authoritarian parenting

Robot Training: Raya’s Story

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

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HA notes: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Raya” is a pseudonym.

Though my family did not officially enter Gothard’s ATI until I was in eighth grade, my parents began attending his seminars when I was about three. His teachings drastically changed our way of life. Gothard teaches there are three root causes to all sin, bitterness, greed, and lust.

A recent flashback I experienced reminded me of how my mom was a vigilant detective, always trying to find out why I behaved poorly.

My parents recently came into town to see their grandkids. We were all chatting around the dining room table after dinner when my six-year-old son grabbed my mother’s hand, “Grammy, I want to show you something.” He pulled her into the living room, over to the computer and navigated to the Toys R Us website like a frequent flyer.

He showed her all his latest toy needs, and my mother laughed, “I remember laying on the floor with the Sears Roebuck catalogue when I was a kid. I would look through it for hours and daydream about all the things I would have when I grew up. I guess things haven’t changed all that much, just the technology.” She then looked thoughtful and paused for a few seconds. She looked at me, but her eyes seemed to be seeing the child I used to be. Then she said, “You were a weird child though… You never seemed to want anything or ask for anything. You didn’t daydream about stuff.”

In that moment I sped through time and space back into my five-year-old body.

The sun is so bright I squint my eyes. All around me I hear the squeals and chatter of my cousins. We are playing with a motorized jeep and motorcycle, racing around our Uncle’s sprawling house. My cousin, Grace, comes running out of the house carrying a box so big she can barely get her small, preschooler arms around it, “Does anyone want to see my treasure?”

Amidst yells of “Ooooh!”, “I do!”, and “Let me see!” we all run to Grace.  She opens the box one flap at a time, then, one by one lifts out each item she has saved. “I wore this barrette on my first day of school”, she says. “This ribbon is from my best Easter dress.” We all oooh and aaah over each special thing as she pulls it out of the box and then carefully places it back with the other treasures.

While Grace is showing us a top, I notice something gold and shiny. It is as if someone hit the mute button on the world. I reach into the box and pull out the prettiest watch I have ever seen. The face is even my favorite color of cobalt blue! I really wish I had a watch like this, I think to myself. Then I notice everyone has gotten quiet.  I look up from the watch and see Jenny staring at me. Her face is no longer animated; it has become cold and stern. I ignore this and ask, “Where did you get this? It’s so pretty.”

“From my nana. It was hers.”

“My nana? Why did she let you have it?”

“No, my other nana. It don’t work no more, so she let me have it.”

While Grace and I are talking, our other cousins have started to wander off and resume playing. Grace sees this and shoots me a look of resentment. As she packs up her things in the box and places it in the back of the jeep I try on the watch. I stretch out my arm and turn it one way then the other. One day I’m gonna get one of these… I wonder where her nana got it… Look at how it sparkles in the sun…  The sounds of playing and motorized toys start getting farther and farther away. I look up. They left me behind! “Hey, wait up,” I yell. I start to run after everyone, but the watch is so big it falls off my wrist. I pick it up and put it back on. I start running and yelling, but it falls off again. Now, everyone it out of sight. I can hear their distant laughter. I hate being left behind. I can’t run with this stupid watch. If I put it in my pocket it won’t keep falling off, and I can run faster. I run as fast as I can and join in the fun. We race, play tag, climb, and swing until dinner time.

A few days later my family and I leave our relatives and make the long drive home.  The first day back my mother begins to erase all evidence of our trip, starting with the piles of vacation laundry.

I know not to get in the way of my mother’s quest for perfect cleanliness and order, so I go to my room to play by myself. 

I am sitting in the floor with a huge strawberry playset in front of me and am surrounded by fruit scented dolls and their pets. Just when Strawberry Shortcake is saving the day from Purple Pie Man I hear, “Raya! Get in here. Now!”

I know when I hear my mother sound like that, I better get there quick. What did I do this time? I think. I run into the kitchen. For some reason there aren’t any lights on. My mother is sitting at the kitchen table. Her legs are crossed and her face cold. She is silent. Then I notice she is holding something in her hand. It’s Grace’s watch! Oh no, I forgot to put it back in the box after I caught up with the jeep! I’ll have to mail it to her. I’ve never mailed a…

“Where did you get this? You stole it, didn’t you?” she demands.

There are a few moments of silence. “I said…where did you get this?”

“I didn’t steal it. It’s Jenny’s. She showed it to us. I forgot it was in my pocket.”

My mother stands up and walks towards me. Her face is turning bright red, “You just admitted it doesn’t belong to you. You took something that does not belong to you.” She starts shaking the watch, “That is stealing!”

I start to cry. I am desperate to convince her of the truth. Otherwise, my punishment for sinning could be severe if she is in one of her moods. If she is feeling generous, I may only lose a few privileges.

If she’s not…I could be left hurting for days.

“It was an accident! I had it on my wrist. Everyone ran off to play without me. I didn’t want to be alone. I put it in my pocket so I could run. I forgot it was there!”

“Don’t you lie to me!”

My face is burning, my hands start tingling, I hear a buzzing in my ears and the room starts spinning. Just a few months ago my mother was convinced I lied to her. I had not. She yelled and yelled at me to confess. I knew I had done nothing wrong and felt confused when she wouldn’t believe me. At the time I had thought about how the Bible says it is wrong to lie. If I confessed to something I didn’t do wouldn’t that be a lie? I even asked my mother that question, but it only seemed to make her angrier.

When I wouldn’t confess, my mother locked me in the guest room.

The only things in the room were a bed, nightstand, a clock, and a lamp. She only let me out to use the bathroom and said I had to stay there till I confessed. I lay in the bed crying and asking God how I could obey my mother and not lie by confessing to something I didn’t do. I begged and pleaded with my mother to believe me. There was nothing but silence from the other side of the door.

After three days alone in the room, I gave up. I confessed to a sin I did not commit.

“I know you are a liar. You are so stubborn in your sin it took you three days to confess to your last lie,” she yells at me.

Crying, I look up at her and whisper, “It was an accident.”

My mother’s face is so filled with rage she is starting to look like a Picasso portrait. “You coveted this watch and that is why you took it. You are a greedy, envious, ungrateful child.”

I pause. I didn’t mean to take the watch. I did really want one like it though. Maybe that’s what it means to covet. I look up at my mother. Her eyebrows raise and her eyes brighten. She can sense a change in me. “I did really like it and wanted one like it. But I only put it in my pocket so I could catch up with everyone. I meant to put it back in the box!”

“God says in Exodus that coveting is a sin. David coveted another man’s wife and it led him to murder. Your covetousness led you to become a thief! That is the root of your sin.  You are such a disappointment to God. He is sitting in heaven crying because of your sinfulness. Even if you were the only person who ever lived, Jesus would have had to die because of your sin! Your sin caused Jesus to be tortured and killed.

“It is just like you were there hammering the nails into him.”

I start to sob. I don’t want God to be disappointed in me. I don’t even want my mother to be disappointed in me. I love Jesus so much. I imagine me taking the place of the Roman Solider in the picture that hangs at church, who is at the cross hammering the nails into Jesus. It is more than I can bear. I am a horrible person. How can God ever forgive me? She must be right; after all, she is my mother. She knows more about the Bible than me. I look at my mother, “I coveted Jenny’s watch, and then I stole it.”

I feel like a bug that someone just stomped on.

My mother stands up tall. The rage and anger she had been emitting are now replaced with an eerie calm and satisfaction. She says, “I’m glad you told the truth. Now you need to pray and ask God to forgive you.”

Sobbing, I bow my head, “Dear God, please forgive me for coveting Jenny’s watch and then stealing it. I am sorry you had to die for me. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen.”

“Now you need to write a letter to Grace and tell her you are a thief, you stole her watch, and you are sorry.”

I sit at the table and my mother tells me what to write.

I detail my covetousness which culminated in my thievery and ask for her forgiveness. I mail the letter and the watch back to Jenny. I never hear back from Jenny and the next time I see her I ask if she forgave me for stealing her watch. She says she doesn’t know what I am talking about.

Soon after the watch incident, my mother and I visit my favorite doll store. Life-sized China dolls, sculpted to resemble real babies, cover every shelf and surface. They are dressed in long, pastel, christening type gowns with little old-fashioned bonnets on their heads.

Every time I enter this store I am filled with longing.

Today when I sense that familiar emotion, I feel guilty about it. I really shouldn’t want something I don’t have. That’s sin. I’m not being grateful. I feel so bad I almost start crying. Immediately, I bow my head and pray, Dear Jesus, I’m sorry for not being grateful for what you’ve given me and wanting more. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen. I look around the room. Everything looks so much brighter. I don’t even feel like I want one of these dolls anymore. That is amazing! From now on, all I have to do is confess my covetousness to God and he will help me not want things.

I traveled back into my adult body in the living room of my own home.

I looked at my mother and shrugged my shoulders, “Yeah, I was kinda weird. I wonder why…”

Over the next few days, these scenes from my childhood were vivid in my memory. Just as I have done countless other times in my adult life, I attempted to make sense of the pain of my childhood. I realized this fear of greed led to a fear of all desire. It set up a lifetime of stunted emotions and lack of feeling. This also resulted in an inability to feel joy over normal childhood experiences like birthdays and Christmas.

Ultimately, I lost the ability to dream.

I felt it was Godly to just accept each day as God brought it and greedy to have big plans for my future. Gothard’s teaching did a great job at programing me into an emotionless robot that followed instruction.

It has taken much of my adult life to undo that programming.

About Those “Model Homeschoolers”…

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Heather Doney’s blog Becoming Worldly. It was originally published on November 7, 2013.

Recently a piece on Hana Williams’ death and her parents’ conviction, “The Tragic Death of An Ethiopian Adoptee and How It Could Happen Again” by Quiverfull and Child Catchers author Kathryn Joyce, came out in Slate magazine. My Homeschooling’s Invisible Children teammate and co-founder, Rachel Coleman, was quoted in it and HIC was linked.

Hana Williams’ tragic story is powerful and grotesque. It shows how at-risk children, including orphans adopted from other countries, can easily be severely mistreated or even die when living in homeschooling homes where the focus is on authoritarian “sin-punishing” parenting and having many children raised as “arrows” for Christ.

What I expect many readers of the Slate piece are struck by is how extreme the circumstances were for the Williams’ children. What they may not understand is that while that sort of awful story definitely exists on the far end of a spectrum of fundamentalist homeschooling, there are more common and often milder strains of it that are pervasive in certain homeschooling subcultures. These strains have made their way into others in a way that is often invisible unless you know what to look for.

The reason most parents do the authoritarian parenting thing in the first place is because they believe it will result in model children and successful adults.

They see children from these other homeschooling families that seem “perfectly well-behaved” and who do “first time obedience” and many understandably want that sort of awesomeness for themselves. What they do not understand is that this “model homeschooler” or “model child” image often comes at a steep price.

Like the infamous (and largely discredited) Chinese “tiger mother” style of parenting, you can sometimes have outwardly successful offspring that nonetheless have increasingly serious secret or not-so-secret mental health and emotional struggles because they have been trained to view the world as exacting, punitive, and unsafe. People who feel that the world around them is constantly requiring perfection out of them often respond by engaging in something that one of my friends called “self-cannibalization” in order to succeed. While you don’t hear much about the ones who don’t succeed, others noticeably surpass their peers in educational attainment and professional achievement.

This is my story as well, really. I grew up isolated and poor and then went on to be an honors student in college, make lots of friends and throw good parties once I learned how to socialize. I was a good neighbor, presented well in public, and was not a half bad partner to love or marry.

Nobody would have guessed at what battles went on in my head or how much intense effort went into “passing for normal” until it all came crashing down.

The walls separating the different spheres of my inner world crumbled during grad school into what for me was delayed-onset PTSD and for others might more closely resemble depression, anxiety, substance abuse, compulsive behavior, self-harm, and/or social phobias.

Some people don’t seem to connect these kinds of dots. Many people trying to defend the reputation of homeschooling (which I will note is different than defending the right to homeschool) note that the writing, educational attainment, and professions of many of us former homeschoolers speaking out about negative homeschooling experiences are respectably good.

These kinds of achievements are the stuff that homeschool leaders and proud parents would love to take some credit for, attribute to homeschooling. But for those of us who have lived through the kinds of experiences we describe, when someone assumes that the reason we have the skills and careers that we do today is because of homeschooling, we get annoyed (and sometimes triggered).

We know that they do not fully understand what happened to us and that they are definitely not hearing from or seeing all of us.

For people who see ourselves as survivors of what I’m going to start calling the Authoritarian Christian Homeschooling Movement (to differentiate it from the views of both ordinary Christians and fundamentalist Christians), it is upsetting to hear the sort of homeschooling we were subjected to and our subsequent skills and accomplishments connected in a positive causal relationship without our permission. It negates some of our feelings and experiences, doesn’t paint an accurate picture, and can also be (wrongheadedly) used as an argument for the status quo not changing (and yes, it definitely needs changing).

See, we know from experience that “well, you’re obviously doing great stuff today” can be and often is used as the basis of a “no harm, no foul” argument. This argument implies that homeschooling in fact worked as intended and the problem simply was that the formula needed a bit more of an ingredient or two, perhaps one of them being love. While I am not one to ever speak against love (as it is a many splendored thing and I think I did need more), I think what we really needed most was less authoritarianism and social isolation so that we could have the choice, rather than the commandment, as to who to give our love to and how.

So while I get that expressing appreciation or admiration or an enjoyment of the things some of us have produced is likely not meant as anything but a sincere compliment (and I and others working on shedding light on this issue do hope you like reading our stories) it is not ok to then attribute our abilities, skills, or professions to quality homeschooling.

However, I realize that me simply stating that it’s not alright to call people exemplary or model homeschoolers when they don’t want the label does not convey the full message as to why. So I decided to ask some of my fellow survivors to fill out the following prompt and share their own answers with you, so you can know why:

#1 – The Prodigal Son’s Brother (pseudonym), male, age 29
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
Much of my social interaction during certain formative years was with adults, rather than peers, and my reading material was far ahead of that for my age 
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I am self-loathing, codependent, sex-negative, vengeful, immature, and suicidal.

#2 – Trinity Ruth Ruhland, female, age 23
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I relate better to my supervisors and older adults. I have a kick-ass work ethic because I had no choice but to work to survive.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I still struggle to have friends my own age, and that I feel a lot of pressure to always be perfect. Also, I am in the Air Force and I’d like people (coworkers who tease me relentlessly) to know that I have an honest fear of things flying through the air and hitting me. It is not that I don’t like playing Wally ball for PT, but that I seriously can’t handle things flying at me anymore. I also wish they’d understand that I have issues with nightmares (a combo of growing up and my time in Afghanistan) and that I can’t watch certain movies because of triggers.

#3 – anonymous female, age 28
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I work hard, I’m efficient, and I do a good job.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I frequently short-change myself to deliver this level of work. I wish they knew that I struggle with panic attacks at the very thought of making a mistake and that this makes it hard to function. I wish they knew that I suffer from chronic health problems stemming from overwork and stress during my teens. I wish they knew that I have a hard time relaxing and enjoying myself.

#4 – Holly (pseudonym), female, age 34
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I work hard and push myself beyond reasonable limits.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I have daily anxiety, frequent panic attacks, depression, nightmares and night terrors, and sometimes am unable to leave my house for days, all because of my childhood experiences in a controlling religious subculture.

#5 – April Duvall, female, age 33, homeschooled 2nd – 12th grade
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I produce high-quality work. I had to get things right the first time all the time to avoid beatings and learn how to hold a job so I could escape as a teenager.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I panic when thinking I have gotten any small detail wrong. I wake up with nightmares after any small correction. I spend hours talking myself down telling myself it’s okay, I won’t be beaten or rejected, I won’t die and won’t bring harm to those under me for not achieving a nebulous perfection. I struggle to navigate group situations, and I see that my oldest child also struggles as I haven’t been able to teach her what I don’t know – how to enter a small group of children playing. My social skills are only good in professional or maybe 1:1 situations.

#5 – Deborah (pseudonym), female, age 23
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I was isolated from every single person except my family and every moment of my life was not only accounted for by watchful adults but used to teach me something – generally not actual education, but “character” or skills I needed in order to be a housewife.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I didn’t have friends or a childhood and that has left me crushed and unable to interact socially with others in an appropriate manner or date until well into my adult life.

#6 – anonymous female, age 26, law student
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I have suffered so much pain, I don’t see the point in laughing or having fun anymore. I don’t go to parties. I don’t hang out with friends. I don’t even take vacations.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I am in counseling for anxiety, I am terrified of people, I have huge trust issues that prevent me from forming close relationships, and I am triggered by anything that reminds me of family. I work hard and accomplish things because burying myself in activity is how I hide from the pain. Don’t look at me and say ‘She’s fine.’ Look at me and wonder how on earth I still manage to function.

#7 – Stacy (pseudonym), age 25, graduate student in history and English
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
Growing up, if I wasn’t capable and mature at all times, at every age, at every event and in all subjects, it meant that I was not only failing as a Christian, cultural warrior who was the only hope for America, but I was misrepresenting and disrespecting God as my creator.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I appear so together and capable today because that binary (fail-succeed) is still dominant in my mind– joy, peace and happiness (feelings that emerge from those grey areas in the process outside failing and succeeding) are fought-for blessings.

#8 – anonymous female, age 30, married, with a master’s degree and established career
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I was required to do everything perfectly every time, both in “school” and out of it, and there was no break from those expectations.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
Now I am on an SSRI just so I can sleep at night because of my anxiety problems and my doctor’s belief that I am on the OCD spectrum.

#9 – DoaHF (Daughter of a Heavenly Father, pseudonym), female, age 23
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I had a perfectionist mother who was always on my back about doing things her perfect way.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I hate the voices in my head that won’t go away. I have authority issues and I dont trust ANYONE, even if I have known them for years. My heart is locked away so it can’t get hurt… for the thousandth time.

#10 – Susannah (pseudonym), female, 38
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I have decades of practice raising children and managing a home; I am articulate, read constantly, and live in a nice neighborhood.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
What is less apparent is that I get panic attacks from grocery shopping, that I get tongue-tied conversing with confident men, and seeing my mom’s handwriting causes me psychosomatic pain.

#11 – Hadassah (pseudonym), female, age 31
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I seem to have it together, am great at organization, pretty awesome in the kitchen, and I am often praised for my kids and understanding them. I’m praised for my language skills, but I refused to learn it from my parents. I have learned everything hands on.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I have some pretty intense anxiety. I have trouble working with others, because I find them in my way or that they’re honestly not working. I end up being assigned projects on my own and do above and beyond the call of duty for fear that I will be kicked off of the program or fired, because it has happened before in a no-fault state.

The only reason my kids and I have “an understanding” is because I’ve gone out of my way for the last 6 years to read a large amount of childhood development books that I bought on my dime.

I seem like I know all the chemistry in the kitchen when I’m barely able to handle the mathematics and never once took chemistry classes. I freak out if my cooking/baking is less than perfect.

People also do not know that I am chronically ill, and often cannot function like they do; or I have panic attacks and need to stop and try again. People do not know that I was held back simply because I am female. That I was forced to be a stay at home daughter and basically was a servant to my parents until I was finally able to marry my husband and get out of my parent’s home. People have no idea that hiding behind the “cool” veneer of homeschooling, my education is so lacking that I’m still filling in the blanks as money avails itself.

#12 – Julia (pseudonym), female, age 24
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
Failure was never an option, appearances were all that mattered, and I am skilled at communicating with my elders as opposed to my peers.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I am just going through the motions. I deal with anxiety, depression, diagnosed PTSD, and feel as though I must always second-guess what others do and say. I can’t trust them, and I can’t relate to them, and I often wish Socialization 101 courses existed.

#13 – Libby Anne, mid 20′s, blogger
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I am hard working, polite, and well spoken.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
What I wish people really knew about me was that because of my perfectionism and past family trauma I get panic attacks when my boss says “I need to talk to you about something” and my heart rate goes sky high when I see a letter from my mother or my dad’s name on my voicemail.”

#14 – Kelly (pseudonym), female, age 30, law student
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
As a child I could not rely on my parents to be mature or conscientious–I had to parent myself in many ways, and was held to adult standards even as a child. They did not support my decisions or acknowledge my feelings unless they mirrored theirs (i.e., they were “correct”), so my decision making and interpersonal skills were stunted.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
This resulted in me constantly second-guessing my feelings, decisions, and interactions with others. I have been addressing these issues through reading self-help books and several years of professional therapy, but have a long way to go. My therapist was shocked that I am as functional as I am, given my past. Several of my siblings have not fared as well.

#15 – Samantha Field, female, 26, blogger
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I was forced to take over the daily running of a household when I was 10 years old, and I didn’t have any real friends– just people who watched everything I did, everything I said, like a hawk and shamed me in public, in front of my entire church, for ever doing something that wasn’t “ladylike” and “mature.”
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I desperately loved science, but because no one was capable of teaching me math I got a degree in music– a degree I don’t even use now.

#16 – anonymous female, age 24, graduate student
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I am the perfectionist daughter of perfectionist parents. I never knew that the pressure I was under to always get A’s was not something everyone experienced until I was in college. The pressure to be perfect, to never mess up, and to handle everything with poise and excellence has been one of the defining struggles in my life.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
How inadequate I feel most of the time. I wish they knew about my struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the depression that made the last ten years of my life so hard. I wish they knew that I struggle with anxiety and social awkwardness, that it’s hard for me to get close to people, and that no matter how hard I try, I never feel like I measure up. I wish they knew that the hurt I’ve suffered from legalistic conservative Christians has made it hard to hold onto my faith.

#17 – Noelle, female, age 22
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because: 
I was forced to grow up at a young age and hold more responsibilities than a lot of adults do, as the oldest of 8 kids.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
I wish people knew that I have no self confidence in myself, I struggle with depression and self injury and my biggest dream right now (which seems impossible) is to radiate peace and positivity.

#18 – me, 30, blogger and homeschool reform advocate
As a former homeschooler, I am noticeably capable and mature because:
I am friendly, educated, conscientious, good at retaining and aggregating information, and I have a knack for bringing up issues, finding common ground, and mediating disputes in stressful or high-conflict situations.
What I wish people really knew about me was:
A violent authoritarian upbringing skewed my baseline settings and left me to struggle with self-care, perfectionism, avoidance of others when I’m struggling, sweaty palms if I hear church sermons, and a strong feeling that harsh or needy attention is love.

Silent No Longer: Lani Harper’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team14 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-11-02 at 8.01.15 PM

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Lani Harper” is a pseudonym.

*****

Trigger warning: graphic descriptions of physical abuse.

*****

< Part One

He closed the door behind us, and told me to pull my pants down and bend over as he dramatically pulled his belt out of the beltloops of his pants. Disobedience was not an option and would most certainly grant me a far worse session with the belt, so I pulled my pants down. Sometimes my mother would let us leave our underwear on, but JD never did. Once I tried to wear double underwear, anything to help dull the blows a bit, but got found out and the reprisal was so severe that I never did it again.

But for JD, all our beatings were naked from the waist down, and if we were wearing a dress, then we were totally naked.

I stood half bent over, holding the edge of the bed, while his mountainous bulk shadowed me from the ceiling light. And braced myself for what was to come. No amount of bracing kept me from stumbling to keep my stance, to keep from falling over. I was a small child and he used all his substantial force to emphasize every strike. Though my legs trembled violently and could barely hold me up, I knew that falling over meant starting over.

With each strike, I was to count out loud. I tried to order my wobbly tongue and quavering jaw to speak clearly enough that I wouldn’t have to begin again, but inevitably I cried and he could not understand me. This meant restarting multiple times, and his frustration when I lost track of where I was. The numbers I pictured in my mind wouldn’t stay still. In the middle somewhere, overcome with humiliation, anger, frustration and other emotions I could not name, I urinated. And prayed that my underwear and culottes tangled around my ankles would absorb the warm liquid, prayed that my socks would catch any straggling drips, prayed that it would not wet the carpet beneath my feet.

I gripped the end of their comforter so hard that I made fists in spite of the fabric in my palms. Gripped harder and harder so as to resist the powerful instinct to raise my hand to shield my bare behind. But I had done that before too, and not only did my arm get the brunt of a lash or two, but I had to begin all over again, ensuring the beating lasted longer.

Hot saltiness tumbled down my cheeks until I was almost gagging on my tears, combined with the warmth of urine down my leg, and the all-encompasingness of my humiliation threatened to drown me.

Indeed, I prayed for death in those moments.

I seem to remember 18 being the magic number, though the number changed every time. This, I guess, so that we would always be wondering, and he would always be in control. I was never sure when exactly he would decide I’d had enough.

When he was finished, he made me recite a verse or two while pulling my clothes back on with trembling fingers. There was a lecture about how how this was his God-given duty to show love to me and help me become less sinful, that I deserved more, worse and should be thankful, that this was hard and he didn’t like it but it was necessary and in my best interests.

Then he would duct tape my mouth shut, a concrete reminder that I was never to say anything to anyone.

My mouth was now shut, and I knew I was to keep the tape on all night, during my sleep. Now go clean yourself up, hurled at me with disgust in his voice.

I did not get to finish my half-eaten meal, but was sent still-hungry to clean up the table and kitchen. I did not regret not being made to sit down, but moving was difficult. My sister Andie was to help me, both to ensure that the job was completed properly and also so that I didn’t sneak scraps off plates to try to ease my hunger. Anyway, the tape over my mouth prevented further eating. Her eyes burned compassion into me whenever I dared look at her.

My mother actually told me after one beating that I would not remember these episodes and that if I did, it meant I was bitter. I remember thinking that I was okay with that because I did not want to forget what she had done to me and how much I hated her in that moment.

I always walked out of The Bedroom with newly-kindled anger and hatred at my parents.

The bruises stayed for weeks, but often there would be another beating before the bruises from the previous incident had completely healed such that my skin was a mottled mess of yellow and green old wounds mixed with the bright red-purple of the new welts. The frumpy, blousy style of the early 80s, combined with the mandated-loose clothing of the fundamental churches actually worked to my benefit: I could hide my wounds, though even the softest cloths chafed my swollen, cracked and oozing skin.

And always, on the way out, he would say, remember, what happens in The Bedroom stays in The Bedroom, and what happens in This House stays in This House. And he would send me away with the knowledge that he was watching and all-knowing, that he would know if I told even my siblings, which would result in another lesson. We were never allowed to comfort each other, though there were a few hasty, whispered words to the newly-beaten one in the dark of our room.

We did not dare hug.

I cried myself to sleep, fiercely dashing the tears from my cheeks, attempting to wipe them away before they sogged the adhesive and loosened it from my skin. I had to be able to show him my still-taped mouth first thing in the morning. After a while, we stole tape so that we could remove the tape while we slept, then replace it in the morning.

The Pearls published their book about the time I graduated from high school, but my parents had been using their methods, espoused by Jack Hyles and Lester Roloff at the time, from our infancy in the late 1970s. Contrary to what the Pearls, Gary Ezzo, Jack Hyles and others who espouse this way of rearing children believe, this expectation of a surface appearance or semblance of obedience actually works against the parents who use it: in our family, it created bitter children adept at hiding their bitterness. It created strife and hardened our hearts (that they thought they were softening) against our parents: we hated them.

It created a subversive culture of deeply angry children with secretive, ignored and repressed anger, who lashed out at each other because we could not lash out at our parents. It created a culture of blind obedience instead of teaching us how to make good and informed decisions. It ignored the fact that we would grow up and move out, and kept us in this perpetual childhood for longer than is natural. As a result, I spent much of my twenties figuring out things and growing personally in ways I should have been able to during my teen years. Finding indpendence and autonomy, discovering my authority and my rights that were denied me.

It wasn’t until I had children that I realized spanking isn’t hard, it is easy.

It is easy to hit, and once you have begun a habit of hitting, the next hitting episode comes easier and easier until it’s rote, instinctual, without thought, automatic. Hitting is also a gateway to anger: the more I hit my kids, the angrier I became and the easier it was to become angry. I recognized this very early, while my kids were still very little, but though they were nothing as severe as my own beatings as a child (three swats with a spoon while clothed), I regret every episode of spanking them.

I do not remember my last beating, though they continued in much the same fashion until I was sixteen. I still remember the humiliation and ferocious anger at being violated on the outside by the beating and on the inside by the changes they sought to force into us, by the association to God and spirituality. It affects me decades later and has thus shaped my views on everything from parenting to God to spirituality, to self-worth and more.

I got out without really knowing what I was running from or why…and was shunned, but that’s a story for another time. Decompressing and deprogramming continue into the present, but I hope that telling my stories will begin to dispell the power my parents and their secrets still hold over me.

My name is Lani Harper, and I am a survivor.

Silent No Longer: Lani Harper’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

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HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Lani Harper” is a pseudonym.

*****

Trigger warning: graphic descriptions of physical abuse.

*****

How to sum up the first twenty years of my life in a few paragraphs? The stories are too numerous and shocking for me to process, let alone speak of.

The memories tumble over one another, leaving me gasping for air as I look with new eyes at my childhood. A childhood I thought was near-idyllic for many years. Even after I started to see my parents as too harsh on us as kids, it took nearly a decade and a half for me to put the label on it. The stories are many, but they all begin with a single point. I cannot tell the rest until I tell the beginning, the root from which all other things sprung. I am a 36 year old woman, a wife of more than ten years, mother to three.

Yet I still feel like a 6 year old girl being tersely instructed to not tell, or else.

They taunted me with mysterious unnamed events that they assured me I didn’t want but would befall me if I spoke, told me they were only able to spare me these horrible things if I kept the Code of Silence. They told us that this was how Christians disciplined their children. Other people outside of our faith wouldn’t understand why we did things this way. They were ignorant, through no fault of their own, and we had to spare them this particularly harsh reality of Christian families.

Logically, I know that he will not beat me or physically harm me now, but emotionally, psychologically, I still hold a terror that he will. Yet I am compelled to speak and encouraged by those who have gone before to tell their stories. Sad, that this is how we bond, that we have been reduced to clinging desperately to one another in our shared woundedness.

My name is Lani Harper, and I was abused.

I am the middle child of five, the third girl, and my father always introduced us like this: This is Number One Daughter (hand on Libbie’s head), Number Two Daughter (hand on Andie’s head), Number Three Daughter (I always tried to duck his hand; I hated the heaviness on my head), Number One Son (a pause while he puffed himself up with pride at introducing our brother Dale), and Number Five (hand on Evie’s head). Number One was better than Two, Two better than Three, but we all paled in comparison to Number One Son. He was never “Number Four”.

I grew up in a house where my father JD exercised complete and aboslute authority over all. His word was, we joked then (but with an underlying seriousness) law. And he brooked no challenges, no contrariness, no insubordination. To do so was to incur the wrath, to bring down his heavy hand of judgment in the form of severe disciplines. I suppose he may have always had this sort of near-obsession with power and control, and joining the military because he was flunking out of college only reinforced these authoritarian tendencies and cemented them by practice, giving him tools and methods to use on us, his insubordinates. He often commented on how running a house was similar to running a ship. And, he would say, I want to run a tight ship.

We were commanded to fall in line and to call him Sir.

Children in this culture are viewed as the property of the parents, and especially of the father. When termed that way, instead of viewing a child as a gift, a blessing, an individual entrusted to two people to nurture into an independent, educated, intelligent, functioning member of their community and citizen of their country, one begins to see how little children are valued.

Children are not people. They are not worthy. They are born sinners, with the innate and persistent duty to sin against their parents. It is an us-versus-them mentality: the children are against us, are going to undermine us, are going to undo us at an elemental level. Consequently, the parents’ focus becomes the need to stand firm against their children’s “wiles”, and to guard themselves against being drawn astray by their children. To be strong and stronger than their children. To resist their children anytime the parents feel pulled against their will, their desires, their instincts. And then to deny their children as they ask for things, in an attempt to show the children, as my father would say, who’s boss.

With this perspective, every small blunder became magnified under the perception that we were elementally sinful, deliberately devious, manipulative, intentionally-subversive.

And it was punished as such. It was a society obsessed with control, evidenced by the behavior of the man’s children. We were brutally instructed on how to act, how to speak, how to comport ourselves in the home such that when outside the home, we would not embarrass them with our childishness.  We were drilled a horrid play-acting at home with severe punishment even for transgressing in practice – until we relinquished our will and just did things the way he wanted them.

So we sought to learn the mercurial rules, learn to be good, learn to do anything and everything we could to not bring about the abuse.

We were happy because children are happy until given a reason to be otherwise.

Happiness, I believe, persists as a desperate pursuit in order to feel normal, and to try to balance out or paint over some of the darkness in the home with something beautiful. It is a pursuit critical to their sanity, offering an escape from the horrors they have to face.

It took years after having kids of my own before I gathered courage to myself to describe to my husband how my parents spanked my siblings and me. After hesitantly giving the details, with a guarded watchfulness in my eye to see if he’d scoff or brush it off as inconsequential, he surprised me.

That’s not a spanking, he said, that’s a beat-down.

I had to change my definition: I now refer to them as “beatings” and not “spankings”. Definitions make all the difference.

The beatings began, like for most children raised in this early pre-solidified fundamentalist culture, in infancy. The weapon of choice grew with us, beginning with a wooden spoon or ruler. Then it was a ping-pong paddle, then a yard stick, and finally JD’s very thick leather belt folded in half, and beatings were given for any number of perceived-failings large and small.

During dinner one night, I stood to reach into the center of the table to give myself a second helping. I remember being excited, though whether at serving myself or being granted a rare second helping, I am not sure. I was about eight and small in stature, and I had a half-full glass of milk. In my childish exuberance, I reached over my glass and knocked it over. And froze. Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe they would let it go. The milk seeped into the crack between the leaf and the rest of the table, wetting the place mats and the table runner underneath the dishes.

Let’s go, JD said with a sigh of exasperation and thew his napkin on the table, looks like you need a lesson with the belt.

And so, in the middle of the meal, I was escorted to The Bedroom. I knew what doom awaited me. All for spilling some milk. I knew that, if I were allowed to finish my meal, that I would be allowed no further drink because spilling my glass might have been purposeful.

He closed the door behind us, and told me to pull my pants down and bend over as he dramatically pulled his belt out of the beltloops of his pants.

Part Two >

Falling from Family Dysfunction into Nightmares Realized — Another Story of Homeschool Abuse: Lana Martin’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team8 Comments

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< Part One

My life during this time was bleak.

I was almost completely isolated, subject to my mother’s personal drama on a daily basis. She lost control of her hoarding behavior, eventually lining the walls of our home with piles of dusty books, magazines, and papers which seemed dearer to her than family living space and respiratory health. She instigated disputes with her siblings and raged about perceived injustices. She spent time planning parties that never happened. Until the last few years, she refused to work outside the home, even though her supplemental income would have enabled me to enroll in music or foreign language lessons. When she finally began working part-time, she spent the income on a new car. She fretted about falling behind in educating me, while doing nothing to improve the situation.

She instructed me to lie about our daily routine.

Despite her awareness that this situation had become quite terrible, she still believed keeping me at home was preferable to exposing me to the horrors of public school. HSLDA purports homeschooling is all but necessary to preserve a child’s decency.  It was, no doubt, far easier for my mother to ignore the reality of the situation while consoled with this noble image.

Despite isolation, my mother continued to monitor my behavior, watching for signs of emergent “teenage behavior” and un-Godly beliefs which might have seeped into our household against her wishes. Laughing at the wrong joke in a movie, for example, might unleash a torrent of shaming rage. One day, wearing nail polish would be acceptable and “pretty” — another day, it would be shamefully worldly and warrant usage of the label “slut”. By the age of 16, I became severely depressed and had lost significant weight, but was not offered counseling or medical treatment.

My mother instead chastised me for exhibiting teenage rebelliousness.

For a while I was suicidal, high-risk given my secrecy and feasible plans. No adult in my life acknowledged that this stress and isolation might have negative effects on me. No one asked me if I felt I was being prepared to enter the adult world or to attend college. My father, despite living in the same house, never inquired about my education or wellbeing. Grandparents expressed concern and curiosity but were silenced by my mother’s convicted assertions. More distant family members inquired skeptically but were blown off with her combative resolve. I felt trapped and hopeless, unwanted and invisible.

*****

I did escape this situation at the age of 18.

My mother’s employment during the last few years enabled me to get out of the house more often and, in turn, my mental health improved. I earned my GED, began working in retail, attended community college, then moved to another city and supported myself through university. I somehow emerged with a strong sense of self and the ability to form healthy social relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have always had my doubts about Christianity. Today I follow a self-constructed spirituality stemming from Buddhist philosophy, yoga, and meditation, with occasional dabbling in occult divination via cartomancy.

However, there is a dark side of myself that only a close few know.

For years I have struggled with PTSD symptoms, depression, social anxiety, and low self-esteem. Often I cannot identify with my peers as the experiences of my first 18 years were so atypical and potentially stigmatizing. I mourn the loss of my childhood and the absence of positive parental figures.

These days I can’t imagine away the pain of this long-term isolation and having been physically abused.

I was thrown under the bus to fulfill my parents’ fantasies of the perfect family.

Nor can I align myself with my parents’ perspective that children and teenagers are indentured servants. I can’t stop caring about how poorly they treated me, nor suppress the feelings of disgust and unease that arise when I see them or imagine visiting them.

I am currently no-contact with my parents. My mother flatters herself with historical revisions, presenting my acceptance to a prestigious graduate program as the success of her home education efforts. They have not acknowledged the truth of our shared history, and I do not know how to relate to them as anyone other than authority figures. I have no emotional attachment to them, and for now their presence in my life merely reminds me of the horrible things they did to me.

But, gradually, I am feeling less shame about what happened to me. I am starting to feel less embarrassed by it and more proud of how I overcame the situation. I am beginning to empathize with my past self, appreciating the things I did then to help me survive into the present. Lately I feel more “human” in some vague sense. Specifically, I feel more capable of relating to other people and knowing what I want and need. On that note, my therapist of five years is a total rock star.

*****

At its core, this is clearly a story about growing up in a dysfunctional family and with an abusive mother failing to manage her mental health issues. However, several aspects of the Christian subculture homeschooling movement stand out as fueling the existing fire of my misfortune, or creating the perfect storm of an abusive, neglectful homeschooling situation.

Regulations on homeschooling may have discouraged my mother from wanting to homeschool, or brought outside attention to my terrible situation. Currently, in many states, future homeschool students silently fade away behind a vague letter of withdrawal and intent. Registration with the local school district would require parents to face school officials and engage in dialogue about their rationale and preparations. Annual lesson plan approval and testing would encourage earnest academic investment and would identify on-going cases of neglect. It has become apparent lately that, upon legal emancipation, many homeschooled teenagers no longer desire to attend Bob Jones University or marry into a Quiverfull movement. Documenting grades and filing transcripts with the local school district would expand higher education opportunities for these children. Such regulations would have imposed reality on my mother’s mostly unchallenged fantasy world, one which placed me at a severe disadvantage.

HSLDA’s promoted image of homeschooling provided an ideal fantasy for my mother to latch onto.

She saw herself most importantly as a warrior for Christ, less so a dedicated teacher. HSLDA propaganda, in fact, less heavily emphasizes the importance of proving quality education and social opportunities for children. One can walk away from an HSLDA forum thinking, “the most important thing is that I remove my child from the evil public school environment.” Dispassionate, research-based information about the work needed for legitimate homeschooling would place the value of teaching above “fighting the culture war”. Availability of such information may have undermined my mother’s romanticized image of the homeschool-mom as an anything-goes hero-by-default. HSLDA’s insistence to avoid regulations and legitimate research on homeschooling does nothing to protect or improve home education, only to help obscure appalling cases such as mine.

It’s clear from my description of family dynamics that one may not expect me to have had a “good-enough” childhood regardless of how I was educated. Sometimes I ask myself, “how would public (or private) school have improved my situation?” My parents failed to educate me; it would have provided a baseline education that was, at least, better than nothing. My parents believed that children should not be allowed a voice; it would have provided access to adult mentors who might have listened to and respected me. My parents were socially isolated, lacking friendships; it would have provided opportunities to acquire developmentally-appropriate social skills rather than learning it all at once as a working college student. My parents did not provide extracurricular activities for me; it would have provided a means to expand myself with arts or athletics.

Finally, my parents did not offer a structured means by which I could assess my personal changes and growth. Formal schooling, no matter how angst-ridden it might be for many young people, at the very least grants the student a sense of autonomy in deciding whether they love or hate school, admire or despise authority figures, agree or disagree with society at large.

My parents robbed me of that experience by imposing their selfish whims on me, unchecked by the isolation.

Although I survived with a fair bit of myself intact, going through this experimental phase while an employee and student, alone in a new city, was both risky and terrifying.

*****

A question I continue to grapple with — and perhaps will, for a while — is: who do you turn to when your own mother is trying to destroy your metamorphosis into a healthy, functional adult? When your father ignores your plight?

What do you do?

No adult in my immediate or distant family intervened, nor were child protective services ever alerted to my condition. Family members cannot be depended on to identify and report educational neglect and abusive behavior. Turning a blind eye is easier for many than dealing with a difficult person or sacrificing the perfect family image for a child’s so-called “rights”.

Homeschooling is a dangerous plan when abuse, isolation, and dysfunction already exist within a family. Homeschooling is also a unique challenge when parents or children already struggle to maintain mental health. A first step toward preventing tragedies similar to my own would be access to dispassionate home education information and enactment of regulations that screen for high-risk families.

Until stories like mine cease to appear, influential organizations such as HSLDA owe such efforts to the wellbeing of these particularly vulnerable children.

In a Closed and Sometimes Tightly Knit Sphere

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Caleigh Royer’s blog, Profligate Truth. It was originally published on October 18, 2013 with the title “Are Homeschoolers Socially Adept?”

I am at a point in my healing where memories aren’t as painful anymore. I have enough safeguards up to protect me from the pain, even though I can still feel the anguish from that memory especially if it is a difficult one. 

But my heart isn’t being neatly sliced by every memory anymore, which is a relief and shows the progress I’ve made.

Of late, my mind has drifted, curiously at first, back to my first memories of being homeschooled. It is with an odd sense of seeing something for the first time as I cautiously navigate memories which potentially hold mines and booby traps to trip me up. The big memories, the ones which hold the most potent abuse from my dad, are carefully tucked away as I chip at them slowly. But I am now dealing with the memories like helping mom move a massive computer desk across a precarious corner of the stairs as she reorganized rooms, meaning I was getting my own room for the first time.

She rearranged like crazy every so often.

Those days of major rearranging were days when all schooling stopped and all of us caught the giddy excitement of seeing the rooms being transformed.

I am being gently reminded of fuzzy memories of first learning to read and suddenly taking off with my avid love of reading. I was 5 or 6 when I first learned the beautiful art of understanding the funny little black shapes that danced across many pages. I being reminded of the pride I felt at being 10 years old and being able to read college level books and “understanding” them, whatever that really meant.

All mixed through these memories is a significant strain of sadness.

It is something I cannot avoid, it is something so strongly woven through my life’s story that it is a permanent part. As my memories go from those earlier memories to ones where I was being forced in an adult role, I feel the shift in the memories. Those memories are no longer slightly nostalgic, no longer reminding me of the days of exciting new discoveries. They are memories more strongly tinged with sadness and the weight of responsibility I carried proudly even though it nearly destroyed me.

I watch a proud little girl completely unaware and unable to relate to her peers, but eager to please authority figures and eager to be the authority figure to those younger than her. It is through viewing the kaleidoscope of these memories that I pick up on a familiar and explanatory strain of something a lot of homeschoolers I know have faced.

I have long struggled with being able to relate to those who are truly my peers.

It has been a struggle of unknown origins, or at least I had no idea where this struggle had really started. It wasn’t until I started following conversations in a group I am a part of on Facebook that I figured it out. I grew up being taught to impress the authority figures in my life, whether those be my parents or the adults in other families. I grew up being given heavy responsibility with being an authority over my younger siblings and being someone they should look up to. Being the oldest put me in that position. It also put me in a position of having inappropriate responsibilities of helping raise siblings, taking care of the kids, the cooking, the laundry, the cleaning. I took these responsibilities with pride. I was proud of how “mature” I was, and how so many people thought I was so much older (like years  upon years older) than I really was.

I saw the other girls my age and the oldest of their families almost as competition. Was I working as hard as them? Did I have as much responsibility as them?

Were they in authority over me or was I in authority over them?

Being homeschooled meant I was in a closed and sometimes tightly knit sphere. In those spheres, I was either sucking up to an authority figure, or I was the authority figure. There was no middle ground, I was never allowed to be a child. It was impress the adults or keep the little kids in line. I viewed the public schoolers as immature, incapable of handling the responsibility I so proudly and gravely carried. I saw them having “fun,” and thought they were such losers. I apologize now if I have ever offended anyone through this mindset when I was younger! I was never taught to relate to my peers. My peers were simply another name for fellow butt-kissers and authority makers. The kids my age were in the same position I was in, kiss up to the adults, or take charge of the littles. I was taught to be the best, not to relate.

I grew up being told and believing homeschoolers were the better socialized group over public schooled kids. I would scoff and laugh if anyone ever challenged that idea. “Of course we’re socialized!” I would haughtily answer anyone who questioned the socializing of homeschoolers. I knew what I was talking about, I was very well socialized, I could talk for hours with the adults.

Socialized meant I could talk and interact well with the adults I found myself face to face with. 

Socialized meant that I was more mature than someone who wasn’t homeschooled and had a better grasp on what it meant to be an adult. (I was about 13 at the time I started thinking like this.)

Little did I know how wrong I was.

I had no idea just how un-socialized I was until I got out of highschool. I had no freakin’ clue how to interact with someone my own age. I only knew how to be on the defensive and to try to not let them put themselves into authority over me. It confused me so much to realize how happy, content, and in love with their lives these “public schoolers” were. They had a healthy appreciation for their childhood and saw the responsibilities I so proudly bore as strange, concerning, and upsetting

I am just now starting to get references to various pop culture quotes and whatnot as we hang out with friends who grew up totally differently than me or Phil. I am realizing I tried to grow up too quickly, and succeeded in doing so, because that was expected of me. This goes back to my post last week about parenting. I never got to be a happy go-lucky child. I had to put on my big girl pants when I should have still been blissfully unaware of the weight of life.

Phil and I won’t be homeschooling our children unless one of them specifically needs it. 

I don’t want my children to be contained or taught that they are above the kids who aren’t homeschooled.

I want them to have normal childhoods and I want to encourage the grand exploration of finding brand new experiences and things. Homeschooling left a bitter taste in my mouth and I haven’t even touched on everything here. While I do believe there are people who have quite successfully homeschooled “normal” healthy children, I never experienced that. I barely made it out of highschool. I taught myself for most of my homeschooled life, and am lacking skills or classes I should have be taught a long time ago. I don’t like admitting this, it’s embarrassing to me. I haven’t taken more steps towards college because I don’t want to find out just how bad my homeschooling was.

So have patience with me and others of us who were homeschooled as we continue trying to ease into culture and societies that are still foreign in some ways to us.

I’m learning to not take myself so seriously and to relax and enjoy the diversity of those around me. I learning to love the differences I bring to conversations and to greatly appreciate the differences others add to the mix. No one is an authority figure to me anymore, nor do I feel like I have to be in authority over anyone anymore.

I can be me and I’m quite happy with that.

Falling from Family Dysfunction into Nightmares Realized — Another Story of Homeschool Abuse: Lana Martin’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

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The HSLDA promotes a certain image of the average homeschool family, a cozy picture which convinces thousands of parents each year to withdraw their children from public school.

Parents in the conservative Christian subculture explicitly use homeschooling to shelter children from secular beliefs. Regardless of the degree of their sheltering, they often want to provide an emotionally and spiritually healthy educational environment for their child. While HSLDA propaganda acknowledges that homeschool parents experience a range of “ups and downs”, it neglects to provide critical, data-driven information on specific challenges. God will lead any willing parent to successfully homeschool, they say, avoiding the issue that some families could be considered high-risk for unsatisfactory, even abusive, homeschooling outcomes.

Instead, these promotional materials vaguely assert that God will use each parent’s strengths to provide a positive and effective home education environment. They assure potential homeschooling parents that, regardless of their educational background, any follower of Christ can give their child a better, safer intellectual and social development than formal schooling would.

*****

My experience as a neglected homeschool student growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional family is testimony that this scenario does not always unfold so neatly.

My mother was encouraged by HSLDA propaganda to homeschool me, and my parents were enabled by lack of regulatory oversight to proceed with little consideration for my needs.

*****

Over the past few years, the confusion and pain that has haunted me for over a decade has driven me to tease apart how my bizarre past came to be and how I managed to survive it. I grew up in a conservative, fundamentalist Southern Baptist family. True to form, my parents believed that children, relative to adults, lack basic rights of respect and agency. They bought into the Dobsonian authoritarian parenting philosophy that rose in popularity during the 1980s: parents are responsible for their children’s eternal salvation, a task best achieved by breaking the child’s willful inner core of sin through severe physical punishment and verbal shaming.

My mother, in particular, was extremely controlling and sheltering. As long as I can remember, I had to sit patiently and listen to her rants about “contemporary culture” and her demonization of public school, working moms, divorced couples, the existence of sexuality, almost all the music out there, and (of course) spaghetti-strap tank tops.

I later realized that her polarized perspective, especially her black-and-white thinking, relates to her poorly managed mental health issues, which most likely expand far beyond official diagnoses of major depression and anxiety disorder. She partially blamed these illnesses on energy lost in battling the devil — particularly in guarding her children against influences of the more liberal family members who were, in fact, instruments of the devil placed on earth to challenge her faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, her personal friend and savior.

My mother’s parenting decisions were driven by fear and paranoia. She lacked empathy, a psychological freedom that allowed her to place ideology above a child’s needs.

My father’s choices were driven by his desire to pacify my mother. He wanted peace and quiet, a need I was happy to comply with, as I had been trained to do since birth.

Life in public school grades K-3 was no picnic. My mother frequently initiated conflict with teachers and administrators. She confronted teachers over which G-rated secular movies were shown in class; she became incensed when her VHS cassette of a cartoon Christian Easter Story was not allowed to be shown due to religious content. Appeal to follow the norms of mainstream society means nothing to someone who is convinced they have discovered the one right way to live.

As I faced my entrance into junior high school, my mother grew terrified of my impending exposure to a more rigorous secular education, jealous of the increased time I would spend away from her during extracurricular activities, and paranoid of “worldly influences” from the more complex peer relationships I might form. She expressed alarm when I began budding as an independent person. I recall her rebuking me for my change in personality, blaming my new attitudes and opinions on peer influence, and shaming me for “becoming a different person”. No developmental change could be attributed to my unique thoughts and emotions; her shame- and fear-based authoritarian parenting creed declares children do not (or should not) have their own. Her need to use her child as a mirror to understand herself prevented her from acknowledging my identity.

My mother’s behavior created intense chaos and embarrassment for me as a child. I became fearful of her near-constant scrutiny of my tone, expressions, and reactions. In his passivity, my father did little to mitigate the negative impacts my mother’s intrusive, unpredictable behavior had on me.

*****

My journey down the rabbit hole begins when I was placed in a Baptist private school, which I actually liked because the 4th grade classes were small and intimate. But half-way through the school year, my mother once again generated conflict with school officials.  The more “secular” aspects of an otherwise quite religious curriculum were questionable. She had taken a part-time job in the after school care program and developed irresolvable interpersonal problems with her co-workers. Suddenly everyone at this school was bad, dumb, not up to her standards. She abruptly moved us back to the local public school for the second half of the year.

I remember this mid-year move as a turning point in my childhood, when I first fully realized that my mother had serious problems which were not being addressed by other adults in my life. I realized that her selfish whims would be catered to at the expense of my needs. That I had to shut up and put up, as I would not be listened to nor respected. I silently grieved the departure, leaving friends I would likely never see again. My last few months in public school were disastrous. I struggled to cope with the change, was self-conscious of my mother’s erratic behavior, and developed behavioral problems. My grades fell from As to Cs. This shift strengthened my mother’s resolve to remove me from this “toxic environment” and teach me at home.

Around this time, my mother became attracted to HSLDA’s portrayal of the homeschool family. Through HSLDA, she learned that children did not need to learn how to be independent, mature teenagers because the concept of “teens” is a modern myth. She declared that dating would not be allowed, but she would supervise a parent-controlled courtship. Participation in athletics, the arts, or science labs would have to be carefully censored and restricted to prevent exposure to un-Godly influences. She learned that mainstream education, socialization and rampant acquaintance-making would be unnecessary for and harmful to my development.

As a homeschooled child I would, presumably, learn how to become an adult through observing and imitating my mother in the home. As an emancipated 18-year-old, I would then either attend a Christian Bible-based private university (Pensacola and Bob Jones were popular ideas) or marry some family-approved fellow I had successfully courted under her supervision.

This was the reality I faced as a 10-year-old girl.

This might have all been faintly reasonable had my family been functional and my mother a healthy, responsible adult. Rather, my mother was increasingly overwhelmed by self-gratifying fantasies and obsessions. She became easily bored with reality, distressed by responsibility. Clearly, between her crises and my family’s financial struggles, even courtship and extracurriculars would not happen. My father was surely aware of these weaknesses and would have had compelling reason to question her competency, but he did not intervene. Even as a young child, I could see that I would not be taken care of in this bizarre world. And I would not have the childhood or education that would prepare me for a successful, fulfilling life in the real world.

This nightmare was my reality.

And so, beginning with 5th grade, I was “homeschooled”. I bracket this term in quotes, because without doing so would be an insult to families who legitimately home educate. At first my mother kept me involved with the local Christian home educators group. We attended meetings, field trips, and play dates. My mother purchased a years’ stock of A Beka, Bob Jones, and Saxon Math textbooks. She planned out a few months of lessons and graded my work for a few weeks.

She voraciously consumed every hyperbolic HSLDA-issued line about using homeschooling to save children in the “culture war”.

At first this seemed better than being in school because I suffered less conflict and chaos. But, predictably, over time the people in our homeschool group became bad, dumb, not up to her standards. My mother withdrew herself socially, effectively withdrawing me from the outside world except for trips to the public library and grocery store, occasional visits with extended family.

My mother’s mental health declined severely as my eight years spent “homeschooling” progressed. For much of this time, my mother slept all day in a depressive state while I cooked, cleaned, watched television, and read library books. My mother continued to purchase textbooks on an annual basis, but most remained uncracked until boredom drove me to fill out and “grade” workbooks on my own. Aside from the secular math curriculum, information I gleaned from the homeschool curricula was uselessly biased toward a fundamentalist Christian worldview.

Somehow I was aware of this and, when a particular subject interested me, I filled in gaps using the latest technological innovation we had acquired: the Internet.

Part Two >

“Biblical” Parenting, Part Three: An Extremely Controlling Parent

HA Editorial Team18 Comments
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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Latebloomer’s blog Past Tense Present Progressive. It was originally published on August 30, 2012.

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Also in this series: Part One: Introduction | Part Two: A Parent Who Assumes The Worst | Part Three: An Extremely Controlling Parent | Part Four: A Parent Who Tries to Change Minds and Hearts through Spanking | Part Five: A Parent Who Isolates In Order to Control | Part Six: Concluding Thoughts

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Part Three: An Extremely Controlling Parent

To briefly review, my first criticism of Reb Bradley’s book “Child Training Tips” discussed the way his advice pushed parents toward the worst possible interpretation of their child’s behavior at the expense of mercy and understanding. Now here is my second criticism.

Criticism #2:   Parents are urged to exercise an extreme level of control of their child’s mind and body, which prevents the child from preparing for adulthood.

Reb Bradley is very straightforward about what he considers the primary task of a parent.  Several times throughout the book, he reminds parents that their goal is to subdue their child’s will: “keep your objective in mind – subjection of their will” (p. 44); “since the goal of child training is to help a child learn to subdue his self-will, parents must take every opportunity to subdue it when it manifests itself” (p. 60); “the child whose will is not subdued in the first few years of life is hampered in the maturing process” (p. 29).

Why do parents need to take control of their child’s will? Reb Bradley explains his reasoning this way: “maturity is rooted primarily in self-control which, in turn, facilitates growth in wisdom and responsibility.  The most basic objective of training children, therefore, is the subduing of their self-will.  From the time children are born, parents must develop in them the ability to say ‘NO’ to their own desires and ‘YES’ to their parents” (p. 28).  In other words, he sees self control is a basic component of maturity and thinks self-control is achieved through imposing external controls upon the child.

I certainly don’t dispute the importance of developing good self-control, especially in light of the “marshmallow challenge” research conducted at Stanford University.

In this experiment, the researchers left young children alone in a room with a large fluffy marshmallow, telling them that they could choose between eating that one marshmallow right away, or getting two marshmallows if they waited for the researcher to return to the room (adorable video here). The researchers discovered that the kids who had the ability to exercise self-control at age 4 went on to experience more success in academics and in adulthood.  So why were some children more able to exercise self-control than others?  After hundreds of hours of observation, researchers determined that “the crucial skill was the strategic allocation of attention. Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow…the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from Sesame Street.  Their desire wasn’t defeated–it was merely forgotten.”  Dr. Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor who headed the experiment, explains, “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it….The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

So Reb Bradley and I agree that self-control is important; what we disagree on is how to help a child develop self-control.

I think that parents who rely on excessively authoritarian parenting techniques are actually hampering their child’s development of self-control; a “subdued” child who simply follows orders to avoid spankings will likely be unprepared for the freedom of adulthood.  

Going back to the marshmallow challenge, Mischel found that when he “taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes.”  Mischel explained, “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

The parents’ task, then, is to give their child the tools to increase their child’s chances of success.  Parents can help their child identify natural rewards and natural consequences of decisions, and parents can help their child develop helpful mental patterns such as how to pay attention and how to distract themselves.  These tools, along with the determination of a strong will, will better prepare the child for the realities of adulthood.  Reb Bradley’s approach of spanking the child for disobediently eating the marshmallow doesn’t give the child any tools that will last into adulthood.

A potentially more harmful aspect of the total control that Reb Bradley promotes involves bodily ownership.  It appears the he considers parents to be the owners of their child’s body; to him, a child attempting to establish personal space is actually rebelling against the parents.  In his book, he lists the following actions as examples of “active rebellion”: “a child moves their shoulder away from a parent reaching out to touch or embrace him” (p. 76); and “walking along, a parent reaches down and takes their child’s hand and the child attempts to pull it away (If the child is in pain because the blood in their hand has drained to their shoulder, and gangrene is setting in, they should be able to respectfully ask to have their hand back.)” (p. 77); also “after being placed on their parent’s lap, they attempt to get off.  They should be permitted to respectfully ask to get down, but only after the parent is satisfied that they are willing to remain” (p. 77); finally, “while being held in their parent’s arms a toddler struggles to get down” (p. 77).

In other words, a child is not allowed to refuse a hug or touch, refuse to hold hands, or exit a lap or arms without verbal permission.  

This type of training–overriding a child’s sense of bodily ownership and personal space–could be extremely dangerous for the child, making them an especially easy target for a predator because the child has fewer personal boundaries to overcome.

This danger becomes even greater when combined with Reb Bradley’s other advice to parents.  He tells parents to require their children to show an excessive amount of respect to people in leadership and people who are older than them.  He explains, “The Bible commands…that children respect…a church leader, or just someone older” (p. 119).  He continues by explaining what the word respect means to him: “Respect: to treat those in authority with the realization that they have power in your life.  It means that when they speak, you listen and obey them, fearing the consequences they could bring for disrespect” (p. 120).

Once again, we see that something positive, like treating people with respect, has been taken to an unhealthy extreme in this book due to Reb Bradley’s obsession with obedience and authority.  A child who regards every adult as an authority, who has no practice saying no to an adult, who has no sense of bodily ownership or personal space–that is an incredibly vulnerable child!

But there’s more: Reb Bradley also takes away the child’s only remaining defense against predators: parents who are open for communication.  “Unless it is an emergency,” he says, “children should never be permitted to criticize those over them in authority” (p. 124).

Growing up should be a process of learning how to take care of your needs, make good decisions, and keep yourself safe.  That is what maturity looks like, and the ability to follow orders has very little to do with that.

Reb Bradley seems to think otherwise; he claims that “learning to honor adult authority when young prepares a child for future adult relationships in areas of work, social relationships, and citizenship” (p. 119).  Perhaps it has been too long since he participated in the culture outside of church events.  Regarding work: with some exceptions, most employers today value qualities that authoritarian parents unknowingly suppress, such as the ability to innovate, show initiative, and solve problems.  Adult social relationships are about communication, understanding, and cooperation, which are also skills that authoritarian parenting does not allow children to practice.  Citizenship, besides the usual payment of taxes and such, is about looking out for the best interests of the country and your neighbors, which sometimes involves activism against leaders who are abusing their power.  And for those who join the military and other similar professions, where unquestioning obedience to authority is valued–joining was an adult decision, and it comes with appropriate training, such as boot camp.  For most of society, life is certainly is not all about obedience to authority; I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt like a  confused and vulnerable little kid inside for years after entering independent adulthood, struggling to get the tools I needed to operate in the world as an adult.

However, the concept of absolute authority and total submission is so important to Reb Bradley that he even gives special instructions to parents who want to start this type of parenting approach when their children are older.  “Give them a time period (perhaps 6-8 weeks), during which all parental commands will be given without reasons, and no appeals will be considered” (p. 48).

How did Reb Bradley choose that 6-8 week amount of time, you ask?

Well, he admits to being inspired by the length of boot camp, and it seems clear that he sees this as a type of boot camp experience for the unsuspecting child.  

He continues: “explain to them that if at the end of the time period, they consistently obey quickly and respectfully, then you will begin to give wisdom behind your commands…..The reasons you give will be brief and may not be discussed at the moment of instruction” (p. 49).  Oh wow, what a great reward for the totally obedient child!  Allowing them to hear a brief explanation later–really, it’s so generous of the parent.  Yes, that was sarcasm, but this book certainly gives parents the impression that children ought to sit around eagerly waiting for the crumbs to fall from their parents’ table of wisdom, and that the parents are very generous to share at all.

In urging parents to withhold information from their children, Reb Bradley seems to put parents in the role of God in their children’s lives.  Or, at the very least, he sees parents as siding with God against their children.  Discussing the Biblical story of Job–the righteous man who suddenly lost all his children, wealth, and health for no discernable reason–Reb Bradley focuses in on the unresolved ‘why’ of the story.  “Although God could have explained to Job His reasons for allowing the trial, He never did tell Job ‘why.’  He would not honor Job’s disrespectful insistence on an answer.  Even after Job finally humbled himself and repented of his pride, he received no answer from God” (p. 51).  Although the obvious application of the story is that sometimes good people suffer, and we can’t always know the reason why, Reb Bradley decided to put a different spin on it: “as parents we must follow God’s example and not reward our children’s disrespect” (p. 51).

Holding so much power over another person is not something that humans handle well.

This is famously illustrated by the Stanford Prison Experiment run by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.  In this experiment, a group of seemingly normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of either prison guard or prisoner.  The prisoners were given new identities and placed in a mock prison, and the prison guards were told to keep order.  According to the Wikipedia article, “the participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo’s expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue.”

How long did it take for things to get out of hand?  The entire experiment had to be stopped early, at the insistence of Zimbardo’s girlfriend, after only 6 days.

 In my opinion, there are far too many similarities between the mentality of the prison experiment and the mentality of this version of “Biblical” parenting.  

The parents, like the prison guards, are told that they are managing bad people; in addition, like the prison guards, the parents are also told that they have absolute power over those people.  It shouldn’t be surprising that in many cases, the parent-child dynamic gets completely out of hand and becomes abusive.  After all, haven’t we learned by now that “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

In summary, Reb Bradley’s extreme emphasis on authority and obedience hinder children’s ability to develop the skills they need for adulthood.  The child, as a result, is likely to be more vulnerable, while the parent is at risk of developing abusive habits from holding so much power.

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To be continued.

I Was Beaten, But That’s Not My Primary Issue With Homeschooling: Rebecca Irene Gorman’s Story

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Rebecca Irene Gorman. Photo used with permission.
Rebecca Irene Gorman. Photo used with permission.

I have a past.

Those I tell about my past find it tragic, unbelievable, and hard to understand.

I want them to understand my past so that they’ll know that I am an intelligent, social, motivated, hardworking woman, not the misanthrope slacker I may appear to be to the casual observer. I want them to know that I’m making positive life choices and tackling challenging issues everyday, even if they are not immediately visible to the outside world, due to the cruel grip of past violence, reaching through time.

Japan progresses into the future with the complex issues of radioactive waste ever-present. Development and renewal in Haiti includes rebuilding after the earthquake.  The America we build today for our children and grandchildren is built upon an America that experienced 9/11 and the Patriot Act. We may forgive the past, but it always continues to exist in the way it molds the present.

My preparations for sleep include putting a band-aid on my nose, threading floss through an oral appliance and braces, rinsing with hydrogen peroxide and oral wound care, turning on a white noise machine and a HEPA air purifier on high, propping myself up on pillows in hot-washed cases, tightly binding a strap around my chin, and attaching an air-blowing tube to my face.

If I’m lucky, I’ll wake up before noon, without sleep inertia, and untraumatized by any lingering nightmares – an encouraging start to my day.

My evenings and mornings – my evenings and mornings now – could have been like your evenings and mornings. But someone made a choice for me, more than twenty years ago, that this instead would be my life today.

Today, I can stand in line at the grocery store. I’m no longer sitting on the ground, in an ankle length dress, while I wait for the sales clerk to ring up my purchases. Today, as long as I remember to take my morning and afternoon medication, I can clumsily attempt a game of volleyball or tennis without needing to sit down between serves.** I can stand long enough to conduct my business professionally. If I were to join a tour through a museum or town, I would probably seek out a chair only once or twice. But this isn’t the way I lived for twenty years.

I make a note on my calendar on days I don’t have nausea, night sweats, dizziness, or hot flashes.

I know that if I go out for a Friday night of teetotaler fun, I’ll still be recovering on Monday.

Sometimes I skip a meal because I don’t have easy access to food that won’t make my symptoms worse.

I embrace the joys of being twenty-nine. The friends I can spend an evening with, or email or Skype. Beautiful afternoons in parks. The companionship of two quirky felines. The occasional party and obscenely long recovery period.

But when I meet a stranger at an event, and he inevitably asks me ‘What do you do?’, the answer resonates in my mind: ‘Not as much as you.’

Not out of lack of ambition. Not because I was born with a disability. Not because I was in an accident. Only because the individuals that the state gave complete control of my fate decided that my pain and the limitation of my life and potential wasn’t worth preventing or treating. My captors, in designer apparel, would corral me into their luxury vehicle, to be paraded before their high net-worth clients, boosting their social equity and enlarging their income. I must perform as a trained animal, smiling through my pain, submitting to verbal abuse when I sat before I fainted, suppressing my personality and self-identity and playing my role perfectly.

I lived in a dirty, dust-bunny-colonized room, with antique furniture, floral curtains, mold plated windows, and spiders between my sheets. If I read, I could mentally block out the sound of yelling, until its source burst into the space – and my face. I learned that the appropriate response was to immediately cower and obey: the longer I delayed, the more ensuing punishments would accumulate.

More than once a week, I was allowed the exercise of a supervised quarter mile walk. More than once a week, I was allowed an hour or two of supervised co-existence with children my own age in a structured educational context. The phone and television were off limits, but I was provided with instructional material in mathematics and grammar with which I could, and did, provide myself with an education.

The age of majority didn’t apply to me. I would live with my masters indefinitely, servicing  their home and work and satisfying their needs for intimacy and emotional support.

Today, when I look a little awkward at that party, or move a little strangely when we do business, it’s because I’m still assimilating into your culture.

And assimilate I must. I do not have a native culture to return to or celebrate.

Is my story tragic, unbelievable, and hard to understand? That’s because you didn’t come from my world. I’m glad for that.

** This was true only briefly. A year after gaining my mobility, I lost it again to wrongly developed hips. Until I go under the knife and complete the ensuing recovery, volleyball and tennis, as well as moderate walks, are off the menu for me.

Corporal Punishment and The End of The Red Stick: Heather Doney’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Heather Doney’s blog Becoming Worldly. It was originally published on February 18, 2013. Read Part One of Heather’s story for HA’s To Break Down A Child series here.

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Trigger warning for To Break Down a Child series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.

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This picture could be anybody’s little sister blindfolded and hitting a piñata at her Dad’s house for another sibling’s birthday.

My little sister lives in a different world than I did.
My little sister lives in a different world than I did.

But it isn’t. It’s my little sister.

She lives in a different world than I did. One with her own bedroom and court-ordered visitation and Christmas presents from a kind stepmother. She has never been homeschooled. She does not remember a time when our family didn’t celebrate birthdays, or was too poor to buy a piñata, or was too “modest” for her favorite summer clothes to be allowed.

She could be using any stick to hit this piñata but she isn’t. She’s using the “red stick,” the most infamous spanking implement our family had.

As far as I know, none of the younger siblings attending this party were ever touched by the red stick and I imagine just a few had been threatened, but the grim knowledge of what it was used for had been passed down.

The red stick had started out as a handle to a child-size broom and then when the broom broke 25 years ago, it became a toy (a walking stick, a bat, a pretend sword) left in the yard until my Dad picked it up off the patio one day, tapped it against his palm a few times and said, “This would make a real good spankin’ stick.”

Then it became something totally new. An object of fear.

It stayed hanging on a nail or propped in a corner in my Dad’s bedroom or office for years except when it was picked up and used to threaten or to leave welts.

“Daddy, please don’t spank me. I’m tender.” No red stick today, only fodder for years of teasing. “Aww, is my little heatherjanes still tender?”

“Do you want a spanking? Don’t make me get the red stick.”

Mom catches one sister padding her underwear with toilet paper in anticipation of a beating. After that, it’s bare bottomed.

“Pull down your pants. Bend over.” Red stick.

Sitting in the “punish chair” corner ’til sundown, hearing the car crunch gravel in the driveway, shaking, hands going cold. Red stick.

“But I don’t want to try and eat a pickled pig lip out of that jar, Dad. It looks just like apig’s lip.” “If you don’t try it, you’ll get the red stick. You’d better eat it and like it.” Tears. Gagging. Spitting chunks of pickled pork into the sink. Red stick.

Pain, shame, anger, fear. Yelling. Red stick.

Running, cursing, slipping, falling, being caught and dragged. Red stick.

Grabbing the red stick tightly, just as tall, if not quite as strong as the woman holding it. “Let go,” Mom says.

“No,” I say, “You’re gonna hit me with it.”

“Yes,” she says.

“Well,” I say, “I’d be an idiot to let it go then, wouldn’t I?”

It strikes me that this photo is the only known picture of the red stick. The only official proof of it ever existing or being used is in a pleasant scenario. As it happens, the red stick finally died that happy day, broke while connecting with the piñata and ended up in the garbage.

A sibling sent me a message informing me that the red stick had met its end and that when Dad was out of range, they had celebrated its demise. I was glad, too: glad it was gone and that it did not die the way I had always imagined it would — splintering into pieces over a child’s behind.

It would never be used to hurt anyone again.

It had broken being used the only way it should have ever been used, in the original spirit it had once had — innocently in child’s play.