Consistency can define a childhood. Growing up in an environment that comforts a child often enables the greatest amount of success while providing the most enjoyable childhood one can find. This generally entails having parents with a stable marriage, remaining in the same school or location during your youth, and a lack of any extreme catastrophes impacting one’s life.
I am missing one of those things. My memories are spread amongst middle America like seeds carried far by birds. My family has lived in eight houses since my birth. Born in Texarkana, we moved to Hastings (NE), Nacogdoches (Back to TX), Allen for a first time, a different house in Allen, Marble Falls (just outside of Austin), a house in Lucas, and then my current house in Lucas.
For the past seven years I’ve lived in this same house, meaning the first ten years of my life was something of a transient existence. This was mainly due to decisions made by my dad, who didn’t enter college until after I was born.
Growing up in a lower-middle class family, college had never been an inherent part of their livelihood. In fact, my dad was the first person in his family to graduate from college. It wasn’t until he realized raising a child costs a lot of money than he thought to move up the so called corporate ladder. My life was then defined by whether he was in community college (Hastings Community College), a university (SFA University), or graduate school (Baylor College of Dentistry).
Moving around exposed me to a variety of environments. Our family tale was much along the lines of the great poet Aubrey Graham’s (Drake) tale “Started from the Bottom”, for as life went along it seemed to always be getting better.
Not that I noticed, if there is one thing I learned about life’s progression it’s that once you become used to something you can’t live without it. The first house we lived in was no bigger than the newspaper room. I relied on Hot Wheels for toys because there wasn’t much else we could afford, and we rode around in an old Mitsubishi 3000 that I wouldn’t be caught dead in today.
Thinking back to those times as a pampered junior here at school makes me wonder how I lived like that. Eventually I concluded that you don’t know you have it bad if that’s all you know. I was so happy as a kid, just watching old videos of my family makes me smile to see what a bundle of joy I was. I was never hungry, never abused, so I didn’t have anything that pointed to my life being poor. It inspires me to realize I was so proud of how we lived when we weren’t near as wealthy as we are now, and pains me to accept that there is no way I could go back to living like that and not go crazy with some of the materialistic ideals I base my high school life around.
It gives me greater appreciation to what I have, and certainly opened my mind to a variety of ideals and different places. I spent a month in private school right after my dad started dentistry. That involved school only on Tuesday and Thursday, a dream for most students but it came with just as much homework as a regular school with only 2/5ths the time to make friends since I was arriving at a new school.