Military Brat Mindset

It took a long time for me to connect with old friends on the internet. First, I was dubious of the internet, afraid of getting sucked into something and paying for membership that ended up being useless. Yep, I was afraid to join Classmates.com.  Second, I'm a military brat. That means I've lost more people than the average kid just by growing up in a military family. By the time I was a freshman in college, we'd moved across the country ten times. This is in many ways a good life, but it wasn't great for making lifelong friends. At least not before the internet. When you move to a new town, you know before you even unpack that you're going to be leaving. You've been doing this before you can remember.  So maybe in some way you don't even understand, you hold a bit of yourself back.  It's easy for me to let go of people. I had to. It was just the way it was. Oh, of course, as I grew up, there were the usual halfhearted attempts at letter writing - long distance calls were strictly out of the question for a kid in my family. Friends would write, but then drift off into their lives without you and you did the same. Maybe one or two throughout the years stuck. In my case it was one. All the rest were lost. 

Then the internet comes along and maybe there's a chance that you could find some of your old friends.  You're curious and wonder about some of your old friends, but there are all these warnings about paying for things using a credit card over the internet. And then there's your military brat head trash. It goes like this. "I was only there for two years. Who's going to remember me?" So I lurked on Classmates.com.  After doing that for about a year, I finally filled in the information they allowed you to post without actually becoming a member. Nothing happened. I felt justified in all my doubts about this ever working. 

Then out of the blue about a year later, my friend Faith from the second high school I went to sent me a note through Classmates. I was astounded and yes, excited. Someone remembered me. We quickly exchanged email addresses.  I soon had a paid membership in Classmates.com http://www.classmates.com/registration/registration.jsp?isEmpty=true&communityId=0&destinationUrl=&dsource=pub|12231|styles|null|11960|1

Faster than I could have ever predicted, I was connecting with a few people from Rich Township Central Campus in Olympia Fields, Illinois. I think my friend Sabine then set up a Yahoo Group for our class especially to avoid the barrier to people connecting through Classmates and having to pay.  I found out that there is a reason you became friends with people even if you lost touch with them. After nearly 40 years of not being in touch with one another, it turned out that my friends and I watched and loved the same television shows and liked some of the same recording artists. Shows and musicians who weren't even around when we were first friends back in the sixties. The core of our friendship was still there.  It was really fun to get little snippets of what people had been up to since those days and what they were doing now. 

And then along comes Facebook and even more connections turn up with hopefully even more to come. While I'm a little wary of the internet, I've come to love the fun of Facebook. Although I don't like it's conformity of format (I still like the wide open way you could make your page your own in MySpace), it's a great way to keep in touch and find people.  I think with the internet and a little social media presence, younger military brats will never have to lose touch with their friends. What an exciting time to be living!

Plus with the Military Brat Registry on the web, older brats have another huge resource for connecting with the lost pieces of their past.