Too Homeschooled to be Normal

I invite my sister Karylle and my cousin Rachel over for our annual viewing of The Holiday.  A Christmas season tradition. We order pizza and pour glasses of red wine. It is one of the most familiar feelings in the world, the three of us girls settling in for a movie. A ritual we have been practicing together for our whole lives. Karylle had been cleaning her apartment earlier that day, looking through old photos to include in a newly thrifted frame. She brought over some pictures — the three of us as young teenagers in my parent’s kitchen on Thanksgiving. Rachel and Karylle, as five-year-olds, sitting like dolls on a couch in Easter dresses, their hands posed and folded in their lap, no doubt dictated by whoever was behind the camera. A shot of Rachel in what we proclaim to be an archival photo for the year 2000. In a black, white, and baby pink Hello Kitty velour tracksuit with a matching trucker hat, Rachel stands in my sister’s preteen hot pink bedroom. In the background is a plastic neon beaded curtain in the doorway, a plush cheetah bulletin board above her desk from Claire’s with a KISS 108 bumper sticker, and magazine cutouts of Nick Jonas. We can practically smell the Sweet Pea body spray through the photo. It holds dear a memory of the hours the three of us spent together in that room with a CD in the boombox or a VHS playing on the little silver TV we weren’t allowed to get cable for.  We hold the photo close to our faces to find all the details of our past selves.

I leap from my place on the floor, down the stairs, the cement of the basement cold through my socks. I find the plastic bin I keep down there in storage and bring it back to the living room. It’s not because of the wine, I would have done this anyway. I can never say no to nostalgia. From the bin, I pull out more childhood photos and photobooth printouts from the mall. Tickets from movies, dating back as far as 2004, their titles barely legible now.  A book of cartoon doodles, an American Girl Doll recipe book. A thick envelope full of notes my sister and I scribbled to each other.  My sister reads them out loud, and my house fills with the sound of our harmonized laughter.  After reading letters from past boyfriends and finding old magazine cutouts that used to be taped on my own bedroom walls, I find a booklet made of construction paper. It’s a birthday card Rachel made for me when I turned 14. Crayon drawings and paper levers to pull to reveal inside jokes we forgot about.

“Wow, we were so creative,” we laugh, looking down at all the things we drew and hand-wrote and glued. The amount of time and care we put into something to make the other laugh, or to be playful, or to say something nice. There are things we suddenly remember that are now lost, that we wish we could find, like how every year my sister and I would make Rachel a happy birthday video with video clips from the internet, a week-long process of editing and cutting and downloading footage illegally off of YouTube.

“We were so weird,” I say.

“Well, yeah,” Karylle says. “We were homeschooled.”

*

The three of us were homeschooled for various grades of our education. As adults, we all have different opinions about how our experiences went, so I can only speak for myself.

After first grade, a year I did not very much care for, my mother had this nagging feeling that perhaps I didn’t need to spend so much of my time as a small child away from her in a place I didn’t even want to be. She talked to my father, in tears over it all.

“You know,” he said. “There are people who actually school their kids at home.” He said he heard about it on the radio. My mother, with a renewed sense of hope, did her research and set her sights on homeschooling. She had to get permission from the superintendent and be screened with a background check. We, her children, had to be tested each year by the school board, a standardized test I took at our public library, to make sure I was actually learning. And so from 2nd through 4th grade my mother taught me at home.  My sister and I, two grades apart, sat on opposite ends of the kitchen table, my mother floating back and forth between the two of us as we studied out of our workbooks. The curriculum was sent to us from a Catholic homeschooling organization called Seton Home Study. I remember the excitement of tearing open the cardboard box dropped off my FedEx, and holding my new books in my hands each year. Each box also came with a fresh pair of plastic rosary beads and a saint prayer card, something I looked forward to in getting to see what color beads I would get or which saint would be featured.

We did lessons in the morning and then crafts, so many crafts in the afternoon, and then my sister and I would be free to play. I was just a kid, happy with my books, happy with my mom and my sister. With Rachel and my other cousins, who were now schooled at home too, thanks to my mother’s influence.

Before 5th grade, my parents heard about a small Catholic school nearby and decided to send us there, realizing that as adolescents, we needed to get out more.  I spent my middle school years in a plaid skirt and navy blue cross tie. For 9th and 10th grade, I went to another private school, which claimed to be Catholic, but it was really just full of rich kids. The tuition soon became too much of a financial burden for my family, the 2008 recession right around the corner. My parents, wanting to spare me from the “heathens” of the public school system, decided to homeschool me for my last two years of high school.

At 16, I was devastated. I fought so hard for my parents to let me stay or to at least let me try out the public school. But in the end, another package from Seton Home Study arrived, this time with advanced math books and the baby blue rosary beads I already had. I still saw my friends on weekends, but it always felt like so much had happened that I wasn’t a part of. One of the girls I spent most of my sophomore year with turned on me, sending me a message via AIM that she would not be giving me the ticket she purchased for homecoming after all. She spread rumors about me, talked behind my back, and I was at my kitchen table with Pride and Prejudice in front of me, unable to defend my honor.

But by senior year, things were looking up. I got my license and a job as a cashier at Pier One Imports. My dad bought me a black Xterra. I only had a few classes left in my curriculum, so I did school for a few hours in the morning and picked up the 1 o’clock shift, the one most kids couldn’t work because public schools let out at 2:30pm. As the eldest daughter with a love of deadlines, my mother no longer needed to be involved with my education. Instead, she handed me the curriculum planner, which I followed to a tee, sending in my assignments through the mail to be graded by the teachers at Seton. I also became very familiar with the math teacher who I spoke to on the phone at least once a week because math has always been the bane of my existence.

I started hanging out with a different girl from my old high school and we went to open mic nights at Kiskedee Coffee House and had sleepovers at her house. And, of course, I was never truly alone because I had Karylle and Rachel as fellow homeschoolers.

But of course, I knew homeschooling was weird, and by default, so was I.

Homeschooling wasn’t as popular as it is now. Back in 1997, when I was just a seven-year-old kid, I was just happy to be with my mom and sister. I didn’t miss my old school at all. But other people didn’t know what to make of it. Women would come up to us in the grocery store, shooting my mother a strained look while they asked my sister and me why we weren’t in school. I remember this happening mostly in the bakery section, where my sister and I were on our way to score the free sample awaiting us at the cake counter.

“We’re homeschooled,” I mustered, sprinkled sugar cookie in hand, to which they would frown and look at my mother like she was insane. This happened so frequently that eventually my mother told me I could stop answering since, as a shy child, these interactions would give me anxiety.

“You don’t owe a stranger an explanation,” she would say. By this point, I imagine she was used to defending her decision.

When I was a teenager and forced to answer questions about my schooling status, I usually didn’t have an emotional support cookie in my grasp. Most adults who asked kept their eyes on me a little longer, no doubt trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Some of them even tutted and said, “Oh really? What a shame.” And shame was exactly what I felt as I watched their opinion of me shift from girl to other. To something I wasn’t or something I was missing out on.

My peers were a mixed bag. Boys either didn’t give a shit or thought being schooled at home would be cool because I didn’t have to be anywhere early in the morning. But the girls— oh, the girls. They often gave me the same looks of pity as their parents or added drama to their responses. “I could literally NEVER do that!” they said. “Oh my GOD.” One of my co-workers at Pier One, a tiny thing with a wide smile of someone who has always known popularity, found my situation so utterly baffling that she made a point to exploit me whenever she could. Once, while telling another girl a story, she referenced her MySpace but then stopped to look at me. “Oh wait,” she said. “Do you even know what MySpace is?”

I couldn’t wait to tell Karylle and Rachel about this interaction. Sometimes, when I worked an evening shift and it was slow, and I had done all my busy work, I wrote notes to them on Pier One stationary, dramatic diatribes of my night that I folded into my apron to give to them later. Because here was the thing —I may be weird to these girls, but I wondered if they had actually ever seen other homeschooled kids.

I had met many religious homeschoolers over the years, especially in the younger grades, when my mother found homeschooling groups so that we could meet more kids to play with. We knew families who weren’t allowed to watch TV or listen to secular music. There was one family who made their own clothes and the girls were only allowed to wear dresses. They had no idea who Mary Kate and Ashley were, never mind N’SYNC or the Rugrats. I knew what MySpace was. Hell, I even watched MTV. I even got my clothes at that mall.

Maybe we were weird, but we weren’t weird enough. My mother remembers feeling as though she was never taken seriously as a homeschooling mom because she didn’t look like one. In her makeup, stylish clothes, and colored hair, she said she mostly felt like a harlot walking into the home-schooling groups. I only remember feeling nothing but proud of my pretty mother, who sparkled whenever she entered a room.

We were these inbetweeners. Too normal to be homeschooled and too homeschooled to be normal.

*

When it was time for me to graduate, I didn’t just get my diploma in the mail as you might expect. Seton Home Study, based in Virginia, also held a countrywide graduation where all the freaks could congregate in their cap and gowns. My family rarely went on vacations —my parents were always in the middle of an argument or getting over one—so the decision to rent an RV and make a real family trip out of my finishing high school did not come lightly. Karylle and I were ecstatic. We couldn’t wait to camp and sightsee. To actually go somewhere. In the RV, we played MASH and read Tiger Beat and danced to our parent’s boxset Neil Diamond CDs. We used up the entire memory card in my digital camera.

We both were very aware of the comedy of the situation. A little homeschooled family’s voyage from New England through the grassy knolls of Virginia with the rest of the country’s Catholic homeschool population. 

During the ceremony, the boy I sat next to talked a lot. I remember working hard to both listen and mentally take notes to relay back to my sister. I wish I could remember our conversation, but when I look back in my diary now, all I had written about the interaction was that this boy was a nerd and his name was Dave. Recently, I asked my mom what she remembers about my graduation, and she said she wore a white fitted pin-striped suit that, upon entering the auditorium, was a reminder of what kind of mother she most certainly was not.

“God, I loved that suit,” she said.

*

I’m sure there are things I lost by being homeschooled, especially for those last few years of high school. I didn’t go to prom, I missed out on parties, I tried weed for the first time a lot later in life. I probably could have made more friends.

But I can’t help but consider, now that I’m a writer, how the experience shaped my creativity. I could argue that the fun I may have missed out on also allowed me to tap into that creative side of myself without the influence, or let’s face it, judgment of my peers. Even though Junior year sucked, I also read 52 books, tracking my reading habits on the inside cover of a composition notebook. I got into drawing and sketching daily. I wrote story after story after story in my notebooks. I bought an ugly wooden easel at a thrift store and spent hours listening to The Fray and Dashboard Confessional as I painted delicate butterflies on it with acrylic paint. I cut up all my issues of Nylon magazine and collaged my closet doors. And then, of course, there were the hours spent with Karylle and Rachel. That time we made a series of silent films we shot with my digital camera and edited together with Windows Media Player. Or the movie trailer we filmed in our basement. The notes and cards and stories we made. Rachel and I even learned how to play the guitar.  It seems looking back, I was always creating or expressing myself. That I was always discovering what I actually liked. Maybe I was always a little weird.

*

Throughout college, if anyone asked me what high school I went to, I just said the name of the private school I attended for 9th and 10th grade. A half truth, still loaded with that old familiar taste of shame, of being the odd girl out. Of course, it really doesn’t matter now. It was so long ago. Now, it’s a story I like to tell to make others laugh. Now it’s my little fun fact, the thing about me that makes me strange. We all have something, don’t’ we? Now, Rachel, Karylle and I look for the ways our experience manifested in our adult lives. Would I have written so much if I hadn’t been homeschooled? Would I have read as many books or daydreamed as many stories? Would the novel I have written exist today? Would I have been a writer at all?

*

Recently, tired of flicking through too many movie options, my husband and I threw on the 1999 rom-com with Frendy Prinze Jr and Rachael Leigh Cook, She’s All That.

“That’s you,” my husband said, during a shot of Laney Boggs, the nerdy art girl, her peers moving out of her way as she trumps through the halls with a canvas and paint speckled shoulder bag. I laughed. He is always finding versions of me in the movies we watch, some realistic and some just to get a rise out of me. Since I didn’t finish high school in the classical sense, I never got to fit into any of those cliches. But if I think of myself at Laney’s age, I, too, spent many nights held up in my room with a pile of magazine clips making a collage or painting. Maybe I really have always been that girl. The little weirdo.