On Homeschooling: I Will Control your Soul

One of my guilty pleasures, a major one, is that I kinda heart Traci Lords. Yeah, she's a campy actress (I think she's even been in a couple of Asylum movies) but...Yeah, there's a real soft space in my cold lil heart for Ms. Lords. And I found this song to be...appropriate.



The group I call the Homeschool Hijackers fall into three major groups: Bill Gothard and ATI, Vision Forum and its support system, and the Pearls. While there are many, many other sub groups--authors, magazines, religious movements--these three groups enter into every single homeschooling story I've ever heard of. Their ideology taints every aspect of homeschooling. Even if your family didn't enroll in ATI, use Doug Phillips' materials, or use the Pearls (terrible. horrible. disgusting.) books, the odds were that people in your homeschooling group did, and it was very likely that the people offering your parents advice were, in effect, offering water from a poisoned well.

Religion has two uses, one positive, one negative. The positive use is the support that it offers the individual. It creates a common ground between individuals. It provides comfort in times of stress. It gives people a common, simplified language for offering complex advice. And, if you believe in the spiritual dimension, as I do, it connects you with something bigger than yourself. In this context the heart of religion isn't about its rules, its regulations and its structure, but rather the individual's relationship first with the divine and second with the general population.

The negative version of religion is a structure of control. The structure works independent of religion, and can be employed in a secular thought system, but works best inside of a pre-existing group with structure already in place. Controlling people requires a great deal of manipulation and momentum; it's easiest to do that by hijacking something that already exists. If you look at the history of abusive cults, the theme that repeats over and over is the Leader coming to a pre-existing group and progressively taking it over.

(As a side note I believe this makes the notion of removing religion to solve the issue of cults pretty meaningless. Religion provides an easy in, but removing the obvious targets simply points the predator at the next level up. Cult-like groups will always exist regardless of religion. The issue is not the groups. It's the predatory thinkers targeting the groups)

The most dangerous thing we do when we discuss manipulative groups is underestimate the intelligence of the manipulated. We imply that if you are well read enough, with enough innate intelligence and mental flexibility, you can recognize an abusive group before you become involved. We say this because we only begin to see these groups once the abuse is so great, it's begun to self-destruct. But there is a long, slow, complicated process manipulative leaders use to attract and then retain their audience, and it very, VERY rarely varies from group to group. It's a pattern utilized by Jim Jones, David Koresh, Scientology and even Nazi Germany. Insulting the intelligence of people involved in abusive groups is not only unfair to them, it is very dangerous for the rest of us. All of us are vulnerable to this kind of thing. If not through a Christian group, then through a group focused on another religion. If not through a religious group, than through a secular one. Manipulative people prey not on human stupidity or gullibility, but on human nature. It is our very best qualities that leave us open to manipulation and damage.

In other words, this is not a problem that you can easily fight.

So if a person, say, a homeschooling parent, is smart enough to see through this shit, why do they fall for it? How does a genuinely good parent fall for the controlling, manipulative and unbelievably toxic materials pushed by mainline homeschoolers? And once they see the sickness for what it is, what keeps them there?

There's a lot of tools, and I'm going to try to address most of them. But the biggest one, the one that runs across the entire thing, is the rules.

The version of Christianity most homeschooling materials promote is very, very strict, with rules including how one may dress, what kind of music one may listen to, what sort of materials one may read, even what kind of food you can eat. Most of these restrictions have absolutely no basis in the Bible. None. Full stop. You will not find "Thou shalt not Dance" or "Stone anyone who listens to Rock Music" anywhere in the Bible. You will find "thou shalt not intermarry with other nations"...buuuuut you'll also find episodes like Paul and the Ethopian and the time Mariam, Moses's sister, poked fun at Moses's dark-skinned wife for her dark skin and got motherfucking cursed with fucking leperosy. (If you're not a Bible-person, OT God has three "pissed" settings: gentle talking to, your kids are dead, and Leprosy. After that you hit fire and brimstone and you don't usually come back from that one) and how absolutely nobody paid attention to that rule. (Seriously. Kings and Chronicles, both halves, spend more time dwelling on the marital habits of Israel and Judah's kings than most tabloids--and IMHO are much nastier about it.)

But the rules. The restrictions.  The things that make life for homeschooled families borderline endurable at best and laughably horrible most of the time. Once you realize that none of it is Bible-based it becomes intensely confusing as to why, for example, girls have to wear floor length skirts when the bible seems more concerned about what the thread composition is (as blends are kinda verboten) than how low it goes. There are no restrictions on music. At all. Ever. (In fact, most of the times music is mentioned in the bible it's less Dances from Terpsichore and more that rave scene from Matrix Reloaded. There's one story where David got so into dancing before God's altar that his wife said "UH, DIGNITY MUCH" and Samuel AKA Voice-of-God for the generation said "Will you please shut up? Oh, and no kids for you.") It's just not there.

(Also: I bring up Dances for a specific reason: It's music written in honor of a classical greek goddess AND it was pushed very strongly by the "Matthews" AKA the high-profile Homeschooling family I worked for back on 05-06. So Rock music is flat out, but music straight up dedicated to a pagan goddess can be recommended AND sold for profit! RIGHT.)

And yet by putting problematic behavior into arbitrary, non-biblical rules, the people behind those rules--all of whom are terrible, by anyone's definition of behavior--manage to cement an attitude and outlook receptive to their version of control. For example, many of the arbitrary rules against music are rooted in a deeply racist perspective, one so repellant that most parents would refuse to comply. Instead of stating that Black People are bad because they're Black, the leaders state that Black culture is bad because it's devil worship and you could go to hell just by association. The emphasis here is not on "black culture is bad" but rather on "hell by association", which means the audience only hears "If I do this, I die." By doing this, the leader has actually prevented the audience from ever questioning his racist attitudes, because this is no longer an issue of race or Other, but of self-preservation. A bonus is if the audience members even start to question the line of thinking--ie why are we saying aspects of Black Culture are devil worship--they either get pitched out of the group or threatened back into compliance. See, by questioning, they're going to hell, which means anyone listening to them may go to hell by association. It's a downward spiral that is very, very ugly.

Dressing up the attitudes you want your group to have under the guise of "right living" nets abusive systems an audience five times larger than they would have had, were they open and honest about their goals. An incredibly good modern example of this is GamerGate--the goal is to hurt people, but by dressing it up in terms most people can agree with (ETHICS! IN JOURNALISM!) they prevent anyone from uncovering what those goals really are. And Homeschooling Culture is a far, far more attractive demographic for this nonsense because it means the leaders can hijack an entire generation of children and indoctrinate them without anyone realizing what the hell is going on.

The thing is? If you look at the Bible, and I mean really look at it, put it in cultural and historical context, not just of the age it was written but of the ages of its translation (something that absolutely no one does, and something that ought to be just as critical a history period, given the MASSIVE number of biases the KJV cemented into stone), you'll see that not only is all this shit completely unbiblical, it's the perfect antithesis to what the religion was intended to be. 

If you ask your average homeschooler/conservative Christian type why they follow these arbitrary and exhausting rules, they'll have a quick, pat answer for you. It's one that gets drilled into your skulls from very early on in your time in the faith: 1st Thessalonians 5:22.

Are you ready for this shattering, human-breaking, awful burden of a bible verse?

You sure?

Here it is:

²² Abstain from all appearance of evil 

Yeah. It's one of the short ones. Which makes it very easy to take out of context. Most verses used like this, you have to cut them into smaller pieces. This one is nice, short, sweet, easy to memorize, and even easier to twist into a pretzel. And as a bonus, it's one of the ones where the immediate context is still obscure enough to make deception possible.

⁴ Now we exhort you, brethren, warn them that are unruly, comfort the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men.
¹⁵ See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men.
¹⁶ Rejoice evermore.
¹⁷ Pray without ceasing.
¹⁸ In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.
¹⁹ Quench not the Spirit.
²⁰ Despise not prophesyings.
²¹ Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
²² Abstain from all appearance of evil.
²³ And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 Even there, it's kinda hard to see the context. It looks like a list of rules and instructions for the individual to follow to the letter without any wriggle room. And there's also a couple really problematic things in there (Despise not prophesyings is troubling when you realize that David Koresh styled himself as a prophet and he was about as biblical a leader as I am a bird.)

But that idea of "HERE ARE RULES YOU MUST FOLLOW" just doesn't cut the mustard. This is not an Old Testament book. This is New Testament, which is really light on rules given the whole "Jesus Died so we don't have to" theme. AND it's a Letter. Again, if you're not a Bible person, The New Testament has your History books (The Gospels+Acts) your Letters (everything between Acts and Revelation) and your "What is this I don't even John are you Okay?" book (The Revelation of John) And like most of Paul's letters, the Thessalonian letters were written to a beleaguered and persecuted religious body from a leader who was in prison awaiting trial and execution, and that prison was also Rome's sewer system. Not too long after this, the Roman Emperor started using Christians (Nero=white guy, Christians=Middle eastern brown people) as torches to light up his garden parties. The church at Thessalonica, like most of the churches Paul was writing to, weren't worried about pot lucks and cotillions. They were kind of preoccupied with not dying at the hands of their neighbors. And what does Paul write about while he's waiting to be beheaded and also ankle deep in literal shit?

Faith. Hope. Unconditional Love.

 Believe, have hope, and love one another. Again: He's ankle deep in shit and he's waiting to be executed (and FYI the only reason Paul was alive to write these letters is that he was a Roman citizen and thus privileged enough to rate a trial before he got dragged out and murdered. Yes, standing in shit for months on end was a privilege) and he's talking about how important it is to believe. To hope for things to get better. To take care of one another without condition (agape, remember?) and above all to endure until the end.

That list up there isn't a list of by-the-book formula instructions. They are the closing wishes from one man in the process of dying to a group of people being actively hunted down and murdered by their neighbors.

The mindset one has when one is going through a trial, be it IRL persecution or online harassment, determines how well one can weather the crisis-es one goes through. Maintaining a positive outlook when things are only moderately awful creates the margin you need to make it through the incredibly shitty low points. The whole focus of Thessalonians is "Hold on, it'll be okay." And when he closes it, Paul re-enforces the message with a list of ideas and touchstones the church can hold onto. Anchors so that when they try to climb up the mountain of horror and persecution and anguish they all faced and the world falls out from under them, they'll have something to cling to.

Do these things, because they'll keep you happy. Do these things, because they'll give you hope. Do these things, because they'll keep you sane when the world loses its mind.

Abstain from all appearance of evil, in this context of hold on, is about not burdening yourself with bad behavior. A guilty conscience adds to stress and overwhelm. There's also the aspect of witness, which is one of Christianity's more loaded phrases. It means, basically, that you behave in a way that brings merit to your belief system. And while that interpretation of 1Thess 5:22 is valid, and should be followed, it doesn't fit the letter's message of Hold on, one day it'll be okay. This letter is not about evangelism and witness--the Thessalonians were already doing that. All the early churches were. And they were dying for doing that. They really didn't need to be told "Oh, that thing that's getting so many of you killed? Go do more of that." They needed to be told hold on, one day it'll be okay. This letter is about taking steps to build the endurance of the individual and the group--tell the negative voices to shut up (not the critics, just the gloom and doom types) and the toxic people to stop abusing each other, have the mentally able support the disabled, and to try, whenever they can, to find joy. It's not asking the early Christians to be content with their lot or to be generally happy, but to find joy. It's almost legit to call it an instruction to find joy in spite of the circumstances.

It's a controversial idea, and sometimes difficult to understand (and a thousand times more difficult to do) But Speaking from personal experience...when you are in a situation that you cannot escape from, if you rejoice in your suffering, if you tell God "I'm going through this for your glory, thank you for this", you diminish the power suffering can have over you. "Grave, where is your victory, Death, where is your sting" doesn't negate the fact of death, only the depth of the agony it causes. It's not about making the suffering an obligation, it's about taking the victory away from the people who are hurting you and turning it into your own. You cannot change the suffering. You cannot change the pain. What you can change is how you and others look at it. You can take control of the narrative. But that attitude takes a lot of discipline and a lot of endurance. This letter, and most of the other letters in the New Testament, was correspondence between individuals and groups on the edge of survival, who wanted to tell their tormentors to get fucked without losing the essential spirit that made their system of belief worthwhile. Fighting back with violence would destroy those beliefs, turn the message of Christ into another violent, toxic cult doomed to horrific self destruction, not because Rome would respond with more violence, but because the violence would destroy the believers from the inside out and make them into the very thing they despised. Christ said It's not what goes in, but what comes out that defiles a man. Violent defense was not an option. Their only alternative was to make their endurance a victory in and of itself. To let the events and the hell they were going through pass through them like light through a stained glass window--to color the events and the horror and the pain with the triumph of enduring until the end, no matter how it ended.To make sure that no matter what came into their lives, all that came out was joy, peace, beauty and love. That was how they lived, and that was how they won.

In other words: They weren't worried about following a whole bunch of rules.

It seems rather silly to have spent so much time on one verse, but Abstain from all appearance of evil is the linchpin for all the rules that conservative Christians have to follow. The attitude is literally one of "Yes, we're forgiven and yes it's from God and not something we can earn, and yes it happened so that we could live without the terror of restriction, but we're  gonna do all that old shit anyway because REASONS." This cognitive dissonance between what the Bible actually says and what Christians practice is actually a major reason why many Christians leave the faith--they realize that they put a great deal of energy and guilt and emotional unpleasantness into absolutely nothing. This is an attitude that breaks people, and an interpretation that allows manipulators and abusers to acquire an audience that deserves so very much better. And of the few verses that support this attitude really doesn't support it at all.

This attitude of "RULES! Follow the RULES!" negates everything the early Christians went through. One attraction to the early church was that they didn't have to follow religious systems that had become political tools for oppression and yet could still have the benefits of religion, faith-based community and connection to God. The two major systems in place at the time, the Roman Empire's pantheism and the Jewish traditions of sacrifice and ritual cleanliness, were no longer things that worked for members of the Early Church.

It wasn't the pantheism that a great many of the Gentile Christians disliked, but it was the politics attached. Offering incense to the Roman Emperor--a major point of dispute between Roman authorities and the Early church, and one that got an awful lot of people killed--acknowledged that the Emperor and Rome were better than you. No, you didn't have to lose your gods. You just had to acknowledge that Rome's gods were better than your gods. The Jews got away with cultural monotheism because they had a long history of saying "fuck that shit" and Rome didn't want to deal with a freshly conquered people exploding. Other cultures did not get the same exemption and gaining access to meaningful Jewish practices were so difficult the religion was, to all intents and purposes, closed. Christians, thanks to their Jewish roots, had taken a stand that made monotheism as much a political statement as it was a religious one. Early Christians were telling an oppressive conqueror "We no longer respect your religion. We no longer respect your 'benevolent' oppression. We are taking back our lives."

 Electing to leave the rules of Jewish ritual cleanliness and sacrifice for Christian practice had the same motive; it wasn't the ritual itself that Christ objected to, it was how the rituals and practices had come to be a form of oppression within Hebrew society. The leadership could, and did, use the rules of ritual cleanliness and the cycle of sacrifice to oppress those who were unable to adhere to it. The law of ritual cleanliness was intensely ablest, excluding those who had deformities, defects and illnesses from the right to fully worship God. Christ's attempts to rectify this--to point out how the entire point of the Jewish law was to support the disabled and vulnerable population--were met with scorn by the leadership but with overwhelming support by the community. Choosing not to adhere to these laws, to accept everyone regardless of how "clean" they were, was stating that everyone counted and everyone mattered.

What marked Christ as different was how inclusive his teachings were, and also how subversive. He prioritized the lower classes--the tax collectors, prostitutes, beggers and lepers--over the upper, the ritualistically unclean over the priesthood. He chose a lone woman, Mary Magdalene, to be the first evangelist and carry the news of his resurrection to the world when he knew that no one would believe her, because it validated the witness of women. He advocated a form of non-violent resistance that emphasized equality and forced abusers to either acknowledge their victim as equal, or stop being abusive. When you realize that a lot of the early martyrs weren't just making a religious statement, but a political one as well--in essence, Fuck you Rome--you realize why so many people chose to die. Yes, it was for Christianity, but Christianity was the tool they could use to get back their lives. The established system was no longer doing what it was meant to do, and Christ came to fix it. The established system put people down, and Christ built them back up. The established system was the method of oppression, and Jesus threw it out of the temple in his one, sole, singular fit of utter fucking rage.

So why, then, do Christians do this? Why do we choose to redefine a faith that was about holding on and inclusive bodies into a faith that is all about rules and oppression?

Because when you follow Christianity the way it was back in the early church, those who would have power lose control. The only way to regain it is to establish themselves as teachers. With that authority, they can act. They erect rules like fences to keep out the people they can't benefit from, as well as the people they can't control. Christianity from its inception was intended to break the methods of control, and for the first several centuries of its existence proved that its adherents could not be shouted down, pushed into violence, or erased. And since the Powers that Be couldn't make it go away, they moved into the leadership instead and started chipping away at what made the religion inclusive and effective. And now, 2000 years later, the manipulation and control is literally written into the blueprints. Even the words of the bible are suspect, because the approved translations came, not from the oppressed who needed it, but by the kings and leaders and abusers who needed control.

But it says a lot that even with the biases of kings and leaders, even with the obscured history and abuse and control, the message is still there. In a world so focused on merit-based individual value, the fact that love your neighbor as yourself made it through the centuries relatively un-scathed says a great deal for how good the truth is at enduring. The Bible is still a valid source for believers. It even still explains how it can be used--be discerning, and pay attention to what kind of effect your doctrine, teachings and behaviors have on both your life and in the lives of others. AKA "By their fruit shall you know them." 

As an example, one relevant story is Peter's vision about the animals. There were two big divisions in the Early Church--one group, headed by Peter, wanted Christianity to be a Jewish thing, because Jesus was a Jew and so were all his disciples and there was this whole "Chosen people" thing.  Paul headed a group that wanted to evangelize to all people, pointing out that Jesus might have been Jewish, but he wasn't exactly checking credentials of the crowd before he preached (Given that the credential was circumcision, that'd be kinda icky if he had) A guy named Cornelius wanted Peter to explain things to him. Cornelius was not a Jew. Peter did not want to go.

And then this happened:

⁹ About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. ¹⁰ He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. ¹¹ He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. ¹² It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. ¹³ Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
¹⁴ “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”
¹⁵ The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
¹⁶ This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.

And Peter interpreted this as God going "I want these people. I say they're mine. Stop being a moron and go talk to Cornelius, his people are downstairs," and Peter made Cornelius the first Gentile of many.

This, my dear readers, is one of those stories that I NEVER WANT TO EVER READ AGAIN. It gets covered A LOT in bible studies, sermons, pamphlets, pictures, you name it. If you hear this story five times a year you're probably slacking off in your reading and attendance. It gets repeated a lot because we Gentile Christians use it to justify how a message given by a Jew in front of other Jews can apply to the rest of us. But by narrowing our focus to our own justification, we lose the entire fucking point of this passage, which is verse 15:

 ⁵ The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

Not clear enough? 

Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.

And yet that is exactly what we do. Every time we meet something we don't understand, something out of our culture's frame of reference, something that doesn't follow the rules we define as "good", we demonize them, call it evil, and do our best to either exclude the Other, or to erase all the differences that make the Other who they are. The sheer fucking wrongness of all these restrictive rules should become obvious once you factor in that, within the context of these beliefs, this is what Christ died to end. Not just the rules, but the oppressive nature of them. The rules that, through compliance, erase the differences that give humanity its fullness. It's these small statements--wear your skirt this long, your hair like this, wear these colors only, listen to just this music and nothing else--that blot out culture far more effectively than an absolute ban would. You can say with absolute honesty that you're not against, say, African culture--better stated as Masai, Zulu, or one of the many other ethnic groups--while you simultaneously attack every single thing that culture actually has on the basis that it's evil. You can say you support women while you confine them in a cage. You can say you support the weak, and then accuse the mentally ill of housing demons. Because the rules have divorced the religion from your life so effectively, you might as well not follow it at all.

It is a system that is absolutely manufactured and artificial. And while some of it absolutely IS the fault of the individual, a great deal more is the fault of the teacher. The individual's choice is to accept the rule and be a shit to others, or reject the rule and risk hell and damnation. The teacher's choice is to first verify that their information is correct, to pass on what is verified truth, and to correct inaccurate information their students may have. 

The history of ATI, Vision Forum and the Pearls is one of exclusion, repression and misery. By any biblical standard, it is a form of invalid doctrine. By the most basic of human standards, it is the ultimate definition of failure.By anyone's definition, it is not something that should ever be followed.

And just because I'm in the mood for awesome music: 
  

On Homeschooling: What I never learned.

This was a very hard post to write. I've let it sit for a couple days to...digest itself. Explaining this shit is rather impossible without explaining how it imploded. Please note: This is not to condemn my parents or anyone involved. It's just...this is what happened. This is how I saw it. I can't describe it another way.  

 It comes in images I don't want want to remember. They're isolated. Disconnected from context. This makes them safe. It's as if my brain has quarantined these pieces of my life out of fear that the rest of me will get infected. They stretch under my life anyway, sinews of motive I don't have to see. 

It's 2003. The test book sat in front of me, open to a bewildering set of blank, globe-shaped charts that I am supposed to answer somehow. It's math. I've always hated math. Four other books sit off to the left. Reading. Social Studies. Science. The Bible. It's the placement test for the ACE curriculum and I've begged my mother for it for the last six months.

I don't have the answers.

It's my fault, I think, because I didn't do enough work. I'm a failure. It's all my fault.

Children accept blame for things they didn't do, because it's safer to be in control and destroy everything you touch than to be helpless and alone. 

Our living room is in the middle of Flour Bluff, the unfortunately named suburb of Corpus Christi that survives because of the naval base. We are less than a mile away from it. When the massive carriers fly in, the windows and cups rattle. The last Fourth of July we watched the Blue Angels preform from atop the pool slide in our back yard. Everything inside this house is dismal, office-supply store brown. The outside is an unhappy pink that forgot it isn't maroon. There are several trees in the front yard and most of them were dead when we moved in. The summer of 2004 a storm rolls through at midnight, and I see the palm trees almost flush with the ground, the wind is so bad. The dead trees fall into the street. The transformers for our entire neighborhood explode like christmas lights in a bad hollywood movie and these trees keep the fire trucks from putting the one on our corner out. We can walk to the Laguna Madre from our house, but it's choked by the causeway out to Padre Island and it smells bad.

I don't realize why I've been asking and asking for this curriculum. I told my mom what I believed myself--I was seventeen and I needed a highschool diploma. What I don't understand is that this urge is fueled by desperation: everything is about to end.

When you are homeschooled, your life is your family. You raise your younger siblings as increasing responsibility is placed on your shoulders. To this day I talk in the royal "we" whenever I'm not careful. It's not an expression of MPD/DID, far as I know--it's because the idea of personal independence just...did not exist. We went to events together. My mother trailing us behind her to adult art classes and sometimes even business events, my Dad bringing me or my brother on long trips. I brought my parents to the first session of any event or group--dance class, writer's group, AWANAS--and frequently, most consecutive meetings. When my parents weren't present, my brother was. When none of them were around I felt as if a limb were amputated.

And by the last year of my homeschooled life, my family was dying.

I felt it in the house: a duplex rental property that my father operated his business out of. Everything smelled like mildew from the time we were flooded out (The storm of 2004. As the transformers in front of our house blew up, a tornado demolished the Del Mar GED program's temporary buildings. Ironically enough, I'd be sitting in one of those classes within four months of their replacement) and also car exhaust, gasoline, and the stale dry smell of "I give up." For the first year in that house we'd struggle to maintain the pool--it was roughly the size of a garden pond and dropped to a grand five feet at its deepest--but near the end the green algea stains were creeping up the side like the ghost of Swamp Thing.

I felt it when I woke up alone. I'm seventeen, and there's days where I don't see another human being until nine PM at night. Mom was going to college to be a nurse. Money, she said, because it was always tight. But it was escape. Running away. I don't blame her. I encourage her, like a flightless bird to an albatross, because this is my family and I'm not supposed to escape but she's miserable and I hate that she's miserable. Dad was neck-deep in a business that would fail within another two years. Money flowed in and then back out like the tide. I saw $20,000 checks; the next week, we'd be eating frozen corn and Ramen. Learning how to get creative when the only edible things in the kitchen are a bag of frozen ravioli and a can of mushroom soup isn't the kind of thing anybody should learn. Sometimes Dad's employees would call the house and demand their money. Once, the wife of an employee called. She said she wanted to talk to her husband. She had just taken a whole bottle of Tylenol PM and she wanted to say goodbye.

I'm seventeen and I'm responsible for all of my education, and now I have a suicidal woman on the phone and I have no idea what to do.

My brother spent all his time in his room playing video games.

Schoolwork piled up, forgotten and unwanted because it was a duty and a job and I wanted to  escape. I didn't have video games. I'd been writing since I was thirteen but now it was my way out and I dove into it. I did NaNoWriMo that year and it was like I was getting oxygen. I wrote eighty five thousand words in three weeks.

My first lace shawl was knitted in that house. My brother got a chihuahua puppy cheap because he had a heart defect, and that puppy took the half-completed shawl and ran three times around the house with it. I sat at the kitchen table for three days with a small crochet hook and my pattern book, slowly restitching the hundred-odd dropped stitches, the ladders, the runs. My school work would sit only a few inches away. I'd glare at it, then carefully work a stitch through a few dozen yarn overs and decreases.

It was escape. That's all.

There was no one to talk to. I tried to befriend the girl down the street, invited her over for a sleep-over. In the process I found a letter my mother had given my father, in which she said she wanted out. I sat there looking at it like it was written in hieroglyphics and I was waiting on a Rosetta Stone to walk me through the permutations of understanding. My parents  can't want a divorce. They can't.

I stopped trying to make IRL friends. It felt like too much work to reach their version of normal.

I discovered webcomics.  I dove into making it--learning how to draw, how to use photoshop for coloring, how to do sequential art. I did it all day, every day, obsessively.

The workbooks I'd begged so much for began to pile up too. They weren't enough. They couldn't drown out that feeling, that awareness that something awful was happening that I couldn't identify, that I did not understand. My life was my family. Nothing could happen to it. Nothing.

Escape.

I decided that the tension was because I wasn't doing a good enough job on the schoolwork. It wasn't working. I needed to get my GED. I need to go to the prep classes at Del Mar because I cannot possibly be skilled enough. I've done so poorly on my workbooks. I've let my family down so much.

The first assessment test they put in front of me, I test out of the program. It was a month before the next set of classes. I would attend the program until then.

It was like the eye of the hurricane. Peaceful. I didn't have to answer a phone. I didn't have to feel hungry. I didn't have to keep track of my brother (I have no idea what he did while I was in the GED program. I do know that he was expected to supervise himself) and I got daily affirmations from strangers. Good job. Good work.

My mother came into it too. She came with me to sign up for the test. She cheered with me when I got the second highest score in the county for the year (It would be beaten out by one other girl, which I was fine with. It meant I didn't have to give a speech) But mostly she was sidelined. She had her own things to deal with, including a major and at the time frightening health issue.

I'd found peace. I'd found the nearest thing I'd ever come to normal school. I didn't recognise it. At the same time, I looked forward to going there every day. Part of me was scared to come home.

We moved.

We moved to a perfect house. Beautiful, in the middle of a cotton farm. There was a small patch of corn right next to the house which would, in a few months, provide us with something to eat for several weeks. It had what felt like a million acres of yard, perfectly manicured. Fruit bearing trees that I was unfortunately very allergic to. I could glean all the cotton I wanted for spinning, and I did.

There was no way in hell we could afford it. Ever. And all of us knew it.

We were like a wild animal chewing off its own limb to stay alive. It was a last ditch desperation move, quite literally. We had nothing left to lose.

It was escape.

Me graduating in no way diminished the pressure on the family. Mom had dropped out of college because of her health issue. My brother moved his games from the bedroom to the main room. My dad was always gone and when he was home there was a fight. o one hit anything alive but it was loud, and a few times he'd beat on the furnature until the fragiler pieces broke. He'd bought another truck--my brother made an animated sprite cartoon about this, and it did not end well for the truck-buyer. My mom and I all thought it was hysterical. We laughed at it until we hurt ourselves because we couldn't admit we wanted to cry--or another lawnmower, or he'd pawned something, or he'd spent all the money getting something out of pawn. I needed to focus on my future--art college was starting to look possible--but I couldn't do it. My life was my family, and I was watching it unravel. I did not have the capacity to look beyond it. The world outside of Family was a strange, scary place where children get abducted by the government and the music is loud and ugly and God is not allowed. If Family ended...

Homeschooling doesn't end when you graduate, you see. Because it's not just the education that impresses itself on you. It's the attitudes and cultures of your family. You are clay; your family's needs are pressed into you and you're not strong enough to resist. Your life is your family. Your family is your life. To claim anything like normal you have to break it. Everything you're taught to value. Everything you believe about you. Everything you ever relied on for strength and comfort and self image and pride. You have to break it all and go down to nothing, and then start rebuilding, which is even harder than breaking.

The last straw was when my mother's car got repossessed. We'd gone on a trip and left Dad with the money to pay the bills; these bills--including rent--never got paid. Instead we had new tires on the cars and new electronics in the house. We did not discover this until the landlord called, and the bank came for Mom's car.

She kicked Dad out.

I remember the panic. I remember knowing that my mom had thrown my dad out of the house. I remember darkness. I remember hurting myself for the second time several days later. Self injury is a red moment that you take from the inside and put on the outside where it's safe, where you can minimize it and fix it with a bandaid rather than risky, honest therapy. I remember struggling on, struggling on, making plans, hoping. Praying. At one point the GED graduation ceremony happened and we threw ourselves into it with suicidal abandon. It no longer mattered what we said or did, it only mattered that for one hour we weren't here, where everything was failing.

We got evicted. Dad found us another place to live.

That last month is mostly blank with small flashes of relevance. Packing. Packing. Packing. Getting to the new house. Watching my dad drag my piano against the door jam, gouging the wood I'd kept pristine. The fucking corn on the cob that we ate almost every day that last month because we literally had nothing. else. to eat. My cat, who was still a kitten and still being bottle fed, curled up on my chest in an expression of trust and security that I was no longer capable of.

 That's why I brought her with me when we went to Houston for vacation. A trip for one week to see my grandparents. Riding up with the cat in the carrier feeling so glad, because not only was this going to be an escape from the house but we'd be able to eat something that wasn't fucking corn for once. I had to bottle feed her still, and I knew my dad couldn't do it. She was so small, and I wasn't able to admit how much I needed her to need me. Like she was my anchor point.

It was October 2004.

I wouldn't see my Dad until Christmas. Snow was falling in Texas. Everything I knew and trusted and believed in had ended.

The one thing I never learned from Homeschooling was how to live when everything I counted on was gone. 

On Homeschooling: Anti-vaxxers, privilege and Social Orthodoxy

There's a wonderful book called Cheaper by the Dozen that has nothing whatsoever to do with a terrible Steve Martin movie. In this story, all twelve of the Galbraith kids contract measles within hours of each other. The doctor, exasperated, tells the Galbraith parents (Frank and Lillian) that whenever their kids get sick, it upsets the health statistics for the whole state. "If I report a dozen new measles cases in one day, they're liable to declare an emergency and shut down all the schools!"

This happened in the 1920s, when vaccines weren't common. This was roughly the same time the President of the United States was a wheel-chair bound polio victim who went through great lengths to hide it.

This book was part of my homeschooling curriculum.  It's one frequently pushed by homeschooling proponants as a good example of parenting, child obedience and, lately, the principles of Quiverful: Have as many kids as your wife can carry. But it also illuminates one of the massive contributors to the anti-vaxx nonsense we now have to deal with.

 See, long before somebody brought their kid to Disneyland and ruined it for the rest of us, the folks that hijacked Christian based homeschooling gave us all an early warning. It came a couple years ago, here in Texas. That group is on the outer fringe of the Christian Patriarchy movement, and I had hoped and prayed that these idiots were the only ones organized enough to break herd immunity, and that any outbreaks would be limited to the insular Christian Patriarchy communities that congregate in North Texas, Nevada, Arkansas, ect. Bad by me.

Dr. Amy Tuteur, AKA the Skeptical OB, has a fantastic article on anti-vaxx philosophy as an example of privilege in the modern world. The core theme is that there is no greater example of WASP privilege than someone having access to affordable vaccines and refusing to use them. And the fact that the Christian Patriarchy movement is full of anti-vaxxers came as no surprise for me.  I knew about this several years ago, when I first started reading up on people like Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips and the ever-disgusting Pearls. But Dr. Amy's words codified something for me that I've been mousing around for months: in our society, it is a privilege to be undereducated and ignorant.Christian Patriarchy takes full advantage of systematic privilege. If White Anglo-Saxon Protestants did not have the privilege they do, Christian Patriarchy would not be a supportable philosophy. The only reason they can hamstring their wives and daughters, keep their children out of public education and spit on modern medicine is because privilege will catch them long before they fall.

This is how you can have a family of twelve live in a house without electricity and running water for ten years.

This is how the raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch could end with positive proof of systemized, instituionalized sexual abuse of children AND have the children go right back to the system that abused them.

This is how you can make a business advocating that parents beat their children until they die from the resulting trauma.

Because people know, somewhere in their minds, that they have the power to be ignorant and suffer no meaningful consequences.

The Christian Homeschooling community was hijacked back in the late 70s and early 80s. I do not use that word lightly. The demographic involved are usually desperate, slightly gullible people who have concern as a primary motive--concern for their children, their education and their politics. It's a population that is very ripe for someone convincing to come along and take over. It happened with Jim Jones in California. It happened with the Branch Davidians in Waco. It's happened in every religion, in every social group, and in every race and creed known to man. It's gonna happen again, inside of groups we haven't invented yet. Predators will always take advantage of others. It's part of the human condition.

There's a lot of key steps to manipulating an individual into rejecting mainstream society and the materials it offers. One of the major ones is to make that rejection a part of your identity. If a person merely has concerns about, say, Child Protective Services, then one can have those concerns soothed. If, however, you are taught to be frightened of CPS, and are convinced through carefully selected and edited case studies that you have good reason to fear them, then you will likely reject information that places them in a good light simply because fear is addictive. But even then, it's likely that you'll start to change your mind. But if fear of CPS is a part of your identity,  then not only will you be virulently anti-CPS, you will greedily consume information that confirms your bias. It is more important to have this bias be confirmed by an outside source than it is to be correct in your analysis.

I watched this happen inside of my family without knowing it. We were Christians, first and always. Then we began homeschooling and, in her effort to get guidance, my mother was taught to identify as a Homeschooler. Homeschooling wasn't just the best choice for our education, it was a part of who our family was. It set us apart, and the negative reaction of her own relatives, and my father's relatives, and our family friends--which quickly disappeared after we began homeschooling--only re-enforced her acceptance of Homeschooling as a part of her identity as a parent. The more shit you get for supporting an idea, the more devoted you are likely to become. And then, of course, she began reading materials that said fear of CPS was a part of being a Homeschooler--that it was an inherent facet of that identity and if you didn't follow it you weren't a real homeschooler. And because being a homeschooler was now an important part of our family Identity, we had to incorporate a fear of CPS into our every-day thinking.

When you factor in that we were also running a foster home full of kids who had been rescued by CPS, and that we had a daily reminder of just how many hoops CPS and the state will jump through to keep families together, you begin to understand the cognitive dissonance I grew up in. On one hand, I was told that we had to fear the state. On the other hand, we were frequently working with Child Protective Services, the court system, the parole system and about nineteen other state-run boards to try to keep our foster kids in touch with their families. We had one child, in fifteen years, emancipate from their parent. And yet we still believed that if Child Protective Services saw me and my brother playing outside at noon, they would take us away from our parents and we'd languish in the foster system forever.

This existed, not because we actually believed this shit, but because we'd been told that to keep our identity as homeschoolers intact, we had to have that fear.

Now, replace "homeschooling" with "good parent", and CPS with vaccinations, and you begin to see the co-relation.

If you are told that to be a good parent, you have to avoid vaccinations like the plague...you wind up with a whole lot of plague. 

It gets even worse when you realize that anti-vaxx rhetoric has become part of the Homeschooling rhetoric. It's not enough to distrust the government anymore; now you have to distrust its medicine. In order to "count" as a homeschooler in certain circles, you have to avoid vaccinating your kids. These are the ATI/Bill Gothard/Doug Phillips/Quiverfull/10,000 kids and Counting people.  If you want to "count" as a real Homeschooler, or whatever, you have to do this, this, this and this other thing. It's a kind of social orthodoxy. If you don't fit all the tennants of their belief system, then you don't get to claim that identity. And because you have already claimed that identity, this means losing everything you now believe defines you.

Debi and Michael Pearl, who really cannot be villified enough, are both advocate anti-vaxxers. None of their children have ever been vaccinated. For anything. They boast about this constantly. They have many devoted followers.

Groups like Christian Patriarchy and Anti-vaxxers are so very strict in who they accept and what behaviors are allowable, that you have to claim and conform to the identity they define. Those who don't get thrown out (or, if they're smart, run the fuck away) very, VERY early on. Want to follow science? Get out. Want to question and analyze all research? Fuck off. Want to allow for the morals and physical safety of others? Selfishness is a part of the identity. Go away.

The result is a band that adheres to a very tight belief system, and who are so tied into it that they will absolutely protect the ideology and the ideologes to the death. Not because they actually believe this shit, but because they incorporated it so deeply into their own psyches, rejecting any part of the idea means rejecting themselves. When an anti-vaxxer or a Christian Patriarchy proponent goes on a spitting rage screed, they're not defending their horrible belief system. They know they can't defend it. What they are defending is themselves. And the knee-jerk defensiveness they display is the same reaction you have when you are physically assaulted--the self must be protected at all costs. It's basic human instinct.

In a very real sense, the anti-vaxx sources and the Christian Patriarchy leaders have built themselves a comfortable protective wall. They can spout whatever they want and know that they will never be challenged. They have a human shield of devoted followers so caught up in the message, they view the Message as if it were their own limbs. The human shield will die for the Idology.

Unfortunately in both anti-vaxx atitudes and Christian Patriarchy, that shield is made of children. And it's the children who will pay the price.

Edit to add: awesomely sarcastic article comparing vaccinations to breaks on a car: http://robertmoorejr.tumblr.com/post/110101466091/im-an-anti-braker

On Homeschooling: Innoculation

When my mother decided to start homeschooling me (and later, my younger brother) she wanted to do it the "right" way.

This was back in '91, '92. At the time, we did not have the internet (That came in '98) and while we had a television, we didn't have access to a television station (less because religion and more because cable costs money and the local access channels came in via antenna and were mostly illegible). I was enrolled in the local public school for approximately half of first grade. I remember very little of this. Mostly the playground, the Candy Day, and how very much I enjoyed buying lunch from the cafeteria because it was something other than sandwiches. My mother, however, had a rather nasty run-in with my teacher--According to family lore Ms. Satoff started shouting at mom in the hallway because I couldn't do math problems in order--and that was the end of my public school career.

However, she had no clue how to homeschool, just that it was something she needed to do because we couldn't afford the alternative--private (and, naturally, Christian) school. So she went to the local bookstore and began buying whatever she could. Grade appropriate used textbooks that she chose without reguard for religious background. I remember a big workbook that was second and third grade material, all subjects together, and as long as I did two pages of math a day I was allowed to do as much of the rest of the subjects as I wanted (This book was approximately the size of a phone book. The math took an entire year to complete. The rest of the book didn't last very long). She bought new reading text books about once a month. These also did not last very long. She began to understand very quickly that, while information retention wasn't much of a problem for most subjects, math was definitely A Problem (all caps required) and that she probably needed to invent something resembling a lesson plan before I ran through everything else she'd bought in the first month.

This was when she started looking for help. And this was when she started running into what I consider to be a big, big problem.

At the time, all of the homeschooling resources locally were run and dominated by Christian groups. This, in and of itself, was not a problem. 99.999% of the local folks were congenial to a fault, your standard white Southerners who would sooner die than allow someone to feel uncomfortable. But when you have an unusual interest--and in the 90s, Homeschooling felt rather unusual--it becomes very easy for information on that interest to become highly centralized. That, in turn, allows the Powers that Be, so to speak, to control what information is delivered, as well as the tone and method of delivery.

The congenial Christian ladies here were all enamoured of several magazines. One of them was The Sycamore Tree, which I have yet to hear anything bad about and which simply delivered a listing of supplies, curriculum, lesson plans and educational toys. Getting the new magazines every month was like Christmas; I circled the things I wanted (princesses, castles and shiny science sets dominated) and looked forward to getting them. When you are seven, eight, and nine, it's difficult to understand that you're not ordering toys, especially when the workbooks were so much fun.

The other magazine my mother subscribed to was one called Homeschooling Today.

This one was the problem.

Once again, educational products dominated the pages. However, this magazine also reviewed information and offered opinions on how valuable each product was, and the emphasis was not on their educational quality but on their religious value--a judgement that is highly subjective, but that was presented as highly objective. An invisible standard that, in the magazine, at least, is never properly articulated, but to which everything is held.

We absorb most of our information as humans by osmosis. We go to spoken dialogue to confirm our own biases. We form those biases by what goes unspoken. There's a story that Whoopi Goldberg told about seeing Nichole Nichols in Star Trek for the first time, where she ran to her parents shouting "Mama, Mama, there's a black woman on TV and she ain't no maid," and how that moment defined something important for her. It isn't so much what Star Trek did as it is what everything else did. Everything else defined what her role would be by what it didn't let her be. There was a void in her experience that said so much more than any amount of racism ever could: You can't go here because there's no one like you here.

That's how those early homeschooling magazines were. Here's an ideal lesson for boys: Science, math, citizenship. Here's their role models: George Washington, George Patton, Buzz Aldren. Here's an ideal lesson for girls: How to sew. Role models? That's you, mom, so here's some advice on how to raise a good little girl. Boys get knights and castles. Girls get the princess locked in the castle. And there's a gigantic void where the alternative ought to be. I remember looking for girl cowboys, girl soldiers, girl knights. Nothing. There was one small paragraph and one small portrait about Joan of Arc in one history book, and I remember reading it over and over and over. One of my favorite movies as a young teen was Lee Lee Sobeski's Joan of Arc, not because it was a good movie, but because it was a girl commander.

And the magazine repeats it over and over: Here's the role for girls. Here's the role for boys. This is what a boy's book looks like. This is what a girl's story ought to be.

And then came the religious suggestions. Study this part. Study this story, because it's edifying. Study this. Make sure you address this part. Define your faith this way because it's the right way. Read this book, it's good. Read this one. Read this.

It's an attempt to develop a world in monotones by delivering only one color. Here's blue. Here's blue. Here's blue. Red, Green, Yellow, these are never even mentioned. It's hard to explain the massive vacuum where an alternative ought to be. It's not that it was railed against. It's that it wasn't even there. The words you'd need to identify the concept aren't permitted. Maybe subjects would be mentioned in hushed tones, a sort of hint at pearl clutching. This is a book with no hint of evolution. No sex education in this health book. This material is edifying for girls. But it never went so far as to actually define what was being avoided.

I am still relatively lukewarm about Harry Potter, but there was one aspect that I fell in love with immediately: the idea that avoiding a subject gives that subject power. Calling Voldemort He-who-must-not-be-named gave him power, made him so much more evil than simply saying the word ever could. That was how the homeschooling magazines worked. They inculcated a horror--not just a desire to avoid, but a horror of subjects--in the hearts of parents who didn't know any better simply by avoiding a topic.

I can't blame the parents at all, because my parents were there. Desperate. Ignorant. Frightened of doing wrong, of ruining their children, and facing an overwhelming opposition. Because oh, those magazines were so careful to validate the choice to homeschool, to educate on particulars, to soothe fears. And there was a great deal of good information in those magazines. Just enough truth to make you swallow the rest.


The result was that my mother worshipped this magazine. If she needed validation, there it was. If she needed information, she could likely find it. And she bought everything they said. To question any part of it was to call the entire thing into doubt.

I believe that my mother made the right choice by homeschooling us, but I also believe that Homeschooling Today, and the materials it advertised, were a poison pill coated in sugar. The best aspects of my education came, not from the magazines or the religious sources, but from secular resources and from my mother. The religious education I value wasn't some workbook or bible study, it was my mother having us create Fruit-of-the-Spirit baskets (Patience was grapes. I have no idea why) or having us act out the ten commandments and the crowning of King David (in which both myself and my brother were crowned. We had tie-dye robes and crowns made of oatmeal cannisters and tinfoil.) When my brother had even more trouble with math than I did, my mother created "Video-game math", in which a hand-drawn Megaman fought his way through stages involving multiplication tables and long division.

Many of the things that I regret came from the suggested materials. Books I hated were the ones recommended. The suggested religious studies left me believing that fantasy books were evil, and that I was committing a mortal sin by writing my own (I spent most of my earliest attempts at writing firmly convinced that they were damning me to Hell.) The gender education is something I am still working through.

Homeschooling is, and likely will continue to be, tied to religious inclinations. Having moral outrage for some aspect of a curriculum is generally the reason parents pull their kids from school, with underlying issues like abnormal learning styles or disabilities being the "reason beneath the reason", so to speak. Mom knew I was struggling with some subjects and was bored to tears in others. The shouting match with the teacher was just the final straw.

But a great number of people have hijacked homeschooling for their own reasons: To indoctrinate a generation into ideas and concepts that are so out-dated and (yes, kids) outrageous by the standards of the religion they claim to advocate. For several decades this movement chose to call themselves Christian Patriarchy. That name has only recently fallen out of favor, and it's not because their attitudes have changed.

And the path into it? It's not chosen by parents who want to live a life that limited. It's chosen by people--scared, frightened people with children, in over their heads and desperate--who aren't aware that the help being offered is, likely as not, rotten to the core.

On Homeschooling and Growing Up: Real School

I kept getting in trouble for skipping school.

It's funny that I'm going to open this possible series about homeschooling by talking about the one time I did go to a normal school. But it set a standard in my mind. As I grew up and gained more autonomy, the episode with real school became more and more important. It's what turned Homeschooling into my choice, into something that I owned and defended every chance I got.

In retrospect that school probably wasn't normal. I had a very small class--7th and 8th grade put together, 13 students--and the curriculum was A Beka. A Beka is primarily aimed at conservative homeschooling groups; I was very familiar with the materials. I'd been using things like them for as long as I can remember. The American History books, for example, used the same photographs and paintings on the same pages in both the 4th grade and 6th grade textbooks. The most we ever learned about Native American cultures were the evangelical attempts of David Brainerd. George Whitfield got more space than George Washington. Civil rights were a footnote; Billy Graham was a chapter.

World History did not exist.

Paddles did.

Of course, the parents had to sign a permission slip. Most of them did. This was a very tight knit community. Most of them went to the same church I did, until that church had a doctrinal falling out and split up. Most of these kids had gone to this same school from first grade on up. Most of the parents agreed that the world might end the next election if we didn't get a Republican into the White House, but they disagreed on wheither or not the End of the World would be good or bad. Clinton was still president. I overheard several adults once have a serious conversation about how he fit all the criteria for the Antichrist.

 Every morning we would gather in the gymasium--which doubled as a church sanctuary on Sundays--and sing worship songs after the Pledge of Allegiance...and the Pledge to the Christian Flag, and the Pledge to the Bible. I was familiar with all three; I'd been doing Awanas AKA Christian Girl Scouts for as long as I could remember. A different class would get to come up to the front and hold up the big, hand-lettered song lyric cards up so that everyone could read them. These were songs that most of us knew by heart. Amazing Grace. Go tell it on the Mountain. As the Deer. I thought everyone knew these songs, because everyone I knew did. Contemporary Christian music was edgy. Pop music like Madonna and N'Sync was unheard of. Literally. No one listened to it. When we were allowed to bring outside novels to school they were the Left Behind series. C.S. Lewis was risky because there were talking animals and magic in them. My class memorized the entire book of James, one chapter at a time. When it came time to learn about evolution, our science teacher gave us a big speech about how this was a state mandated course and we didn't really need to pay attention. He followed it up with a special on how Mt. St. Helens disproved the whole thing because of petrified trees.

We got tested on that.

My brother and I were enrolled there because my mother wanted to have a job. Our homelife was chaotic and financially unpredictable, and Mom's tactic for solving this was to get a job. She did this several times that I can remember. Sometimes she would try to homeschool us while working. I'd be the one taking care of my brother and supervising both his lessons and my own. Mom would grade our work when she got home. But this was difficult and stressful and more often than not I'd wind up playing dolls upstairs, or digging in the side yard with my brother, or up the nearest tree with a science fiction novel. Sometimes I'd even get my brother wrapped up in a video game, then get on my bike and take off for the library. Then, bookbag balanced on the handlebars, I'd go down to the city park, hide my bike in the bushes and walk down to the riverbank. This time around, she decided to place us in school. I was very excited. It felt like a special treat. I'd get to be with other kids. I'd have all these great new books to read. But because her job started earlier than my dad's, it became his job to get me and my brother to school.

We were never on time. NEVER. I would be outside, sitting in the car fifteen minutes before we were supposed to leave; my father would come out ten minutes after. Then the rush to my classroom, hoping and praying to God that I'd get there and the class would still be there, that this time Assembly was a few minutes late. No luck. Shove the coat and lunch box into the cubby--everybody brought their lunch, the school served no food--and race down the hall. If I was lucky and Dad were quicker I'd make it in time for the Pledge to the Christian Flag or the Pledge to the Bible. More often than not we were on the third or fourth song, and I had to make my way to my class with my head down in shame. I was so awfully, horribly late. It was my fault for not making Dad get out to the car sooner. I'd have to be better tomorrow.

After a few months, though, Dad decided to stop taking us to school.

It wasn't an every day thing. He had a job, after all. But at least once a week, on Tuesday or Wednesday, sometimes on Friday, he'd decide we didn't need to go to school that day. We'd get in the car--I'd be nerviously drumming my fingers on the armrest, worried about being late--and when we got to the highway he'd turn left instead of right and we'd start driving. We'd end up in Weatherbury, or Grandbury, or Dublin, and he'd go to garage sales while we sat in the car. When our grades began to suffer, he'd take my brother to school and keep me out, and we'd be driving, driving, driving all day until it was time to pick my brother up and take us home. We'd go to lunch. He'd tell me how special I was. He'd introduce me to all his friends. I learned to bring books with me because I knew I'd get very bored. I'd ask nicely to listen to Christian radio; more often than not, we just played Rush Limbaugh.

By this time I hated school. I hated how boring the materials were. I hated that we were allowed to use calculators during math, that I wasn't allowed to learn how to calculate square roots longhand, that we spent two weeks on "practical" math, like learning how to read electric meters and how to divide recipes, but only spent one day on pi. I hated that we traded World History--something I'd never gotten to study--for Texas Government. I hated, hated, hated the bible study period. I hated the materials we had to study in language arts. The english teacher had an obsession with Spain, so when it came time to do research reports we were each assigned a different Provence. Some of the books we had to study were good--Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Shiloh stand out as high points--but some of them were just teeth-grittingly awful. Johnny Tremaine should never be inflicted on an adult, much less a thirteen year old. Each day we had to read an assigned chapter, summerize what we'd just read, and then identify the parts of the sentences in our summery. This is a noun, this is a verb, this is an adjective. I'd been diagramming sentences since I was eight, so this was completely uninteresting. Finally, I stopped copying down the lessons altogether. I already knew this and I was sick of all of it. I just wanted to go back home to my homemade yarn dolls and the epic fantasy adventure we were having beneath my bed.

At that point, the English teacher pulled me out of class, sat me down, and gave me a long lecture on everything I was doing wrong. And the thing he focused on wasn't that I had stopped participating in the lessons, but that I was skipping school. And I sat there feeling deeply betrayed. I had not understood that Dad was pulling us out without permission from the school. I believed that a parent had every right to simply call in and say "So and so is sick today" and then just...not take us. I sat there, staring back at my teacher, and feeling like I'd just been tricked by all these adults. I'd been told my whole life the world worked a certain way. Now they were telling me it worked differently and that it was my fault I wasn't playing by the rules.

The next day, Dad wanted to keep me home again. I begged and pleaded no. I didn't explain about the talking to I'd gotten--I didn't want to get in trouble with him--so I just said that I really, really wanted to go to school that day. Please. I didn't want to skip it anymore. 

 He was very hurt. He didn't understand why I did not want to have fun with him anymore.

Now, as an adult, I understand: my brother and I existed for our parents, not for us. They saw school as warehousing kids, a place to get them out of their parent's hair for a few hours so they could go have jobs and whatnot. School was not a place for children. Education was something we got because the government said we had to do it, and because it'd be useful in some far off distant land where we'd be adults and our own people. When Dad decided that he didn't want to put his toys in the School box, he'd keep us out and spend the day amusing himself. When he didn't want to play with us, well, that's what school was for. And of course it all got dressed up in God's Will. We weren't going to evil public school--no hyperbole there, the public school system was the literal tool of Satan and my brother and I were so blessed not to be in it. No matter how bad things got at home, public school would be worse.

There is a part of me that understands how insane all of that sounds. There's another part that still thinks it is normal, that still cannot see what the problem was.

He cut down on the absenteeism, but he'd still do it. And now I'd sit in the car with high anxiety, knowing that the next day I'd be going to school and I'd probably get in trouble again. By then I wasn't allowed to go to recess anymore. I had to sit in class and do additional work to make up for the amount of school I'd skipped. I didn't care; the class had decided that they wanted to play basketball in the gym instead of going outside, and I was sick to death of basketball. I'd much rather sit in the classroom. When I finally got caught up, I still begged off. I didn't want to touch that goddamn ball ever again. I'd memorize bible verses until the class left, then sneak over to the bookcase and snag something interesting, like The Invisible Man or The Dark is Rising.

That's the only good thing I got out of that year of school: it introduced me to Susan Cooper.

When school ended, we moved. We'd been living up north near Dallas, and now we moved back south to just outside of Corpus Christi; that was when the wheels on the family bus really fell off. We went back to homeschooling. We'd learn out of old, battered college textbooks. I'd do research reports on whatever I wanted. I'd read the encyclopedia for fun. I never had to learn to spell. For maybe a year, things were stable. The one thing I knew, though, was that I did not ever want to go back to school. Mom was right--it was just a place to warehouse kids, where learning was limited by the slowest person in class, and where you were not allowed to study anything you wanted, but only what the teacher had assigned you.

After that, some years my mother would ask me if we wanted to enroll in real school or stay at home. I was always adamant. Homeschooling. Real school, I knew, would just be misery all over again.

A few weeks ago my mother and I were talking about the past, and my growing up and homeschooling, and I brought up how abysmal my lone experience with "real" school was. How I was often driven to frustrated tears in Math Class because I didn't understand, and I wanted to, and the rest of the class was just using their calculators when there was this whole wonderful thing we could have been learning about. How much I loathed reading the assigned books. And I mentioned how I got in trouble for absenteeism because Dad kept pulling us out of school.

She stared at me, amazed, because she never knew.