I've moved 28 times in my lifetime. This is the story of a new America

The Guardian

2 days ago

My special talent: I can survey any room in a house and accurately estimate how many cardboard boxes and spools of bubble wrap are needed to efficiently contain its contents. I wish it wasn't a personal point of distinction, but I can't escape it: I've lived in 28 homes in 46 years.
In my middle-class midwestern family, two rules reigned: you never questioned going to Catholic Mass on Sundays, and you never asked why we kept moving – the only answer was always the same: 'It's for your dad's job.' And so we followed him, the car-top carrier on our wood-trimmed station wagon bursting with clothing, mix tapes and soccer cleats as our eyes fixed on passing cornfields.
Being jostled between addresses became the defining characteristic of my coming-of-age 1990s girlhood. I'm now 46, and I can't seem to stay in one home longer than a handful of years. That same geographical stability I craved as a child has become an emotional confinement. I'm terrified to make an offer on another house; it would signal permanence in a body pulsating with restlessness.
I used to think our constant moves were just a quirk of my family – but we were part of something bigger. In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans were on the move. A shifting economy, two-income pressures, and corporate relocations made motion feel like progress.
We weren't just packing boxes – we were absorbing a national ethos that told us movement was advancement, even if it left us unmoored.
My story started in seventh grade. I was a target for bullies with a pimpled face and thick, frizzy hair. Puberty shot me into a frame like my grandma's – 5ft9in, solid bones, size 10 shoes – so when my parents sat us down on the couch for a 'family meeting' the summer before eighth grade and said we were moving from rural Missouri to suburban Chicago, I was excited to escape the ridicule of the popular boys.
Mom was a homemaker and Dad the breadwinner; she didn't put up a fuss about the move. My parents married days after they graduated from Ohio State because Dad had a job offer in Baltimore and Mom couldn't go unless they wed. They never had time for wanderlust, and I now sometimes wonder if she wanted an adventure or loathed it.
As I started in my new school, my parents blessed me with prescription-strength face cream and let me throw a party in our basement. I invited all 59 kids in the eighth grade class – branding myself the 'fun new girl'. It worked and soon I found myself singing Soul Asylum lyrics into a hairbrush along with my new besties at a sleepover.
Meanwhile, my mom became obsessed with our new neighborhood in Naperville, an idyllic suburb of Chicago. She raved about the riverwalk and every other upper-middle class touch we hadn't experienced previously. I loved it too. I started high school the following year with a large contingent of friends, playing basketball and soccer. Then, the summer before sophomore year: another family meeting. We were moving back to Missouri. I sobbed for weeks, devastated to leave the first life that felt like mine. I still remember looking out the back window of our minivan as my mom blasted Carole King's Tapestry as we headed south on I-55.
The cumulative stress of relocating during critical developmental stages can impact kids later in life, according to a 2024 study published by JAMA Psychiatry. People who moved more than once between the ages of 10 and 15 were 61% more likely to experience depression in adulthood.
This data wasn't just inked in journals; it lived in me. And like a suitcase full of unresolved attachment issues, at 14 I carried these experiences with cramped hands. It informed my understanding of permanence: that true safety was an illusion, that stability was always conditional, that the only reliable way to cope with discomfort was to disappear from it.
The day before senior year started, I walked into the house to my mom frantically packing boxes. After two years of trying desperately to get us back to Naperville, my dad had a new job there and we needed to leave later that day – in time for my brother to start his freshman year of high school in the morning. I can still feel myself hyperventilating between the kitchen table and the bay window, wedging myself metaphorically into that house during an epic meltdown. But, the family motto, though never stated, was clear: keep moving.
Between ages 13 and 18, I went to five schools in five years and lived in even more houses.
My reality was a microcosm of a broader psychological truth: that instability during formative years can shape how we see ourselves long after the packing tape is ripped off the last box.
Other longterm studies have found similar links to lower life satisfaction. Beyond being more prone to depression, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who moved frequently as children tended to have lower life satisfaction and poorer psychological well-being as adults. The research, which followed over 7,000 American adults for 10 years, found a direct link between the number of childhood moves and lower reported well-being, even when accounting for other factors like age and education.
In young adulthood, my instincts gravitated toward fierce friendships – the chosen family that defined my college years and early 20s. Earning an entry-level wage I expected impermanence in the big city, although while scraping together rent with my friends, my singular dream was a husband, kids, and the white picket fence I never claimed in youth. I was determined to affix myself to a permanent address.
I married the first man who asked at age 29. I bought us a condo in 2007, six months before we got divorced and a minute before the infamous 'big short' caused the housing market to burst.
Everyone had said real estate was a sure-fire investment for the long term, but living in my one-bedroom marital condo alone felt like PTSD. I eventually saved enough to sell in 2014, bringing money to the closing table just to get out of the 'investment' meant to be a stepping stone to suburbia.
By the early 2000s, job transfers and economic instability had made geographic permanence feel almost quaint. Raised on the promise of 'Home Sweet Home,' my generation entered adulthood expecting sanctuary and instead dodged stereotypical landmines of economic precarity and unbalanced cognitive labor.
According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, homebuying rates for Gen X and older millennials have lagged behind previous generations, squeezed today by high interest rates and low desirable inventory. The dual-income household, framed as a pragmatic necessity, has metastasized into a common storyline on a TV series – one where home functions less as a haven and more as a finely-tuned productivity engine, but with an abundance of decorative throw pillows for aesthetics.
It's not that the dream of the stable home disappeared – it just started charging an untenable monthly rent.
In my mid-30s I faced the unstable market by renting a no-frills, fourth-floor walk-up whose memory still charms. My second husband wooed me away four years later, and this time to the state of nirvana I'd always wanted: the 'forever' home in the suburban cul-de-sac perfectly perched up on that hill. So, we overpaid, and I affixed his kids' artwork to the fridge with magnets that boasted 'Home Sweet Home' and 'family forever'.
The marriage wouldn't last. Within three years the 'for sale' sign erected in the front yard would again be a marker that I failed to do the one thing in life I wanted more than anything: to stay.
I didn't know how to pack the feeling of loss, so I took it with me after draining my savings account once more for an unfavorable sale to a new family. I inked a deal in 2018 on a condo in downtown Chicago, on the same street of my former favorite apartment. But the pandemic, losing my cat, getting laid off, and miscarrying the one successful pregnancy I ever had all within six months led me to sell the condo I had mortgaged at a sub-3% interest rate so I could lower my expenses.
Today I live in a dark, garden-level apartment, contemplating what Sigmund Freud called 'repetition compulsion' – the tendency to unconsciously repeat traumatic events or patterns of behavior from the past even if they are unfulfilling. I seem to be pining for a life I can't materialize. It is my pre-move childhood: the stale smell of the rarely-washed couch blanket we all used, the sound of my friends bouncing a basketball on the driveway, the waft of cigarette smoke from the kitchen when my parents had their friends over for cards.
If the walls had veins they'd pulse to the energy of pizza night, intermittent shouts of 'Uno!' and that indescribable chaos when the only thing that outnumbers the dishwasher cycles are the friends and neighbors stepping through the foyer.
But every attempt to find this pulls me further away from settling into the present. I can't imagine how to create a happy life for myself without that feeling of family I've been trying to replicate.
I've lost tens of thousands of dollars on real estate and even more in self-assurance. My body carries every goodbye out a minivan window more acutely than my conscious mind. If I do emotionally commit again to an address, it might be ripped away. I want to know that true belonging isn't a myth.
I often wonder what affixing my restless energy to another permanent address will do to the animal living inside of me – all she knows how to do is advance! advance! advance! What if, like motherhood, I simply missed out on the American dream? Is home ownership another childhood entitlement I need to blow into an imaginary balloon and watch gently float above my open hand?
As I face a housing market with low inventory at high prices and outrageous interest rates, I consider the paradox of my packing talent. It's easy for me to stow things away, but I need courage for an internal move – to fully unpack where I am right now and finally just build a life already.