Ex-Homeschooler Fashion

I started to feel more at home in my body instead of wishing I could jump out of it and run away screaming.

Friendship and Parenthood

“I wish that myself as a child could have known that a good future was coming, so that the dark nights didn’t seem quite as cold. However, the coldness of the past makes me value even more the warmth of friendship now.”

Learning To Leave My Son With Others

“I have been able to overcome my deeply ingrained childhood perceptions for myself, and feel like a functioning and happy member of the big outside world. However, I am unexpectedly having to go through the same process again, now that I am in the role of a mother. All the progress I made for myself, I am having to do again, this time for my son.”

Teaching My Son the Lessons I Didn’t Learn

“As a mother, I feel like all the kindness and love that I pour into my son’s life is somehow healing my own childhood wounds. I see him learning the lessons that I wish I had learned myself as a child, and I feel at peace. He is learning, right from the start, that his feelings are important.”

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Seven

“From hanging around with people such as Scott Lively in my fundamentalist Christian homeschooling community, I understood the danger that America was facing from the gay agenda. I believed that the gay lifestyle was depraved and corrupt… Then one day I accidentally met a gay person.”

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Six

“It didn’t help my situation that my sister took naturally to wearing cute dresses, having tea parties, and making crafts. She didn’t even need coaching, while I was unsatisfactory even with coaching. As I watched my brother leave for his many outdoor adventures with other boys, I felt cheated and limited.”

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Five

“I wasn’t secure enough in my boundaries, so I was hyper-sensitive to any attempts to control or manipulate me, whether it was a friend or a family member. Even just their attempt to change my opinion by sharing a different perspective was threatening to me.”

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Four

“The doctor asked, ‘Do you think you’re depressed?’ ‘Oh my goodness, no!’ I answered. When the doctor left the room, I burst into tears with no idea why. I finally decided that I must have been upset that my Christian witness was damaged since I wasn’t showing Jesus’ peace and joy on my face.”

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Three

“Not every homeschooling family is so repressed about sex, but at Reb Bradley’s church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room. A favorite theme of Reb Bradley was sexual purity and ‘Biblical courtship.’ He was fond of referring to 1 Timothy 5:2.”

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Two

“Out on various errands or on family vacations, wearing my very odd, ill-fitting clothing, I felt the stares and desperately wished that human contact was unnecessary. ‘I wish I could just be a hermit!’ — this sentence occurs a little too frequently in my teen journals.”