Moving
I started school in 1970, before North Carolina had mandated kindergarten. In the United States, then and now, public education consists of additional 12 grades. During those 12 years, I attended 13 public schools, even though I was very fortunate to be able to attend the same high school for three years.
When first grade rolled around my parents were still married to each other and we were living on a military base - a situation that lasted for one week of school. They decided to split up and my mom and siblings and I moved to the small town nearby where my parents are from. I finished first grade at the same school my dad had attended as a child.
We moved to an adjoining county for a little while and when school opened we were still there but within weeks of the first day we moved to Raleigh, the first time I'd ever lived in a big town.
At the conclusion of that school year we moved to a nearby suburb. My Mom got married to a guy who didn't like me and I didn't like him, so I moved to live with my Dad who was freshly home from Vietnam and remarried himself. That lasted for a couple of years and for the first time I was able to go to the same school for parts of two years. I had just finished fourth grade when, missing my mom, I moved back to NC.
Of course she had moved by this time, so it was another new school for 5th and part of 6th grade before we moved again. Interestingly enough, as an adult I came back to this area and worked in that school system for 20 years, retiring from there in 2020.
Mom's husband was a journalist for a chain that owned newspapers across the state. We moved again before sixth grade was over to the town of New Bern, NC near the coast. The school I attended was a month away from closing for good and there had been a lot of racial strife there just before I started attending. It was pretty scary. After the summer break there was a new school to attend, albeit on the same city, but shortly after the first of the year, we moved again, all the way across the state to a city outside Charlotte. I finished 7th grade there but over the summer we moved back closer to the coast to Jacksonville, near the large Marine base Camp Lejeune.
I got to go through the 8th grade in its entirety without having to move and when 9th grade rolled around, I was back at the same junior high, but it didn't last long. I got caught with the very first joint I ever bought and kicked out for two weeks. By this time my step-father and I really, really didn't get along and so I left my mom and siblings for the last time at the age of 14 and moved to my Uncle's farm in Fayetteville where after some courtroom drama establishing him as my legal guardian, I finished junior high and went on to the high school next door for the next three years.
As an adult, I haven't wanted to live that kind of transient life. I've lived in the same house since 1996. My kids can bring their kids to the same house that they grew up in. When Wonder Woman retires in a few years we may end up moving. It will be up to her. There were probably some benefits to all the moving around I did as a kid, but off the top of my head, I can't really think of any. Needless, to say, I resented it at the time. I'm so glad that at least my youngest got to go to school with the same cohort of kids for the entirety of her school years. The older two weren't quite that lucky but they had their own shot at stability in their middle school and high school years, although my oldest daughter had it a bit rocky. She recovered well though and is giving her kids a nice stable home without a bunch of moving around.