This was one very large part of my struggle, throughout our ATI years. Anything I did, I did because I wanted to, not because I had to, according to my parents. And yet, I did almost everything because I had to, not because I wanted to.
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Once my adoption was final, my name was changed a third time to Ruth Esther Copley. And thus began a nightmare from hell over the next twelve years.
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“One day, when I was fourteen years old, I remember asking my mother if she had ever wanted more children than just me and my sister. Her response was an automatic ‘of course.’ And she cried for the rest of the afternoon. That was the first time I heard the word barren.”
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“There are times, like when I’m writing a post like this, that I feel much the same way I did that day: defeated, humiliated, like a victim, but then I remember, I’m a survivor. I fought, and clawed my way towards finally getting the right to start my own life, and won. I survived the toxic self hatred and ignorance of fundamentalism, and cast it aside.”
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“One of the popular elements of the conservative religious homeschooling movement that appeared in the church-cult was the belief that ‘teenage adolescence’ is a modern societal construct and is a completely unnecessary stage. I can remember all the arguments for this vividly.”
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“I spent most of my childhood in an Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) Church, and for that reason we were never part of the larger homeschooling movements…Because of the cult-like environment of the church I was raised in, I never had the opportunity to interact with anyone outside of my church.”
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“She was showing me the curriculum she was using. It was the same atrocious Accelerated Christian Education (A.C.E) curriculum we were raised with. I spent my whole school life with it, first in a IFB affiliated private school, then in home school.”
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Homeschoolers Anonymous 