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Grassroots in Education: A History of the Modern Homeschooling Movement in America, Part 3, By Katy-Anne Wilson

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

Grassroots in Education: A History of the Modern Homeschooling Movement in America, Part 3, By Katy-Anne Wilson

Katy-Anne Wilson describes herself as “mommy to four public children who are or will be sent to public school (so thankful for special education programs).” She is about to graduate college with a degree in writing and sociology. This post was originally published on her blog on August 11, 2012, and is reprinted with her permission.

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In this series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

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Right Wing Conservative Politics

"These fundamentalists are now unhappy with the public school system that was a Christan fundamentalist initiative in the first place."
“These fundamentalists are now unhappy with the public school system that was a Christan fundamentalist initiative in the first place.”

Christian fundamentalists consider America to be a Christian nation founded by Christians and on Christian principles. The Christian fundamentalists are highly involved in political activism, and their workforce is made up mostly of stay at home wives and mothers. (Gaither 2009, p. 337). Cooper and Sereau state that parents who homeschool are more highly involved in politics than parents of children in public or private schools, and they are involved by voting, contributing money, contacting officials and attending rallies. (Cooper & Sereau 2007, p. 122). They also say that homeschool families are politically savvy and have used an intense political commitment to advocate some real change in society on the issue of homeschooling. These families are very well organized and have lobbied for their rights. (Cooper & Sereau 2007, p. 125)

Coleman (2010, unpub.) claims that the religious fundamentalist homeschoolers are also politically motivated and intend on solving the culture wars through political platforms. She further says that the Christian fundamentalist homeschooling crowd are now a very strong and powerful political force. (Coleman 2010, unpub.) The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) which is run by Mike Farris fights for the rights of fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers.

These homeschoolers also have their own college to accept homeschooled children called Patrick Henry College.  And many a high school or college aged Christian fundamentalist homeschooled child finds themselves being involved in political activism for the conservative religious right. The religious right also successfully infiltrated the Republican party in the 1980’s and have been strong in their political involvement ever since. (Dowdy & McNamara 1997, p. 168).

Cimino and Lattin (1998, p. 137) claim that the religious right is heavily involved in wanting to make America into a Christian nation and therefore push their fundamentalist ideals onto everybody. Many of these fundamentalists are Christian Reconstructionists, a movement which advocates bringing back many of the Old Testament laws and living a life based strictly on the Bible. There are, however, some Christian fundamentalists who do not advocate reconstructionism but rather they fight for “traditional values” or “family values” which is where the culture wars come into the picture. (Cimino & Lattin 1998, p. 137)

Conclusion

The Ideologues see homeschooling as a major way to wage the culture wars and gain political clout, trying to get America to live by traditional white, Protestant, fundamentalist values. These fundamentalists are now unhappy with the public school system that was a Christan fundamentalist initiative in the first place. Many homeschool their children in order to teach them their own ideologies. If they can have lots of children and indoctrinate those children well enough into their belief system, they’ll have a new generation to carry out their plan as they will believe the same thing their parents did. If they sent their children to public school their children would be taught a different worldview and would have much less chance of growing up to be a right wing, conservative, Christian fundamentalist.

Although there are plenty of secular families who homeschool, this paper focused on the religious right, the Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, because they make up the bulk of the homeschooling modern homeschooling movement and have certainly had the most influence. These people homeschool in order to wage a “war” on the culture, wanting to change American society into a Christian society based on Biblical values and rules, as interpreted by the religious right and not necessarily by what the Bible actually says.

It is very important for American society that they realize the magnitude of what is going on here. The Christian fundamentalists basically took over an entire movement and rallied their own crusades for homeschooling, so that they can pass these same ideologies on to their children whom they hope will repeat the pattern. Their goal is to infiltrate further into the political arena, in order to fight the culture wars. If Americans want to be sure that they won’t be executed for being homosexual or for having an affair, or live under other such laws, they had best keep a close eye on the actions of the conservative right wing Christian homeschoolers and not underestimate their influence.

End of series.

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References

Carper, J, & Hunt, T 2007, “Chapter 9: Homeschooling redivivus,” Dissenting tradition in American education pp. 239-264 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Coleman, R.E. 2010, Ideologues, pedagogues, pragmatics: a case study of the homeschool community in Delaware County, Indiana, Masters thesis, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.

Cimino, R & Lattin, D 1998, Shopping for Faith: American religion in the new millennium, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Cooper, B & Sureau, J 2007, “The politics of homeschooling: new developments, new challenges”, Educational Policy, 21, 1, p. 110-131, Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Dowdy, T.E. & McNamara, P.H, 1997 Religion north American style, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Gaither, M 2009, ‘Homeschooling in the USA: past, present and future’, Theory and Research in Education, 7, 3, pp. 331-346, Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Goldfield, Abbott, Anderson, Argersinger, Argersinger, Barney, & Weir 2001, The American journey: a history of the United States, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Klicka, C.J, 1995 The right choice: the incredible failure of public education and the rising hope of home schooling: an academic historical, practical and legal perspective, Noble publishing associates, Gresham, Oregon.

Grassroots in Education: A History of the Modern Homeschooling Movement in America, Part 2, By Katy-Anne Wilson

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Grassroots in Education: A History of the Modern Homeschooling Movement in America, Part 2, By Katy-Anne Wilson

Katy-Anne Wilson describes herself as “mommy to four public children who are or will be sent to public school (so thankful for special education programs).” She is about to graduate college with a degree in writing and sociology. This post was originally published on her blog on August 9, 2012, and is reprinted with her permission.

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In this series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

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Culture Wars

"The culture wars in the USA emerged in the 1920’s and they continue until this day."
“The culture wars in the USA emerged in the 1920’s and they continue until this day.”

The culture wars in the USA emerged in the 1920’s and they continue until this day. (Goldfield et al. 2001. p. 777). The USA had gone through many social changes and people were reacting to the changes.

The Main Issues

The main issues in the 1920’s were:

1). a new morality promoting greater personal freedom which those who were against this thought would take away pre-existing morality. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778);

2). The teaching of evolution was being promoted as progress in science but there were people who believed this to be a threat to their religious beliefs and freedoms. In fact one of the major players in the culture wars was the famous “Scopes Trial”. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

3). Jazz music emerged and was met by enthusiasts as something that was important to culture and modern. There were those who opposed this however due to the beat and style of the music. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

4). Immigration was a major issue in the 1920’s, some wanted greater diversity and to allow immigrants from all different places, but many saw this as a threat to their white privilege. They argued that it was important to block certain kinds of immigrants due to the fact that they wanted to maintain the rights and interests of white, protestant, males. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

5). Prohibition was a name given to a policy that outlawed liquor. Those who were in favour of the prohibition argued that by prohibiting alcohol, families were stronger, crime rates were lower, and society was more stable. Those who were against the prohibition claimed that people needed to be allowed to make their own choices about their own lives without the government interfering. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

6). Religious fundamentalism was also a large part of the culture wars, and is also one of the main focuses of this paper. Christian fundamentalists wanted to observe what they considered to be traditional Christian beliefs based on the Bible. However many people saw the Christian fundamentalists as intolerant and dogmatic, and saw them as a hindrance to social and political progress. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

7). Racism was still an issue at this time and the Ku Klux Klan emerged claiming to be an organization that promoted admirable values such as community responsibility, patriotism, and traditional values in society. Those who opposed the Ku Klux Klan saw them as a group of bigoted racists who resorted to violence to try to force their values on society. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

8). Popular culture also began its rise during the 1920’s and many thought that it provided them with great entertainment and was something that helped them to relax, but many also saw it as something that posed a threat by convincing people to conform to the ideals of the artists or authors of popular culture. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 778).

9). The consumerism mindset was also coming about in the 1920’s, and this caused people to have a higher standard of living and they were able to own more things. However those against this mindset saw it as selfishness and also as wasteful.

Some of the main issues in the culture wars in the USA remain the same to this day. Religious fundamentalism, as this paper shows, is still a major player. Goldfield et. al. claim that the main contender of the culture wars today is women’s rights. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 781). The modern homeschooling movement is dominated by religious fundamentalists, who for the most part are against women’s rights. The fundamentalists also kicked back against the supreme court decisions to outlaw organized school prayer and Bible reading. This remains a large “culture war” value to the Christian fundamentalists today. (Gaither 2009, p. 338).

The other main contenders are gay rights, abortion, euthanasia and social justice. (Cimino and Lattin 1998, p. 145) The culture wars lead us into the political realm as the fundamentalist homeschoolers believe that they can use their right wing conservative politics to influence and even infiltrate the government and manipulate them into governing America by fundamentalist ideologies and interests. (Coleman 2010, unpub.)

To be continued.

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References

Carper, J, & Hunt, T 2007, “Chapter 9: Homeschooling redivivus,” Dissenting tradition in American education pp. 239-264 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Coleman, R.E. 2010, Ideologues, pedagogues, pragmatics: a case study of the homeschool community in Delaware County, Indiana, Masters thesis, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.

Cimino, R & Lattin, D 1998, Shopping for Faith: American religion in the new millennium, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Cooper, B & Sureau, J 2007, “The politics of homeschooling: new developments, new challenges”, Educational Policy, 21, 1, p. 110-131, Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Dowdy, T.E. & McNamara, P.H, 1997 Religion north American style, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Gaither, M 2009, ‘Homeschooling in the USA: past, present and future’, Theory and Research in Education, 7, 3, pp. 331-346, Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Goldfield, Abbott, Anderson, Argersinger, Argersinger, Barney, & Weir 2001, The American journey: a history of the United States, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Klicka, C.J, 1995 The right choice: the incredible failure of public education and the rising hope of home schooling: an academic historical, practical and legal perspective, Noble publishing associates, Gresham, Oregon.

Grassroots in Education: A History of the Modern Homeschooling Movement in America, Part 1, By Katy-Anne Wilson

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

Grassroots in Education: A History of the Modern Homeschooling Movement in America, Part 1, By Katy-Anne Wilson

Katy-Anne Wilson describes herself as “mommy to four public children who are or will be sent to public school (so thankful for special education programs).” She is about to graduate college with a degree in writing and sociology. This post was originally published on her blog on August 4, 2012, and is reprinted with her permission.

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In this series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

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Introduction

"The public school system in America originally emerged as a protestant religious initiative in the 1830’s."
“The public school system in America originally emerged as a protestant religious initiative in the 1830’s.”

The story of the modern homeschooling movement in fundamentalist and evangelical Christian circles, who currently dominate this movement and have done so for more than a quarter of a century now, is a story of manipulation. A lot of the modern homeschooling movement happened because of the “culture wars” which started to emerge in the 1920’s. In fact the whole premise of this paper is that the main reason the modern homeschooling movement is as strong and popular as it is currently is because the religious right wanted to gain political and cultural influence in order to “take back America for Christ” and turn the USA into a Christian country. The religious right want to force the American people to live by their ideals and their morals by changing laws in America.

This paper focuses on the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian homeschoolers because 85% – 90% of homeschoolers are fundamentalist or evangelical Christians. (Gaither 2009, p. 341) When the modern homeschooling movement first started there were roughly 10,000-15,000 children who were homeschooled in the USA, but by the mid-80’s the professional estimates are at somewhere between 120,000 and 240,000 (Gaither 2009, p. 341) and now that number is even higher at 1.35 million children in the United States are now homeschooled, (Cooper & Sereau 2007, p. 110) with the majority of these being fundamentalist or evangelical Christians.

The modern homeschooling movement started as a grassroots effort in the 1970’s on the part of secular educational reformers who believed that an institutionalized school setting was not conducive to their children’s education and wanted to educate them through means they considered to be more natural. By the 1980’s, the fundamentalist Christians, the ideological homeschoolers, were beginning to infiltrate the homeschooling movement and by the mid-80’s had completely hijacked the movement from its founders original intentions and had turned it into a political fight against society. (Coleman 2010, unpub.) During the 1970’s the “Christian Right” (fundamentalists and a lot of evangelicals) rose to a position of great political influence. (Dowdy & McNamara 1997, p. 162)

Educational History in the USA

Emergence of the Public School System in America

The public school system in America originally emerged as a protestant religious initiative in the 1830’s and was established by the religious fundamentalists such as the Calvinists, Puritans and the Reformers. (Goldfield et al. 2001, pp. 403 – 404). The Puritans believed that everybody should learn the Bible as well as basic math, reading and writing skills, and they thought that the best way to do this was to develop a public school system. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 403). Klicka (1995, pp. 117-118) claims that the main reasons for wanting the children educated at all were so that children could read the Bible for themselves and if they could read and understand it for themselves then they would obey it. The main goals of the original public school movement were literacy (but only as it pertained to learning to read and obey the Scriptures) and vocational training (which was really either household work, the trade of the child’s parents, or an apprenticeship in another trade). Although colleges have existed in some form in the USA since the 1700’s, the goals of the Colonists did not usually include a college education for their children. (Klicka 1995, pp. 117-118). However the public school system was very loose and unregimented until the 19th century.

The public school system was overhauled and reshaped between 1880 and 1920. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 681). The 1920’s were the start of what has been dubbed the “culture wars” (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 777). It was during this time of public school reform that things such as compulsory attendance laws came about, and when kindergarten was started and age appropriate segregated classes were formed. The public schools began to hire professional teachers, and the schools provided students with vocational training. (Goldfield et al. 2001, p. 681).

Although it was fundamentalist Christians who began the public schooling movement, they abandoned it in droves during the 1980’s in order to home school. Secular educational reformers started the modern homeschooling movement which was soon taken over by the Christian fundamentalists and while secular people homeschool, it is not to the same magnitude as the Christian fundamentalists. There are also many Christian fundamentalists who place their children in public schools too but there are many more who home school.

The Modern Homeschooling Movement

When the modern homeschool movement began, it was actually lead by secular educational reformers in the 1970’s (Coleman 2010, unpub.) who believed that schools damage children. The two secular leaders of the modern homeschool movement were John Holt and Raymond Moore. (Gaither 2009, p. 339) In the 1980’s Christian fundamentalists began to join the homeschool movement in large numbers, but for different reasons than the secular crowd. Coleman (2010 unpub.) refers to the secular educational reformers as “Pedagogues” and the religious crowd as “Ideologues”, because some homeschooled for pedagogical reasons and some for ideological reasons. During the 1980’s the Pedagogue crowd and the Ideologue crowd worked together with common goals such as making homeschooling legal in all 50 states of America. (Coleman 2010, unpub.) By the early 1990’s, homeschooling was legal in all 50 states even for parents with no teaching certifications. It was at this time that the Ideologues split off completely from the Pedagogue crowd having completed their goals of making homeschooling legal. The split had been inevitable and had been in progress since about 1985. (Gaither 2009, p. 340)

The Pedagogues simply wanted their children to be able to learn in a natural environment rather than be in institutionalized schooling, because they believed that natural learning was better for their children. Their primary motive was that their children be well-educated. Whereas the primary motive of the Ideologues was to religiously indoctrinate their children in Christian fundamentalism. (Coleman 2010, unpub.) In fact, most religiously motivated homeschoolers believe that they are fighting a culture war and that they must keep their children from being influenced by society, which they usually call “the world”.  The culture wars are very important to fundamentalist Christians, and they believe that they are raising children in order to “take back America for Christ”. (Coleman 2010, unpub.)

To be continued.

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References

Carper, J, & Hunt, T 2007, “Chapter 9: Homeschooling redivivus,” Dissenting tradition in American education pp. 239-264 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Coleman, R.E. 2010, Ideologues, pedagogues, pragmatics: a case study of the homeschool community in Delaware County, Indiana, Masters thesis, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.

Cimino, R & Lattin, D 1998, Shopping for Faith: American religion in the new millennium, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Cooper, B & Sureau, J 2007, “The politics of homeschooling: new developments, new challenges”, Educational Policy, 21, 1, p. 110-131, Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Dowdy, T.E. & McNamara, P.H, 1997 Religion north American style, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Gaither, M 2009, ‘Homeschooling in the USA: past, present and future’, Theory and Research in Education, 7, 3, pp. 331-346, Education Research Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 13 August 2011.

Goldfield, Abbott, Anderson, Argersinger, Argersinger, Barney, & Weir 2001, The American journey: a history of the United States, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Klicka, C.J, 1995 The right choice: the incredible failure of public education and the rising hope of home schooling: an academic historical, practical and legal perspective, Noble publishing associates, Gresham, Oregon.

I Feel Like I’m Getting Crap From Both Ends: Amy Mitchell’s Thoughts

HA Editorial Team13 Comments

I Feel Like I’m Getting Crap From Both Ends: Amy Mitchell’s Thoughts

HA note: The following post by Amy Mitchell was originally published on April 25, 2013 as “About that homeschooling thing” on her blog Unchained Faith. She describes herself on her blog as a “family woman, feminist, LGBT ally, reader, writer, and nerd. Progressive Christian skewering church and culture one blog post at a time.” This post is reprinted with her permission.

"The fact that a web site like Homeschoolers Anonymous even exists–out of necessity–cuts me deeply."
“The fact that a web site like Homeschoolers Anonymous even exists–out of necessity–cuts me deeply.”

I don’t talk about homeschooling very often.  Part of the reason is my kids–I prefer not to discuss them without their permission.  Since homeschooling is, by nature, about my daughter, I tend not to write much.  When something general comes up, however, I find myself wanting to respond.

The latest is a series of posts written by former homescholars.  I don’t begrudge them needing their space to talk about the frightening world from which they came; I believe safe space is vital.  My problem is not with Homeschoolers Anonymous, or even with some of what they’ve written.  My problem is with the response it has generated.

Before I begin, let me go on the record saying that as a homeschooling parent, I do not feel like an oppressed minority.  I may be in the actual minority, but that doesn’t make me oppressed.  We love our school district (our son is a public school student, and our daughter will likely be one eventually).  We have a great working relationship with them.  We’ve borrowed materials, including text books, and the teachers are always more than willing to give us suggestions.  Later this morning, I will be dropping off my daughter’s third quarter report and staying a few minutes to chat with the security guard who accepts it for transit to the office.  I can’t stress enough how much we appreciate what they’ve done for us.  Keeping that relationship good is what enables us to enjoy homeschooling our daughter.

That said, it makes me angry when I feel like I’m getting crap from both ends.  Many of my fellow homeschooling parents have been critical of the fact that we are working so closely with the district–they believe we’ve somehow given up our “rights.”  Others find it distasteful that we don’t use a specific, prepackaged curriculum.  A few even turn up their noses at our lack of “faith-based” instruction.  And among those who don’t care about any of those things, we’ve taken heat for not living a more “organic” lifestyle to go along with our homeschooling.  It hurts, but as a result, we’ve never found a homeschool group that felt like home.  We’ve stuck with individual friendships (I’m so beyond blessed that one of my best friends also homeschools her daughter) and have enrolled our daughter in other activities.  She’s a Girl Scout, takes two dance classes, and participates in other activities as we find time.

On the flip side, there are the Angry Ex-Homescholars.  Again, I don’t want to take away from their very real pain.  But comments about how people can “spot a homeschooled kid a mile away” and rants about how it’s “damaging” to the kids make me unbelievably angry.  What makes me angry is not so much that people think those things but that a certain subset of the population has given them reason to think them.

When I hear about the way the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (the legal activists) have put pressure on families to refuse to comply with social workers or the way that some parents have used homeschooling as a tool of abuse, I want to scream.  I want to cry when I hear from adults who were homeschooled that they never learned proper math or that their parents, for religious reasons, refused to teach them about human sexuality.  I want to punch something when I see some of the crap that passes for science in “Christian” homeschool materials.  The fact that a web site like Homeschoolers Anonymous even exists–out of necessity–cuts me deeply.

When we began our journey more than five years ago, we had a purpose in mind.  Our son, who came out of the womb with the energy of a lightning storm, was reading at a third grade level at age four and a half.  The combination, we knew, would be lethal in a classroom.  The original plan was to keep him home until middle school.  When first grade rolled around, we had already discovered that he didn’t fit in well with other homeschooled kids (he was bullied, believe it or not, for being a dancer).  As a family, we’re pretty different from most.  On top of that, he needed to be around other people almost constantly–he’s the definition of an extrovert.  So we sent him off to a great public school, where he has continued to thrive.

We offer our daughter the option every year.  So far, she has chosen to remain at home.  I have maintained my drive to ensure that she develops high-level skill in reading and math (so far, so good) and that she finds ways to pursue her passions.  I refuse to use Christian materials, because they are long on religion and short on actual science.  I have a girl who is interested in keeping our natural world and our animal friends safe–if I want to draw her back to her faith, what better way to do it than to help her understand that God made all these beautiful things?  We don’t need Bob Jones or A Bekka to help us do that.

We can’t afford private school full-time, and the only schools offering a la carte classes are the Christian schools–which for us is a big no.  I won’t allow my daughter to be taught science by a teacher who denies evolution, believes in a literal 6-day creation, and insists that humans and dinosaurs must have co-existed.  So if my daughter decides to stay home longer than middle school, we will be searching for ways to supplement what I can do so that she isn’t behind in any way come graduation.

There are several things I need people to understand about homeschooling:

1. We are not all families that believe a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant.
2. We are not all like the HSLDA folks.
3. Not all of us weave religion into every aspect of our day.
4. Many of us want our kids–especially our girls, who may or may not experience this even in public school–to study math and science.
5. Our children are not all easily recognizable as homeschooled kids.  People are constantly surprised to learn that my daughter is homeschooled.  I guess they don’t expect her to be socially or academically competent, or perhaps they think she doesn’t fit their stereotype of “weird.”
6. Not all of us think education is one size fits all.  Being a half-n-half family works well for us; it’s different for other families.
7. When anti-homeschooling people and HSLDA members alike fight over this, it hurts everyone.  Many of us don’t want to be civilian casualties in your war; please don’t use us as pawns.

I write often on my blog about how we need to get to know the people we are judging.  Please don’t make assumptions about me or my family without knowing us.  When you make sweeping statements about what homeschooling families are like (or about what public schooling families are like), you are causing pain to those who don’t share that view.  Work to make it safer for all kids; work to get legislation in place so that abuse can’t be covered (including among public- and private-schooled kids).  But don’t do it by saying nasty things about what you think we’re up to in our household.  Chances are, you will be wrong.

Why I Stopped Being Anti-Gay: Heather Doney

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Why I Stopped Being Anti-Gay: Heather Doney

Heather Doney blogs at Becoming Worldly.

I was homeschooled until my grandparents forced my parents to put my siblings and I in public school.  I landed smack into the middle of 9th grade and big time culture shock.  It wasn’t that my high school was some liberal bastion of anything (being in the suburban Deep South, it definitely wasn’t), it was simply that I was around a ton of people my own age for the first time in my life and most didn’t seem to care about or hardly even notice me at all.  I was that unsocialized homeschool kid, the only one like me, alone in the crowd, awkward, lonely, and vulnerable.

I tried hard to adjust and at the end of sophomore year something amazing happened – I finally, for the first time in my life, made a close friend.  He was smart, so we competed for who got the higher grade on assignments, and he made me laugh with his mischievous sense of humor.  We lived in the same neighborhood and soon became official “best friends.”  This meant that we sat by one another in every class we could where there wasn’t assigned seating, passed notes, and got together to ostensibly help each other study for tests, then mostly sat around listening to music and talking instead.  He really helped my transition into public school get better and made me feel much more normal. I finally, for the first time in my life, did not feel socially alone. It was awesome.

We generally got along well except for a couple serious arguments on faith and morality.  The first was after he’d convinced me to go to church with him and ended up trying to pressure me to “get saved.”  The fact that I was agnostic really bothered him. “I just want you to go to Heaven, Heather,” he’d said.  He’d also once told me (when unsuccessfully trying to skip an extra credit event and convince me to just sign his name to the attendance sheet) “Come on…please? You don’t believe in God, so what does lying bother you?”  It was such a hurtful comment that I remember my reaction to this day.  I’d started crying and explained that just because I didn’t pray didn’t mean I didn’t have a decent sense of right and wrong!  I had rebelled against some things, but still kept a lot of the morals I’d been taught as a homeschooler.  Lying was wrong.  Cheating was wrong.  Stealing was wrong.  Being gay was wrong.

Looking back, I guess one reason my friend and I bonded is that we both had painful secrets.  I never told him, not even once, about the patriarchal violence, supposedly based on Christian values, that I still endured at home.  After all, the only thing worse than it happening was people knowing about it.  Sometimes I called him up and asked to come over though, not telling him why I needed to get out of the house.  During one of those hangouts late in our junior year, as we idly sat around listening to Eryka Badu, his new favorite singer, he’d said “would you be my friend no matter what?”  “Yeah,” I’d responded, “Why?”  “Nevermind,” he said. “I’m not ready to say yet.”

He didn’t say until the beginning of senior year.  We were painting set pieces for our senior play behind the cafetorium (yes, a cafeteria/auditorium combined) and he told me he was in love with “Jay,” another high school guy.  They had kissed and he felt so happy and he also hated himself, figured God would hate him, that his grandmother would hate him.  I told him that I was shocked to hear this but I loved him no matter what and he was my best friend no matter what.  We changed the subject to other things.

I kept my composure until I got home and then I got in the house, dropped my backpack on the stairs, sat down next to it, and bawled my eyes out.  My Mom came out of the kitchen to ask me what was wrong and when I blurted out that my friend had said he was gay, the horrified look on her face made me cry even more.  I felt so confused about everything.  This was the same mother who, in a lecture to me once on how I was “so disobedient and disrespectful,” had said “at least you’re not a lesbian.”  Like most homeschool kids, I was not raised aware of the fact that both gender and sexuality are a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, some either/or.  I was instead taught it was all black and white and being gay was just a really bad choice, terrible in fact, made by messed up people.  Fact is, while I’m pretty straight, I have occasionally found other girls attractive before, so at the time my Mom had made that comment, I’d felt silently guilty for that.

I was now quite heartbroken for my best friend.  I cried for the “disorder” he had, the wife he’d never have, the babies that would never look like him, the unhappy, shunned life I imagined he would always lead, and then, after I was done crying, I had to think about homosexuality in a light I’d never done before, not as I’d been taught to view it, as something done by disgusting and warped people, but as the seemingly innate orientation of a loved one.  It made me feel very confused and start to reconsider my beliefs.

The next day at school my friend passed me a note, a letter he’d written.  It said that if I told him to stop being gay that he would, that he wanted me to tell him if I thought he should stop, convince him out of it, that because I was his best friend, I could.  Now, as an adult, the answer to such a letter seems easy but back then it wasn’t.  It was while writing him a response by flashlight in my bed late that night, thinking the situation and my response through for hours, that I realized that being gay was obviously not a choice, like I’d been told.  It was just how he was and it was society that was hurting him, not his orientation.  He would not be risking everything for this if he could help it.  He found guys attractive like how I found guys attractive and he always had.  I thought about the tone in his voice when he said Jay’s name and then the answer was clear.  He had to be himself and he also needed to avoid emotional abuse as much as possible.  I wrote him back a note saying that I loved him no matter what, that he was my best friend, and if he loved Jay and wanted to be with him, that I would keep his secret, wouldn’t say a thing, so no one would be mean to him about it.

I kept my word and was fiercely protective of him when rumors started, but another friend he confided in wasn’t.  She told people he was gay.  Word spread fast in our small southern high school.  Suddenly social life became harder for him, and my friend, the stellar student, always put together, always chatting with everyone in the hall, started getting lower grades and seeming to hate school.  I was worried about him.  Being a marginally popular guy had always mattered to him and now he endured all this social judgment and it was a huge weight on him.  I could see it.  His boyfriend Jay had it even worse.  Jay’s father found out about the relationship, called Jay a faggot, threatened to kick him out of the house, and forbid him to speak to my friend.  My friend and Jay’s newfound love did not survive the stress and they were over before the senior play happened.

Soon afterwards, my best friend and I were in cap and gown, walking across the stage at graduation.  Southern graduations are loud affairs, often with airhorns, whistling, and stomping involved, but it seemed like hardly anybody around me even clapped for my friend as he walked (although personally I yelled like a banshee because hey, that’s how it’s done).  None of the football players, baseball players, or basketball players (and my high school was a sports-first, academics-second kind of place) wanted to be seen as being too heartily enthusiastic for a gay guy though.  After all, then someone might suspect them.  My friend was the exact person he had been before – smart, dedicated, competitive, good looking, fun to be around, and yet because of who he had loved he was now seen as tainted and dangerous.  It was hard to watch this unfold, but I imagine it was considerably harder to endure.  I can definitely see how homeschooling (in the right kind of non-fundamentalist environment) could help protect a kid from the pain of that sort of anti-gay culture.

Thankfully things have changed a lot since that graduation day in 2001 and my friend and I, who still keep in touch, have very different lives now.  When they say “it gets better” I suppose that’s what they mean.  I have a graduate degree and nobody has laid a hand on me since I was 17, and he has an accountant boyfriend and a good job today.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to come out as an “ally” and I actually never officially have before now, but I will say that this friendship definitely changed my perspective and I have been one ever since, just in quiet ways.  After all, this friend was my ally at a key time in my life, the very first best friend I’d ever had.  Once I saw the truth about how toxic and false the anti-gay worldview that I had been taught really is to people like him, I had to stop perpetuating it myself.

Shame on those parents who think that their children are an “arrow” in this “fight for traditional marriage.”  Nobody, gay or straight, deserves to be another casualty in this “culture war,” and nobody deserves to be shamed or prevented from being honest about their romantic and sexual desires because it shakes up someone else’s little world of black and white thinking.  Today I am proud to say that I am no longer anti-gay and I strongly feel that gay people deserve equal respect, equal love, equal opportunity, and equal honor for their love and relationships.

I Am Trans, And I Am Beautiful: Haley

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

I Am Trans, And I Am Beautiful: Haley

HA note: Melissa, Haley’s spouse, will be sharing her thoughts tomorrow. Their courtship and coming out stories have been shared by Melissa on Patheos.

I grew up homeschooled from age 8-16 when I started taking classes at community college. I am the oldest of five with four sisters younger than me. My dad was a pastor and my mom stayed home to homeschool all of us. We were very conservative politically and religiously. Almost all of our friends went to the church pastored by my dad and another pastor homeschool dad. Almost every child in the congregation was homeschooled. It was a very conformist place. Diversity was measured in curriculum of choice, whether Abeka, Bob Jones, Sonlight, etc. Almost all of my social outlets happened at church under the control and observation of the homeschool parents. If you didn’t like that control, tough luck, you didn’t have access to anything else.

As a means of survival growing up, I figured out that agreement with the system was the only way to survive. I watched some other kids try to buck the system and suddenly they had no homes or they lost the ability to drive a car, or their parents stopped supporting their education. I also observed families where kids were given very little academic education in favor of gender role based education for girls to become wives and mothers while the boys were taught how to learn handy practical physical labor skills. I lived in a family that tolerated higher education as long as you kept saying the right thoughts. I was part of a forensics class in community college that I enjoyed but my parents seemed to dislike the gay professor who coached the team and they worried about influences over my life. I quit forensics after only one semester because of their worries.

The gender bias towards men becoming big earners with power while women were supposed to tend home and hearth and be a man’s helpmeet was kinda weird to observe for me. You see, ever since I was a child I’d wished I was a girl (at birth I was assigned male and raised by my folks that way). When I was 11 I read a history book (a secular one that sneaked into the home) about Christine Jorgenson the first American to publically transition from male to female and I immediately thought, “Someone else like me.” But I already had heard the denouncements of gay people. I had been hearing the strict, strict, strict conceptions of gender all my life. I knew that this awareness was something I should never ever talk about. In fact, I spent my adolescence on a roller coaster of simply hating myself for my sin and perversion. I accepted the lie that there was something seriously wrong with me. I plowed myself into my religious faith in an attempt to save me from my “sinful” desires to be female. No amount of repressing would put it out of my mind for long. I’d look in the mirror and wonder what I’d look like as a woman. I’d sneak moments of untraceable internet access to look up transgender people and information about them. I’d secretly hide elements of women’s clothing in my room, and then often feel super guilty and throw them out only to buy more later. As I considered a career, I felt that the ministry was the highest calling, it was all that I knew growing up as a preacher’s kid, and it was a career that I could never gender transition in because that wouldn’t be possible. I needed to protect myself from myself or so I thought.

Oddly, homeschooling in some ways had a couple of upsides to being transgender. And here is why. It was easier keeping up appearances around your peers when you only saw them at most a few times a week. I didn’t suffer some of the bullying that my trans sisters experienced in public school settings. Also the exclusive homeschool setting gave me opportunities to day dream and imagine. During these times I would often image myself as a woman. However, the homeschool setting was a terrible place to be transgender overall. You couldn’t meet other people like you and if they started giving clues they might be like you, they’d be kicked out of the church and the community. It has been fascinating as an adult to meet other queer homeschooled adults. We were there the whole time, it was just we all knew that saying anything about our identity would get us thumped and humiliated. I feared my parents somehow figuring out I was trans, I had read in Christian publications like World about therapies to try to make people straight. I knew these therapies sounded awful and I didn’t want to ever be subjected to them.

Basically, growing up homeschooled I had had no access to life on the outside. I didn’t know anything about jobs, taxes, how the government actually worked, basically nothing. The closet was an act of self preservation while homeschooled. You couldn’t let that get known. There were times when I got very mad about not being able to change my feelings so that I wanted to be a male. I would get depressed and contemplate suicide over feeling frustrated that I couldn’t change and not wake up wanting to be female. I also had severe anxiety about everything. I developed an ulcer when I was 17 and a college student. My parents were very focused on my grades. I performed well gaining magna cum laude in community college, and summa cum laude for my undergraduate degree at a local Christian College. When I went off to seminary, working for my dad’s ministry, and with him holding the purse strings, I poured my life into school and work. When I was excessively busy it would reduce the amount of thoughts about being a woman. But it would never go away or even let up for whole days. I could maybe have an afternoon of work where I didn’t think about trans people and being a woman but never more than that.

And for those who might argue being trans is a choice that isn’t the case because women in the homeschooling community are less than men. I understand that now as a liberal participant of society today. There is no reason for a homeschool “boy” to want to be a “girl.” And I knew it even back then. If I was a girl, my options in life would be reduced by the community. If I got married and had a baby, I would never have a career, I would have to obey my husband. I would have very little autonomy. Being a guy which felt all wrong to me had so many benefits compared to the women I’d known growing up that it kinda made it a little bit easier at that time pretending to be a guy to retain that level of control over my life. As I started meeting women outside the homeschooling community and saw how they could live their own lives, I realized that I could be a woman and live a good life and have personal autonomy. Patriarchy is a terrible teaching and it degrades women. It was oozing everywhere in the homeschooling community I grew up in.

But when I was hiding who I was, I was still steeped in the homeschooling community and I started courting this other homeschooled girl named Melissa from a family that then numbered nine siblings and today numbers 11. I was almost 20 and she had just turned 20 when we married. After a quick supervised courtship I proposed to her and we married. Within a few months of our marriage we had already suffered a miscarriage and were just waiting for children to be given to us. I went to seminary the summer I was married and plowed myself into my studies. We tried to live up to the ideology we’d been raised in. Melissa had been denied higher educational opportunities and due to my dad’s “job” for me which taxed me heavily working 80+ hours a week of school and his projects, she didn’t work and was my stay at home wife until our first baby was born. She got pregnant and had our first baby when we were 21.

When I was twenty-three I was burned out working for my dad, trying to start another homeschooler church in the city I’d gone to seminary in, finishing seminary, and becoming a parent to two. I was in crisis. My gender issues were still raging, I was getting disillusioned by the ideology I’d grown up with but didn’t know any alternatives. After a tumultuous summer, I took a call to serve a church in Canada over 1000 miles away from both of our families in Illinois. I served that congregation for three years and it was during that time that I finally was far enough away from the craziness of the Christian Homeschooling Movement to live my own life. We had two children born in Canada. I started reading things I never had before. I started meeting more normal people where women worked jobs. I discovered some of the stuff I’d heard in the U.S didn’t seem all that relevant in Canada. Finally, I came out to my wife as transgender when I was 24 and we started a two year journey to acceptance.

During that journey Melissa realized she was more lesbian than straight and I had always known I was attracted to both sexes and our relationship deepened and grew more intimate than ever before. Instead of being play actors doing our “roles”; we were two people living our lives together. During that time period our marriage became a real partnership. When I was 26 I started the process of gender transition and left the ministry. I was so proud of that day when I legally became Haley. In the 18 months since then, I went back to school to be a cosmetologist and am now employed as a stylist. Melissa entered the workforce for really the first time and she has thrived. Our parents took things badly but really they controlled our lives for long enough. Homeschooling is the ultimate tactic to retain control of children who should be developing into autonomous adults. I am very proud that my oldest child attends public school and will be joined by her sister next year.

Being transgender and homeschooled wasn’t cool. I think everyone deserves to have teachers and people other than their parents who invest in them. I gained so much from the teachers I’ve had in higher education and it was huge that these people were outside of my family system. I also believe that experiencing diversity is awesome. I didn’t knowingly meet in person another trans person than myself until after I was already in the process of gender transition. That is how isolated and homogenous my circle of contact was. I had very little exposure during homeschooling to the outside world. Even ethnic minorities were quite mysterious. This is not okay!

I am so glad that I have met so many vibrant LGBT homeschooled young people who got out.  We are okay just the way we are. Growing up homeschooled we had every reason to hide our identity but now that we are adults, we can be ourselves finally. I am the happiest I’ve ever been. I love being me. I no longer feel like an actor in my own life. I am glad to be a woman, wife, mother, friend, and cosmetologist! I love raising my four kids and having them know me for who I really am. I am glad to have the truth out there.

I am trans, and I am beautiful.

Homeschoolers Are Out: An Introduction

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

*****

“You’re homeschooled? That’s gay.”

I was probably 5 or 6 when a neighborhood kid who attended public school first articulated the idea that me being homeschooled was “gay.” Of course, nothing about my parents’ decision to teach me at home had anything to do with homosexuality. Plus I’m straight. But that’s not what the kid meant, was it?

What that kid meant was that homeschooling was stupid, and stupid things are gay things, thus equating gayness with stupidity. That kid was also 5 or 6. I have not had contact with him since we played games in the middle of our quiet, suburban street in San Jose, California so many years ago. For all I know, he might now be an outspoken straight advocate for marriage equality, or even gay himself. His use of “gay” at the age of 5 or 6 was probably cultural, something he picked up on in school or maybe from a homophobic parent. Pop culture — then and and today — has often associated “gay” with negativity.

As an awkward homeschool kid who had occasional interactions with kids from public schools (we were allowed to play with them after school in our neighborhood), I always encountered one of two reactions from my friends: either (1) homeschooling was awesome to them because they thought it meant we just got to stay home and play video games all day, or (2) homeschooling was gay. I don’t really remember why they would think homeschooling was anything less than awesome (usually I would pretend that, yeah, we did get to play video games all day, just so they would think I was cool). But it’s possible they saw I was a total dork and deduced that, if total dorks are usually called “gay” and I was a total dork who was homeschooled, then homeschooling must be gay, too. That’s kid logic for you. (Ironically, many adults today still use kid logic.)

The numerous times I heard “homeschooling is gay” stick so lucidly to my mind because it was the first time I ever heard about “gayness.” It wasn’t until years later, when I learned from the conservative Christian homeschooling curriculum and worldview programs that homosexuality was evil and political nefarious, that I consciously thought about LGBT things. But from that one moment through probably half way through my undergrad program, both mainstream and homeschool cultures reinforced this idea that “gay” was synonymous with bad.

This idea, this deeply rooted hatred and desire to discriminate, is by no means unique to the conservative Christian homeschool movement. Yes, you have followers of Rushdoony who actively call for LGBT individuals to be stoned. Yes, you have people like Michael Farris who actively campaign against Prop 8 and the simple right of people of any gender to have a foundational relationship based on legal equality. But at the same time, it seems like almost every other day that I read some heartbreaking story of a gay kid in public school who was bullied to the point of suicide. Every time I turn on the radio I hear a hip hop star throwing gay slurs left and right.

The fact is, LGBT individuals face almost insurmountable discrimination and dehumanization on a daily basis. They experience this in their home life, in home schools, in private schools, in public schools, at work, and when they try to do something as simple as hold hands in public at a restaurant.

In creating this week’s focus on LGBT homeschool awareness, it needs to be clear that the pain and hurt that LGBT individuals experience happens universally. It is not unique to homeschooling. Indeed, with the significant amounts of bullying that these friends and peers of ours can experience in public schools, homeschooling can actually be a safe haven. Sex advice columnist Dan Savage minced no words that homeschooling as an educational option could save lives. When a gay 15-year-old boy from La Grande, Oregon hung himself earlier this year on account of being bullied, Savage noted that the boy, Jadin, had begged his parents to home school him to get him away from the cruelty. Savage said,

My heart breaks for Jadin’s parents and I don’t doubt that they’re filled with regret and I don’t want to make their pain worse. But I’m going to repost my advice for parents of bullied gay teenagers because there are other Jadins out there who haven’t harmed themselves but who may be at risk of doing so:

If you know your gay kid is being bullied at his school err on the side of overreacting. Err on the side of doing something drastic. Err on the side of turning your own life upside down. Because you don’t want to find out the abuse was more than your kid could bear when it’s too fucking late to do anything about it.

Straight parents: If you know your gay kid is being brutalized in his school and you’ve complained and it’s gotten worse, get him the fuck out of there. Homeschool him. Homeschool him and sue the school. Move away. Move someplace more tolerant. Move someplace better. If you can’t move away—or if you can’t move right away—send your son or daughter to live with relatives in another city, a better city…. And straight parents? Once you realize your kid is gay—which parents of gay kids usually realize long before their gay kids realize it themselves—take a long, hard look at the community in which you live. Take a long, hard look at the church where you worship. Take a long, hard look at the schools your kid will be forced to attend.

Then decide if staying put is worth your child’s life.

My heart goes out for Jadin, and for every kid that felt or feels so scared of being him or herself that suicide seems the only option. My heart goes out for all the kids that are hiding who they are, because of this fear. Savage makes a really good point, people: when our communities cease to be unsafe, we need to get out. When public schools cease to be safe for bullied LGBT kids, homeschooling can be an ally to the LGBT movement.

That  being said, many of us in conservative Christian homeschooling subcultures know that not all homeschooling communities are safe for LGBT individuals. Growing up gay or trans or even asexual in a world where the loudest voices demonize gay marriage and advocate stoning can be gut-wrenching and brutal. We who have been through this world know the horror stories: the kids that were kicked out of their homes, that were rejected by nearly everyone who knew them, that were forbidden from ever contacting family and friends again.

This week, Homeschoolers Anonymous honors the voices of our LGBT friends and peers. We are giving a platform to the stories of those homeschoolers who weathered the storm: the ones that are still terrified of coming out, the ones that have come out and experienced rejection, the ones that have come out and found acceptance, and the ones that are still processing everything and putting their selves’ pieces back together.

This week is for everyone that has felt different. The L’s, B’s, G’s, T’s, A’s, Q’s — ah hell, this week is for the whole alphabet of humanity!

Homeschoolers are gay. And so many other things, too. And all of us at HA — regardless of our identities and orientations — stand together in solidarity in the affirmation of each other’s humanity, beauty, and worth.

*****

Update, 05/21/13:

The heart and soul of this week’s LGBT homeschool awareness series is to stand in solidarity with our friends and peers of all sexual identities and orientations. I came up with the title, “Homeschoolers Are Gay,” based on consultation with some personal friends who are LGBT homeschoolers. The goal was to use a title that was inclusive, catchy, and poked fun at pop culture’s perjorative use of “gay” and tendency to otherize. That being said, a concern was raised yesterday that this title can feel alienating to some members of the LGBT community. And if even one person feels alienated, that is one person too many. The whole purpose of this week is to include everyone.

So, after further consultation with several of this week’s writers, I am choosing to rephrase this week’s series as “Homeschoolers Are Out.” I would also like to stress that, whenever I say “LGBT,” I am not limiting the week to those specific letters. All identities and orientations are welcome. I will be changing the main graphic for the series to reflect this rephrasing.

My sincerest apologies to anyone that felt excluded.

On another note: thanks, everyone, for the amazing support yesterday as this series begins. The stories we will be hearing this week are near and dear to my heart, as they are the stories of people I care about and love.

What Happened When I Called the Cops on Dad

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Heather Doney’s blog Becoming Worldly. It was originally published on April 26, 2013.

I’ve been reading these stories of homeschool kids who were so scared of CPS. They were told that CPS were evil, would find any excuse to take them away, and that they would wind up in foster care situations where they would be horribly abused, physically and sexually, and where people hated them because they believed in God. They were told that the worst thing the foster care people would try to do was force you to reject Jesus and if you did, you would go to hell with them when you died.

Sadly, that fearmongering anti-CPS indoctrination was my story too. I was told the same thing. I was also not allowed to go outside in the yard on weekdays until we saw the Catholic schoolgirls through the window, walking down the sidewalk in their matching skirts, signifying that “school hours” were over. My parents were careful to keep us hidden from truancy police even if they weren’t careful to have us do any actual schoolwork.

Given all these years of instilled fear and propaganda, and how much I honestly believed a lot of it back then, I ended up doing something surprising as a teen, something that is still to this day the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I figured I’d share it here.

Just to give you the background, I was 14 years old, my grandparents had recently forced my parents to put all of us in public school (I went into 9th grade), and my Dad still regularly did things like hit us with belts; slap, kick, and body slam us; yank our hair; drag us out of bed or out of the shower; and repeatedly slap us in the face. Often it looked and sounded a lot like this. As we got older and he increasingly lost control of us, as we started to question and oppose things more, the abuse just seemed to escalate. It was bad enough that today I have a “bum knee” and a pinched nerve in my upper back, both developed in my mid teens and neither attributable to any other cause than getting physically abused by my Dad, as I did not play sports.

The worst part of it all was seeing my siblings get hit (I either “tuned out” or fought back when I got hit) and I was concerned that one of them might get maimed or killed, particularly my younger brother, the eldest son, who always got it the worst. At public school I had recently learned that most people figured you were supposed to call 911 if something real bad was happening. I decided to give it a shot.

“I’m gonna call the police!” I said, but nobody seemed to notice. Dad was too busy hitting and shoving my brother and calling him names, and my brother was too busy curled up on the livingroom floor, trying to make himself as small and unhittable as is possible for a nine year old to do. I don’t know where anyone else was. It was a small old house with all the rooms pretty much connected to all the other rooms, but people still seemed to find ways to quickly disappear at times like this, except for me. I never seemed able to pull off the escaping thing very well, and by now I was thoroughly sick of it. I had also been told I was responsible for my siblings often enough that I believed it. I had decided I was going to do something radical and crazy. Even if foster care got us it couldn’t be worse than this, right?

I shouted about calling the cops again and again no one paid me any attention. I went into my parents’ bedroom and picked up the phone. I pushed the 911 buttons quickly so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. I could barely hear the sound of the operator’s voice over my own heartbeat. I told her “my Dad’s hitting my brother and won’t stop.” She calmly asked for the address and said “ok, we’re sending someone out there right away.” She asked me if I wanted to stay on the phone until they got there and I said no and then thanked her. It seemed I only had a moment to wait and then suddenly there were sirens. The police arrived and then two young men in blue were standing in the living room. I came out and sat on the old gold-colored couch in the living room in my ratty nightgown, stifling sobs. I suddenly felt embarrassed as I hadn’t brushed my teeth or washed my hair since waking up, and my face was red and stained with tears. I felt ugly and by the looks on their faces they seemed to think I was ugly too. They looked at my brother, standing there, bug-eyed, and then let him go in the other room, which he was in a hurry to do. Dad turned on the charm and told them a story of how he was disciplining his son, who had misbehaved and that I had just lost it and interfered. He told them I was wayward, and willful, and disrespectful and had cursed at him.

One cop took my Dad outside to hear more of this yarn, and the other one stayed to look at me sternly and lecture me on how I needed to be respectful to my father, accept punishment for bad behavior, and not curse at adults. I sat there, seething, saying nothing. You just don’t talk back to a cop, especially when you’re a 14 year old girl and he’s obviously taken sides and ignored all evidence that didn’t fit with what he wanted the situation to be. They didn’t even check my brother for bruises or marks (which he had). The cop looked only a few years older than me, not much taller. He apparently knew nothing about this type of situation and obviously didn’t want to learn more.

Mom was standing there in her nightgown, nervous and sinewy, arms folded tightly, with purple lips and a crazy, almost baffled expression. Her usual look when fights happened. The policeman tried to include her in the conversation about what I should and shouldn’t do. I glared at her and said “you know what was going on, and you never do anything.” Now it was time for her to play the victim. She looked at the cop with big child eyes and said that she believed children should be disciplined in a Godly manner and her husband was the head of the household, blah blah blah, but that she didn’t like it when he slapped the kids in the face and when he would get mad she just didn’t know what to do.

The cop then directed all of his attention at Mom, trying to ask her questions, probe deeper into this. He quickly discovered what everybody else already knew, that asking Mom any kind of yes or no question and expecting any kind of direct or conclusive answer was an exercise in futility. She gave him a few long, indirect run-on sentences about nothing. He became bored and joined the other cop outside with Dad. I looked out the window and saw them talking on the gravel driveway, just along the fence line. Dad was standing inside the gate and they were standing outside. His body language showed that he probably wanted to kick them off the property altogether but instead was being submissive and deferential and thinking he might be in trouble. I looked at my brother, who’d come back in the living room, still bug-eyed, to look out the window with me. He said “you shouldn’t have done that, Heather.” I turned away from him as my heart sank and I sobbed. I’d done this for him. I didn’t want him to get killed. I looked back out the window.

The two policemen looked comfortable, chatting with Dad easily. One of them came back up to the door to tell Mom that they’d spoken to him and told him that corporal punishment was ok, but that slapping your kids in the face is not included or allowed. They said they’d also told him that if they had to be called back out here, he’d be arrested. They were leaving now. That cop didn’t even look at me again, still sitting on the couch. I didn’t matter. I felt so alone, terrified. I figured I was probably going to end up dead. Dad would kill me and I would be buried in the ground somewhere and no one would ever find me! They were leaving and he was coming back inside and I knew he was furious, and…suddenly I wasn’t scared anymore. I was a ghost, floating up above my left side, looking down at the ugly gold couch with the ugly teen girl on it, saying “hmmm, I wonder what’s gonna happen to that girl, Heather?”

Dad walked into the house and I stopped dissociating. I wasn’t a ghost anymore. I was me and all I could hear was my heartbeat. I wasn’t afraid. I would meet death straight on and show no emotion. I would look expressionless. He would not get any begging for anything from me. He stepped into the kitchen and instead of showing anger, he looked over at me with the saddest betrayed eyes I had ever seen him look at me with. He seemed like a little child that someone had punched. He slowly looked at me again and then averted his eyes, seeming to not bear to even see me anymore. He spoke to Mom in a sad voice and said “I can’t believe you didn’t support me. I don’t even have a good Christian wife that supports me.” He brushed off her attempts at conversation and sadly shuffled into the bedroom to lay down. Mom tried to go in and talk to him but he said “just leave me alone,” in the same sad resentful voice, and she ended up coming out and cleaning the kitchen table instead. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t smacked or yelled at or killed! I was still on the couch and nothing had happened to me.

The next day at school I felt exhausted and mentioned to the boy I liked in computer science class that I’d called the cops on my Dad. He looked at me, shocked, and said “Wow, that’s terrible!” He didn’t ask any questions and kept playing Doom, so I kept playing Oregon Trail, feeling worse than usual every time my pioneer family drowned in a creek or starved to death. I felt guilty. Maybe it was terribly wrong to call the police on a parent. It sure felt wrong, but so did a lot of things. Was it more wrong to treat your own kids like that? Was it wrong to be a cop that’s stupid and doesn’t pay attention when it’s your job? What was I supposed to do? Accept that it was corporal punishment and it was ok, we deserved it? I just couldn’t. Getting hit had just always felt wrong, disrespectful. I decided I wouldn’t say anything else to people at school though. Apparently that just wasn’t a good idea. Still, the more I thought about what happened when I called the cops, the more I felt angry. I was still afraid and on guard the next few days, thinking there was a chance I might still have it coming from Dad.

All that week he didn’t speak to me or interact with me, except once to tell me “Grammy wants to talk to you,” and hand me the phone. I picked it up and she started yelling on the other end. She was attempting to tell me what a terrible child I was for calling the police on Dad. I tried to explain to her what was going on, because she’d listened and tried to help when I’d told her stuff before, but she just couldn’t hear me over all of her own yelling. I finally told her I knew I did the right thing and she just didn’t know. She got me to promise her that next time there was a problem, I’d call her, not the police. It was an easy promise to make because after what had happened and how those cops were, I didn’t plan on ever calling them again anyway.

After that everybody stopped mentioning that I’d called the cops on Dad. The only reminder was that he seemed to try and show more self control. He stopped getting the belt or the red stick, even if he still threatened to use them. If we did something he didn’t like, he would put us “on restriction,” his term for grounded, in back-to-back two week increments (which would usually end up being extended for months on end), and when he did lose it, he was more likely to only corner or intimidate us, and if he did hit us, only leave bruises where clothes or hair would cover them up. Also, now he had to be careful because every time he lost it on somebody, Mom would scream “I’m gonna call the police! I’m gonna call the police!” She never did call on him though.

The abuse ended for me when I moved out at age 17 after Dad knocked me over in a chair, chipping my front tooth. The abuse ended for my siblings two years later when Dad moved out and my parents divorced.

Two years ago my brother, now 25, and I finally talked about the time I called the police, our first time ever discussing it since it had happened. He said he was sorry for telling me I shouldn’t have called back then, that he had thought what was happening to him was just routine, normal, and that what I did was what was out of line, extreme. He said looking back he was glad that I called, that he felt it was a “wake up call” to Dad and while things still weren’t ok after that, they got better. I cried when he said that.

There was certainly no need for him to say sorry for anything he’d said as a little boy, but his words now, as a grown man affirming that I’d done the right thing, meant so much to me. Nobody had ever told me that. Back then everyone had acted like I was very much in the wrong, a person who betrayed my family.

I look back and feel so very thankful that I somehow had the guts to fight that fight, that my siblings and I all survived it, and that the younger ones can just be kids and don’t have to go through any such stuff.

I Can’t Tell My Story Without A Trigger Warning: Elizabeth’s Story

HA Editorial Team30 Comments

I Can’t Tell My Story Without A Trigger Warning: Elizabeth’s Story

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

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Trigger warnings: this story contains graphic and detailed descriptions of rape, physical abuse, the physical results of abuse, and religious apologisms for both physical and sexual abuse of children.

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I can’t tell my story without a trigger warning. I try writing it without describing physical and sexual abuse and it just doesn’t work. It could get graphic.

I just spent the last half an hour sitting in the corner, hugging my knees, and bashing my head into my wall because I dared to post a link to the HSLDA petition. I’m nearly 40, but I’m terrified of getting into trouble.

I can’t use my name–call me Elizabeth. This name I write with isn’t mine. I picked a name that I think is the sort of name that a typical white, protestant American would have. I hope that some homeschooled kid with that name and a similar story won’t be tortured or shunned on account of my speaking out. I just hope that anyone who reads this and sees someone they know knows that it wasn’t really them. It’s just an eerie similarity. Please don’t punish them for speaking out, because I’m someone else.

I can’t tell my story exactly. I’m afraid my family will recognize that it’s me writing. I only feel safe writing anything at all, even vagueing up the details, after reading the lawsuit filed by survivors of abuse covered up by sovereign grace ministries. It’s sad when the text of a lawsuit reads like your biography, but there you have it. It made me realize that this culture of abuse is sufficiently widespread that my parents could just read my personal story of our nightmare family and assume it comes from any anyone anywhere.

It at least gives me some plausible deniability. Not that I need plausible deniability–I have no contact with my family or anyone from my childhood. I won’t even be setting foot in a church again. But I’m so terrified of repercussions that I need a crutch. The brainwashing runs deep. I know I’m safe intellectually, but the rest of me doesn’t believe that safety is possible.

What lets me comment on the differences between homeschooling and other kinds of schooling? I’ve done it all. We started in a religious homeschooling coop–we did PACES first, later A Beka. Then my parents homeschooled us by themselves in a Northern European country–the rest of my education was in the United States. When we homeschooled in Europe there was no curriculum: it was closer to unschooling. Then they sent us to a private fundamentalist Christian school. Then they sent us to public school.

My parents’  reason for homeschooling us was ostensibly religious. We never heard that we’d get a better education than in public school. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that public school would corrupt us. There’d be peer pressure. We’d risk getting caught up in a bad crowd and imperiling our immortal souls.

This seemed plausible at the time. After all, our church was very isolationist. You know that Emo Philips joke about the Baptists on a bridge? That was us. Everyone else was wrong. We spent hours learning about other denominations and how they got it wrong. Maybe some other Christians would still get into heaven, if God was extra merciful, but we were the only ones who actually had it right!

Did I mention that I basically had zero friends?

We were taught that children had to obey all adults unconditionally and instantly. We were taught that good Christian children who don’t want to burn in hell submit to their parents. They submit to discipline from their parents, other adults, or older children. They submit to spankings. They do not talk back. And so on. If you are wrongly accused you should still accept your punishment because you are a worthless sinful being and the punishment is probably good for you anyway. If you don’t accept punishment when you’re wrongly accused, that’s a sin, so you need to be punished for that now. Catch 22.

And we were taught that good, Christian children do not ever let anyone find out that they aren’t completely thrilled with their lives. We should never complain to secular authorities (or anyone, for that matter, but especially secular authorities) about anything. It makes us bad witnesses. It makes us bad Christians. And we might also be selfishly risking the destruction of our families because CPS will come and take us away. And there isn’t anything better, so after CPS destroys our families, we’ll still be disciplined so destroying our families and our parents’ good names will have been for nothing. If your bottom is sore from a spanking, you’d better not wince as you sit down. If you’re in pain down there, you’d better not let it keep you from walking normally. Don’t talk about your punishment. Don’t let anyone see you cry.

And we weren’t taught about sex, or wrong touching, or children’s rights. Most kids would get this in public school. At a young age, they’d learn that there are things adults aren’t allowed to do to them. They’d learn that they have the right to say ‘no.’ They’d learn that if something is wrong they can tell their teacher or call the police or something. Later, they’d have sex education and learn what sex is.

Here’s what I thought the word “spanking” meant when I was a kid: if your dad is home, usually it happens right away in your bedroom or his. If your dad isn’t home, you get sent to the guest room, where there’s nothing to do in the meantime, to wait for him to get home. Then the spanking commences. Maybe he’ll go for the big wooden paddle. Maybe he’ll pull off his belt. Sometimes he gets them both out and makes you chose. If he makes you choose, he’s feeling particularly sadistic.

Just the paddle is better. Then he sticks to your unclothed bottom and thighs. The pain is excruciating, but it’s a good sign if he doesn’t take his belt off at all. He’ll probably just finger you a bit when he’s done. Ditto if he bends you over his lap instead of over the edge of the bed. If he just breaks out the belt, he’s lost his temper. You’ll get hit everywhere that can be covered by clothes. The individual strikes aren’t as hard as with a stick, but the beating goes on forever. Sometimes your body just shuts down. Maybe that’s better; if you wet yourself the spanking might stop there because you’re now too gross and dirty to rape. But usually he’s going to finish the “spanking.” The whacks stop coming and then he’s inside you, crushing you with all his weight and ramming into you over and over until he’s done with his business.

I was told that all kids got spanked. I didn’t understand that ‘spank’ meant a bit of a beating for most people and not an extreme beating followed by rape. I didn’t even know what rape was, as I knew nothing about sex. I had no idea what was going on.

Spanking was how my dad got access during the day. If he wanted it and I hadn’t done anything wrong, he would make up something wrong. Notably, he’d wait for me to look at the telephone. Mind you, I was too short to actually reach the telephone up on the wall, but he needed to make sure the message was ingrained. He’d wait for me to look at the phone then punish me for thinking about making a phone call. For thinking about lying to people that I was being abused. It was part of his way to drill into my mind that there was no way out. That this way of life was all there was or ever could be.

I only remember a few instances of explicit training. I remember a gruesome rape when I was too young. I can see my baby fat hands in my memory. I can taste blood. I wonder if that was the first time. I think the ripping might have caused some nerve damage. I can’t actually feel much on the surface, which might have made me the perfect victim in the future. He could do whatever they wanted and I wouldn’t react much. I remember one day when I was older–maybe 3ish–getting taught to relax properly, to stretch out, to be able to take in something larger. Being told that this is what big girls are supposed to do. This is what good girls are supposed to do.

Compared to a spanking, simple molestation didn’t mean much. There was a ‘monster’ that came at night and did his thing. I was told that I had nightmares. And I had to comply instantly with any demand made by an adult. I had to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. So if I was running around at church and an adult said I had to come give him a hug, I had to. And if his hand slipped up under my skirt, I was supposed to relax like a good girl and ignore the uncomfortable pressure filling me up. I guess it got out to anyone who was interested that I was groomed for complete submission and wouldn’t make a scene. I don’t know if he shared me on purpose or if all the perverts attracted to the good cover of a patriarchal church found me independently.

The violence was most extreme when we were at the cooperative homeschool. The school and the church reinforced the message. We only came into contact with other kids in the same situation. The probably weren’t all being seriously abused, but some of them sported regular bruises–new dark blues and purples in a new pattern over the fading browns and yellows from last week. Even the ones who weren’t abused weren’t told that they had rights. None of us was going to compare notes and discover that rapes weren’t a standard part of spanking. It was Orwellian. We didn’t have the words or concepts to address any of it.

No one at church would question my dad’s authority. He was a well respected member of the community. He was all godly and stuff. The benefit of the doubt extended to someone in his position was endless. By homeschooling us through this crucial period, my dad normalized abuse and kept me from finding out that I had rights. I literally had no idea until I was an adult that there was anything else out there, that this was not the natural order of things, that everyone wasn’t raised with this sort of abuse. Insofar as I ever heard about child abuse, I was taught that abuse was something that happened to other people.

When we homeschooled in another country, the abuse stopped almost completely. My dad was away from the comfort and safety of being an established pillar of the community. The monster still came at night, but the daytime abuse was drastically curtailed. I spent huge amounts of time being free and happy. The only punishment I recall was being yelled at.

I was only punished for one thing: speaking the other language. Somehow I’d picked it up, although my parents and other siblings hadn’t. My dad could use English at work and didn’t need to know it. Everyone spoke English in the shops anyway. My mom didn’t have a problem with it, but my use of the other language outraged my dad. If I uttered a word in front of him, his face would turn red and he would explode with anger.

How dare I speak another language. I couldn’t know what I was saying if it wasn’t English. I could be insulting someone and not know it! Because I couldn’t possibly know what I was saying if he didn’t know what I was saying. I couldn’t guarantee to him that I wasn’t saying something inappropriate because he couldn’t speak the language. So the act of speaking the other language was deceptive: I was hiding things from my parents by not speaking English. I never knew that I wouldn’t be spanked after these outbursts; I only connect the dots with the illegality of spanking in the other country now, as an adult. Looking back, I realize that he was afraid of getting caught in a country that cared about its children. He needed to make sure that I didn’t trigger any alarm bells there and get rescued by their child protection agencies.

When we returned to the US, we went to a fundamentalist Christian school. The ‘spanking’ resumed but it was much less frequent. Partly the training had kicked in and I was a good little robot. It was very difficult to find a reason to spank me. Partly we now lived in a bigger house. I had my own room and was far enough away from my parents room that it was unlikely for it to wake anyone up when he came in at night. Partly he couldn’t assume that he’d get a free pass at the new school. Teachers were from other denominations who might be just as distrustful of us as we were of them. Some students were just there because their parents thought they’d get a better education at a private school. Some students were even there because they’d been expelled from every other school and their parents couldn’t find anywhere else to take them. While I was guaranteed to not get any sex education or get told I had rights by the school, it was less clear that I wouldn’t exchange information with peers who knew stuff.

The fundamentalist Christian school went bust over doctrinal differences (surprise, surprise) and I was allowed to finish out high school at the local public school. It was the most supportive and loving environment I’d experienced in my life. No one made fun of me, as they had at the Christian school, for having zero social skills. People, not just teachers but students as well, put up with horrific ideas from my upbringing and gently taught me tolerance. Even people who didn’t like me were still patient and cordial with me. And my dad had to stop the ‘spankings’ altogether.

He still came in at night. He suffocated me so I wouldn’t wake up. I only woke up to absolute terror a few times. Rape is a thousand times more terrified when you fade in and out of consciousness from lack of oxygen. When I asked the youth pastor at church he said it was a demonic attack. I tend to trust my gut; I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. I think he was just gullible and never got any sex education himself either. He was a relatively young adult who had never dated. I don’t think he had any idea that he was passing on a lie used to conceal abuse.

Unfortunately, I got to public school too late to get sex education. It would have been covered in junior high. I’d learned about periods the day my first one started (I was at the Christian school at the time). A neighborhood girl who went to public school found out how little I knew about it and tried explaining the facts of life to me, but she was several years younger than me and hadn’t learned all the details herself yet. I am grateful that she noticed something was wrong with my complete lack of education and did her best to step in and fill in my educational gaps. But there was so much she couldn’t tell me.

So I didn’t know that periods were supposed to happen regularly, about once a month. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t normal to go months between periods. I didn’t understand that that much pain and that much blood was abnormal. I didn’t understand that something was very wrong if you had to spend several hours bleeding into the toilet and passing chunks. I didn’t put two and two together until I had my first miscarriage as an adult. Then it hit me that my period got regular after I got married. I wasn’t in so much pain. The flow was lighter – a pad was enough instead of having to spend time on the toilet because it was too much. And it hit me that while I’d had a few odd periods in high school, I’d mostly just had a succession of miscarriages. I still can’t have kids. I wonder if it’s from too much violence to my reproductive organs at such a young age. It’s not something I can face having a conversation with my doctor about.

I didn’t understand that I was experiencing rape until we had to read a short story in 12th grade advanced English about a girl being raped. That’s when I learned that that’s what rape was and, by extension, that’s what sex was. But I was too afraid to tell anyone. The programming to pretend everything was fine persisted. Teachers and counselors noticed and asked if something was wrong and I instinctually lied every time. I didn’t know how to do anything else. I didn’t believe anyone could help me, just that it would get back to my parents that I’d told someone. And then I’d be in for another spanking; I’d rather have died than risk another spanking.

I tried reporting my abuse to the authorities once as an adult but the law wasn’t on my side. If I’d been a minor, they could have gotten CPS involved. But as an adult, the law is written for specific instances. You can’t charge someone with years of violence and rape where there are so many memories jumbled together. You need a report of a specific instance. And remembering a specific instance with all its details when it happened all the time is like remembering what you had for dinner on March 12, 1986. What time was dinner? What did you eat? Did you have company? How was the food arranged on your plate? Who sat where at the table? Good luck with that.

Having been rebuffed, I tried getting out but it didn’t take. The economy was in shambles and I couldn’t find steady employment. The U.S. has a patchy safety net. One of the things that we as a society assume is that people’s parents don’t suck. If you’ve very lucky and your abuse is caught and you end up in the system, there are programs for young adults who have aged out of foster care. These programs aren’t perfect, but it beats the hell out of choosing between starvation and going back to an abusive family. After you’re an old enough adult (I think it varies by state), you are eligible for things on your own. But there’s an awkward gap between 18 and 20 something where your eligibility is determined by your parents income. Long story short, I ended up homeless. I had to go crawling back to my parents, tail between my legs, and enduring several more years of abuse before I married my husband and escaped.

I firmly believe that if public school teachers had gotten to me before the brainwashing set in that I might have told them the truth. I think the brainwashing would have been harder if I’d been getting a counterbalancing affirmation from public school that I was a human being with rights of my own. And you know what? Maybe my dad still would have found a way to abuse me, but he either would’ve had to pull me out of public school to keep the abuse hidden or he would’ve had to abuse me a heck of a lot less.

That’s what bugs me the most when homeschool parents bring up the fact that kids in public school get abused too. They act like that’s evidence that regulating homeschool is pointless. From where I’m sitting, that’s hogwash. I’d take rare beatings over frequent beatings. I’d take beatings severe enough to leave obvious marks during just summer vacation over getting those beatings several times a week around the year. I’d take just being raped over having the crap beaten out of me then being raped. I’d take being brutalized for the first 7 years of my life over being brutalized for the first 20 years of my life. I could go on down the line.

It’s clear to me how the abuse I received changed with the amount of control my parents had over the other adults in my life. When it was just them and church, the abuse was horrific. When it was public school teachers who weren’t going to give them a pass just for being Good Christians, the abuse was relatively minimal. I guess it reads as pretty extreme still, but that level of abuse required that they already have the prior controlled environment in which to make sure I never found out about my rights. And it’s way less than the baseline level of abuse they established when they had complete control of my environment.

But the more I think about my upbringing, the more I think the church and homeschooling were just convenient. In the wake of the ohio kidnap victims’ escape, an article in the guardian addressed the issue of girls and women being trapped in long-term situations where they were kept as prisoners and raped repeatedly. It quotes Prof. Sherry Hamby of Sewanee and journal editor of Psychology of Violence as saying “I don’t think there is any question there are other victims in similar situations. We are only catching the dumb ones.” It’s the first time in, well, ever, that I’ve felt like I wasn’t invisible. Usually situations like mine are invisible to mainstream media that is usually so desperate to maintain our societal illusion that abuse is a rare thing that is done to and by people we don’t know.

There are victims in similar situations. And we do only catch the dumb ones. My dad is extremely intelligent. It doesn’t matter what his personal beliefs might be: the perfect place to isolate his prey was in a patriarchal religious sect. The perfect way to avoid letting his kids encounter mandated reporters is through homeschooling. The perfect way to keep me from going to authorities was to lie to me about my rights and to surround me by other kids who didn’t know their rights. I don’t think I’m special. I don’t think I’m unique. I think odds are high that there are plenty of other people who grew up just like me.

Torching All That Is Sacred: Alexander Anon’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Torching All That Is Sacred — One Child’s Emergence From a Totalitarian Environment: Alexander Anon’s Story, Part Two

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

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In this series: Part One | Part Two

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Something people should know about me: I am a fighter. Now, I am not an obvious fighter, and if I was put into the ring, I guarantee nobody would put money on me; but that does not change what I am by nature. See, I am a quirky fighter.  I am weird.  I am unpredictable, though not always intentionally so.  For a while, I simply took what my parents dished out and did not question it.  I do not mean what they intentionally dished out; I mean that I adopted a victim mentality and pitied myself for being in the situations I found myself in.

As I grew older though, I started wanting to change things.  I would still take things timidly, but if they pushed too hard, a fire would flare up in me and I would push back.  Harder.  Through this, I learned that I am much stronger than I had ever previously thought.  I am not a victim; I am the one in control.  If my parents would chide me for engaging in foolishness, I would keep it coming and even ramp up my efforts.  What could they do?  I was invincible.  My foolishness knew no bounds; there were no depths which could be plumbed, no dregs that could be drained.  I could out resource them, outlast them, and outsmart them at virtually every corner until they admitted the futility of their efforts to make me into the cookie-cutter Christian homeschool child.  I had another advantage: the sibling just under me was much more openly defiant (although he used vastly different tactics), thereby allowing me to get by being just slightly less troublesome.

Since being in college, my mom has several times equated my academic success (completed undergraduate honors program with a GPA of 3.92) to having been homeschooled.  This is quite possibly true, but I have never quite had the heart to tell her the truth: her perceptions of my homeschooling experience are much different than my perceptions of that same experience.  If I was to be completely honest, what I enjoyed most was the freedom of homeschooling.  I could do what I wanted, when I wanted, and pursue whatever caught and kept my attention for as long as I wanted without interruption.  For me, at that point in my life, it meant creating Redwall cards that played similar to the Decipher Lord of the Ring’s trading card game.  I would spend hours reading the books, creating workable game mechanics and themes for each culture, and then drawing and coloring the cards.  I was an artist, and a not-too-bad one at that.  I was also an avid reader, but only if the book was of interest.  Many history books and other required readings were simply not to my tastes, and since there was no way to prove if I had actually read the book, I occasionally lied about how much of the book I had read in a particular day (or, at my worst, simply did not read the book while claiming I did).  I did this so that I could spend time doing what I wanted to do: Redwall cards.

I was also notoriously bad at science.  For a while, I thought I simply sucked at science.  Since then, I have realized I did not understand how to study at that point in time.  I would shove a bunch of scientific definitions in, then output them for the test.  On tests where there was more information to memorize, I would earn lower grades.  This measured nothing about my ability to actually understand science; it measured how well I could replicate 15+ definitions word-for-word, with each definition containing several sentences and sometimes looking more like paragraphs.  My junior year, she threatened to kick me into public school for my senior year if I failed a particular science test (since I wouldn’t then be able to pass that grade of science).  Needless to say, I took the ethical high ground and cheated my ass off.  I did not (and still don’t) think it is fair to both at once tell your child that public school is essentially hell and then threaten to send your child to that hell if they do not perform to your liking.

I mention these two aspects of my homeschooling life because they would later get me in trouble just when I thought I was home free in college.  After attending college a few years, I casually joked about how I sometimes wasn’t the best homeschool student as a kid.  To me, it was funny.  Look how well I’m doing in college despite goofing off the last few years I was homeschooled (11th & 12th grade).  My mom, on the other hand, broke out crying at even the hint that I had cheated or lied.  To her, my not taking some aspects of school seriously somehow reflected on her.  It told her she hadn’t done well enough homeschooling to make me care, even though not caring about school is typical for teenagers at that age and I had proven I could excel in college.  She had not failed in any sense of the word, since I was prepared for college and doing well.  But she did not see it that way; only saw that I was admitting homeschool had not been the perfect picture of happiness she thought it had been.

Secretly, deep down, I suspect the true reason she cried is because my goofing off the last 2 years I was homeschooled sent a clear message that I did not need her and homeschooling as much as she thought I did.  Did not need her as a teacher, that is.

This gets to the crux of the matter; it ties together this up-until-now rather bizarre and random story of my childhood.  I think that despite whatever reasons my mom thought she was homeschooling us for, her true motivation was to never have to be alone again after living her entire childhood virtually alone.  Homeschooling, while it may have been about us not getting hurt by others in public school, was also about her not getting hurt by nobody needing her.  It was about making us dependent on her, so that she felt wanted.  Needed.  Ironically, she sometimes lashed out when we expressed the very dependence on her that she had fostered in us.  More than a true need for us to be homeschooled was the need for her to have an identity outside of her children.  An identity that should have come from her relationship with my dad, and with friends her own age.  She needed to escape the burden of parenting for a time instead of embracing it even more fully and homeschooling us all.

I am not saying we should not have been homeschooled; but rather, homeschooling us should not have been the top priority.  She often screamed, “What about me? When do I get to do what I want to do?!?” when she got mad at us for needing her.  But the truth of the matter is this; she was too scared of nobody needing her to ever wander off and do something she wanted to do.  She was afraid that if she did wander off, she might return and find everyone had forgotten her, or worse: never even noticed she left in the first place.

This, then, is what I want to communicate: my entire childhood was shaped by events driven just as much by my mom’s need to be emotionally fulfilled as it was trying to give me what I needed in an education.

Possibly more.

The worst part is knowing she did not do this consciously, she simply failed to recognize what was going on and intervene.  This is not a ‘Fuck you, mom! Fuck you, dad!’ letter.  This is not an article to be used for arguing homeschooling is psychologically harmful and should therefore be overseen, controlled, or prevented by the government.  There is no political message here, no hint of animosity towards anyone; no purpose for saying any of this other than that it is the truth.

The truth.

Truth is never something I was good at hiding, or even wanted to hide.  I tell everyone who will listen that I would rather have a ‘fuck you!’ screamed in my face and punctuated with physical blows than have someone pretend to be my friend.  I do not care if I am physically assaulted; I care if I am told the truth.  Asshats are a dime a dozen; but honest people are virtually impossible to find.  Bluntness, that is.  People who throw social politeness under the bus in favor of calling it like it is.  The ‘ain’t no bullshit here, captain!’ kind of people.  There many honest people in the world, but few who will be blunt with you.

That is what I mean.

In order to avoid ending on a downer note, I will fully self-disclose that things have gotten so much better over the past few years I have been attending college.  Only my youngest brother and sister are still homeschooled, with my oldest sister having attended public school since 9th grade.  I do see my youngest brother struggle with many of the same things I did, but I know I am here to guide him through the confusion and pain that accompanies his upbringing.

More importantly, I know what helped me cope and have given him access to these means at a much younger age.  When I was growing up, I did not have anyone to reach out to about this.  My youngest brother can talk with me about this all; about how sometimes although our parents love us both very much, they do not act rationally and instead resort to violating their own rules and taking their emotional issues out on the children and use us to meet deep needs that we can never fullfill.  He can question me about why most people think the earth is billions of years old but he learns it is only several thousand.  I do not provide him with ‘the answers’, but ask questions to help him think through the issues on his own.

That is what true homeschooling should be: parents providing their children with an outlet to escape the biases and politics of public school without imposing their own biases and politics.  Because ultimately, that’s what homeschooling is: freedom.  Freedom to question authority, to question rules, to question the ‘no tolerance’ policies that are a virtual shitstorm in public schools.  My story is one of that freedom being unconsciously abused, but that same freedom can be used to free others from the abuses they may receive elsewhere.

As hinted at in my opening paragraph, eventually my parents figured a lot of their issues out and loosened the stranglehold conservative Christians had on their throats.  This legalism went to hell when our family became the black sheep of the congregation and the pastor and elders treated our family like shit.  We were accused of much, and treated like enemies instead of brothers and sisters in Christ like they claim to treat all believers.  What they failed to mention when you sign up is that their interpretation of the Bible only tells you to treat people as human if they think as you do and do not question what you demand of them.  Anyone who threatens their reputation, who is similar enough to them and then suddenly appears less than perfect, is quickly either intimidated to fall back into line or else cast out into the cold world to die a lonely and painful death.  Fortunately, our family pulled together and told them that while we appreciate their willingness to spend their entire lives with their heads on vacation in the wonderful world of Up-Your-Ass, our family preferred to admit we are living, breathing, feeling, fallible individuals who must address our shortcomings and forgive each other.

So yes, our family is no longer the perfect Christian, homeschooling family we once were. Thank God. And I mean that; I am both relieved to leave the bullshit and small-mindedness, and thankful to God for rescuing us from the bullshit.

As you can tell, I still believe in God. But not the Orthodox Presbyterian Church God that requires men to dominate women, for children to obey their parents without questioning what they are told to do, and for His followers to spend their time prior to dying and enjoying their life in blissful paradise feeling like shit because they believe happiness is automatically indicative of falling into sin.  Focusing on how fucked up you are, or others are, does nothing to solve the problem.  Even their own book tells them that much, but they still do not see despite claiming you do not see.  Slowly, their God died to me (not for me), and I can personally attest that this death did not occur on a cross.  It took place in my mind, after years of watching my family suffer the consequences of sucking it up when things got hard and pretending everything was alright.  However; this god did die at a cross.  Crossroad that is. The death of the OPC God was a crossroad where I switched paths.  Where our whole family switched paths.

I have never been more proud of our parents than when they essentially told our old OPC church to go fuck themselves. (This message was not communicated quite as bluntly, but the effect was the same).

In closing, I am not mad at my parents. I hold no bitterness for them, or anyone else, including the OPC church and their members.  I am still friends with many of them, and see the pleading looks in their eyes to come back when I occasionally visit.  But I see more than this.

Underneath the pleading for me to return to them I see another kind of pleading; a pleading for someone to rescue them from themselves.  As for me, I am never going back. Not permanently, although I do visit every once in a blue mooon. Having now experienced life in the open — in the sunlit world having emerged from Plato’s cave with the totalitarian forces striving to keep individuals locked away in the cave — I know what it is I will spend the rest of my life doing:

Fighting to free others from the blindness, from being emotionally used and feeling helpless to escape, whether it occurs while being homeschooled, public-schooled, or not schooled. Because using others, even unconsciously, to meet your needs is not right; and having gone through this myself, I find that I cannot wish it upon anyone else either.

We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

We are Homeschooled.

*****

End of series.