military brats

"Where are you from?"

For a military brat, this otherwise simple question is sometimes difficult to answer when meeting someone for the first time.

A military brat is a child of a parent(s) who serves in the armed forces. Brats usually move from country to country, or state to state, every 2-3 years when one or both of their parents become stationed somewhere else. In the course of one's childhood, that could mean moving to a new place nine times!

As a former brat, people often ask me if it was hard to move so frequently. My answer is always a resounding, "NO!" Though it was not all rosy, for the most part, being a brat taught me invaluable lessons.

Being a brat teaches you how to deal with the unknowns and inevitable changes that life brings. Living in foreign countries gives you an appreciation of other cultures and makes the world a smaller place. Being thrown into new situations enables you to be adaptable in just about any situation.

As a military brat, you get a lot of travel in at a young age. And you probably get a chance to do what few civilians can say they've done: fly on a military cargo plane! If your family is stationed in Germany, you're just a day's drive away from a visit to Paris, or Berlin, or Rome! My family always took advantage of where we lived, making sure we took in as much of the native culture as we could handle.

Many military brats have gone on to be famous: Glenn Close, LeVar Burton, Mia Hamm, Annie Leibovitz, to name a few!

There are some things that brats miss out on such as growing up in the same house your whole childhood, and graduating with the same friends you started out with in Kindergarten. Brats don't get to spend much time with their extended family. And as a military brat, you might be stumped temporarily when asked, "Where are you from?"