Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1)
Summer is prime transition time. Families with school age children want to move and get settled in the new community before the school year starts. College students move out of dorms and apartments, only to relocate into new ones a few months later. New graduates move to the location of their first job. I sold a home last summer. The couple buying it insisted we have the closing by the first week of August because as a teacher he wanted to be settled before he started a new school year.
Though the calendar claims January 1 is the start of a new year, for people on the move the start is more realistically Mid-August. I come from a family of transient people. We’ve always had a home; but until I was six, we didn’t stay in any one of them for long. I lived in four states before I started first grade. I didn’t go to pre-schools or kindergarten – there were no such things where we lived when I was that age.
First Hand Experience With Transitions
My father was a civil engineer. We went where the projects were until my younger brother and I were approaching school age. Our mother decided he and I would not be switching schools every year or so as our older brother had done. My mother told me she and our father moved fourteen times in their first eleven years of marriage. Our three birth certificates list three different cities in two states.
Such mobility is not all that uncommon in the age of global communications and travel. None-the-less, it takes a toll on folks. I have met people who have been at the same address for forty or fifty or even sixty years. I cannot imagine what that would be like. My longest stretch at one address has been six years. That’s only happened twice. Six years at one address during my grade school years and another six years during my junior and senior high school years. Since then I’ve changed addresses over thirty times, moving back and forth between Ohio and Texas.
My most challenging mobility chapter involved our four moves in five years. Move number four led us to Houston. In August. With one family vehicle – a VW van that did not have air-conditioning. The dog immediately picked an infestation of fleas that required treating the carpet, yard, dog, and kids. I turned to the local farm and ranch store to learn how to discourage Texas-sized invasions of fleas.
Another Year, Another School District
The girls started school in their fifth school district. My husband started the new job that moved us to Houston. I collapsed with a severe state of burnout and found myself in a deep pit of despair, depression, and discouragement. The fourth move left me too tuckered out to cope with the mountain of brown boxes and the learning curve to find places to handle the numerous details of running a household and raising a family.
I signed up for a couple of classes at a local university, which led me to the office of Earlene, the guidance counselor. She tossed me the emotional life preserver I needed to regroup and get settled one more time. Then I used the time to write my first book; a book about mobility issues. It kept me busy, taught me the art of writing a book length manuscript, and introduced me to the world of book publishing. The last dozen copies of Married and Mobile are stored in a filing cabinet in the garage. If you want one, you can have it for the cost of mailing it to you.
I’m editing and updating the book now to publish as: Fragile: Move with Care. In the mean time, I’m offering a free booklet entitled, Twelve Tips for Taking Your Sanity with You When You Move. As a friend told me years ago, “Someone might as well benefit from all that painfully gained experience.”
Get Your FREE Booklet of Transition Tips
You can download the free booklet here: [ddownload id=”2793″ text=”Click to Download”]
If your summer includes a move, I hope this pamphlet will help you make your move with your sanity and your sense of humor in tact. If you aren’t moving but notice a moving van pulling up in your neighborhood – consider bringing back the lovely custom of greeting the new neighbors with a plate of something. You might just end up with a terrific new friend.