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strongwomanspeaks4joy · 3 years

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Homeschooling isn’t (wasn’t) for me

Sometimes gaps appear in what should be my toolkit for this thing we call life. Sometimes those gaps are there from past traumas wiping out memories or the ability to retain information. Sometimes those gaps are there because the information just was never put in. That download didn’t happen. Something was missed. The adults in my life forgot to teach me a thing. Oops. Right? No harm done, right? “You’re so smart! You’re able to figure it out.” Right?

But those gaps mean that suddenly my brain skids into a locked-break stop. I struggle to answer simple questions because I don’t know the simple basics of the question. Cue anxiety, depression, and feeling like an absolute fraud. Feeling stupid. Feeling angry. Feeling lost and adrift. Feeling like a failure.

...............

I was homeschooled K-12. That means I never went to any kind of public or private school until college. Some families really succeed in homeschooling. Their kids become curious, thoughtful, inquisitive, and well rounded learners. There’s a TON that goes into homeschooling and even more into successful homeschooling. But the thing about homeschooling is that as the kid you are ENTIRELY subject to what your parents decide to teach you. So, say, your parents are hyper religious and insist on aaaalllll of your textbooks be “god-centered” you’re gonna have a very weird and incomplete experience. Add a abusive parent and it’s a done deal. You’re gonna have a bad time.

I had such a time.

To be fair, my mom tried the best she could with the limits she/J put on our schooling, and pretty much having to do it all by herself. She also had one kid who had developmental/cognitive/behavioral/health issues, one kid who was a typical learner and mercifully self motivated but with trauma responses, and me, a stubborn kid with at least one undiagnosed learning disability and plenty to be mad about. J was a constant threat and we were all being regularly abused by him and just trying to be okay-ish. Sometimes mom would ask J to help us with some schoolwork as an attempt to build a relationship between us or because she was so frustrated or overwhelmed with her lack of recourses or training. Those were almost always bad times and we (mom and us kids) were left to deal with the aftermath. So she did the best she could under the circumstances. And it left me with really shoddy basics and massive amounts of anxiety about it.

Mom taught me to read and to enjoy learning that was the biggest thing she was able to do for me. I wrote exactly one paper before college. I suck at spelling. I don’t know grammar worth a darn. If I’m not actually interested in the topic I can hardly force myself to learn it. My understanding of the natural world comes from Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and documentaries on PBS. Due to my undiagnosed learning disability I can add and subtract IF I have a calculator AND a pen and paper AND a lot of time. We didn’t get away from J until I was almost 17 and we didn’t move to another state until I was nearly done with “schooling”. Both of my siblings went to public school after we moved since they were younger and still had time. BJ stayed in public school and made HUGE developmental leaps. SL only went for a year but it made an important impact on how she did in college. She spent most of her time on the Deans List. I’m super proud of them both, especially from where we all started.

I struggled a lot in college. I did most of my writing by feel, spellcheck, and a friend or two who was willing to read over my papers and fix the worst of the grammar issues. I got decent enough grades (even made it to the Deans List one year!) but everything was a massive, exhausting, terrifying struggle. I learned on my feet as I went along, desperately hoping I could figuring it out fast enough to not fail the class. Thankfully, while I’m not overburdened with intelligence, I ain’t no dummy. I only understood that once my therapist pointed it out, btw. I had no idea that to survive childhood the way I did and to be able to get through college as well as I did and have a vaguely functional adulthood took some amount of brains. Even with that I generally feel like a fake. There are so many sudden gaps in my knowledge that it keeps me scrambling along and terrified that someone will ask me a basic question I don’t know.

My husband has been helpful with settling me there. He never bats an eye when I ask questions about things people generally know (or at least have an idea about). His gentle shushing when I stumble through apologies for not knowing things is sinking in--slowly but surly--and I don’t have to throttle a panic attack just to ask (again) what a noun or adjective is or ask him to do simple math for me. I’m starting to accept that I have limits and that it’s okay. I’m still mad about it though. I already have a naturally occurring learning disability. I really didn’t need the added failure of lackadaisical schooling and a traumatic childhood. But here we are.

Today a friend asked me to describe him using adjectives and verbs as a fun thing. Its been hours and I haven’t responded to his text. Instead I’ve been online trying to figure out what adjectives and verbs are, having an anxiety attack, and writing this out. Hopefully writing this will help get it out of my head faster. I don’t know if I’ll be able to respond to him. I have an idea what adjectives and verbs are but I know it won’t stick. Even though it’s a friend who won’t mind if I screw it up the thought of possibly getting it wrong turns my stomach.

I’ve also been thinking about if I do have kids someday how I’m going to handle the conversation with my mom when she askes if we’ll be homeschooling and offering help and advice. Because we won’t be. I know public school can also be rough and leave gaps. I know it comes with it’s own issues. But I also know I am not equipped to teach my kids at home. I also don’t have any desire to use that time to indoctrinate them into my beliefs. I don’t know how to have that conversation with my mom about how angry I am that I had to fight for years past the insanely narrow and twisted evangelical christian nonsense to be able to accept that science is real, vaccines are not going to give you autism, and a lot more has happened in the world besides christian history and white/western history. It’s probably a conversation we will never have.

At least I love to read. That by itself is amazing. Mom did teach me that but from her own love of reading and that example didn’t need homeschooling to pass to me. I love reading and learning IN SPITE of the schooling I received.

#homeschoolingisnt4everyone learningdisability

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strongwomanspeaks4joy · 3 years

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This is just a dumping ground

Tumblr, for me, is just a dumping ground of thoughts. None of this is going to be in order but just a place for emotional or mental barf. Sounds appealing, no?

Anyway, SL came for a visit. She’s been here for about 3 weeks. It’s been the longest time we’ve spent under the same roof since I graduated college. We’ve always been close so I think we both expected this time together to be good “sister time” where we could reconnect and help each other. It didn’t turn out to be that kind of visit. It became painfully obvious fairly quickly that I have spent the last couple years intensely trying to move away from patterns and habits that I learned in childhood (namely emotional manipulation, accepting emotional manipulation as the norm, and all the old patterns associated with that kind of conditioning). SL on the other hand had chosen to go back to The Family (J’s horribly abusive, manipulative, and awful clan) and stay in close contact with them since she was in college. She even lived with one of our aunts for about two years until last Fall. Staying in that kind of environment has taken its toll on her. She never un-learned emotional manipulation. And honestly, in that kind of place the only way to stay sorta safe (since she choose not to leave) is to learn to counter manipulate. She doesn’t do it to nearly the same extent that The Family does, but it’s still there.

Turns out the work I’ve been doing through therapy and trying to reset patterns of behavior means that being emotionally manipulated has become HIGHLY triggering for PTSD stuff for me. So there’s SL, just acting like she’s been taught, and me, having a massive internal meltdown. I tried talking to her a couple times about how--while I understand where she got it and why she’s operating this way--that she is actually doing the emotional manipulation thing and that its actually hurting me. She doesn’t want to hear that she’s hurting anyone the way she’s been hurt (who would?) but she handled that by having two almighty meltdowns with tooooons of emotional manipulation thrown my way. I get why she did that. Reacting like that is how The Family deals with any kind of criticism or boundary setting. Living in that environment for so long has meant that she has learned this stuff out of necessity. She’s also struggling with depression and PTSD as well. But it still hurts me a lot. I’ve been hanging on to the edge of a depressive slump by my fingernails, desperately trying to not fall in. I’ve been fighting the overwhelming numbness of being constantly triggered every day. I’m trying so hard not to shut down. I’ve muscled through this before but now I know that that isn’t healthy. It’s actually damaging to shut down and keep rolling. But boy howdy are those patterns strong in how I’ve always had to operate.

Thankfully I’ve had K and roommate T to talk to some. They also recognized that SL was being super extra and uncomfortable. But those moments of conversation have taken place on the sly when SL has been out of the house or in the privacy of bedtime because SL has also been suffering a severe case of nosiness and fear of being left out so she pretty much follows me around the house. It’s been absolutely exhausting, tbh.

She left today. I have all kinds of mixed feelings about it. I’m super relieved to not have to work to NOT snap at her or shut down completely. I’m glad I don’t have to feel like I have to be on guard all the time to her wheedling. I’m tired of having to constantly be disappointed and bummed and readjusting my expectations lower and lower. I’m also grieving the closeness that didn’t happen. The happy memories that weren’t made. The easiness that wasn’t there. The time that wasn’t enjoyed. I know I could’ve “made it fine” very easily...but not honestly. Not genuinely. And at the cost of myself and the progress I’ve made.

That’s something nobody talks about: the struggle of healing at different paces when you’ve grown up in a traumatic home. It is so frustrating to try to connect with siblings who are in a very different place in their healing journey than you are. Especially if they’ve chosen to go back to those people who have hurt them. There have been so many times I just want to take SL by the shoulders and shake sense into her. So many times I just want to yell “WHAT THE ACTUAL HECK ARE YOU THINKING?!?!” when she goes back to The Family again. And now she’s operating in the manner she’s learned to survive them while I’m learning how to have boundaries against that behavior. So she feels hurt when I say no. And it hurts me to know that it’s hurting her. This may sound kinda weird but it’s like when you take your pet to the vet to have something painful but necessary done. They don’t know why you’re hurting them so you feel terrible but you also know it’s gotta happen. Idk. It just sucks. But I HAVE to deal with my stuff. It’ll eat me if I don’t. SL is just starting to deal with all the trauma that she’s received from the people who said they loved her. So me trying to tell her that her behavior is hurting me just triggers all kinds of reaction from/for her that she doesn’t even know she’s doing. But that doesn’t give her a pass. It just sucks. *sigh* I don’t have any answers. I’m just trying.

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strongwomanspeaks4joy · 3 years

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The basics/Main Characters

The basics about me: I was raised in a very conservative evangelical christian home. My siblings and I were homeschooled to give us a “christ centered education”. We went to church in the next town over a lot. We had almost nothing to do with the community in the town we lived in. It was a small, rural town like so many: past its prime by 40 years with more crime than the locals wanted to admit and rife with poverty and idiotic pride. We lived in a fairly quiet neighborhood and the local kids (including us) spent any spare moment playing in yards and riding our bikes in the street. Life wasn’t all bad.

But dad was there. I’ll call him J. I don’t like calling him “dad”. He lost that right years ago. J was a narcissist and somewhere on the dark triad scale (narcist/psychopath/sociopath). He was the boogyman, the monster, the bear, the judge, jury, and executer. He was the Spanish Inquisition. We lived in cringing, placating terror of him and his moods. I’ll be talking a lot about him since SO MUCH HAPPENED and it’s taken me literal years to realize that he was the adult in all of those situations.

Mom suffered under J’s abuse for 30+ years. She was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually abused that entire time. She loved us the best she could and took care of us the best she could. She struggled through depression and health issues while practically being a single parent to three kids close in age--one with special needs--while also running the house and homeschooling us. She thought she was saving/protecting us from J and it took her a long time to realize that she wasn’t. She was also complicit in the conservative indoctrination and a lot of the more general crappy stuff that she believed was important or good (purity culture, hyper-religiousness, being an anti-vaxxer among other things). She is still anti-vax, conservative, super religious, gullible as heck, kinda racist, homophobic, transphobic, other phobics that I probably have yet to discover, voted for Trump, and often circles the drain on being radicalized. She’s also amazing with kids, supportive in ways that surprise me, loves her kids to the moon and back, an amazing musician, and gentle (if sometimes a parrot of much less gentle people). She’s a complex person. I love her and I’m proud of her and also profoundly disappointed in what she chooses to believe.

I’m the oldest kid. I’m now in my 30′s and have strayed farthest from the old conservative life/beliefs. I started doing that at 17 when we moved to a different state and I made friends with folks who were the kind of people I had be raised to distrust and avoid but ended up being my kind of people. I’ve always landed in the weird in between places. I’m too liberal and ask too many questions to be a real conservative/evangelical. I’ve often been to conservative in my own moral code to jive well with the more relaxed crowed. Though I’ve figured that out more in the last few years and I’m DEFINETLY NOT conservative OR evangelical. When I was a kid I took my “eldest sibling” roll very seriously. I tried REALLY hard to protect my siblings. It didn’t work. I’ve carried some almighty and misplaced guilt because it didn’t work. I’m also engaged and, because I dearly love my fiancée, I have realized that I’ve got a lot of “daddy issues” I need to work on to be healthy myself. My fiancee is SUPER SUPPORTIVE AND WONDERFUL OH MY GOSH. Due to the pandemic I haven’t been able to keep myself insanely busy to run away from my issues soooo anxiety and lack of previously available workarounds (aka never stop spinning) means that I’ve finally gotten my butt to therapy and WOW there’s a lot.

Sibling 2 I’ll call SL. They are typical middle child: people pleaser, peacemaker, “easy” kid. SL and I were attached at the hip as kids. We were often mistaken for twins since we were close in age and had the similar mannerisms. We didn’t experience the same things the same way but we had very parallel childhoods that often overlapped. When we’re telling stories about the past we still refer to our individual selves as “we” since we were always together. J really targeted them for more of the sexual and surrogate spouse abuse. They were young enough and desperate to please this impossible man that they tried to make him happy and not rock the boat. It didn’t work. They’ve carried the mental and emotional damage from that to this day. They’ve been in and out of mental health hospitals, therapy, medication, suicide attempt, but they’ve done INCREDIBLE work to become a heck of a lot more stable. I could not be more proud of them!

Sibling 3 will be BJ. They were the youngest and also the one with special needs. The cognitive, behavioral, and learning disabilities they deal with is a freaking laundry list of conditions. J *hated* them. He was more physically violent with BJ than he was with the rest of us. By the time BJ was 6 they had had multiple wooden spoons broken on them through spankings, had been taken by the throat by J and shaken till their teeth clacked more than once, had been locked in their room alone overnight while they had a complete autistic meltdown, hand been screamed at, grabbed and physically hauled around by the back of the neck on the regular, mocked, belittled, scathingly criticized, and completely dismissed as worth J’s time or energy unless it was negative. BJ and I fought all the time as kids. They were my kid sibling so I was protective of them--but I didn’t really like them until I moved out of the house and we weren’t driving each other nuts. They have also done an INSANE amount of work to be the person that they are today and I am so, so SO proud of them!

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