N. Homeschooler

Definition: Home scholar. Home skuller.

Home’s cooler. Mom’s schooler, Mom’s cooler. Momomo, homoschooler, moanschooler. Home’s drooler.

Dome schooler, womb schooler, doom schooler, ooler, ooler. Homesfoolers. Homeschoolerooler ruler homeschooler, homeskooler, homeskulir, home’s slkur, Momschooler. Huh oh m’ school er!

Thirteen years. My mother says it seems like yesterday that everything happened. She thinks it was “just yesterday” that I started homeschooling in kindergarten, my Hello Kitty backpack on the floor, dusty reading books from the 1940s open before me. Still, just as I scrambled the word homeschooler above, my memories are scrambled. I know it hasn’t been “just yesterday.” It has been a very long time.

Joy Academy. That’s what our little unit was called. Homeschooling began for me with my five-year-old elbows on the dining room table, my sixth-grade brother on the other side, as we very solemnly and cluelessly prayed on the first day. Joy Academy took place at the table, on the sofa, in our bedrooms, in the playroom, and the kitchen. Instead of typical extracurricular activities, we had homeschooled picnics and playdates and project fairs and speech nights. There were homeschooled book sales and events and conventions, where the mothers, with their glasses-wearing leggy kids named Ethan or Jeremy or Justin trailing behind them, talked and talked and talked. I’m not sure what they were saying except, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he gets out of the house…who knows what will happen.” We went to a homeschoolers’ group called a “co-op” on Wednesdays, Thursdays, or Fridays. Those places always had dorky names like Wacky Wednesdays and Thoughtful Thursdays. Even so, our little unit needed a name to keep its sense of purpose and dignity. Though Mom and Dad christened the mini-school Joy Academy, I remember screeching rather than joy from the start. And we were the have-it-alls, on a street full of have-nots.

“May I have a break?” we begged our mother.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said, time and time again.

I remember my brother heating tennis balls in the oven, how they became light and airy, bouncing from the stairwell ceiling to sprawl on the ancient hardwood below, as he screamed and dived after the balls. I remember being my brother’s little schoolmate, listening to his audiobooks about Little House on the Prairie and such, overhearing Gombrich’s Little History of the World on the sofa-arm (I was never sure exactly what a Roman Empire was)—and jumping to the rhythm of addition and subtraction CDs with him on the trampoline.

I remember Crazy Wazy Mix-up Days, when I purposely scrambled the order of the universe by picking my school subjects from slips of paper in a coffee mug. My mother would add “secret subjects” to the mug, such as giving her a big hug or running around the house three times. I remember the planet reports. “All About Uranus” was a co-written report my brother and I did on Mom’s Alpha-Smart when I was nine. I got through Jupiter and Neptune before I gave up the idea that I’d write a report on a planet every single May until I graduated high school. I didn’t have any idea that there weren’t enough planets in the solar system.

Why does anyone want to hear about it? I am the only homeschooler left in the wonderful world of Joy Academy. Whatever illusions we had about the glories of homeschooling and creativity don’t matter anymore. Homeschooling means I have to drive the school bus that never moves. If there’s another lonely child somewhere in the world, will he see past the fact that I am a homeschooler who is stuck in a time warp, trapped behind these windows? I am a child of these windows. You must remember that when you feel you’re alone. Be aware of the distance from room to room. Take good care of your carelessly stacked schoolbooks and tenderly caress your broken pencils. When you’re thinking you’re the only homeschooler on the island of misfit homeschoolers. Be aware of the precise patterns of atoms, snowflakes, chemical formations in saliva, veins in the heart, bean plants with white flowers, the periodic table, war-torn years in the history book, mold spores growing on the windowsill, and broken projects you’ll never finish. Be aware. Of the smallness of the world. Of the many fathomless worlds sinking past your shoving and crying and fighting, from manuscript to cursive to typewritten, your words that stumble up to understanding. Homeschooling is a long, long stay home, a long fumble for identity—because even though you might know so much, you’ll never know what you’re talking about.

Nobody will know you when you’re homeschooled. No truancy. No recess. No cafeteria. No principal’s office.

Nothing was ever about people like me when I was growing up. Books, songs, movies…all were written by and for public-school folks. My favorite storybook characters all went to public school, and no one except for Laura and Mary Ingalls came close to the stuck-inside life I had. I wished someone, somewhere, would write a book about a homeschooled girl.

When I realized no one would, I figured I’d write that book. It was no problem. From my earliest years, I was quietly, almost unconsciously, composing a book about the Girl Named Lydia, chapter by chapter, in my head. When something notable happened to me, my mental typewriter wrote The girl did this…the girl did that. My entire life was a book writing itself in my head, and I hated like hell that I couldn’t grow up fast enough to write the thoughts that crowded my mind. Even though I put on my Hello Kitty backpack and walked up and down, up and down the street at Bardwell Elementary’s let-out time, to blend in with the public-school kiddies, I was too short and silly and odd to learn anywhere except at home with Mom. My book could only write itself when I stared out the windows, fancying the Bardwell world a fairyland of neat, precise desks. There was a fascination for me in the systematic torture of a poor neighborhood’s elementary school. I could feel the cool metal of my desk beneath my legs; I could smell my erasers and chalk and feel the swing of my lunchbox. And that always made me wanna cry. I did cry, especially when my homeschooling day lasted two minutes longer than Bardwell’s day, and everything seemed suddenly unjust.

 But Public School was just a game, and homeschooling was the real world. What the public-school kids would call fantasy and play-pretend was my most serious reality—for me and my brother. Then my brother went to public school at fourteen, and I alone was homeschooled. Then he and I were divided and rested on opposite sides of the pendulum. Though my brother made a fool of himself, he was the real world, and I was not the real world.

“They taught me social skills over there!” he’d yell at me. “And I want you to go to public school, Lydia. I want you to walk the same halls I walked.”

“Normal people don’t know what they’re missing,” I often reassured myself.

Backwards Girl. That’s what they called me when I first started writing. I could write just fine. Only every letter came out the mirror opposite of what it was supposed to look like. They wanted to look backwards and couldn’t be any other way. I was the letters I wrote, backwards and misspelled and odd. I was Aidyl instead of Lydia. I figured anyone who tried to know me would hold my soul into their mirror of normal to figure me out.

Still, I looked for the beauty my soul drooled over—the beauty in plays and movies and music. Even though I was always going somewhere else, into a stranger world, away from the beauty, stuck in the backseat of the car, the beauty remained. It remained in scrawny hours at my church clubs, AWANA, and at the playgrounds at sunset. When my brother bothered me, I would tell him indignantly, “I’m thinking!”

But nobody remembers that Lydia thought anything. I hung in the hopes of bigger people forgetting my faults and freaks and tantrums, and the thought that they would publish my private diaries in a museum after my death. I would be behind polished glass forever. The beauty was there, no matter how repetitive the songs became, no matter how faded the stars.

This is how you come home, paradoxically, to yourself, a home you’ve never left.

“My Father’s World Curriculum: From a Biblical Worldview!” the advertisement chortled. I stared at the backside of the homeschool book catalogue. The nice Christian family it showed made me angry for some reason. That’s not realistic! I thought. That’s not what homeschooling looks like!

These folks, even with their slightly insecure smiles, had it all over my family. I could see it in their eyes: uncomplicated life. Simplicity. Fifties suburbia throwback time. Sheltered bubble kids. Happy and heart healthy as Quaker Oats, they blatantly advertised what was most important to them and the sellers of the homeschool curriculum: faith, hope, and family! Family values, Judeo-Christian values.

Family Values. Hah. Well, Christians speak of family values. Speak of bowing their heads to pray. Hands closed together, eyes closed. Reading the Bible. The children in bicycle helmets, the wife in decent wife clothes, the husband a manly leader. The children homeschooled, learning how to take on the culture. Learning how to live while connected to a solid base unit with old fashioned values in a world that changes its values every five minutes. They think family, a solid two-parent heterosexual family that attends church, is the answer for everyone. Judeo-Christian values, they say. Our culture has fallen because the family fell.

But the family…can’t redeem you. What do they know? Those “perfect values” look laughable when you look at my family’s story. In every way, we’re just plain tired, vulnerable, wild, alone. So values are not the answer for everything. Everyone’s messed up. Leaning on your family rather than God will leave you crumbling, because your family will inevitably disappoint you.

Besides, we can never know what lies in the deepest regions of the human heart—even a Judeo-Christian, traditional, evangelical heart.

“Where do you go to school?” the cheery adults asked me, assuming, of course, that I went to public school.

“I’m homeschooled,” I said, feeling foolish.

           “Oh!” They searched their brains for something to tack onto my surprising announcement.

            This usually amounted to, “My step-niece’s husband’s sister was homeschooled,” “you’re so special and blessed to be homeschooled,” “it’s OK that you’re homeschooled,” “you must like not having that terrible pressure,” or “I know, the public schools are horrible, right?”

Thirteen years, kindergarten through twelfth grade, I’ve spent as a walking lab specimen representative of all homeschool-kind. People ask me how I like homeschooling, as though hearing my experience will affect their opinion of all homeschoolers everywhere. I’m a footnote to the real world, but then again, what’s the real world? I’m not normal. Normal is only a setting on the dryer. Yet the real world gawks and glowers at homeschoolers, calculating, deciding, deriding.

This bewildered response of adults follows the public-schooled population’s general assumption that homeschoolers don’t exist…in subtle and not-so-subtle words.

Infernal questions about my nonexistent public-school career—I’ll scream if they ask me those questions again! Some people still let on like they don’t know what a homeschooler is. It gets tiresome to explain over and over who I am. Embarrassing questions are all around us. I still remember the sting of shame on my cheeks when one random boy told me, “You’re homeschooled, so that doesn’t count as real school.” I’ve been informed that I’ve spent my entire career on vacation, not working. Worst of all was when someone asked us if we have any books in the house. As if.

Some people envy my life, saying, “Homeschoolers get to sleep in, wear slippers and pajamas, eat while doing assignments, and have everything their own way.” I haven’t done school in my pajamas since first grade. Homeschooling isn’t some nonstop sleepover. If it’s this easy, why isn’t everyone choosing to drop out and join us?

Still others clasp my hands and remind me how blessed, special, sweet, and unique I am to be homeschooled. But I don’t need non-homeschoolers to tell me who I am. Wouldn’t I still be special if I went to public school? Is this my only identity?

Some people think of homeschoolers in sociological terms; some think of us as hippie leftovers; some think of us as cultists, fanatics, kooks, recluses, and nerds—possibly planning a nerd-versus-anti-nerd apocalypse.

 And this suspicion kept me indoors for endless hours. Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike in the time between finishing my schoolwork and public school letting out. Mommy said that someone would ask, “Why is that little girl not in school?” I looked truant anywhere I went between 8 A.M. and 3 P.M. Sometimes, we had to pretend to not be homeschoolers. When the social worker from my brother’s school came over, my mother laid out my books on the table in firm, thick stacks, writing a long list of my subjects on the dry-erase board, with the words WORK TO DO triple-underlined. I hated this, but Mommy said we must prove that we were “getting stuff done.”

What reversed the prejudice against homeschoolers was simple: viruses. Coronavirus shut every woman, child, and man in the house, leading to sympathy for the isolation some homeschoolers feel every day. Now, homeschooling is a kinder, gentler movement, soothing to those who’ve been battered and bruised by the horrors of public school. They tell me that more and more kids are growing up at home. So we’re officially not labeled freaks anymore. For a while, at least.

Whatever the general consensus about homeschoolers is, well, really, it doesn’t matter anymore. I graduated from Joy Academy Homeschool. But I’m still…just me. I still reserve the right to remain a freak. That part doesn’t change.

I just wish someone would let me be as I am. I wish someone would just not define me. I wish someone would not tell me who I am, not even good things. I wish I didn’t have to be healthy or unhealthy, selfish or generous, geeky or smart, pretty or ugly. I wish I didn’t have to be called short, skinny, homeschooled, a pseudo-hippie, a girl, a writer, a little girl, a young woman. I wish I would just be nothing—no name. Let me be as I am. I am a person, I am an alien. I belong and I don’t belong. I’m a daughter, a sister, a volunteer, a teen, a person who loves but not a lover, a hearer of words but also a hider of my own words. But all these labels do not quite define me. I’m not a weirdo, a normal baby, an animal, a mammal, a survivor of pestilence and strife and Covid-19, a survivor of catastrophes major and minor. I’m not quite these things. Let me be an unanswered prayer for the time being. Let me be a pimpled, awkward, friendless, whiny, secretive, writing, writhing and thrashing little hunk of a person—a nobody in the outside world’s eyes. Let me be gloriously unwhole and not improved upon. Even though my life is backwards and I am a naïve bullying target and I don’t know anything about life, my own life is still valuable. Not just how I could be, but how I am.

We are the homeschoolers. We are from here, but not from here. We are not so different, yet still acridly different. We are among those who boil saliva, as fetal, innocent, and exposed as the formaldehyde-caked baby pig on display at the homeschool co-op project fair. We are among those who stay longer and longer.

            Stay. Don’t be in a hurry. Stay, stay, child. The children want to stay and hug the furniture that is their very own. When you come, come home slow as rain and math facts, for the heart is a lonely hitchhiker across the page of life. Come home slow with the weight of your cartoon backpack stuffed with redemption.