It’s the month of the military child, and that means everybody is talking about moving and living out of cardboard boxes. If you’re a military brat, you’ve experienced everything from people asking why you aren’t from anywhere to why you say foreign words in daily conversation. Being a military brat is sometimes quite the challenge but in the end you know you wouldn’t trade how you grew up for anything. So here’s a list of some things you probably know all too well as a military brat...
1. If you’ve lived overseas and then moved back to the states, you experience everybody assuming that you are a native from that country.
2. You probably call the United States of America, just “the States."
3. You didn’t go to many take your child to work days because of where your sponsor worked.
4. In fact sometimes you weren’t even allowed past the lobby of your sponsors building.
5. Your sponsor has probably responded to you when you ask “What did you do today?” with “If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
6. You hate the number one dreaded question of military brats: “Where are you from?” But after many years of practice, you have figured our some sort of answer.
7. You probably have had a döner and have days where you crave them and wish the States could catch up to this amazing food.
8. You’ve also drank Spezi or Schwip Scwap and tried to make it yourself after moving away, but can never get just the right amount of Fanta and Coke that go into it.
9. You always have at least one thing that gets lost in every move.
10. There’s always one box left in your room because its too much commitment to finish unpacking a place when you know you’re leaving in a year or two.
11. You’ve never really had “a person” because by the time you got somewhere everybody already had groups and best friends.
12. Picking a college was really complicated and difficult because you didn’t really have a home state to pick a college from.
13. You’ve got the whole “awkward new kid” thing down to a science.
14. You’re oddly good at bowling because we all know a military kids favorite past time.
15. You know a ton of weird facts about the States and our history thanks to AFN.
16. You’ve blown something up because you forgot to use a power converter.
17. You still forget that the National Anthem doesn’t play before all movies.
18. Career day at school was boring because it was the same jobs that you heard about all the time.
19. You know to stop whatever you are doing at five if you’re on base.
20. You’ve encountered a situation when you’ve used your ID and someone thanked you for your service even though you're a dependent.
21. You’d rather lose your driver’s license then your military ID because that is way too much paperwork.
22. You call people by their last names and don't think anything about it and neither do they.
23. Your schools JROTC program was really good and a ton of people were a part of it.
24. You’ve known your sponsor's social since you were 10 but still can't remember your own.
25. You know how small the world really can be when you go to college and find out the kid sitting next to you went to middle school with your best friend from high school.
