homeschool

Here’s To Girls Who Have Been Made Ashamed Of Their Bodies: Pearl’s Story

HA Editorial Team28 Comments

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

I’ve been loosely following Clare’s viral blog post about getting kicked out of her homeschool prom. The story resonated with me because it was similar to things I’ve experienced growing up in conservative homeschool/purity culture. Unfortunately, some homeschool parents gave a really ugly response to her story. They felt that, since she had used bad language, and put purity culture in a bad light, that it would be OK to publicly share unsubstantiated claims about her behavior the night of prom. They didn’t like her individual narrative, so they replaced it with another individual narrative they did like, because, well, any girl who would use curse words must also be a liar and a slut.

I thought they were supposed to be adults, but all bets are off when you step out of line in their eyes.

Fine, if they won’t believe Clare’s story I’ll share my own.

Growing up, my mom put a lot of importance in how I appeared to others. We had a lot of conflicts about her wanting me to dress in a way that would look good to her friends. For example, wearing a dress to Thanksgiving dinner at a friends house even though I knew I’d be playing outside all day. When I started wearing bras she bought me a really uncomfortable bra that she would make me wear on Sunday. I hated it because, besides being uncomfortable, it had thick seams through the cups that showed through every top and made me very self-conscious.

I still don’t understand how breasts can have a Sunday-appropriate look.

There was such fuss about bras and how they made my breasts look that I started slouching badly to try and hide my breasts entirely. At 17, she bought me a hideous dress that didn’t fit for a special occasion at church. I didn’t have a choice, I had to wear it because it made me look “nice”.

The emphasis on modesty really began around 11 or 12 when I began puberty. Whenever we went shopping my mom would examine clothes on me in the dressing room to make sure they were modest enough before purchasing. (Or have me come out and model for pre-approval in the case of hand-me-downs.) I would see clothes other girls were wearing, and naturally wanted to dress in a way that made me feel cute and like I fit in with other girls my age. Around age 13 I would try choosing clothes at the store, but when mom gave them the once over in the dressing room they rarely passed the modesty test. Shorts had to go pretty much to my knees, shirts had to be loose enough to create a straight line down my sides. If clothes I chose didn’t pass the test I had to stand in front of the mirror and look at myself while my mom pointed out all of my undesirable body parts the clothes were supposedly drawing attention to.

It was so humiliating I eventually took the easy route and started dressing like a boy.

The grunge era was only about 5 years past, so you could still buy flannel shirts and baggy jeans for girls. I stopped wearing shorts entirely around age 14.

My mom would always tell me that I just couldn’t understand because I didn’t understand how boys think. Boys, she said, think about sex all the time, and I could cause them to stumble (lust after me) by dressing immodestly. I couldn’t possibly understand, she said, because girls don’t care that much about sex, they really only want love. I became very ashamed of my body and for the most part tried to hide it. If I ever felt a burst of confidence and wanted to wear something cute and feminine I would usually have it pointed out to me that someone would see the shape of my breasts, or the curve of my waist, or that my bra was showing, or that these shorts or skirt were too short and any thing more than an inch or so above the knee was too tempting.

By the time I was 19 years old I had a job and had saved up some money and started going shopping for my own clothes for the first time. The clothes I chose were kind of tacky, because I didn’t have any practice dressing myself. But by nearly anyone’s standards they were very modest. I didn’t even wear shorts, I was still too ashamed of my legs, but I did wear skirts to church. The skirts I chose always went below my knees. I didn’t wear tank tops, most of my shirts actually had collars. The shirts were fitted, and except for one not tight.

The first fitted, collared T-shirt that I brought home made my mom cry.

She said she could see the curves of my waste and the shape of my breasts. I felt cute and feminine for the first time in my life, so I didn’t allow myself to be guilted into giving it up. I started standing up straight. I also bought bras for myself, and chose some with some amount of padding because I felt more covered in case of cold weather. My mom saw one out drying after I did laundry, and brought it to me to show me how the padding made my breasts look bigger, and that was immodest. I had a pair of shoes I’d wear to church that had one and half inch heels. My parents expressed concerns that they were too sexy.

A few months after buying my own wardrobe, my parents came to me to tell me that an elder in our church had approached my dad to tell him the way I was dressing was causing his sons to stumble.

My parents made me show them each piece of the clothing I had bought so they could decide whether it was modest enough. Very few pieces passed their test. The rest they ordered me to put up in my closet until I was married and it was my husband’s job to decide how I dressed. (Fortunately my wedding was only a few months after that.) In the meantime, I bought a few baggy T-shirts to get by on; it would’ve been too humiliating to go back to the flour sacks I had to wear before.

Modesty/purity doctrines and body shaming are an unfortunate realty of conservative Christian culture. They may or may not be directly related to homeschooling, but I have yet to find anyone who believed these things that wasn’t a homeschooling parent. There is nothing girls in these situations can do. Once someone has told you you are causing them to stumble you have to change your clothes, no matter how humiliating or unreasonable it may be. To do otherwise would be tempting someone on purpose, because now you know that you’re causing them to sin.

Growing up hearing these things made me very ashamed of my body. It took years after getting married before I was even comfortable wearing shorts. Making a girl ashamed of her body is a horribly cruel thing to do. It’s not like there isn’t enough pressure to look and dress certain ways from mainstream culture.

So that’s my story. It won’t be a viral success, but if enough girls tell their stories there is no way that homeschool parents can say they are exaggerating, or that they have some kind of malicious vendetta, or that they deserve to have their reputations damaged.

So here’s to girls who have been made ashamed of their bodies.

You are a person, body and soul, your body is you. And you don’t have to be ashamed of having a female body. It is beautiful, don’t hide it.

Self Preservation and Mental Health

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Sarah Henderson’s blog Feminist in Spite of Them. It was originally published on her blog on September 3, 2013.

In my last post, I made a brief mention of how living in a state of survival affected my mental health. I thought it would be a good idea to expand on this issue, because in my opinion it is the crux of why having quiverfull families and homeschooling in chaos is abusive to the children involved.

As I have mentioned before, doing something that causes harm to your child is abusive regardless of your intentions or religious justification. Children are do not become raised in a vacuum. Children do not have the ability to protect their own interests, and as I have shown in a previous post, in fact unfortunately do not have the right to do so. Therefore it is a parent’s job to try to protect their children from harm as much as possible – no perfection required – and to introduce good things and reduce negative influences as much as possible. It is my belief that that most parents would not argue with this assertion, because most parents have their children’s best interests in mind.

When a child is raised a quiverfull family, there is a core belief involved that stipulates that older children should help raise their younger siblings.

This is commonly known to those outside the quiverfull movement as the “buddy system”, but survivors sometimes call this “sister-moms”. The use of older siblings to care for younger siblings can cause various levels of neglect depending on how organized the family is and whether there is homeschooling involved. It is typically simply impossible for a mother of 6 or more children to recover from childbirth and unending pregnancies at the same time as being able to provide adequate care to that many children, provide adequate schooling for that many different grades, cook nutritious meals, do laundry, and keep house. Don’t get me wrong, I do not object to children having chores. I do object to a ten year old child being responsible for a whole department of parenting or housekeeping, such as all cooking, or all laundry or all cleaning or all child care.

This is the difference between a child helping with chores, and “the use” of children to help raise other children or “take over” certain aspects of being a housekeeping mother. When there is a high level of chaos, the older children can become invested in running the household. Indeed, that is the goal of quiverfull families: to pass on the ideals of raising a big family and having women stay in the home and replicate the family values as soon as they are old enough. However, this emotional investment will have one of two outcomes: either the sister-mom will succeed in pulling off an inappropriate amount of responsibility in the home and move on to their own submissive marriage and many children without ever experiencing her own life, or she will fail at the vast amount of work required to raise a family as a young teen. If she succeeds, it is a tragedy.

If she fails – and many fail – she will be subject to shame by others inside and outside the family. The problem is, in order for a daughter to participate in the investment I described above, there is a certain amount of self-deception required. The girl must become oblivious to her own needs and desires, ignore her own sexuality, and truly believe in the moral obligation to participate, to the exclusion of all other life paths. Otherwise she will object to what is being taken from her.

The other important factor apart from self-deception is self-preservation.

In a chaotic situation, there is difficulty in maintaining discipline, and some parents do not have the skills to do so with a few children, let alone over half a dozen. Child abuse and “squeaky wheel” parenting is very common, where children are punished for being loud and only receive help when they are insistent enough to get it but not loud enough to warrant punishment. In this type of environment, there is not enough parental supervision to guarantee good behavior, so they may depend on older children to help supervise the younger children. Sometimes this means that if younger children misbehave, the child responsible for watching them may also be punished for not preventing the infraction. When this happens, the goal becomes less about moral behavior and more about each child protecting themselves from punishment.

A sister-mom who has juggled age-inappropriate levels of chores and child care for years, and is responsible for the behavior of others, lives in a haze of survival. They do not let themselves fully absorb what is going on around them, and do not allow themselves to experience the unfairness in their lives. When a failure takes place, the entire facade crumbles down. The girl will realize that the very parts of herself, the very skills she takes pride in, are what makes her different and scarred compared to others the same age. She will realize other girls have something she does not have: an identity outside of someone else’s children and ideology. If a girl fails at being a sister-mom, there is nothing left unless she makes something happen. If you have no other identity and no social skills, building these from scratch as a teenager seems like an insurmountable task.

The process of disillusionment that takes place is terrifying and horrifying.

Imagine spending several years working on something you really believed in, and investing every moment of every day in it, and believing that it was your life purpose, and one day it simply falls away. Teenaged girls in this situation are typically quite sheltered as well, and tend to not know much about depression and self-harm, which means that they are exposed to the life-changing effects without understanding what is going on, and believing that they are deficient in some way and are the only one in the world going through those feelings.

Quiverfull families are not open to exploring such issues and seeking help, and such help would be counter-productive to the goals of the ideology. Sometimes such girls retreat from their moment of clarity back into the haze and try again. Others are given help within the ideological circle, and the girls are encouraged to suppress their feelings. Others leave.

For the ones who leave and start their lives over outside the quiverfull community, it can take years to start to feel normal. It is difficult to feel normal when you are not living the purpose you have been taught, and are no longer pursuing those goals. Another important aspect is that as a sister-mom, a girl will raise children who are not hers. When she leaves, she walks away from small children who she loves and they know her as the source of food and comfort. It is impossible to fully describe the loss this causes, and the unselfish teachings from childhood can make it difficult to move forward with one’s own life when there is a huge part of the soul that is still attached to the raising and protecting of younger siblings.

When a girl starts to open up to her own life, she will start to realize how much of her life has been used up to pursue the goals of someone else. There is resentment towards both the parents and the siblings, which brings with it the conflict of not wanting to resent siblings for what they had no control over. Sister-moms are taught to not pursue their own goals and to malign typical ‘worldly’ goals, and it can be painful to process what is right and wrong and pick a moral code to live by. Sister-moms who leave will often also simply miss their families and feel rejection because they cannot stay and live their lives. They will feel confusion and shame, and be afraid of going to hell for their actions.

They experience the conflict of self-preservation both while living in the haze and while getting out. All these experiences can trigger depression, self-harm, and self-destructive behavior, and when a girl is used to living in a haze of denial, it is very difficult to get out of the new haze of depression if she falls into it.

A parent risking a girl’s mental health to get help with child raising other children is abuse.

Do Stacy McDonald and Kelly Crawford Pass the Duck Test on Patriarchy?

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Julie Anne Smith’s blog Spiritual Sounding Board. It was originally published on May 8, 2014 and has been slightly modified for HA.

*****

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says ‘duck’. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he’s wearing a label or not.

~Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala during the Cold War in 1950

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Are you familiar with the Duck Test?  It’s an inductive reasoning test.  This familiar expression is an example of inductive reasoning:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Not long after I posted the article “Queen Bees of Homeschooling Stacy McDonald and Kelly Crawford Don’t Like the “Victim” Word in the Lourdes Torres-Manteufel vs. Doug Phillips Lawsuit,” there was some fallout, most likely related to the pushback they received here. It’s always interesting to watch the responses to blog articles where we are exposing truth. We typically see back-peddling, web scrubbing, but rarely an admission of wrong teaching, etc.

I think it’s important to document what happened so that people can see for themselves and discern. Do the behaviors match the message? What is the fruit that we see? Is this the kind of teaching we want to stand behind and pay good money to hear at conferences? Do we want these foundational teachings to influence our families for decades?

Last week, R.L. Stollar, co-founder of Homeschoolers Anonymous, informed me that Kelly Crawford had written a blog article in 2008 entitled, “Tired of Patriarchy’s Bad Rap.”

Crawford’s article comes up here on a Google search:

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But surprise, surprise.  If you click on the link to the original article, this is what you see:

ja2Quack, quack.

Homeschoolers Anonymous shared Crawford’s 2008 article on their Facebook page recently (on April 29) and noticed the article was removed between 4/29 and 5/2. Stollar also quoted Crawford in his comment:

For a clear definition of biblical patriarchy,” she said, you should “go here” — here being a link to the now-defunct Vision Forum’s “Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy.”

The “Tenants of Biblical Patriarchy” has been long scrubbed from the Vision Forum website, but here is the cached copy.

Homeschoolers Anonymous has a copy of Kelly Crawford’s article on file here.  When will people learn that if they post articles on the internet and remove them, it makes them look like a fool?  Take a look at the first two paragraphs of her article, the article she scrubbed:

I guess I’ll be rehashing the same topics with new names until I die, but they won’t let me go.
There is something I’m so tired of. The word “patriarchy” is practically synonymous with an explicative in this culture. I’m tired of that. Patriarchy is not a new concept, but one as old as the world itself. It is biblical and if you don’t like it, and you’re a Christian, perhaps a new religion would suit you better. 

So, did Kelly Crawford change her views on Patriarchy?

She said she would rehash the same topics until she dies. Why would she remove that article from 2008? What is she trying to hide?

Quack, quack.

After posting the “Queen Bees” article, both Stacy McDonald and Kelly Crawford came to my blog to comment, having never participated at Spiritual Sounding Board before. We saw their true colors:

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Yes, Stacy McDonald, publicly made a low blow about the mental stability of one of my commenters.

Stacy has had a couple of weeks to think about that comment, a couple of weeks to e-mail me and say that perhaps she was out of line with that wording, but she has not. That was a rude comment. People pay to hear this woman speak, they read her blog articles. They look to her for guidance in how to raise their families. Enough said.I also want to point out another incident that occurred on the same day the article was being discussed here.  Spiritual Sounding Board reader Taunya reported that Kelly Crawford privately emailed her after 6 years of silence between the two saying,“Can’t you see what kind of people you’re running with now? The evidence, the fruit, is so clear.”  

Did you notice the 6-years-of-silence part?  

Although Crawford doesn’t mention the silence, it’s important to the whole story. Obviously this hit a nerve for Crawford and is not something to be dismissed lightly. Imagine Taunya’s surprise in receiving such an e-mail after so many years of silence. Let me put in my own words my interpretation of what Crawford is saying:  This information I am sending you is so important that I am breaking 6 years of silence to send it to you.  Listen to me!  If you don’t believe the way Stacy and I believe, you’re one of those bad-fruit people.  

What was the rotten fruit Taunya was talking about?  Things like this: 

Furthermore it is not “God’s will” for adult daughters to live in the homes of their fathers until marriage. There is nothing biblically wrong with young women attending college, working or living on their own. This is wrong and any woman falling for this as “God’s Word” is deceived. These are cult-like teachings must like the idea that women need to wear skirts and dresses for the sake of modesty or that it is wrong to limit the number of children one has.

And:

The definition of priest says it all Kelly! No women needs a priest! A man goes directly to God through Jesus and a woman does as well. She does not need her husband to be her mediator nor does she need him to be her prophet. She can read Scripture and the Holy Spirit resides in her just as He does her husband, no need for a husband to be her prophet! And KING? Wasn’t that addressed in the Old Testament. None of us need a king, we have that in Christ. 

Doesn’t that 6-year silence also say a lot? It reminds me of junior high.  “I’m not going to be your friend if you don’t like Suzy Q.”  Do you see what this is?  It’s my-way-or-the-highway mentality. You have to go along with my beliefs in order to be part of my group. It creates an us vs. them mentality. You are either in, or your are out. 

*****

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

~Douglas Adams

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Quack, quack.

Stacy and Kelly left the conversation, but the conversation continued to over 400 comments, but look what happened within 24 hours on Stacy and James McDonald’s Facebook page.  The first is a rant from James McDonald:

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Attitude much, James?

On the same day, April 23, Stacy posted a note on her Facebook wall endorsing her husband’s article, “The ‘P’ Word,” which is about Patriarchy. Her husband, in his article on Patriarchy discusses words and their meanings and how sometimes the meanings change. He tries to paint a beautiful picture of Patriarchy.

But check this out, is she really saying she is going to have to disguise that P (patriarchy) word from her vocabulary?

Stacy McDonald: All that being said, I personally believe that, for the sake of clarity, and knowing that the word has been so ravaged in the eyes of so many, it’s best to not to use the word. Because the term is not as important as the principle. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Biblical order is important, but we don’t have to use a word that provokes people or causes them to misunderstand us.

April 23 at 9:55am · Like · 15

Ok, so let’s just act like that word doesn’t exist. Is that what she’s saying? We’re going to continue doing the talk, and walking the walk, but we’re just not going to let anyone know what we’re really doing is Patriarchy. 

*****

When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.

~James Whitcomb Riley

*****

What we see is a very familiar pattern of behavior:

  • anyone who disagrees is labeled in a negative way:  mentally disabled, rotten fruit, divisive, some might even question the salvation of one who disagrees
  • instead of addressing conflict or misunderstandings: remove article entirely with no explanation
  • completely mischaracterize a critic, claiming criticisms they never made like a “strawman,” then  talk only about the strawman instead of the matter at hand
  • publicly air a “woe is me” rant of martyrdom on own forum to garner support and “attaboys”
  • black/white thinking: you are for us or against us

Folks, the above patterns are the rotten fruit.

It’s rotten fruit in attempt to defend more stinking, rotten fruit:  Patriarchy.Stacy and Kelly have been promoting “Biblical Patriarchy” for years.  Now Stacy wants to quack about it, without using the P word. It’s time to call this heretical teaching out now. It is destroying families. It is keeping young ladies held captive in their own homes, not giving them choices to further their education, to be critical thinkers, to use the creative minds God created for them.

Removing blog articles and not saying the P word is not going to change the fact that Patriarchy = Duck.

Not All Homeschoolers Are Religious (But Many Are)

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on May 14, 2014.

Sometimes I feel like I have to play this thing from both sides.

When I and other bloggers talk about some of the problems in the conservative Christian homeschooling subculture, we are informed by secular homeschool parents that not all homeschoolers are religious, and in fact that religious homeschoolers are just a minority today and not really a problem to be worried about. Well yes, we know that not all homeschoolers are religious. However, it’s a simple fact that many—perhaps even the majority—are.

When I read comments on mainstream news articles about things like Clare being kicked out of her homeschool prom for her dress, I see individuals who assume that all homeschoolers are religious, that all homeschooling is about religious indoctrination, and that homeschooling should therefore be shut down plain and simple. This is not helpful and certainly not true. There are secular homeschool leaders, textbooks, support groups, and conventions. A significant and growing percentage of homeschoolers are not religious homeschoolers.

And here I am, caught in the middle of misperceptions on both sides.

There is a lot I could say here, but I think it might just be simplest to quote from information put out by the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. This passage comes from “Reasons Parents Homeschool,” a page on the organization’s website.

Sociological research on homeschool families and their motivations, practices, and characteristics suggests that, going back as far as the late 1970s and early 1980s, there have been two main groups of homeschooling parents. First are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who want to give their children a Christian education, and second are progressives who believe that formal schooling stifles children’s natural creativity and that education takes place best outside of the classroom. Throughout the past three decades, these two groups have coexisted in what sociologists and historians have described as an often uneasy tension. While the two groups at times cooperated, they also each created their own local, state, and national homeschool groups, conferences, and organizations. Research suggests that those with religious motivations have been the larger group by far since the 1980s, and that this group has also been the more successful at networking and building organizations and infrastructure.

Recent work suggests that these two groups continue to exist with very similar motivations and characteristics as in the past. Many parents today continue to homeschool for religious reasons, and religious homeschool curriculum is common. Conservative evangelical speakers teaching the supreme importance of the family and the scientific reality of creationism make their rounds speaking at homeschool conventions and before homeschool audiences across the country. At the same time, progressive educational reformers such as John Taylor Gatto speak at “unschooling” conferences and gatherings, encouraging parents to forgo classrooms and textbooks and engage in radically child-led learning.

Even as many parents continue to homeschool for religious or pedagogical reasons, recent sociological work suggests that an increasing number of parents are choosing homeschooling for purely pragmatic reasons: because the academic quality of the local schools leaves something to be desired, or because of bullying or health problems. Some families homeschool in order to be closer as a family, or simply so that children may have access to an individualized education. While homeschooling in the past has often been an act of religious or pedagogical protest, homeschooling has today become mainstream and accepted as a valid educational option. In an era of increasing school choice, parents turn to homeschooling for a variety of practical reasons that are often very family-specific.

I also want to quote briefly from “How Have Scholars Divided Homeschoolers into Groups?“, which adds another dimension to this.

The most recent addition to scholarly literature on homeschooling is Jennifer Lois’ 2012 Home Is Where the School Is (Lois, 2012). In contrast to earlier scholars, Lois focuses specifically on homeschooling mothers. Perhaps the most notable thing about her work is that she categorizes these mothers slightly differently than previous scholars. Rather than dividing them into ideologues and pedagogues or believers and inclusives, she divides them into “first choice” and “second choice” homeschoolers. First choice homeschoolers, she says, are mothers who feel that they are called to homeschool, whether for conservative religious reasons or progressive pedagogical reasons. In fact, Lois’ work seems to suggest that both types of mothers similarly find root for their choice to homeschool in their common identities as mothers. Second choice homeschoolers, in contrast, are those who come to homeschooling after other educational methods fail their children. For these mothers, homeschooling is not an identity but rather a temporary educational options. Lois finds that first choice homeschooling mothers report higher levels of satisfaction and that second choice homeschooling mothers are likely to look forward to the day when their children are grown or back in school.

Feel free to read these entire pages if the excerpts interest you. The basic point I want to make is that, yes, religious homeschoolers make up a significant percentage of both the homeschool population and the infrastructure of the homeschooling world, and that, at the same time, there are many who homeschool for pedagogical or pragmatic reasons that have nothing to do with religion. It is wrong to assume that all homeschoolers are religious (or that all religious homeschoolers are extremists) and it is wrong to assume that religious homeschooling is a marginal or insignificant part of homeschooling as a whole. 

I want to finish with a chart from the National Center for Education Statistics. The data displayed was collected in 2011.

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When reading the chart, bear in mind that many scholars feel that sociological work may get at parents’ motivations more accurately than a survey of this sort. I tend to agree, as my parents might put academics down as their number one reason for homeschooling on a survey like this even though they are very clearly and solidly religious homeschoolers. Further, “a concern about environment of other schools” may mean a variety of things, religious or secular. Finally, some scholars question whether religious homeschoolers may be less likely to participate in a government survey of this sort, and whether that may skew the results.

If you want to read more, you may also find “A Brief History of Homeschooling” and “Homeschool Demographics” of interest.

My Elaborate Plan

HA Editorial Team8 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kierstyn King’s blog Bridging the Gap.  It was originally published on March 8, 2014.

Five years ago, on my birthday, I left home.

Obviously, there’s a lot of backstory to this, and, I guess, this is that story.

I didn’t say goodbye – I couldn’t say goodbye. I was terrified that if I did, if I told them I was leaving, that they would shut me in my room, and jam the door and not let me out. That they wouldn’t let me out of their eyesight ever again, despite my having reached legal age where they couldn’t do anything – and I would have fought, you bet your ass I would have fought. I would have called whoever I could, police included, if they locked me up when I was 18 – but I didn’t want that to happen, I didn’t need that delay, I didn’t need that pressure or the guilt trips that would then ensue and cause me to acquiesce.

My mom was 9 months pregnant with the last child, due any day – I prayed that my mom would have the baby before my birthday, so I didn’t have that weight on my shoulders. I talked about how praying never really worked for me, this wasn’t any different.

I had spent the last three months planning my party, working on my parents to let me go to the mall by myself without a sibling. I told them of my plans many times – how I was going to hangout and eat dinner with friends and then we’d go to a movie and they could pick me up at like 10 or 11 when the movie let out.

I started carrying a messenger bag with me everywhere I went months ahead of time too, so when I packed what I was bringing with me, and brought it to the mall, they wouldn’t notice anything different. I always had a jacket in there to keep it looking full, no one thought anything of it. On my birthday, I packed my vital records that I had kept/hidden after getting my driver’s license the month prior, my HSLDA diploma, my laptop, a pair of clothes, and my conveniently travel sized birthday presents.

I convinced my family to celebrate my birthday early, before I left for the mall because I would be home after the kids went to bed and we had church in the morning. They didn’t really like it, but they went along with it.

I had bought all of my siblings presents with some leftover amazon money from christmas or something, and put them in my backpack by my bed with a note dividing up my stuff and saying I love them.

I got to the mall, and my closest friends met me and we had an early dinner and that was as far as the plan I told my parents about went, because after that, my actual plan came into play.

This plan, the escaping part, had been in the works for over six months.

In August of 2008, right before the olympic opening ceremonies, Alex and I woke up to an email in our inboxes from my parents saying “we have decided to end the relationship between Alex and Kierstyn and are forbidding them from speaking to each other.”

This happened conveniently after my mother had yet another positive pregnancy test (or whatever it was that indicated to her that she was pregnant and had every reason to control my entire existence again). Things had started going downhill since that May, and the last time Alex and I had seen each other in person(June), we created this plan.

If my parents broke us up (because they had been acting like they were about to and causing a lot of drama and being suddenly very negative and pushy and ridiculous) that on my birthday Alex would come get me, and we would run away.  If it was on my birthday, there would be nothing legally my parents could do, since I was legally an adult – we would be free to do whatever. We hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

July happens, Alex is asking about a proposal (the earliness, yeah, okay, they were pushy) twice is what sent them over the edge – twice because they didn’t respond the first time and the vacation he was planning on proposing to me on was coming up soon and he needed to buy tickets.

Interestingly, when Alex asked my dad in general about proposing, my dad gave a whole-hearted yes that lasted until the next morning when my mom took me aside and told me that my dad had changed his mind. This wasn’t the only time this had happened – dad endorsing something, then going to bed and “changing his mind” I knew it was bullshit, I knew my mom was actually behind it and the subsequent announcement of the pregnancy sent me over the edge. I was livid that my mom was having yet another baby, I cried on the phone to Alex telling him that my life was over – because in many ways, it was, this was the one that was going to do me in, if there was one that was going to do that. I realized I couldn’t keep living as my parents slave but I also had no choice. At this point I didn’t realize that what was happening was abusive and wrong, I thought I was wrong. This pregnancy is when the shit hit the fan.

So August, the email happened. The email obviously created an email fight and I was too emotionally distraught to deal with it, so I told people to stop CCing me. I screamed and cried uncontrollably, I went outside where I was alone and there was room only to have my mom come out and tell me to get back inside or someone will think something is wrong (ya think? asshole). I went in, and she sat on my bed and deigned to tell me she understood what I was going through (um, she has no idea what it’s like for parents to decide they can retract your adulthood, control every move of your life, and break you up with your boyfriend just by being parents – her parents didn’t do that). I glared at her through streaming tears, and managed to muster “only for six months”, she said “no” shook her head and left, as I watched her, still glaring.

This triggered a borderline suicidal depression, or whatever it is that results in suicidal ideation – because I did that a lot. I was already depressed (but I didn’t know it until I started meds and realized what not depressed felt like, and realized that was not what I had ever experienced), but this was just, every time I thought I hit bottom, the bottom caved in and I fell deeper deeper deeper into an increasingly dark abyss, of confusion and self loathing and numbness. I was always waiting for another shoe to fall because they kept hitting my head, it was unbearable, and the entire six months, that went unnoticed. No one said anything. In fact, I barely talked to my parents at all except to go over my birthday plan and be demanded of. I felt so alone and uncared for and every day I felt like I was dying inside, and every day I was reminded just how much my parents really didn’t give a shit about me as myself, only in relation to my service to them.

Interestingly enough, I had told my parents, after my trip in June, that Alex and I were planning on running away together should they break us up, because they were all like “we feel like maybe if things keep going this way we’ll have to stop it” and I was like “yeah, well, if you do, I’m leaving” and they didn’t believe me, or remember this conversation. I remembered it because I thought I was screwed – turns out my parents don’t have much of a memory for things I say, unless it makes them angry and/or bent on punishing me. And before anyone dares get into “but parents are wiser” territory, this was about stuff that had been completely resolved, stuff that happened because I was projecting things (my parents) onto people, and stuff that was cleared up because I was apologized to. And also about petty theological disagreements my parents had with his parents. Nothing that had anything at all to do with the relationship or the relationship dynamics between Alex and I – just them and his parents (again. my parents destroyed so many of my friendships because of their disagreements with parents).

So, I bode my time, I flew under the radar, I became what felt like invisible – I made plans to get my driver’s license in January, started carrying my messenger bag around in October or November, and started birthday planning in November, and was beyond that, never noticed.

I told some people I trusted about my plan, and was supported, mostly – except for one person who was supportive at first, and then was like, you have to tell your parents because youth pastor said and I was like “…” but all my close friends, all the ones who’d been with Alex and I from the start, knew sort of what was going on and were super supportive – which meant the world (and still does <3). Then I left, I left on my birthday without saying goodbye, before my mom had the baby. My grandparents had come up for the baby/to be around to help, so I wasn’t leaving them hanging. I don’t know what it says about me that I still, five years later, have to justify my escape with but my grandparents were there, so I knew the kids would be taken care of, and I wasn’t abandoning them altogether.  I think I feel like people will still be like, but you left your siblings! Which, I’m pretty sure is not the reaction people should have, because I shouldn’t have had to have been my siblings’ (essentially) primary caretaker in the first place. Strangely enough, I’ve never had that reaction, but it could be because I always pre-emptively answer it.

It killed me though. Leaving without saying goodbye killed me. I mean, I said goodbye, but not with the “I’ll never see you again probably” ending, but I hugged and kissed them before I left, because I needed to. Because, I was leaving everything. Leaving didn’t trigger a change of heart on my parents, it just enraged them. I didn’t know if I’d ever see them again, honestly, I still don’t know if I’ll ever see my siblings again. My grandparents paid for our plane ticket to see my family in the December of 2009, and that’s the last I’ve seen of them.

My parents have spent the last five years telling my siblings not to be like me.

In 2010 my parents decided they wanted nothing to do with me until I apologized to them for the hurt I caused. It destroyed me. I didn’t leave my room for two weeks.

I don’t know how to say this emphatically enough, leaving was hard, it was brutal, it wasn’t something I did willy-nilly, it destroyed me, there were times I re-thought leaving at all because I knew it meant leaving my siblings and believe it or not I do give a shit about them. Ultimately I left, because it was a life or death choice. I could stay, and wither and die – internally, definitely, and with a daily increasing possibility of physically – or I could leave, and have a chance at life and then be there on the other side for my siblings when they get older – or at least have that chance. So I left. I left on my birthday five years ago, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done (to. this. day.).

I just wish that maybe people really understood what that meant – means – feels like.

Something Is Wrong With Me: Jane’s Story

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

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

I grew up with the Pearl books surrounding me.

My dad had cases of their “To Train up a Child.” The church moms and young married women were constantly talking about Debi’s book “Created to be his Help Meet.” This book was given to every young lady either getting married or recently married. However, in my teenage years my mom thought that the book was not age appropriate to me (I might start asking what sex was!), so I was not allowed to read it.

Despite not being allowed to read it, I picked up on many of the themes in the book from listening to the other ladies in the church talking about it. I remember many times hearing the women talking about what “type” of husband they had. I heard enough of that that I could even figure out what “type” my father and brothers were and especially what type I wanted my husband to be (or not to be – my dad was a “steady” and honestly I couldn’t stand his methodic ways most of the time).

Despite not being allowed to read many books when I was a teenager, I was great at reading books on the sly. When I was 16, I managed to pick up “Created to be his Help Meet” for a few minutes while visiting my recently married sister. Of all the pages to open up to, my highly hormonal, sexually awakening yet so innocent teenage self opened the book to the “Bad Bob” story. I found the story on another website (which also has a great commentary on this story), and reprinted it here (trigger warning for misogynistic language):

*****

Bad Bob

In the following story, the characters, Bob and Lydia, are composites drawn from counseling sessions of two different couples. We have heard the same basic story many times over while ministering to countless married people. 

Bob had an upset stomach and was not hungry, so his family dropped him off at the motel where they would be staying, and then they went to get something to eat. His dad never let them watch the motel TV, but Bob knew they would be gone for at least an hour, and he was bored. The first scene that he saw held him riveted. The music was sensual. Bob stared, trapped in his own shocked silence. There before him in slow motion was a woman walking up steps. All he could see was the woman’s behind encased in a short leather skirt that was slit up the backside. The camera slowly shifted down her long slender thighs until he could see the backless high heels. Then it traveled slowly up her long legs focusing on the open slit as she climbed. He watched as she reached the top of the stairs and stepped into a room; still the camera stayed on her legs. Bob’s heart pounded in anticipation. The soft music began to swell as the camera climbed. A sound on the outside of the motel door jerked Bob back to the present. He hit the off button with such force as to crack the remote and then flung it across the room as if it were a poisonous spider. False alarm, no one was there, but after only two minutes of a mere introduction to soft porn, Bob would never be the same. That day was the first day that Bob masturbated. He was 13 years old.

Two years later, Bob was sitting in church when Lydia, the youth director’s wife, stood up directly in front of him to take her youngest child to the bathroom. His mouth got terribly dry as he stared at her round behind encased in a tight leather skirt with a slit up the back. It is true that Lydia’s skirt was several inches longer than the one that was no part of his daydreams, but when Lydia bent over to pick up the child, several of the young men sitting behind her slowly covered their laps with their songbooks. Bob almost hated Lydia after that day. She was responsible for his torment and temptation. The force of those few seconds of soft porn 2 years earlier, along with the stretched material pulled dangerously high as Lydia leaned over, caused him to empty his semen into his pants, right there in church, resulting in a large wet spot. He found a use for his Bible that day after church. It covered his shame as he rushed out to the van to take the back seat. A week later Bob dropped out of the youth group. His sudden departure puzzled and saddened the earnest youth director. He went to Bob to ask him if there was anything Bob wanted to talk about. Bitter bile filled Bob’s mouth at the memory of the youth director’s wife slowly walking up the church steps with her tight skirt and high-heeled shoes, just like the woman on the TV. Lydia, with her sanctimonious smile, did not deceive him; how could she be so dumb as to not know exactly what she was doing to him? No, he had nothing to talk about, he told Lydia’s stupid husband.

Lydia never knew she had shamed her husband, hurt his ministry, and caused a young man to smolder with bitter hatred and almost falter on the edge of quitting the faith. She would not have believed me (or perhaps she would have been secretly pleased at what she thought was her beauty) if I had pulled her aside and explained how the young men at church were reacting to her and why several treated her with such distain. She would have explained to me that her style was just “her style,” and they needed to get a grip. I know this because I have talked to many Lydias.

Bob had not looked at porn since that first night, but his mind was in a constant struggle, and his battle with masturbation was never-ending. Opened or low-cut shirts were a misery to him. Bare midriffs were bad too, but a girl who had long slender thighs coming to the meetings in mid-length shorts or skirts made him miserable beyond belief.

When Bob was 22 years old, he met a sweet, little peach of a girl with soft, warm eyes and a good, clean heart. They married, and Bob was relieved that his miseries were finally over. For the first three years she was sexually exciting, and he was able to fully enjoy what before had shamed and frustrated him in his youth. He known knew blessed relief from his old enemy, lust, which was finally brought under control in his pure marriage relationship.

Life never seems to roll out easy, and after Bob’s wife had her second child, she stopped being so responsive to Bob in the bedroom. Her excuses were exhaustion, sickness, didn’t want to get pregnant, didn’t feel like it, it hurt because “something seems wrong inside me now,” etc. She knew she had to give him sex once a week, but she came to him half-heartedly, which caused him to never really get total satisfaction. The women at work always dressed sexy and had tried to provoke Bob, but he saw them as a bunch of diseased animals, so although they provoked him, he resented it.

Church was different. Church ladies seemed clean and wholesome. At 25 years old, Bob was in his prime, and he needed his woman. God had designed his body with a sensitive trigger that needed release at least 2 or 3 times a week. He had developed certain habits in order to avoid unexpected temptations. His wife had no idea why he had such strange habits, like picking the spot where they would sit in the church, but she just sat where he led her. Lydia was not a problem anymore. Thankfully, the few years that had passed had played havoc on her beautiful behind and thighs. Bob smiled and said “hi” when he saw her walk by. She still tried to pull on that stupid “what did I do” look, like she really didn’t know why he had always disliked her. It was true, he still did not like her and found a certain sense of gratification at the demise of her beauty. Seeing her made Bob remember when her husband, the youth director, was teaching a small group meeting of young married men, explaining to them that all women go through times of total disinterest in sex, including his own wife, and how important it was to be vigilant against lust during those times. He had felt sorry for him at the time, but now Bob’s own little honey had turned off her water spigot of sweet loving.

“Vigilant, I must be vigilant.” Bob was scanning the church building looking for a safe place to sit when he felt his wife pulling on his arm. “I want to sit over behind the Chandler family.” Bob’s alarm went off. Three tall, long-legged, beautiful teenage girls, who liked tighter, shorter skirts, were members of the Chandler family. He groaned with irritation. His wife caught the groan and took offense. He wished he could explain all this complicated mess to his wife, but she would only get jealous and spend the rest of his life watching where and who he was looking at…. He allowed her to lead him into the row of temptation. If anyone could see his mind while he sat behind the Chandler girls, they would have had him arrested. He knew he was Bad Bob, full of lust, anger, frustration, and defeat. Somehow he always thought bitterly of Lydia when he was feeling defeated: “What a fat cow, no, not a cow, she’s a pig.”

*****

I know this story has so many things wrong with it on so many levels, but I will leave that to others to discuss.

Today I want to talk about what that story did to me and my idea of sexuality. You could probably say I grew up without sex education. My mom went to great extent to not discuss sex with me. In fact, at the age of 16, I was still terrified to sleep in the same bed that my brothers had slept in without changing the sheets because I thought I would get pregnant by my brothers – and that would be the ultimate sin and shame!

When I read Debi’s story, I thought I was given a great secret into the mind of a man.

Between this story and also sneak reading “For Women Only” by Shaunti Feldhahn, I formed the idea that men were sex robots that could be completely turned on and ready to hammer me from just glancing at my butt in tight jeans. Despite rejecting many of the teachings of my fundamental upbringing, I didn’t realize these views on men’s sexuality were so wrong. I hadn’t connected these ideas to the religion because I had never been exposed to how men really were (after all, I could never openly talk about this!). I found these teachings haunted my sexual life years after I had left everything resembling fundamentalism behind. Here I was, thinking that it was a fact of life that men could ejaculate in their pants by just seeing my butt through a tight skirt.

When I became sexually active and eventually married, I thought there was something wrong, ugly, and not womanly about me. Why? Because these men were not aroused the way Debi said they would be by my body. My husband can see me butt naked and may not necessarily be aroused just by the fact that he can see my naked body. This was extremely hurtful for me when all my life I had been taught that the slightest peek of my body could have a man ready to tear my clothes off.

I thought something was extremely wrong with me.

After time and time again of not seeing men aroused the way I was taught they should be by my body, I started to get obsessed with it. I think somewhere deep inside I knew that I wasn’t a defective woman and I wanted to prove that to myself. I turned to man after man to see if I could find one man that reacted to me the way Debi said they should. After all, I thought something was wrong with me, not Debi’s idea of men. I wreaked havoc on my young life with this obsession and felt an immense amount of shame for the extent I went to try to prove that I was actually womanly the way Debi said I should be.

Thankfully, I met my wonderful husband and slowly healed. It wasn’t easy, but over time I think I have gained a more healthy view of men’s sexuality. Or at least realized that I am a normal woman and my husband is a normal man. There’s nothing wrong with either of us, even though he does not react the way Debi says he should. On a side note, he doesn’t even need that release 2 to 3 times a week just to remain faithful to me. I am grateful to say there’s so much more to him than that.

I think one thing Debi (and many other fundamental Christian authors) has done is she writes thinking that the younger, homeschooled, sheltered generation will have many the same experiences as she has. After all, most parents first got a healthy view on men’s sexuality before they are exposed to radical ideas such as Debi’s. By having some exposure to the real world, the parents are able to balance it out more than the sheltered kids are.

I don’t think Debi realizes how much these young, innocent girls truly believe her.

After all, she’s married and she knows what a man is actually like. She knows that her story isn’t entirely the real world. But these sheltered girls don’t know. These sheltered girls spend their entire lives making sure to not have men ejaculating in their pants only to reach the marriage bed and be extremely disappointed when they meet a real man. No one ever told them that sometimes they might be met with a soft dong. If no one ever told them that, they will think something is wrong with them. I don’t know how many of these disappointed young girls took the same route as me.

I don’t know how many of these poor girls may have destructively turned from man to man just trying to prove they are as womanly as Debi says they are.

When Home Is Worse Than Rape: Cora’s Story

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

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HA note: The title of this piece is the title chosen by the author. The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Cora” is a pseudonym.

Trigger warning: abusive parenting, rape.

My first memories are from when I was 3 or 4. We were living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I remember every detail about that house. We had a cocker spaniel named Lacey. She was the only person/animal that I was ever emotionally attached to for many, many years.

My memories from that time are very vague. I remember the place, and then flashes of ghosts uttering words and phrases. Feelings. Small snippets of events. I had a clown for my birthday party. I was locked in my room screaming for hours. I rode my tricycle outside. My mother yelled at my father for not hitting me enough. I became a master at hiding. Under the bed. In the top shelf of a closet. Behind a bush. I would stay in my spot for what seemed like hours. My feelings were a constant mix of fear, anger, frustration, and a strong desire to leave. From the very beginning, I wanted to be nowhere near her.

It was my fault, I was told. I was a “difficult child”. Or maybe just a child. Still, it must have been my fault just for being there, right? The grown up has “authority” so it couldn’t possibly be them, right?

We moved to New Zealand. My next memory is being chased around the living room of our house with a switch because I wasn’t cleaning up fast enough. I was 4 or 5. I screamed and picked things up and it seemed like it never stopped. I would sit in my room for hours alone, and lose myself in my own made up world. This world was misery every day. I would make up a different world.

Something fabulous happened in New Zealand though. I was allowed to go to school. I remember how happy I was to leave home every morning. I had friends who would cry and miss their parents when they were gone. I could never understand why. The good memories of my childhood were all away from home.

I don’t remember much of my father from that time. He was a ghost in the background. Not saying much. I remember calling him “Daddy-doo” and trying to spend time with him when she wasn’t around.

I was a “rebellious” child.

I was spanked constantly. My memories of early childhood are essentially a long sequence of being hit, with intermittent memories of other people. All of whom knew something was wrong. All of whom would talk about my crazy mother behind her back. None of whom did anything. I learned early that my father wouldn’t stand up for me.

I remember having to re-write school assignments for hours until they were approved. I remember all of my “infractions” being counted throughout the day to determine the number of hits I would get every night. I remember some of the sessions feeling as though it must have lasted at least an hour. I remember hearing everyday how bad I was. I believed her. And so I never tried to be “good”. I knew it would be useless anyway. The rules always changed. She was always mad. She was always yelling. Always. I never imagined that I had any power to change anything based on my behavior. So I didn’t try. I just found my hiding spots and made up my own stories.

We returned to the US for a while, before going back. I asked about Lacey. I had been thinking about her and missing her the entire time we were gone. The only time I experienced the sensation of missing someone until much later in life. My dad told me that they family who had been watching her decided they didn’t want to give her back, so he said they could keep her. I felt again, that he wouldn’t stand up for me.

In our second house in New Zealand I would climb down the hill behind the house and be gone for hours. No one ever noticed. Not until I took my brother with me one day. I was a nuisance, so the only way to avoid punishment was to disappear.

When we came back to the US things got worse. In the US you had to be vaccinated to go to school. You also had to be surrounded by ungodliness. So I was homeschooled. I was at home. All day. With her. They also suddenly became even more religiously conservative. I was no longer allowed to go anywhere with friends. For a while our neighbors could come over to play, until one of the boys kissed me. After that it was just me and my siblings. At home. With her.

We all got assigned the household work. I had the kitchen, the dusting, the mopping, my room and bathroom, my laundry, and occasionally her room and laundry. My brother had the vacuuming, feeding the pets, and his room and laundry. My little sister had her room and laundry. But we were all so lazy. She would nap, drive us to homeschool events, go to the store, and “organize”. We were the lazy ones. We were bad. We were lazy. We were rebellious. It was all our fault.

I started getting grounded from the few things I was allowed to do. Watch G rated movies, talk on the phone, go to church events. Didn’t lift your blinds this morning? Grounded for a month. Didn’t wash the dishes in time? Another month. And another. I just assumed it was a permanent situation, so again, I never tried. I did try speaking up though. My dad would always tell me, “your mother does so much for you, why don’t you appreciate her?” I remember writing my dad a letter describing the situation. I could tell it shook him. He said he would talk to her. She yelled at him. That was the end of it. I continued to learn that he wouldn’t stand up for me.

I told a relative when I was around ten years old that I wished she would leave and never come back.

No mother at all is better than a whirling mass of violence and anger impenetrable to reason.

In a strange turn of events she started comparing my siblings to me as they got older. Your sister got these grades and your sister wasn’t as bad as you, etc. I can only imagine how the must have felt being told that they were worse that their bad, rebellious, lazy sister.

The fear of the outside world grew. Daring to have a friend that didn’t attend our 100 person church was out of the question. Dating was out of the question. Even our relatives of the same religion weren’t conservative enough and were therefore suspect. We were warned about them. We were warned about everyone. Everything and anything happening outside of the bubble was to be feared. So we stayed at home.

By some miracle I made a friend at the age of 16 or 17. She went to church with me. Then another girl moved into town and starting going to our church. I was finally allowed to go somewhere with someone outside of the home. I started secretly dating the second girl’s cousin. Having been told all of my life that my worth was in eventually being someone’s wife, serving him, and having children and that my virginity essential to attracting a husband, I naturally informed my suitor that I wanted to wait until marriage. He agreed. Then he started pushing. And pushing. Until he held me down in the bathroom one day, and forced himself on me. I don’t remember how, but I pushed him off of me and ran to the other room. Bleeding. I told my friend. She told me it was because I was teasing him. I believed her. We both lived in a world that demanded that women be responsible for a man’s desire. The mere fact of existing and causing a man to want you means you should expect to be violated. She has grown up now, and we are both different. She is still my friend. I can’t blame her, because I hadn’t learned yet either. I would have said the same.

I never told anyone else for a long, long time. I knew my parents would also tell me that it was my fault. Dating. Being alone with a boy. Kissing a boy. Growing boobs. And I would be locked up, at home, for good. To me, the threat of being forced to be home was worse than rape. And the threat of losing what little freedom I had gained was worse to me than letting a rapist go free.

What they didn’t know and what I didn’t realize then was that rape isn’t caused by dating, or being alone with a boy, or wearing tight jeans, or any of those things.

Rape flourishes when a girl is told marriage is how she obtains worth, and virginity is how she gets married. When her virginity is stolen, she will never tell. Rape flourishes when women are told that they are at fault, and face dire consequences if they reveal their rapist. Rape flourishes when women aren’t taught about their bodies, told that they aren’t able to make their own choices, and how to identify predatory behavior or even that it is wrong. Rape flourishes when it’s always a woman’s fault when a man has desire. Rape flourishes when you teach your boys that they own and control women.

I moved out of state when I turned 18. I hit a breaking point when I realized that it wasn’t just my parents and the people at my church who were this way. I went to a small Christian college, and realized that these attitudes were the norm. This time I bucked against it all that I could.

To this day I cannot enter a church building without intense feelings of anger and mistrust. I will never allow myself to be held down again. I started talking about it little by little. With each memory another surfaced. Sometimes they hit me in waves. It’s too much, and I get physically ill. Some memories I still can’t bear to relive. So I push them back every time they come up. Someday, maybe. But not yet. I have found a man who loves me, and cares deeply for my well-being. They told me I was “brainwashed”. She told me I was “addicted to him”. I suppose, if you define unconditional love and acceptance as addiction. If you define peace, comfort, and trust as being brainwashed.

They have never accepted any personal responsibility. I have tried to bring up many of these instances. I’m told it was my fault. I was a difficult child. That an adult, who intrinsically has the power and knowledge, would physically and emotionally abuse a four year old and then blame the four year old is sick.

They have told me my departure is “heartbreaking”. I wouldn’t know.

My heart was broken by the very first memory.

Christian Homeschool Dads Lust After 17-Year-Old Girl, Get Her Kicked Out of Prom

HA Editorial Team201 Comments
Clare on the way to homeschool prom. Photo source: http://www.hannahettinger.com/fuck-the-patriarchy-guest-post-by-clare/
Clare on the way to homeschool prom. Photo source: http://www.hannahettinger.com/fuck-the-patriarchy-guest-post-by-clare/

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

A 17-year-old homeschool girl, wearing code-appropriate clothing to her homeschool prom, got slut-shamed and kicked out because some middle-aged homeschool dads couldn’t stop ogling her from a balcony.

Hännah Ettinger at Wine and Marble reports today that her sister Clare was recently attending the Richmond Homeschool Prom. The prom has a specific dress code, which you can view here (click image for full-size version):

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Clare was excited for this evening. She searched over 6 stores for the perfect dress, eventually finding it at Macy’s. She spent her own money on the dress — money she had been saving up from tip money from work. Not only was it “gorgeous, silver, and sparkly,” it was carefully vetted: “Like a good little homeschooler,” Clare writes, “I made sure that the dress was fingertip length on me; I even tried it on with my shoes, just to be sure.”

Unfortunately for Clare, the night of her much-anticipated homeschool prom didn’t go as planned. She didn’t expect — and understandably so! — that there would be “dads on the balcony above the dance floor, ogling and talking amongst themselves.” These dads were ogling to the point that Clare and her friends felt “grossed out.”

As it turns out, these dads couldn’t be bothered to exercise self-control to keep their eyes and minds off of Clare’s 17-year-old homeschool body. They told one of the prom assistants that Clare’s “dancing was too provocative,” even though Clare hadn’t been dancing, and that she “was going to cause the young men at the prom to think impure thoughts.” The prom assistant then tried to make a different excuse, saying Clare’s outfit wasn’t up to dress code — even though Clare immediately proved it was. After being challenged, the prom assistant called security and refused to let Clare speak to a higher-up.

Security then kicked Clare and her friends out of their own prom, and all because — as Clare puts it — “I was told that the way I dressed and moved my body was causing men to think inappropriately about me, implying that it is my responsibility to control other people’s thoughts and drives.”

Clare’s closing remarks are spot-on:

“Enough with the slut shaming. Please. Goddamn I’m not responsible for some perverted 45 year old dad lusting after me because I have a sparkly dress on and a big ass for a teenager. And if you think I am, then maybe you’re part of the problem.”

Be sure to read Clare’s entire post at Wine and Marble here.

Also: visit Richmond Homeschool Prom’s Facebook page here. Tell them that, maybe next they should be more concerned about grown men creeping on underage homeschool girls than homeschool girls just trying to enjoy their hard-earned prom celebration.

UPDATE, 7:45 pm Pacific Time:

The Richmond Homeschool Prom’s Facebook page has deleted a bunch of comments from people protesting their treatment of Clare. Here are two pages of comments they deleted.

UPDATE, 8:45 pm Pacific Time:

The Richmond Homeschool Prom appears to have deleted their Facebook page entirely.

UPDATE, May 13, 1:25 pm Pacific Time:

Hännah Ettinger has posted an update on Clare on Wine and Marble. View it here.

What is Quiverfull?

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on February 18, 2012. It has been slightly modified for HA.

Quiverfull: The Basics

The Quiverfull movement takes its name from this verse:

Psalm 127:3-5 – Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.

First is the idea that children are a blessing and always something to be welcomed. The more children a man has, the more blessed he is. Children should never been seen as a burden, but always welcomed with open arms.

Second is the whole arrow part. What do you do with arrows? You shoot them at your prey. The Quiverfull movement holds that these arrows, or children, are to be shot out into the world to win converts and make the world more Christian.

So, have many children because they are a blessing, and because you can shoot them out into the world to influence it for Christ. 

The Military Rhetoric

Now there’s quite a bit of military rhetoric involved here. Don’t let you throw that off. The whole “army for Christ” thing isn’t literal. The Quiverfull movement isn’t arming its children or sending them to jihad camps. It’s called a metaphor.

As an example, Prominent Christian homeschool leader and Quiverfull advocate Michael Farris likes to tell homeschool parents that they are the “Moses generation,” taking their children out of “Egypt” and training them up in “the wilderness,” and that their children will be the “Joshua generation,” who will go out and conquer the land of Canaan. (Or as he also phrases it, “retake America for Christ.”)

Now Farris doesn’t mean these children will retake America for Christ with guns and tanks. What he means is that they will retake it for Christ by winning converts and influencing the politics, law, education, and culture of our nation. And yes, there is dominionist influence at work here.

Ideological Uniformity

It should be obvious that implicit in all of this is the idea that Quiverfull children will share their parents’ beliefs, ideas, and values. After all, what good would it be to have arrows that go astray when you shoot them? Part of this metaphor is the idea that arrows are shaped carefully, whittled to the perfect size and balanced just so – and that parents are to do the same with children. If a child is raised properly, the Quiverfull movement holds, that child will become the ideological and lifestyle clone of his or her parents.

It should be obvious that this creates problems for children in Quiverfull families. It’s not just young people like me growing up in Quiverfull homes feeling stifled by the expectations of conformity who have noticed that there’s a problem. There are articles by Quiverfull leaders who talk about the problems of children “jumping ship” or children who “went wrong.” Of course, their solution is not to change their ideology, but to try different tactics to shape their children.

Birth Control

There’s one more thing to be mentioned, and that’s birth control. Hardcore Quiverfull families reject birth control entirely, believing that it subverts God’s plan for the family. They believe that if they follow God and go without birth control entirely, God will provide for them. God controls the womb, after all, and going without birth control allows God to choose a family’s size and timing.

But a family doesn’t have to go all the way and reject birth control to be influenced by Quiverfull ideas. There are lots of families who, influenced by these ideas, have much higher than average numbers of children and raise them to be “arrows shot out into the world” even as they use birth control to space the children out a little bit or to call it quits when they feel they can’t handle any more.

Conclusion

When I speak of the “Quiverfull movement” I really mean all of those who are influenced by Quiverfull ideas, not simply those who go all the way and reject birth control entirely. For me, the idea of raising children to be arrows shot into the world is a more important part of Quiverfull than is a complete rejection of birth control.

When people look at families like the Duggars, all they see is the “we don’t use birth control” and “we think every child is a blessing” part. Would that that were all. It’s the idea of raising up children to be a metaphorical army for Christ, miming their parents’ beliefs and lifestyle while winning converts and influencing America’s political and legal systems and its culture, that is more problematic.

Note: Remember that most Christians think this stuff is loony.

GHC Retracts Invitation to HARO

HA Editorial Team14 Comments

Official Statement by the Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out Board

May 9, 2014

We regret to inform the HARO/HA community that the Great Homeschool Conventions (GHC) board has — without any explanation — reneged on the offer for R.L. Stollar, Executive Director of HARO, to speak at the June 2014 GHC convention in Ontario, California. The HARO board has made repeated efforts to communicate with the GHC board and ask them to reconsider this reversal of their original invitation. However, the GHC board has not reconsidered. When they did respond after several days, they failed to give any reasoning for the decision beyond simply stating that they did not approve the application.

We know many of you were excited about this opportunity for HARO. The board members were beside ourselves with joy. Speaking at homeschool conventions is one of our most pressing goals for this organization, and we were grateful and humbled that GHC originally offered us a session. We are also overwhelmed with the love and support our community showed us by donating not only what we needed to make HARO’s presentation happen, but also donating above and beyond that need. We raised the full $1,250 necessary in 48 hours, and as of yesterday donations have continued to pour in, reaching $1,500 — 120% of our stated goal!

To everyone who shared and/or donated to our fundraiser: Thank you for the support. It is greatly appreciated. It is a blessing to know that so many people stand behind our vision and mission as much as we do.

It is with a heavy heart, therefore, we’ve had to face GHC’s reversal. We have to figure out how to handle the funds we already raised and what to do with Stollar’s almost completed 10,000-word speech. While we are not interested in speaking negatively of GHC at this time, we do owe it to you — our community and backers — to give you a basic timeline and details of the communications that occurred between HARO and GHC. That timeline and those details are as follows:

Timeline of HARO/GHC Interactions

On April 19, 2014, Kim McMillan — GHC’s Exhibitor Coordinator — received HARO’s application to speak at the Ontario convention. She responded by email that, “We will review your application the week of April 28th immediately following our Midwest Homeschool Convention – April 24 – 26th.”

On May 2, 2014, during the “week of April 28th” she previously mentioned, Kim McMillan told HARO that, due to another speaker’s cancellation, she could in fact “add a session for [HARO] on our schedule.” A screenshot of Kim’s offer follows below:

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Later on the same day of May 2, HARO gratefully accepted Kim’s adding of a session for us, began filling out the paperwork she sent, and informed her that we are “going to need to raise money” because we are a “brand-new non-profit.” We asked Kim for financial deadlines.

On Sunday, May 4, HARO finished the paperwork Kim sent on Friday, May 2. We reiterated the need for information about payment, stating our fundraiser started the following day: “We are launching a fundraiser first thing in the morning (Monday). So please let me know what deadline we’d need to get you the money or deposit to you by. [We are] grateful for the opportunity to be part of the Ontario GHC!”

On Tuesday, May 6, HARO had yet to hear anything from Kim. We emailed her yet again, informing her of the fundraiser’s success: “We now have money through our fundraiser to pay for the exhibitor booth. So let [us] know if we should just get you a deposit for the time being or the full $500.”

Several hours after our final email on Tuesday, Kim McMillan left a phone message with HARO that the GHC board was denying HARO both a speaking and exhibiting spot at the convention. No additional information was given, and she never responded to our emails.

On Wednesday, May 7, the HARO board sent an official statement to the GHC board, asking them to reconsider this reversal of their promise. You can read HARO’s statement to GHC here.

24 hours after sending our official statement, we had not heard back from either Kim or the GHC board. We sent a follow-up email asking for a response within another 24-hour cycle. We emphasized the importance of being transparent with our backers and needing to inform them of any new developments as soon as possible.

Finally, today — Friday, May 9, 2014 — we received a response from Kim (but no response from the GHC board). Kim’s email contained no mention of the GHC board reconsidering their retraction, no reason for that retraction, and no willingness to dialogue. The extent of her email is as follows:

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This “extra step” of approval was: (1) never mentioned in any correspondence between Kim and HARO, (2) never stated as an extra step in the email Kim sent when she said she could add a session for HARO, (3) never explicitly stated in the GHC speaker application itself, and (4) never explicitly stated on the GHC website.

Where We Go From Here

As much as we are reeling with disappointment from this decision, HARO’s number one priority at the moment is being transparent in our next few steps as we figure out what to do with the money we have raised. If it were up to us, we’d click a button and have our fundraising server — Indiegogo — cancel our campaign and refund everyone immediately. Unfortunately, Indiegogo will let us neither cancel our campaign nor refund anyone any amount.

HARO believes the best course of action is as follows:

1) Either explicitly earmark what we have raised for a future convention opportunity, or

2) Figure out how to refund our donors (which cannot happen until after our campaign ends, and may involve less than 100% refunds due to Indiegogo fees)

HARO would like to honor and respect each and every one of our donors’ individual wishes. So if you donated to our GHC campaign, we will be sending you an e-mail through Indiegogo. Please respond to that e-mail letting us know how you would prefer us to handle your donation. We also will update our Indiegogo campaign with this information, in light of the fact that we cannot manually cancel the campaign. Please note that we will need to figure out how to make each refund happen (PayPal donations will be the easiest to refund).

The Speech

HARO Executive Director R.L. Stollar had nearly completed writing his hour-long speech for the Ontario convention. About 8,000 of the necessary 10,000 words were written before we received word that GHC was reneging on its offer. Regardless of whether each donor would like us to refund or save each donation, HARO as an organization values following through on its commitments. So every single one of our donors will still receive a digital download of Stollar’s presentation, “Facing Our Fears.” This presentation will be completed, formatted into an e-book, and possibly even recorded as an audio file as well — and then the presentation will be sent ASAP to our donors.

We will also make a copy of the presentation available to the general public within a month from now.

Final Thoughts

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we figure out how to proceed with everything in the next few weeks. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to ask. We look forward to continuing our vision of “Renewing and transforming homeschooling from within.” While we are disappointed with this development, it does not faze us in the long-term.

On to the next one!

Sincerely,

The HARO board

Andrew Roblyer
Lauren Dueck
Nicholas Ducote
R.L. Stollar
Shaney Lee