The "Not-Knowing"

Sometimes when you have news to share, you lose track of who you've told.

There will always be a part of me, too, that feels like it is egotistical to think that people would even care about my own drama. But right now, there is little I can share without setting the stage with some background information.

We are moving.

When my husband was in Iraq he told me that we would be moving this summer. For a while he thought he might know where we were headed. But things change.

We're moving this summer but we don't know where.

At first I thought that I would keep this information to myself until things were clearer. I hadn't even planned on telling the kids. But things get complicated. They get especially complicated when you start dealing with contracts and admissions deadlines for private schools.

As always with this military life, it is the "not-knowing" that is the hardest.

After living here for nine years, our roots are deep. My children were born here. We've lived in this house on base for seven years. And our daughter started at Southfield School six years ago.

We have fond memories of this base, for sure, but we won't be sad to leave it. Shreveport/Bossier City has grown tremendously in the last few years and we like it here more than we thought we would. But we won't miss it either.

It is the people we will miss. And our school.

So, even though we don't know where we're moving too, we know that we want to find another Independent School (a private school like Southfield) wherever we may go. Since my husband will be moving to a certain type of job, there are a handful of places where we are more likely to move than others.

And so armed with this knowledge and the database from the National Association of Independent Schools, last month I started to do research. I soon discovered that the admissions deadlines for most of these schools were February 1. I also knew there was no way we'd know where we were going by then.

I must admit that I felt a certain amount of despair. Not only will we be leaving a school and a life that we love, we don't even know what our life might be like next year. I feel rudderless. I feel like we're leaving our family yet have no destination in mind.

I decided to be proactive and go ahead and apply to the schools that we loved the most in the cities where we may most likely end up.

Of course all of these schools want us to visit.

This past week we decided to bite the bullet and my son and I headed out to visit a couple of these schools on the East coast. It was quite an adventure and the two of us really enjoyed our time together. We both fell in love with a school and now my son is desperate to move there.

But we still don't know where we are going. If nothing else, it was a good experience for him to test and interview at high-quality schools. And we spent some serious quality time together.

I haven't slept well in weeks. I've been dreading telling people we're moving because I know from experience that you can start to feel the distance right away. People stop making plans with you. People who don't want to say hard goodbyes start to distance themselves now. Some people even get mad at you for planning to leave. (Blame my husband, not me!)

And I've been losing sleep because I can’t stop speculating about where we might go and how it might be. We have lots of decisions to make and they are all on hold.

It's the life of a military family, but it has been both easier and harder because we have been here so long. It's hard to sever deep roots. It's hard when you don't even know where you're headed. For all I know, it could all fall through and we’ll end up staying here!

It's the "not-knowing" that is always the hardest. Always.