A 16 minute read.
I don’t like telling people that I was homeschooled. It makes me feel like a specimen: they always ask, “What was it like?” as if I was a giraffe recently escaped from the zoo. Did you sew your own clothes? Did you ever wash your hair? Did you speak English? Did they feed you grass?
I always have the urge to explain that I bought my jeans at American Eagle, I have several friends I am not related to, and I can talk to people in modern English, despite my dad’s efforts to the contrary–when I was learning to speak he would read aloud an old version of The Canterbury Tales, which sounded like this: “Me thinketh it acordaunt to resoun, to telle yow al the condicioun of ech of hem, so as it semed me.” No, I am no different from my peers. But I don’t tell them that. Instead I say, “I read a lot of books.”
But that is not a full answer. Homeschooling is so much more than a way of learning math and history; it was my life. It shaped how I think and act. So why do I keep it a secret? If it didn’t make me weird, why does it bother me?
I wasn’t one of those kids who began in public school and then transitioned to homeschool; homeschool was how we started. I don’t remember much from before first grade–sitting at a little table in my underwear drawing numbers, and the tight hot feeling in my chest when my mom told me I could not eat the whole bird’s nest I made of pretzels and powdered sugar frosting in one day. As I got older I added and subtracted and multiplied. I learned to write, and write cursive. I read stacks and stacks of books from the library, including one with flaps and pull tabs that allowed me to extract a mummy’s brain from his nose with a crochet hook. I wrote and illustrated books of ten or twelve pages about ancient cultures, and a scroll about Egypt that was so long it stretched across the whole living room. I helped my mom bake flatbread and made clay jars and wove miniature rugs out of yarn.
The year I was eight we had a season pass to Reptile Gardens. The walls were lined with glass boxes displaying marvelous creatures–a bright yellow poison frog, a python slithering through a geode, a statue of a woman dressed in exotic clothes holding a crystal ball who would occasionally yell, “Come get your fortune!” My little brother ran around and I watched him nervously, afraid he was annoying other people. I learned many important things there: snakes move using little flaps on their belly; gila monsters are real; don’t give money to the fake fortune teller. But the best part of Reptile Gardens was the shows. We saw a man wrestle an alligator, a parrot sing happy birthday, and a falcon dive for strips of jerky. Once, the pheasant got disoriented and ran away from his captors to hide in the grass, so the birds of prey could not be brought out because there were children present, and this was not BBC’s Planet Earth.
This makes homeschool sound fun, which is not entirely true. We seldom went on these field trips. Everything was homework–I had to keep myself focused and on track, even when I didn’t want to. My brother would not stop talking unless he was asleep, and on many occasions he drove my sister and me to tears because we could not concentrate. I had to memorize multiplication tables and wasn’t allowed to play until I had finished all the day’s duties. We didn’t get snow days or extra vacation. We had to take standardized tests every few years to make sure we were actually learning.
At track meets I was a tortoise in a crowd of hares, except the hares never stopped to take naps during the one-hundred meter dash.
But once our work was finished, we were free. Then, if we had nothing to do, we would read or ride our bikes or stuff our extra clothes full of blankets to make the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. If we wanted something, we would make it, especially my brother. He built himself a working pinball machine out of cardboard and a soapbox out of pallet wood. When he decided he wanted a muscle shirt he sewed one from an old sheet and drew Jesus on the front and the twelve disciples on the back. I made myself an assortment of dolls, each more disproportionate than the next, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder bonnet that entirely eliminated my peripheral vision. My sister learned origami and folded a jar full of stars and jumping frogs.
My fashion sense was interesting. I dressed myself carefully, always wanting to look nice, but I didn’t understand what a normal outfit was. I loved dresses and skirts and wore them while I hiked and gardened, sometimes with hot pink sweatpants underneath. There’s a photo of me hauling tree branches after a snow storm in a lacy purple sweater and ski mittens. My favorite outfit was a pink paisley dress (it had pockets!), diamond print gray and white leggings, and a pair of mismatched socks–one with colorful circles, the other with triangles.
My middle school years all blend together in memory. I would sit at the desk in my mom’s bedroom and read about men who sailed across the ocean on a raft, and try to understand algebra and recreate impressionist paintings. I say recreate, but I often miscalculated the proportions and had to make up a large section of art that wasn’t there.
In sixth grade, I began my journey to public schooling by joining the middle school track team three weeks into the season. The only detail not fuzzy about the process is when my mom and three siblings and I were leaving the school after signing all the necessary paperwork, my brother ate an Every Flavor jelly bean that tasted like a rotten egg and gagged the whole drive home.
There were a lot of people at practice, and a lot of boys, and I was scared of boys, even though they ignored me because they didn’t know who I was and they were only twelve and didn’t yet want the attention of girls. I was also scared of girls, because they wore leggings and short Under Armour shorts and had sleek hair and double ear piercings. They seemed so confident as they raced each other around the track, declaring Dylan the prize. And I jogged behind in my dirty pink sneakers, confused.
At track meets I was a tortoise in a crowd of hares, except the hares never stopped to take naps during the one-hundred meter dash. However, I was determined to keep improving and returned in seventh grade. My track buddy did not, recognizing her skills lay in less athletic areas. I now know her absence helped me push myself as a runner. But at the time I missed our conversations about whether she should dye her hair green and how to cure hiccups. Another seventh grade girl tried to integrate me into her friend group, but I was hesitant because she spoke crassly and I didn’t understand most of her jokes, except for the time she moved a garbage can and sat under the sign that said “trash.”
Back then I waved my homeschooling about like a standard because people thought it was interesting, but when they asked the inevitable question–what do you do?–I still replied I read a lot of books, except for the time I said I did basically nothing and then got soundly scolded by my mom.
When I was in eighth grade my dad assigned my siblings and me to read Macbeth together. In order to understand it better, we would pick one scene of each act to reenact. I insisted that we film it, because I imagined myself a movie director. So somewhere there is a video of my sister, her long curly hair hanging over her eyes, stirring an imaginary pot in the backyard and croaking, “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,” while I paraded around thinking I was the star of the show.
As I got older, my struggle with diligence grew. Forcing myself to pay attention to my work had always been challenging, but without anyone watching me, I quit trying. I took so long to finish anything that my mom made me write down all I did, and what time I did it. My list goes like this:
9:19 do mental math & problem solving
9:20 sit & stare at math
9:23 stop staring at math & TRY to think 🙂
9:27 read new concept
9:45 start to fall asleep
You said to be very detailed!
Even I was shocked at how much time I wasted during the day, especially when I was supposed to be doing algebra. I worked to change my behavior, but most of the time it felt like juicing a rock.
My parents did their best to keep the four of us children on track, but they didn’t have time to check on my work every day while schooling the younger ones. Once I reached high school, I generally completed everything out of a sense of obligation–I had to follow the rules. It wasn’t until my senior year that I skipped Bible for a few months, but I felt so bad I spent my first semester of college reading A Theology of Biblical Counseling to make it up. But my siblings don’t have the same legalistic drive. One of my brothers prefers dismantling bicycles to writing essays, and my sister just gets distracted. They both, on several occasions, have gotten themselves behind and then had to spend their summers reading Les Miserables or studying geometry.
To my surprise, many of my classmates were annoyingly friendly. They would say hello, and I was not yet ready to respond or engage in normal human conversation.
In ninth grade, I enrolled in two classes at Central High School. I have no memory of the reason. I didn’t even remember it at the time–my mom had to tell me, once we got home from the open house, what my choir classroom looked like. It was not the size of the building that made me nervous–I was familiar with the halls because my dad teaches English there–but there was so much I didn’t know. What happens if I have to go to the bathroom while I’m in class? What happens if I forget my ID? What happens if I get sick? I wrote in my journal, “I was kinda freaked out at the start, but I think I’m gonna like school there.”
Running in circles on a gravel track with a hundred little kids hadn’t prepared me for the hoard of cursing, kissing, snapchatting teenagers that swept through Central’s halls. I walked in a cloud of obliviousness formed by a lack of knowledge. At the beginning of the year one of my dad’s twelfth grade students announced that he would be my senior friend. It was mostly a joke, but he occasionally climbed on top of his desk chair and waved his arms dramatically above his head when I walked by. I told my family, and then proceeded to announce, “I’m so glad I haven’t had to deal with boys flirting with me yet.” My dad laughed, and I flushed because I knew I had missed something important.
I knew that I hadn’t been around other kids much, hadn’t experienced the things they did, had never seen a social media app. In my mind, I built my peers up to an impossible height. By the time I was fourteen, I thought everyone noticed that my jeans weren’t as skinny as theirs, my shoes were not real Converse, my hair was frizzy, my phone was nonexistent, and decided to avoid me.
But to my surprise, many of my classmates were annoyingly friendly. They would say hello, and I was not yet ready to respond or engage in normal human conversation. Please understand that this was not typical for me. In the past, I never struggled to find things to say to anyone, and I could hold eloquent conversations with my teachers in English and Spanish (“no me gusta hamburguesas,” I would tell Señora Kranz, “pero me gusta frijoles”). But when my classmates spoke to me, which was often, meaning about once a week, my brain would stall and strangely terse or sarcastic things would come out of my mouth, or I would be rendered mute, left only to nod or look mildly panicked. I wished desperately that I had inherited my brother’s social ease–he knew the names of everyone in the neighborhood, their children, their pets, their grandkids. Words flowed from him without restraint and his only mistakes were due to over-friendliness and immaturity, not fear.
I think my ears burned red most of the time. When words left my mouth they always sounded different than they had in my head. In Spanish 1 I told my teacher that she was “mi profesora favorita” in front of the whole class and spent the rest of the day chastising myself for sounding like a suck-up. In tenth grade, on the first day of Chemistry class, a junior boy asked for my Snapchat. It was noisy in the room and I wasn’t familiar with this ritual, so I said, “What?” Only after several days of contemplation did I remember he had pulled his phone out of his pocket when he spoke, and put the pieces together.
It was in high school I stopped telling people I was homeschooled. It helped that no one asked anymore; there were 2,000 students, so they never wondered why they didn’t see me in their other classes. But the pressure to fit in had been building through middle school, and homeschooling was one of the things that made me different. I don’t know why I was afraid people would judge me for it; whenever it came out, no one really cared. The topics that really shocked people were phones and boys. When they discovered that I didn’t have a cellphone and had never dated or kissed anyone, my peers would exclaim, “What?” or, “Oh my gosh that sounds so nice!” Or, “So do you have dial-up wifi?”
In eleventh and twelfth grade, I was mostly public schooled. I had much less free time than before, but I chose to spend my extra hours with my siblings. We hiked and cooked and dressed up in our mom’s old clothes and talked, a lot.
I loved the way I did high school, and looking back I wouldn’t change any of it, even though I didn’t get to walk at graduation or wear a cap and gown. I went to regular school with people my age, but still did cool things on my own. The summer before tenth grade I started writing a book, just for fun, and once I’d finished the regular sophomore English curriculum my dad had prepared, he let me work on the novel for school credit. The next year I interviewed my grandpa and recorded for posterity his stories about baby ducks and tractors and pizza. For P.E. I went to the school gym with my dad and picked up ten-pound weights and put them back down.
Now, two years into college, I realize people have always described me as “chill” and “quiet,” never “shy” or “awkward.” They compliment my hair and my outfits. They tell me that I’m good at talking to people. I’m not even homeschooled anymore. So why do I hate to tell people about it? They clearly don’t judge me for it.
When a classmate read the first draft of this essay, she told me that she loved my story of how I’d grown confident in my own skin. But that’s not what this story is about, because even though that’s what I tell people, it’s not true. Even though I become more socially aware each year and push myself to talk to people and buy earrings without my mom’s help, I feel awkward. My communication problems persist: in my twelfth grade English class, my teacher complimented my hair and asked what I’d done to make it look so good and I said, “I washed it.” And just last week one of my coworkers made a comment about how she cried a lot, and I told her, “That doesn’t surprise me.” I spend most of my time thinking about what other people might be thinking about me, and how I should impress them. I feel like that pheasant at Reptile Gardens, a bit disoriented and lost, hating to hide in my safe cage yet longing to be shielded and protected from all the scary vultures and falcons out there. But I don’t realize the birds of prey are like the sharks from Finding Nemo, having decided: “I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food. Except stinkin’ dolphins.”
Here’s what I wonder: was it homeschooling that has made me feel so awkward and out of place, even after five years of being in the public school system, or is it just that I’m human? When I’m at home, with all social pressures removed, I make even more mistakes. I hurt people with sarcastic comments. I joke about turds. I’m loud. I poke my brother until he screams. I listen to the words pour from my mouth and think, why can’t I just shut up or say something good or actually funny for once. Why can’t I just be good, for once.
Maybe the reason I avoid telling people that I was homeschooled is because, deep down, I fear that the stereotypes are true of me. That I do have trouble communicating, and I don’t conform to the social codes of dress. But is that really a bad thing? A certain level of social knowledge is helpful, but there is joy in the pink paisley dress and crazy socks.
Ellen Sheehy 