It was the hottest moving day of all 24 moving days

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

After almost nine long months of mental and physical preparation, the pain hits hard and fast, sometimes with a lot of screaming. Then it’s over, leaving a mess behind and even more hard work ahead. 
Some remember the pain, but apparently most forget. 
I’m talking about moving. 
Since adulthood, I’ve had one child, with epidural assistance.
In that timeframe, however, I have moved my stuff 24 times, not a doula in sight.
A few of the moves were in college, most with my military husband. They weren’t all major moves, because we didn’t always require a tractor-trailer trailing us wherever we went. At first, we had a futon, boxes of books and a hair dryer.
Now we have what the military refers to as “household goods.” Thousands of pounds of them. It took two days

to pack the household goods, then it took a college linebacker, two running backs, a kicker and their high-school coach an 11-hour day just to move those household goods onto a semi-truck. It took eight long, mattress-less days for the truck to reach Wilmington, Ohio, delayed because the freak-of-nature derecho that met us here June 29 and traveled all the way to our previous city of Washington, D.C., where it knocked out power for days.
Finally, our stuff made it to Wilmington, where the atmosphere this summer felt strikingly similar to the surface of the sun. The sweaty movers knocked back countless cases of water and sports drinks in the 100-degree heat. They crunched across our Mohave-Desert-brown lawn and over the boiling black asphalt driveway. It was the hottest moving day of all 24 moving days, in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave that had just turned deadly in Cincinnati. 
As they say in the South, it was hotter than a billygoat with a blowtorch. And believe me, we have moved in the South, but never on a day as hot as July 5, 2012, in Wilmington, Ohio. 
Somehow, although our much-anticipated mattress was ruined and several household goods lost their way, we made it back to Clinton County, the place where my husband and I both grew up. It took months to totally unpack, despite the fact that some folks -- those who must be the ones who forget childbirth pain -- thought it would just take a day or so to “lose the baby weight.”
And now, here we are, crossing fingers, paws and pinkies that it will be the last move ever, or for at least 10 years (which would feel like forever). Not because we don’t want to live other places -- in fact, there are few things more enjoyable than immersing yourself in a different culture to the point you feel like a local -- but because the moving equation becomes extraordinarily complex when you add children to it. School-age children. 
It was a tough sell to our school-age child, even with cousins and grandparents dangling carrots. Our daughter had friends in D.C. she’d known the majority of her life. The suburban school districts surrounding Washington, D.C., are unparalleled academically. We lived 3.4 miles from a high school that each year ranks among the very best high schools in the United States. The cultural and patriotic opportunities were endless.
Our daughter was open to moving, but it was a tricky transition, made exasperating by the incredible lengths we had to go through to enroll her in school and have her academic records apply at her new school here. Most military children will attend six to nine different school systems from kindergarten to 12th grade, according to the National Military Family Association. So a few years ago something called the Military Interstate Children’s Compact was created among voluntarily participating states. It addresses transition issues, including enrollment, placement, attendance, eligibility and graduation. In short, it tries to make it less awful for military kids to have to follow their parents all over the world.
What we found, however, was that a state such as Ohio can agree to follow the compact’s guidelines all it wants, but if you’re moving to a civilian community, you can talk till you’re red-white-and-blue in the face, contact the next school the minute you get permanent-change-of-station orders, register your child months ahead of time, and still not have proper academic placement the day school starts. Because even if most people truly try to help, there’s always one person who will treat new students like statistics.
That’s OK. Military children learn to be resilient. They are asked to “bloom where they’re planted” and have often been compared to dandelions: hardy and strong, yet blown to all corners of the world, with roots that are nearly impossible to eliminate, even with the strongest poisons. Sure, most people think of dandelions as weeds, but I believe most parents would prefer a toddler’s grubby fistful of dandelions to a crystal vase of expensive long-stemmed roses.