One

I’ve been reading some posts at Homeschool Anonymous over the past couple days.  It started when a blog I read, Concerning Purity, reblogged this post concerning a maleperspective of the purity culture. 

This blog post was posted today.  Although I didn’t identify with everything, such as the shaking, much of the author’s situation sounded a lot like mine.  Here are some highlights.  Any emphasis is mine, and it highlights what I especially identify with.

My parents were absolutely terrified of teenage rebellion. Thanks to various books and speakers popular in the homeschooling community, my parents believed teen rebellion to be a recent American trend due to indulgent parenting and peer pressure. A rebellious teen was more than just an annoyance in the homeschooling community: that teen was turning his/her back not only on the parents, but also on God. What a tragic waste of years of sacrifice and careful training by the parents! This type of thinking motivated my parents to maintain careful discipline and to shelter us from almost all contact with our peers, even at church.

I distinctly remember the conversation between the youth pastor and my mom. I was probably 14 or 15, and so shy that I would start shaking if anyone tried to talk to me at church. Although social interaction was painful, I desperately needed it, and I think the youth pastor noticed that. He approached my parents after church one day to invite us to Sunday school. My mom asked for the materials that were being used in Sunday school, and took them home to peruse them with my dad. I heard the decision the next week at the same time as the youth pastor: “Our kids will not be attending Sunday school.” The reason? Apparently the material mentioned a teen who was frustrated with his parents, and it was dangerous for me to think that frustration was a valid or normal feeling for a teen to have toward parents.

I used to cry myself to sleep at night quite often, occasionally trying to get my mom to notice my tears by sniffing juuuust loud enough for her to hear as she walked by my door. When she came in to ask why I was crying, I would say something like, “I don’t have any friends” or “I don’t know how to talk to people.” The answer to these was always the same: “You have us” or “You’re talking to me right now.” In the morning, life would proceed as usual.

I identify with this a lot.  My parents let me go to youth group for a couple years, but as I got rebellious and angrier, they didn’t let me associate with my peers at church anymore.  From what I can remember and from conversations with my parents, I think that my mother felt like I had been more of a “good girl” prior to youth group…meaning, I was better behaved when I was 10 or 11.  Like the author of the above blog post, my parents didn’t believe that teens should be frustrated with their parents.  Chafing against parental control was a disobedience problem, not simply a sign of needing more independence.

I started puberty at 12.  There’s a big reason I was acting differently.  It’s called “hormones going crazy.”  Most teenage girls go through this, and it’s fairly common knowledge that young teenage girls become someone totally different than they were a couple years earlier.  It has nothing to do with what friends you have or how much interaction you have outside the home.  Hormone levels are surging in a way they never have before, and this causes an extreme amount of emotional anxiety.  I’m about 80% certain that my “bad behavior” was linked to me going through puberty.

Even today, if I start a new birth control, or my hormones are messing up, I go through a huge behavioral shift.  Just this last January, I started taking birth control again, and Matt and I nearly got a divorce!! (Mostly kidding!)  I was moody and quite irritable.  I yelled at Matt constantly.  I was really, really angry all the time – not unlike most of my teenage years. 

I know I was a problem child.  I was quite willful and disobedient, and I know my parents did what they thought was best at the time.  But regardless of whether my isolation was right or wrong, the fact over the matter is, my isolation did quite a number on me.  I learned that I couldn’t be my true self around my parents, or bad things would happen.  I learned to hide what I was really feeling from Mom and Dad, or I would be in big trouble. 

My parents would likely argue that I was far from isolated.  I had friends my age – three, to be exact.  The first, Sam, was a pathological liar that went to live with her grandmother when I was about 14 or 15.  The second, Sara, was my friend by default.  One year older than me, Sara had enormous emotional problems and learning disabilities.  I was a genius compared to her.  The ONLY thing we had in common was sewing, and she wasn’t interested in learning new techniques.  She liked to make the same skirt pattern over and over and over.  If I hadn’t been friends with her, I would have only had my last friend, Amanda.  And to be honest, Amanda was just friends with ME by default.  She was more my sister’s friend.  So it wasn’t a great and lasting friendship at all.

Another argument my parents would make against me being isolated is that I was surrounded by lots of people, especially at church.  There were a lot of older people at my church, and we socialized with them twice a week at church and the monthy game night.  We also had kids in my mom’s homeschool group that I could talk to…except most of them were more than five years younger than me.  It wasn’t until I started working at Subway my senior year of high school that I actually had interaction with different people.  Honestly, I think this is what saved me from horrible embarrassment at college (although I was quite tactless until my early 20’s). 

Anyway, back to the blog post.  I identify with this 100%. 

Now I’m 30 years old, with four years of college and eight years of work between me and my teen self, yet I still feel the effects of the isolation I experienced growing up.

First, I still feel significant social anxiety in even the most non-threatening situations. I am particularly at a loss in group settings full of new people. What do I say? When do I say it? Whom do I say it to? How/when do I end a conversation? Even in a circle setting, when it’s my turn to say my name, my blood pressure skyrockets.

I’m almost 26, and still, I dread meeting new people.  I’ve rarely intentionally made a new friend.  My friends in college were mostly classmates that just stuck around (I never initiated first contact), and I didn’t stay real-life friends with any of them after college.  All my current friends are either extensions of Gina (we became friends while working at Subway, and just kind of clicked), or extensions of Matt. 

It’s very difficult for me to maintain friendships, mostly because it’s a lot of effort.  I never learned how to put in that much effort into maintaining so many different friendships.  Growing up, I never had more than two friends at one time, so it makes sense to me that I can’t effectively put that into practice now, as an adult.

Second, in the whole world, there is no place and no group of people where I feel like I belong. It’s like I was raised in a different culture, with the distinct difference that I can never go “home” to it. I’m permanently a foreigner; interacting in this foreign culture takes a lot of attention and effort. I’ve tried to catch up on the culture I missed…to watch the movies, to listen to the music, to see pictures of the clothing styles…..but it will never mean to me what it means to you. People always use cultural references and nostalgia as a way to build community and connections between people; for me, they create distance and remind me how different I am inside.

These days, I manage to avoid shocking people too much, unless I decide to tell them about my past. To me, the biggest compliment I can receive today is, “You were homeschooled? Wow, I can’t even tell!”

THIS. 

I feel like I was raised in another country.  I constantly feel out of place.  At work, I’m surrounded by people 20 – 30 years older than me, so when I am culturally disconnected, it’s easy for me to tell them it's because of my age. 

 

And I certainly understand cultural references from the last seven years.  But refer to anything further back than 2006, and I have to quickly search my brain to understand the reference and make the connection.  And a lot of times, I just don’t get it.  (Ask Matt – he does this all the time.) 

I’m not writing this to complain about my parents, contrary to my mother’s opinion.  I have issues.  Serious issues that I’m just starting to explore and heal.  I need to be fixed, mostly because no way can I ever have kids being like this.  Are you kidding?  They would turn out worse than me! 

 

I don’t want to blame anyone for this.  But things happened that made me emotionally unhealthy.  It’s time to change that.