I am such a brat.

Earlier this year, I entered the Erma Bombeck essay contest to try and win entry to the bi-annual writing workshop they have in Dayton, Ohio. I did not win, but I thought I’d share the entry I submitted (human interest, less than 500 words):

I am such a brat.
I have so many people who were my friends. I knew them well for a time, but I don’t talk to them much anymore, if at all. I won’t take the blame for it.
I think of these friends often. They are close to my heart. There’s my first best friend – we walked to elementary school together and played Trouble on her front porch before she played soccer Saturday mornings. The two neighbor girls and I formed a trio who faced puberty together with numerous slumber parties. There’s the group of girls who took in an outsider in middle school and let me join their lunch table. There are the shared secrets with my high school best friend as we stood on the cusp of adulthood and the youth group pals who still know all the words to DC Talk songs. In college, there was the bad roommate and the good roommates who more than made up for that experience. There are those who share in the camaraderie of being at a small, Bible college together. There are co-workers who turned into a wonderful social network. There are also the military spouses who shared deployments, long nights and odd living locations.
Did you guess that right? Yes, I’m a military brat. Knowing what I knew, I still became a military spouse.
Brats’ sacrifice for our country is often overlooked. We never volunteered for the job. We envy those who got to grow up with their friends and didn’t have to constantly say goodbye. However, most of us wouldn’t have traded our lifestyle for the world, because we got to see the world.
Today’s military brats are the luckiest in some ways. Social media allows them to keep their friendships alive as they move. It wasn’t around until after I graduated from college.
Very few of my friendships survived by writing letters but some have been re-born thanks to social media. I wonder where a lot of them are now. I am always missing something or someone. I miss the taste of Japanese candy. I miss the sights of Europe. I miss the Rocky Mountains. I miss my friends most of all.
It was usually easy to make friends when we moved. There was the military brat checklist of introduction questions – Name? Siblings? Where have you lived? Where does your dad/mom work? How long do you have left here? Even if none of those answers offered a connection, there was an automatic connection of being at the same place at the same time. Lifelong friendships have been made on that simple connection.
Once a brat, always a brat.