Time to get off my soapbox and back to my story.
In my second year out of public school, we truly moved into the homeschooling world. This wasn't the plan when my parents pulled me out of the local school system--I don't think they anticipated the events that unfolded over the summer of 1986 that led to the shift from our church ACE school to homeschooling. In retrospect, I suspect my mother was not happy with this development and the resulting infringement upon her free time.
What led to our transition to homeschooling? That summer our little church experienced a split. The pastor introduced the congregation to some teachings that grew out of the Sovereign Grace Ministries movement--particularly Charismatic worship practices, the shepherding concept and Calvinist doctrine--and the congregation, which had up to that point been heavily influenced by the legalistic, rigid, and definitely uncharismatic teachings of Bill Gothard, was heavily divided. The irony, of course, is that while the worship styles of Gothardites and SGMers appear very different, the underlying doctrine is uncannily similar and equally malignant.
In the end, the SGM-leaning folks (including my family) won and the Gothardites left abruptly and angrily. I did not have a chance to say goodbye to my two closest friends, and we saw each other, briefly, only twice again. No one would explain to me why half of the church was gone overnight, other than to condemn and shun those who had left; the topic was largely off-limits and everyone was expected to continue on (happy happy, joy joy) as if nothing had happened. I was devastated and confused, but I had learned by that time to bury my objections and control my outward expressions of negative emotions.
With our school enrollment reduced by half after the split, the pastor decided to close the full-time ACE school and shift the families into a part-time, hybrid school using the Lifepac curriculum from Alpha Omega. Out of resentment or perhaps a sense of inadequacy, my mother largely abandoned my middle brother and me to complete our schoolwork on our own (my oldest brother had graduated the prior year). Day after day, I sat at a desk in my room and struggled through my workbooks, which at that time were printed in black and white on newsprint-like paper. It was mind-numbing and frustrating, and--already emotionally fragile from the recent events in our church--I frequently broke down in tears when I failed tests. I knew I was a bright kid; I had seen the results of the assessment tests I took before leaving public school. But these workbooks baffled me. I fought the temptation to tear the pages out and rip them into tiny shreds. My father ordered me to erase the workbooks and do them over again and again until I achieved a perfect score, which only added to my sense of overwhelming incompetence.
I remember my sixth, seventh, and eighth grade years as being dominated by my mother's smoldering but well-concealed anger; I tried to avoid provoking her hair-trigger temper and left her to her hours-long Bible devotions and lengthy afternoon chats with her best friend, the wife of the neighbor who had molested me. My mother is, I suspect, a true narcissist, and this situation brought out the worst in her personality. If I interrupted her with school-related questions, she was irritated and impatient. I understand now that she surely did not want to spend her days teaching us, but the pressure she and my father faced to keep us out of public schools must have been powerful. She had never completed high school herself, having dropped out at sixteen when she became pregnant with my half-sister (who I have only seen twice, but that's another story). The simple truth is, she was wholly unprepared and largely unwilling to teach us, and she must have been overwhelmed at times herself. But that in no way absolves her of the horrific abuse we endured at her hands, nor her and my father's decision to cave under church pressure rather than admit her inability to teach us and put us back in public schools.
It was during this time that the earliest tendrils of doubt about my identity as a Christian started to creep into my thoughts and I began to seriously question the teachings of my church. I was becoming disillusioned: the sexual abuse inflicted upon me by our neighbor, while it ended by the time I reached puberty, had destroyed my remaining sense of self-worth and filled me with shame; I was quietly grieving the loss of my close friends in the name of God; and the suddenly intense hostility from my mother all came together to create a volatile situation, catalyzed by the oppressive isolation and increasingly-bizarre religious beliefs that surrounded me. I began having panic attacks and started slipping into a slow spiral of depression. I saw little point in continuing to pretend that I wanted to be like the hypocritical cookie-cutter women in our church: submissive to men yet passive-aggressive toward children and other women; exceedingly modest yet at times shockingly inappropriate; outwardly humble yet in constant competition to prove their superiority. The seeds of rebellion, sown over many years of being ignored for who I was, finally began to sprout. Combined with my depression, panic attacks, and the cumulative effects of physical and sexual abuse, I found myself falling apart. And I wasn't sure I cared anymore.
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