this was the first time I had ever been to a public school that didn't have uniforms and didn't have like a religion class that was mandatory. In fact, everything about the classes was different. Let me explain this a bit though.
I didn't go to a typical England school. They all have to wear uniforms and also have religion studies. Where I went to school, was on an american military base school. So it was like a little hunk of america in England. In fact the entire base was just a small like 5 mile piece of property sectioned off of America, it had a lot you could ask for in that place but everything was downsized and completely tiny. The school I went to was no exception. The class I transfered into had about 16 students in it as the full class-size. We never interacted much with any other schools because the closest american school was a good hour or two away. And guess which base was the smallest in the entire country? The one I happened to be at.
But yeah, so I went through classes shyly and not knowing any one at all. The kids were actually really friendly though and the classes I got signed up for were some I had never even known you could take in middle school like a Video Filming and Editing class. Soon enough, within the next few days, I was apart of the classroom "family" atmosphere the kids had developed with being in the same grade and being in the same position as the others in terms of moving to a new school and not knowing anyone. It was a very interesting concept that I cherish and I also did not like for later reasons.
It was nice to have an accepting environment at first. I decided to just relax the rest of the year since I only had a couple of months left till the end of the school year and then I was finally onto my last year of middle school. They say the environments are different in other countries because you have to "grow up sooner" which I can definitely see now looking back on it because not just me, but the other kids of that school got a taste of it in the next coming two years.
Near the end of seventh grade year is around the time I first dealt with the word, suicide.
I didn't know the person who had commited the action but it was really close. Right next to the school, there was a bowling alley where the kids would hang out and on the lucky days, we would have gym there for a fun day of bowling. It was literally 20 ft from the school and was connected to the gym so it made perfect sense for it. That year, the owner of the bowling alley decided to hang himself in a stall of the restroom and one of the officers of the base had to take care of things because the co-worker who had found the body had gotten a little too broken up about it. No one really expected it apparently. We did not really hear this news from our parents too in-depth, but actually our teachers told us what had happened. It was weird having teachers be so open with their students in these types of terms and conditions, but they said it was part of their job as teachers to embrace us for life matters so we all just nodded our heads and thought about what had happened.
However, at the end of the school year, me and my family made a surprise visit to the states. My parents just told me and my siblings that we were coming to see my grandma, but they stressed that she was not the same from when we last saw her. We all were a bit scared and worried at the sound of this till my parents explained the situation a bit more.
My grandmother had had a stroke. One day while she was sitting out in her sun-room alone with her dog, it just happened. Her entire right side of her body was now paralyzed and she could barely walk by herself at the time. It was such a sad sight to see. Her once booming body of energy was now this somewhat somber replacement of my grandmother. It took a lot out of me to see her like that. Her memory was a bit foggy and she couldn't really get out the right words to say at a time or so and would mix up our names with others, but at least she was still there.
One thing that made me happy though. She still had that smile. Although it was a little one-sided, the bright twinkle in her eyes and the smile she had was still there which was more than enough for me. I knew my grandmother was still there and would still be the same even if it killed her trying. She began to move about herself and then began to improve her motor abilities and soon enough she was back in her house trotting slowly by herself and her little pup. Of course, some things had to chance and she was still a bit slower in everything, but at least I still had my grandmother.
The rest of that summer flew by and I didn't do much but move into the new house that we would be renting for the next couple of years and then trying to hang-out with friends more. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Finally, I made my way to eighth grade. The year of school I would always black out in my mind and not really want to talk about. Though, I feel I need to write this down. So here goes nothing I guess.
Eighth grade year started off just like every other school year. The only thing is the adding of a new student or two and the lose of one or two. There was only one I really remembered was this girl named Leah. Me and her hit it off right off the bat and became pretty good friends. I hung out with my normal group of friends as the tag-along member because I was usually the quieter one out of the group and didn't mind following along with whatever was going on. The year continued and classes happened and just the usual normal melo-dramatic nothingness of school. Near the end of the year is when things began to spike up to a point of no return and where no one would really be acting the same way again for a long while.
And I just happened to get caught up in the center of it's gravational pull.
So let me just skip a few pages to get to the point where it all began. It's a bit fuzzy after trying to forget after all these years but the crucial bits are there. Basically to start it off, there was this kid in our class that just did not like me nor did he really care for anyone else in the class besides his two friends. (One of which he was dating and the other just was a close friend since forever) He began just with little quips under the breathe towards me and a couple of my friends and some just uncouth words but it didn't really affect anyone much because people just decided to avoid him for it. 'Cept this one kid in my friend group who would try and get our "groups" I guess if classification was need to hang out a bit and everyone was cordial in that sense except that one kid whenever he got the chance towards me.
Tension built, but as usual in situations such as this one, it was just pushed onto the backburner. And as it usually does, the point boils over and everything explodes. This ended up turning from a normal just dislike to a full-out involvement of almost the entire school.
The point of no return is a scary one, especially when things get really insane. The day that started it all was probably one of the worst days of my life, if not, the worst yet.
It was Health class and our teacher (who was also our Social Studies teacher) was absent for the first time ever and it was just another mom sub of a student who also went to the school in her place. We took our normal seats for the most part and people gravitated towards their friends in that set-up. I ended up sitting in front of the kid who didn't like my due to the way my friends ended up sitting and dispersing and I could tell from the groans I was getting from him and his posse that I was a bit unwelcomed. I just tried to ignore it and move on with my day and talk to my friends since there was no assignment.
However, he didn't like being ignored so he ended up kicking me from his chair with saying things like "I hate him. I just hate him." and I wasn't expecting it so it hurt a bit and the thing is, the teacher didn't see any of this from her desk so then he began to just flat out hit me in the back which the substitute finally saw because someone got her attention about it and decided that we both should be sent to the office. (Okay that is one thing I will never understand, how come the kid who gets hurts also gets sent to the office/also in possible trouble? That is something about schools I never got in those terms. I can understand if it was a fight but if it wasn't then yeah. Anyways).
I was sniffling a bit and I remember yelling at him in the halls as we were being escorted to the principals office *which was only 10 ft away from the class* and he was just grinning like he had won or something which just really set me off even more but I just bit my tongue because the substitute apparently didn't like the usage of the words "Burn in hell." which wasn't that bad considering the vocabulary most kids end up using in today's world. He ended up being put in the principal's office and I was sent to class again where I just wanted to sit alone.
When I got in though, the classroom had erupted because there was no teacher in the room and people were just gossiping their heads off. I just took a seat at the front of the class and decided to sit and sulk a bit, but someone came up to me with a smile asking me a very strange question.
"So what's my number? What do I rank?" he said with a weird smile. I just shrugged not knowing what that meant at all and at that time the rest of my friends came up asking me the same question which I did not get at all. Then the answer to my question finally arose with the girlfriend of the guy who had kicked me and the like. She acted as if she was being personally affected by all of this and that she had been the one to be kicked and said with a point of her finger towards me she shouted, "He's the problem of all this. He made a list of everyone on myspace that ranks the people in class as to whom he likes the best. He also is a sick pervert! All he does is look at women whenever they bend over and he makes me feel like a piece of meat and I'm tired of this."
That is where I just shut down. I am terrible in confrontational situations and being called-out or just things being said about me that aren't true at all. First off, I never had a myspace because my parents were weird about social networking at that time so that threw out the list thing and then the fact that I was a perv was just not true either. For one thing, I would never have looked at this girl. She was just....no in every sense of the word because well she wasn't the prettiest to put things nicely. Plus I guess to put thing simply, I wasn't interested in any of the girls in my class because I just felt more like friends with a bunch of them and just...complicated time in my life for that sort of thing which made that hold no weight at all.
However, the eighth grade me, didn't know how to retaliate or anything so I just broke down and just sat there tearing up without anything to do about it. There was no teacher, I was in a room of peers that all thought I was some sick freak due to rumours spread by that girl and her boyfriend and it was just...unbearable. A few of the girls of the class came over to comfort me a bit but the teacher soon came back into the room and tried to get me to move back to sit near that girl and I just told her I was fine where I was and she didn't push it. So she just went back to her desk and it all just moved slowly with whispers till class ended and school was finally out.
I ended up leaving the school alone and walking to my mother's office where she worked and called her down to the lobby to ask if I could just talk to her for a second. She knew something was wrong just by hearing the tone of my voice (she told me later on) and hurried down. She saw me sitting there with just a sorrowful look and she just hugged me and asked what had happened. I told her everything and then she told me to just go to the Youth Center (where all the kids would hang out after school since it was just close and had a lot of fun things there). She said for me not to talk about it with anyone which I told her I promised I wouldn't.
I made my way then to the youth center where my friends were waiting at the door about to go out to do something like go to the grocery store or something to get out of the youth center and they said I needed a cake to cheer me up. We were about to leave until someone new I hadn't seen before walked into the youth center. It happened to be the older brother of the kid who kicked me and he wanted answers to what happened from me. I told him I didn't want to talk about it, but the brother kept pushing it and pushing it and saying that it was all my fault because his brother would never do something like that. Eventually the dreaded manager of the staff of the people who worked at the youth center (which was like four people) came over with her mother hen nature and said that we needed to have a little "sit-down" to try and figure everything out. My friends soon left because she shot them an evil look to go away and then I was left alone with her, the brother, and the kid's girlfriend...again for Round 2.
My odds were heavily against my favour to say the least. It ended up just being them having a counseling session with me needing to admit that I was a bit of a perv and that it was my fault in the entire dilemma and I just didn't want to deal with it so I got up and left. The manager was near livid at this but I honestly did not care. I felt trapped. I just wanted to go somewhere else. I waited outside till my mother called and told me where to meet her to be picked up and when she saw I was still crying she became possibly the scariest human being I've seen in my entire life and from that day, I vowed, never to make my mother that angry. When she had heard what the manager had tried to do, her fingers flew on the dial of her phone to call the center. When the manager picked up, like she always loyally did, my mother let her have it.
My mother is known for her sassiness in our family but when talking to other people she is a very kind-hearted women which she normally is, we just tease her about being sassy. She was yelling into the phone about how could someone let that happened to someone in such an unfair manner without consulting the parents, or how in the world it was her place to do such a thing when the Youth Center was there for a kids to get a break from school and not have to deal with that sort of thing. When she hung up the phone, the next second within a blink, my father was already on the phone with her and they were discussing the entire situation. When I got home, my parents just told me to not talk about anything that happened at school tomorrow and just avoid the problem people. That sounded fine to me. I just went up to my room and tried to sleep everything that had just happened off.
If only that was the end...
The next morning, I went into school normally and everyone was still a bit awkward about what had happened but everyone went about normally. However, when I got into my usual seat in first period science, Leah was really tense and scared for some strange reason. I ended up talking to her about it and she told me that she had overheard the kid who bullied me and his girlfriend and that it made her tense as all get-out. She even decided to try and confirm it by talking to them a bit about it and from what she got, it seemed to be true.
He had written a kill list.
The name should be self-explanatory but I couldn't believe it and Leah was freaking out about it and we ended up talking about it all through the rest of class. She wanted someone to go with her to the vice-principals office to talk about it and so I went with her to make sure she was alright. I couldn't believe it. This was really starting to get serious from just classic bullying. We ended up just telling her and leaving for our next class. We just felt numb the rest of the day with the news of what had gone on.
The next day of school, he wasn't in school. Me and Leah were happy and we went into class as normal but all the teachers were very different. They were much more stoic and non-emotional towards us after what happened yesterday. When we got to English class, we were all given a new assignment. We had to keep a journal and write entries in it for a grade. Our teacher said she would not be reading these but she wanted us to write in it to "express our thoughts on anything we wanted" and she made sure to stress the word anything. Then our Health class was transformed into a "group therapy" session in which we would be writing letters and addressing them to the class if we wanted to. We had to talk about how certain things made us feel and everything.
We found out later that the authorites had been called in on the thing me and Leah had told the Vice-principal and they had down a complete shake-down of the kids room. We heard this from his "poor and heart-broken" girlfriend who was telling the story to all would hear because of how "wrong" it was.
Next what happened at the end of the school day, instead of walking outside to the youth center, my dad was waiting outside in his business suit he wore for work and ushered me to follow behind him quickly.
He told me that the police wanted to talk to me and the police station and ask me some questions about what had been going on. When that hit me, I couldn't believe something so serious was going on and that what Leah told me was actually true and everything was just rushing by so quickly I didn't know what to think. I remember getting really scared as I waited outside the hall for my turn and the person who walked out of the room with her father before I went in was Leah. She had been crying and gave me a quick nod before her and her dad left. Me and my father went in and discussed with the officer and I answered all his question regarding the "list" and he had told us what the girlfriend had been saying is true because they did do a search, but they were not giving any of the results out.
When I was leaving the office, more students from my class were lined up with their parents to go into questioning. I just went home for another night of restless sleeping. That was posisbly the worst 24 hours I had ever experienced in my entire life.
The next day in our first period, the principal walked into the classroom before we began class and told us that the kid would not be returning to school for the rest of the school year and that his base privileges had been revoked. Some kids gave a sigh of relief while the girlfriend just turned really angry. Hell hath no fury like a women's scorn. She just stomped away when the chance arose and slowly.
With that finally over, everything was slowly returning to normal and everything seemed a bit more pleasant now that everything was finally over. Everyone just began to "forget" what happened during that year. No one truly forgot but it was something no one talked about.
The rest of my time in England happened a bit rapidly with people leaving and new people joining in our class. We were finally in high school. Very different atmosphere than we were used to since none of us really saw each other that much anymore in terms of classes and when we didn't have the chance to hang out. Ninth grade year was going alright until one thing that changed things.
My mother began to become ill.
End Act 2: England's Experiences
. I mean, I travelled frequently and spent quite a bit of time away from my parents growing up, but I've always been able to come home to the same place. It's funny though because I regularly fantasized about moving as a kid; the idea of suddenly living in a completely different place and going to a new school seemed sort of glamorous to me (in hindsight I see why it wouldn't be at all 
).
