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A Navy Brat

November 23, 2016 Lisa Rogers

I am a Navy brat.  I grew up in a military family.  My dad is retired from the Navy, my mom is a veteran, and my sister is an Army nurse.  On Veteran’s Day I saw many posts on my social media feeds thanking military members and their families for their service and sacrifice.  Sure, there were hard times, times of sacrifice.  For me and my sister growing up this meant moving every few years and going weeks or months at a time without our dad present.  But when I look back now, I don’t look back and think about the things they or I sacrificed; it was just our life, our normal.  I look back with gratitude and appreciation for not only the service my family gave to this country, but also to all the opportunities the military life afforded me.

I got to see things people don’t get to see in their entire lifetime.  We were stationed in Iceland while I was in elementary school; there I got to ride a duckboat through a glacier, see geysers burst out of the ground, ride Icelandic ponies, cross the Arctic circle, and see the Northern Lights streak across the sky.  When we moved to Italy when I was in middle school, I travelled Europe, visited my extended family in Germany, and learned to ski in the Alps.  In the five years, I lived overseas, I experienced so much. I am grateful for my family that served and the service for providing us the opportunity to see just a small part of the word.

Through the moving and adjusting to different homes and cultures, I became comfortable with change and transition.  As such, I developed the skills that we, as student affairs professionals, hope our students will develop while they are in college.  I see this manifest today in the ways I develop and maintain friendships.  I have one close friend from my time overseas whom I actively keep in touch with (while others I keep in touch with over social media).  Growing up in the military helps you develop maturity and perspective.  For me this has boiled down to the realization that the friendships that are meant to last, will.  If you’re meant to keep in touch with someone after a move, you will.  Life moves on and so will you.  Change is natural and normal, but it can be hard to teach someone this until they experience it for themselves.

When I tell people I grew up in a military family, it is amazing how foreign of a concept it can be to some.  They ask, “was it hard moving around all the time?  Starting new schools?”  It could have been (and for some of my peers it was), but for me it was just normal - and I loved it.  I do not share these things to diminish the sacrifice of those who have served or to belittle the number of issues facing our veterans when they return from service.  Instead, I hope to shed light on the fact that for some who serve it can be a way out of a life they didn’t want for themselves and a way of providing great opportunities to their families that otherwise would have been inaccessible.

I would not trade the life the military provided me and my family for anything.  It is something I treasure and is most certainly something I am grateful for as we begin this holiday season.  To those who served and continue to serve, thank you.

Lisa Rogers is a Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI.  She is a member of the NASPA Women in Student Affairs Social Media Team and co-manages this blog and the WISA Pinterest account.  She attended graduate school at Loyola University Chicago and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Vermont.  Despite her many years of moving around, she calls Maine home.  She is a lover of puppies, tea, and yoga.  She would love to connect with you on LinkedIn or Twitter (@lrogers123).