The Corrupt Constant

It was the age of dirty feet and mosquito-bitten backs. The age of learning to swim in the frigid Puget Sound and climbing the trees to our different worlds. My brother and I had spent every summer of our young lives at our Grandparents’ home in Bremerton, Washington. No matter where our navy brat lives took us, we always found ourselves back on that property on the waterfront.

We didn’t have much consistency in our lives aside from family. With Dad’s position in the military, we moved around every couple of years, and with each move came a new environment, new friends, and the necessity for us to adapt or be left behind. Just recently, I rewatched Cheaper by the Dozen to explore the experiences of the children who too had to leave a comfortable place they called home; as revisiting childhood artifacts as an adult does, I found my attention lingering not on the once comedic storyline, but on the experiences I now found relation to. The kids didn't want to leave, hell, they avoided it at all costs. As a child interacting with this story, I would have sworn they were overreacting, but as I rewatched the film, I questioned why I was so okay with my transient lifestyle and the ever flowing cycle of making friends, getting comfortable, then uprooting once again. The only constant in those times was my brother and that spot down on the waterfront.

The other constants were our cousins in Washington. Every summer we would roll down the long gravel driveway to Grandma’s and not thirty minutes later, like clockwork, we would see the cousins meandering down the beach our way. They lived four houses down, and everything between us we considered no man’s land that we didn’t dare explore alone. The sea out front and the woods behind were our realms, our world conceived out of the imaginations of the collective.

But at the end of one summer Mom and Dad pulled my brother and me in from our adventures. We were sat down in the living room, Dad stood at the window as the cousins left on their own journey home, and Mom pulled my brother into an embrace on the couch. I sat alone on the other couch and very quickly the joys of that day disappeared as their news met my heart. Our family, the one constant I had known, would be broken apart. I was in shock, disbelief in fact, my best friend was crying in the arms of my also crying Mom, and my Dad still stood at the window, trying his best to mask his pain. I had to get out of there, so back to our realm I ventured, this time alone.

Our world was never the same after that day. When Mom and Dad would start to fight, my brother and I would run out to the creek, hoping the sound of the rushing water would drown all of the pain. But eventually, the yelling seemed to grow and grow, and the joys that we once found in our childhood kingdom were ravaged by the realities of separation and fear. Our old creative escapes no longer giving us the consistency we hadn’t realized we had been relying on the whole time.

Maybe my brother and I were more like the kids in Cheaper by the Dozen than I thought. Maybe our consistent home was not our houses and our schools that we always had to leave, but our home filled and created by our imagination those summers. I see now why those kids were so heartbroken to have that taken away.