It was great to find Military Brats Online. I got tears in my eyes reading about looking for home. I've been moving for years. 12 schools in 12 years. Different colleges. Living and working on the Navajo and Gila River Reservations. Always looking for a place or a group where I belong; never finding it.

We were at Ft. Barry north of Frisco when I was 8 years old. I visited recently and found it had become a park; the old house still standing, the trees so much larger, but mostly as I remembered--probably one of the few placed I've called home that still exist as they were.

For the most part I live my life in a kind of permanent exile, with no hope of going home and no place to call home.

What's hardest is seeing the absurdity of the idea of home as defining a group to which one belongs; knowing how much damage that idea has caused; and yet not being able give up the wish to belong.

I wonder if military brats are all existentialists?

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Military Brats Online in 1997.