Reel Seven: The Kid with Eight Schools

The artifact is a number that will not sit still: eight schools, maybe ten, depending on how you count the ones that lasted only a few months before another move made them irrelevant. There is no enrollment file that follows a child like that forward, no transferred record that arrives ahead of him and tells the next building who he already was. Every school was a cold start. By the time I was old enough to understand what home was supposed to mean, I had already lived in enough places to know it was not something owed to me.

Moving that many times teaches you to read a room fast. It makes you good at starting over, good at locating the exits, good at calibrating who is safe within the first week. What it does not teach you is how to stay — how to build something in one place and trust that it will still be there when you come back to it. When you are never given a consistent model of permanence, permanence stops registering as a thing you are entitled to. It starts registering as a thing that happens to other people, in other houses, on timelines that seemed steadier than mine.

My father was in the house, though we were not close in the way I needed. Some of my uncles were incarcerated or struggling with addiction. I am not building a case for sympathy out of that — I am naming the practical mechanics of who I became and how long it took to become it. The absence here is not a government rewriting a newsreel. It is smaller and more total than that: an entire childhood's worth of continuity that simply had no infrastructure behind it, no record that traveled with me, no single adult relationship that made every restart feel settled. I found a version of it at the Boys and Girls Club — adults who showed up on the same day every week, who remembered my name across visits, who gave me a data point that said a person could be worth returning to. That data point is most of what this chapter is actually filing testimony about.

I am writing from the space between two kinds of continuity: the home where my father lived while I moved from school to school, and the fixed address and close, deliberate presence I am trying to give my daughter. I want her to have a name she can say without flinching and a father who remembers things on purpose instead of by accident. I am fluent in what it costs to rebuild a self from scratch in a new room every year. I am still, in some rooms, not fully native to the opposite — to simply trusting that a place will hold.

By my mid-thirties I had built something real on top of all of that — three consecutive years of the highest performance distinction at Amazon, a nonprofit, a daughter I am present for, a series of writings saying the things I needed someone to say to me when I was that kid with no fixed address. The kid with eight schools made it. Not despite the moving — partly, strangely, because of it. I do not know yet whether that makes the eight schools a wound or a skill. Some days it is both, in the same sentence, and I have stopped trying to resolve which one gets to be true.