New Home School Parents, Heads Up!

I am so proud of all the home school graduates I have met!

Without exception, they are all strong-willed, courageous people who are finding their own authentic way in life.  I think that no matter the quality of one's educational experience, or the degree of emotional nurture vs. emotional neglect or abuse even, home schooling in itself transmits these qualities by its very nature.  To home school is to go against the flow of larger society, and children who are home schooled constantly hear that decision praised.  Even the religious home schools (maybe especially the religious home schools?) are continually hearing that going against what is easy and popular when conscience calls you to do so is a good thing, the right thing, the best thing.

So it is no surprise then, that these home school graduates have a strong sense of responsibility to improve the lot of those who come after them. Homeschoolers Anonymous is a web site dedicated to sharing the stories of home school graduates that will not be featured at home school conventions or plastered on the cover of Practical Homeschooling magazine.  (These stories need to be heard, too!) It was created by home school graduates, to help improve the lives of home schooled children who come after them.  Their goal is to improve things by the shining the light on areas that need improvement.  All of the stories shared there are authentic, written by home school graduates themselves.  These stories need to be told, and the home school community needs to listen and learn. 

New home school parents especially, be wise!

Take notice!  Don't just listen to the home school salespeople trying to get you to be just like them.  Do not be foolish, only listening to those whose children are still at home.  They have the option of still believing they are doing everything right and because of that, they can predict how life will turn out for their children.  Those whose children are already grown adults, that's who you should be seeking out for advice.

You are in a much better position than earlier home school parents, because you have the opportunity to inspect the fruits of the labors of home school parents who came before you.  Make the most of that opportunity!  As scripture counsels (Proverbs 18:17, Luke 14:28-33), get all sides of a story before you decide.  Really investigate what you are trying to accomplish.  Check out what has already been done by other people so you can figure out what you want to do differently and what you want to emulate.  

I realize this will be difficult, for many reasons. One is that when a family experiences "failure"- any result that is outside the advertised shiny, bright, happily subservient, doctrinally and sexually pure teenager- that family will disappear from most home school support groups.  Sometimes they are kicked out, but more often they drop out. These parents may feel ashamed that the product of their home school didn't turn out as advertised.  They may be asked to leave, especially if the results they are experiencing don't conform to the religious side of expectations.  A poorly educated but morally upright teen/young adult is not nearly so embarrassing to many home school support groups as a teen/young adult who is seen as morally compromised.  

On the other hand, they may leave the support group because of disillusionment.  When their marriage is falling apart, their teenager turns up pregnant, or is caught doing drugs, shoplifting, looking at porn, etc. then they may wake up to the fact that they have bought into and been promoting a lie and want no part in it anymore. Or they may be compelled to put their children in public school because of any number of reasons- a severely ill parent, financial constraints that require the home schooling parent to work- and so leave the home school support group.  All home school support groups require that a family be home schooling to belong, so any family that stops home schooling for any reason will not be at support group meetings sharing their stories.  You will have to search them out.

And the final reason that talking to home school graduates, and parents who have graduated all their students, to see where life takes them, is the passage of time.  You won't hear about gay home schooled Christian teens because they don't come out to their parents until years have passed since leaving home.  You won't hear about atheist home schooled graduate of Christian home schools because they don't leave the faith for years after leaving home.  In fact, you won't hear about any of the graduates who go off script after leaving home unless their dong so actually involves criminal activity that splashes across the headlines, like the Alexander story in Louisiana.  

[A home school boy dutifully marries the courtship bride his and her parents decided upon. His wife gets pregnant right away because they follow the script and don't use birth control.  Coudy goes to work, and interacts with people outside of the home school movement for the first time.  He falls in love with a co-worker, quite unexpectedly I am sure.  He has never experienced such strong attractions before, as he was assigned his wife and wasn't allowed to even date.  He and the co-worker begin a romance.  And somehow, truth always outs.  His young bride finds out about the affair.  Maybe he even told her himself, I don't know.  As she is packing to leave him, the weight of the shame that will fall on him from his community overwhelms him, and in a panic, he kills his young bride.  THAT is a direct result of the Christian home school fantasy and the expectations he felt to fulfill them as a star of the movement.  He was never allowed to just be Coudy, and figure out who he was at heart and what he wanted.  His life was dedicated to doing what his parents wanted, because somewhere along the line the Christian home school community became confident that what they wanted, God wanted.  It ended in heartache.]

All of the Christian home schooled youth want to please God.  Those whose parents and churches claim to speak for God the most adamantly are the ones whose children are at most risk of leaving the faith eventually.  You can not control their environments forever, and eventually they will start to run into the mysteries of life and find the pat answers they were taught are insufficient.  You will read many stories along this vein at Homeschoolers Anonymous but you won't hear them at your home school support group. They won't be brought up onto the platform at home school conventions (though some were paraded there back when they were still teens at home) to tell their story today.  They will not be featured in home school magazines. 

All of which is a real shame.  The inquiry for truth seems to have been abandoned by the home school movement's leadership. They believe they know all truth, and so they just dismiss and ignore all reality that exposes their "truth" as a lie.  Instead of being smart enough to listen to the adult children, children raised by all the standards and methods the movement promoted, leadership is just doubling down on the standards and methods that have failed.  They turn deaf ears to anything that doesn't support what they want to believe.  That isn't right. Home schooled children deserve better!  

Finally, the absolute worst stories out there, the ones we as home schoolers want to ignore and should not, are the stories of child abuse.  Sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse is happening in the home school community, and the home school community had best address it!  It's no use trying to explain it away with the True Scotsman defense. Our adult home schooled graduates are well versed in the dynamics of logic and debate.  No, it's happening.  It happened under our watch, under my watch.  So, what are good home school parents going to do about it?

HSLDA's response to these stories of neglect and abuse?  Silence. Denial of being in any way responsible for these children.  Not shock, not horror, not remorse.  Instead of leading the charge to put distance between nurturing home schooling families and abusive home schooling families, something that can only happen with transparency and accountability, HSLDA is trying to make it easier for abusive parents to home school. Witness this recent attempt to remove all transparency and accountability from the home school law in Iowa.  The current regulations are not burdensome and they are working well.  Why would HSLDA be working to remove all accountability and transparency from Iowa home school regulations?  

That's a question every home schooling parent, every home school support group leader, every home school support group member, should be asking themselves.  I know I never had anything to hide, and was in fact proud of the education and the home environment I was providing.  If you, home schooling parent, can't say the same, you shouldn't be home schooling.  You should make sure your children receive lots of love, good nutrition, emotional nurture and educational opportunity every day.  If you are doing that, and  I believe most home schooling parents are doing just that, then you should be open and transparent to the community in which you live about what goes on behind your closed door. 

 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. I Peter 2:12

The public needs to be able to see your good deeds.  Being transparent and accountable honors God.  Don't seek to hide in the darkness of obscurity, be eager to show the world the wonderful work that your home school in accomplishing!  Do it for the children, because Jesus calls us to love children  (all children, not just our own) and treat them with dignity and care.  Read carefully Matthew 18:1-9.  

It's time for the home schooling community to cut out and cast away families that abuse their children!  The only way to do it is to come out in the open and show the world what's happening in all our home schools.  The righteous will be rewarded, the wicked will be found out, and all of society will be better off for it.  

Lead the way, home schooled graduates! Lead the way, new home school parents!  Don't let the old guard lock you into making the same mistakes they (we) made.  Do it not only for your children, but for all children.  Heads up! You are the new face of home schooling.  Please let it be an open and honest face, publicly displayed, that has nothing to hide and much about which to proudly smile.

What NOT To Do When Your Home Schooled Teen Rocks the Boat

Hi blog readers, if any of you are still around! *waves excitedly*

I am taking a ten minute block out of studying for finals to write this VERY HELPFUL post!  I hope that parents of home schooled teens will share near and far, because for some strange reason this does not seem to be common knowledge.  I am not sure why, except... well, maybe I do understand.   But at any rate, for whatever reason, some people need to know these things.  So, in case any of those who are at a loss are searching the web for help, here we go:

#1 DO NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR TEEN'S CELL PHONE

I hope you got them that phone as a lifeline to help no matter where they are.  The fact that they can talk to friends on it is a social bonus, but that is not the main purpose.  When your teen is rocking the boat, looking for more freedom or respect than you are ready to give, do NOT take their phone away. That is beyond stupid.  When/if they run away or leave home, how are you going to contact them?  That's right, you can't, you took their phone away!  And really, if your teen is out somewhere without your all-controlling protection, don't you at the very least want them to be able to call 911?  Seriously, stop and think.

#2 DO NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR CHILD'S ACCESS TO EDUCATION

If you take away the laptop they use for online classes, or take them out of co-ops and/or lessons, how will they get the education they need to become self-sufficient?  And if that is the point, and you are PURPOSELY ISOLATING THEM and sabotaging their ability to become independent by denying them access to education- you are in violation of human decency, at the very least, and quite possibly the law.

You don't have to give them unlimited access, but they need to get their school work done at the very least.

Remember HSLDAs advice to keep a prominent presence in your community as a means of avoiding a visit from social services?  That continues to apply when your little ones become teens.  You look like an abuser when you isolate your children from the community.  It may be because you are one, and if so, I hope you get busted. But it may be only because you're confused and afraid and got bad advice from an overbearing control freak, pastor, or both. Don't do it.

#3 DO NOT CONSIDER SHADOWING AS AN APPROPRIATE WAY TO RELATE TO YOUR CHILD

I never heard of this before I met C. online, but apparently some Christian author out there somewhere has promoted tethering your teen to momma 24/7 as an appropriate way to parent.  If any normal person hears about this, they will darn sure call social services, and well they should.  That is insane in the brain.  A teen is an autonomous human being, inexperienced but clearly capable of independent thought and action.  Shadowing is psychological torture, and you could even go to jail for it.  Don't be that person, bringing shame on the home school community, your family and your church.  Why do I even need to write "don't torture"?

#4 IF YOUR CHILD LEAVES HOME AND YOU FIND OUT THAT HE/SHE IS WITH RESPONSIBLE ADULTS IN A SAFE PLACE, DON'T HARASS THE RESPONSIBLE ADULTS OR THREATEN THEM.

 Making overbearing demands on people you don't know is NOT going to improve your position.  You will look like an ass, and everything your teen says about controlling parents looks 100% right on. Further, if you threaten them, then law-abiding adults have only one option: ask the teen to leave.
So what then?

Your teen is no longer with responsible adults, no one has any idea where the teen is and the teen doesn't have a cell phone.  Great, what if real trouble starts?  Would you really rather your teen be in a jam with no access to 911 than allow them to talk to friends you don't agree with?  That seems rather extreme.

Plus now, when/if your teen does speak to social services and mentions the threats of total domination of personal space (shadowing), social isolation and denial of education, there are responsible adults who can testify to your domineering behavior.

Smooth move, Ex Lax.

#5 DON'T CHOOSE SCORING THEOLOGICAL POINTS OVER WINNING YOUR TEEN'S HEART  BACK

Teens love their parents.  They really do.  Most of them would do anything to get their parents to be proud of them.  The distance growing between you is a normal part of growing up.  Reach out in good will and bridge that gap with love.  Allow your teen to think differently than you do, believe different things than you do, like different things than you do, and show that you love and accept them just the same as always. That's how you win a teen's heart, and that is way more important than being "right".

And the one thing you SHOULD do:

TRUST.  Trust in your parenting, that all the years you spent have given a good foundation.  If you are a believer, trust in God who is everywhere, who sees all, and who loves all parties involved.  Why freak out in a tizzy if you have faith in God?  That seems to put the lie to all you claim to believe.

Finally, trust your teen.  Odds are good that your teen would love to come home, love to continue in relationship with you, if you would just stop being pompous, controlling, self-righteous know-it-alls and go back to being Daddy and Mommy.  Ever watch Intervention? The ones who are going to make it always have family members who:  Remember the good times and talk about them, show affection, express faith that the person in the jam can turn things around, and promise to love them always.

Then, and only then, do people start mentioning consequences.  Take a lesson here, and go and do likewise.

You're welcome.

One Last Thing...

School starts up again tomorrow, so my blog will go back to being neglected for the next few months.  But I just had to say...

I AM SO GLAD I HOME SCHOOLED!

Nothing is perfect, and certainly there were many problems with our family life and marriage as my kids were growing up.  Before I accepted the probability of my daughter being "on the spectrum", I often doubted if maybe her slow social development was possibly related to not being forced to interact with crowds on a daily basis.  Now I know with 100% certainty that home schooling had nothing to do with it at all.  In fact, who knows where she would be if she were forced to deal with crowds on a daily basis?  It would not have helped her mature any faster, or changed her neurology.  So, yeah, I am glad she did  not have to deal with public school.

Instead, her earliest years were spent in a calm, creative environment.  Our home was resplendent with educational paraphernalia: books, DVDs, CD-ROMs, paints, colored pencils, markers, whiteboard and markers, scissors, glue, construction paper, magnets, puppets, toys, craft kits, music, posters- you imagine it, we probably had it.  She had all the time in the world to explore and most of the day was free to get busy.  I can't think of a better environment in which she could have grown up.

The middle school years were tough, and things were  not good at home.  Mom had been imbibing Poison for my Marriage for years, and the damage was growing daily.  When I listen to P!nk's song "Family" I think of how tough that must have been for her.  But even then, I am grateful  that on top of that she didn't have to face the expectations of a school full of NT adults and children each day.  Rejection and misunderstanding from her parents, her church and social groups was bad enough without crowds of people to overwhelm her and add their disapproval to the mix.  As much as I misunderstand and didn't notice being home with her every day, how much more would *I* (not working moms in general, but me specifically) have missed if my attention was further divided to include the workplace AND the potential problems she was facing expanded to include the public school environment?  For us, home schooling was the right choice.

Home schooling has turned out to be a boon for my son as well, at least as far as the interests he has and the man he is.  He would like to be more popular (who wouldn't at that age?) and he certainly would have had a greater crop of potential friends to choose from had he attended public high school.  But this coming semester, going to the urban community college instead of the rural community college he attended last year, I think he'll solve that dilemma.  Also, the wisdom that comes with maturity (not everyone at public school is popular either) will give him a greater sense of satisfaction with his life.

So, if I had to do it  over again, would I still home school?  Yes.  If I had the budget to afford an exclusive preparatory school, I would have encouraged my daughter to try that for high school.  Ditto for  my son.  Christian school would remain out of the question, because school should be about learning and education, not indoctrination.  But we never had that kind of money, so home school- for my two- really was the best option.

Peace and good will to all who read here. SS

My Daughter, My Hero

My daughter amazes me.

She is extremely talented in several ways.  She's an amazing artist.  It comes to her naturally, things that I never got right even though I took art in public school for several years.  She was born seeing all the layers of color in the every day world around us, and since childhood she has incorporated this talent into her art.  She sees the color in white.  She can correctly put one hundred different hues of a color in order, with no mistakes, in record time, and she does it for fun.  She remembers color, something I was told is not possible.  For my daughter it's possible.

She's an amazing musician.  When she was seven, she started taking guitar lessons at a local music store.  Her first instructor was a nice enough guy, but she was quickly losing interest.  She played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at her first recital.  At the end of that year, I called a musician friend to look for an instructor who might make it more interesting for her.  I was told there was only one instructor in the area, and she gave me his name.  Rex Willis, music professor at the local university, took her as a student and at eight  she began playing classical guitar.  She was good at it, and good at it without practicing for hours a day.  She played for the next six years, and then quit as suddenly as she had begun.  Recently she picked her guitar up again, and in a day it all began coming back to her.  She plays beautifully.

The girl has language skills.  As a tween, she used to co-write adventures with friends as characters they created from the world of Neopets.  Neopia, I think it's called.  She learned to read seemingly effortlessly at the age of four, and used to devour books from the library.  In the early years, I would get twenty books from the library each week, the most one could check out.  She would sit and read them all, one after the other, in a single day.  The fact that she recently graduated cum laude from university is due in no large part to her exceptional talent in language arts.

And this talent is not confined to English only.  She also has foreign language skills.  I started teaching her Spanish when she was in kindergarten.  She grew bored with that by late elementary and wanted to learn Japanese.  Though it took a few years before I actually found her a tutor, she did not become discouraged and give up on that dream. She also taught herself some Russian and studied codes, including gypsy codes, online.  Probably the most unique part about her is how she put her language and analytical skills to to use by coming up with her own code. She kept her diary in code starting in middle school, a complicated written alphabet that looks to me a lot like Tolkien's elvish.  It's hauntingly beautiful.  I thought she had created an entirely new language, but it is all English, just in code.  Still, it's very impressive and she worked with it continually, changing and evolving it several times through the years.

All of these talents and interests are pretty darned impressive, but her innate talent is not why she is my hero.  Her character is why she is my hero.  She is a better person than I am in so many ways.  My hat is off to her this morning, and I want all of you to also know why I am in awe of her.

She does not back away from hard things.  While her many talents are impressive, every day things have not come easy to her.  Her large motor skills were always lagging behind other children her age.  Yet even though physical coordination does not automatically come to her easily, as it does for so many of us, she has not backed down from physical challenges.  She joined ROTC as a sophomore in college, worked hard to earn a spot at field training, and passed.  This was incredibly challenging for her, and yet she took it on and worked hard, really hard to earn her top score of 90 on her physical fitness tests.  She also was part of a mime team at church in her teens.  She swing dances, something I am not coordinated enough to pull off myself.  Because it was difficult for me, I never tried very hard to learn to dance.  Even though it is very difficult for her, she has kept at it for several years.

She works hard to accomplish and achieve many things the rest of us take for granted.  When she went to college, finding her way around campus was far more difficult for her than writing a paper.  In her freshman year, she lived on campus at a small school whose entire campus took up only one city block.  Her sophomore year, she transferred to the big city university and lived off campus.  I did not appreciate at the time how much courage and determination this took, because I shrugged off her difficulties with spatial awareness.  I scorned her when she confessed to me as a middle school child that she couldn't find her way around our neighborhood.  I accused her of not paying attention to her surroundings and being stuck in her head, when the opposite was true. She has always had to seriously concentrate on her surroundings, because she sees everything.  Where my brain ignores so much of what I see and helps me naturally focus on only the important features of the landscape, she sees everything.  If I were her, I might very well never leave my home.  But she did leave home, and successfully made her own way in this world.  Her senior year she moved even farther off campus and got a place of her own, with no help from her parents  That may be common for most of us, but it was bold and audacious for my daughter.

Driving falls into the same category. Now that I am finally starting to understand how her brain works, my admiration for her grows daily.  She was not eager to get the keys to the car as a teen. It was just one more way the world (and I) blew her off as weird.  She is not weird.  She is careful and thoughtful. She waited until she was ready to take on the challenge successfully before stepping out to earn her driver's license.  She resisted a lot of peer pressure to start driving before she was ready.  When she finally decided she WAS ready, she passed her driver's test on the first try.  I didn't pass my driver's test on the first try, and I have an easy time navigating my way through space.  I do it effortlessly.  She works for it.

In fact, my daughter does perseverance unlike anyone I have ever known. She does not stop until she has accomplished what she set out to accomplish.  The recent undergraduate degree she earned, in spite of all she has going on to accomplish everyday living, is a testament to her diligence. She graduated, cum laude, with  a Japanese major, an aeropspace engineering minor, and she did it in only four years.  It took serious daily application of effort, far more effort than we regular folk will ever know, over those last four years.  She accomplished it with honors.

But of all the character traits she has that I admire, it is her loving heart that I most appreciate.  She is kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving like no one else I know.  Since coming to realize how often she has been misunderstood, unappreciated, criticized and even ridiculed unjustly, the love that she shows everyday amazes me.  I am in awe of her loving heart.

So many of the comic book super villains have their evil hearts explained because they suffered injustice and loss and could not get over it.  We humans resonate with that, because we understand the concept of having a breaking point. We understand it because the world is full of bitter, angry people who can not get over the injustice they suffered. We ourselves all have a hard time with moving on from heartache and pain.  While all of us have been misunderstood and falsely accused, few of us have known such experiences on a daily basis.  My daughter has.

Honestly,  if I sent this to you, the odds are good that you have misjudged and rejected my daughter.  Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents have all been angry at her or rejected her for what appeared to be resistance, apathy or rebellion.  In a new situation, she needs more sleep and more time to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings than neurologically typical people.  Because of this, people misjudge her as lazy.  It takes a lot of concentration on her part to master all the visual stimuli her eyes and brain see, and the quietness she exhibits while she is concentrating has been judged as being unfriendly.  The fact that she is never at ease or relaxed in these stressful situations means that her relatives call her weird, and say she has a personality problem.  With rare exception, though all of our relatives are Christians, self-righteous condemnation has been the most common gift my daughter has received from her relations.  I include myself in that number.

The rest of the world is no kinder.  People are expected to behave more or less the same with very little variation allowed among us.  We call it "normal". When someone's neurology puts them outside the norms, whether that is in the form of great talents (which  my daughter has) or in ways that make life more difficult (which my daughter has), this world is not at all welcoming.  You would think that with such amazing talents, she would be lauded and encouraged to develop her talents to the fullest.  That rarely happened. The cattiness and jealousy people have expressed over her talents hurt just as much as being misunderstood and rejected for her social difficulties.

And yet, she loves.  My daughter loves.  She loves God who created her and is the closest friend she has ever known. She doesn't love religion so much though, as it has never been a place of comfort and welcome to her.  But she has a rich and full spiritual life with the One who never casts out those who come to Him.

She loves and forgives those who have rejected her.  Painfully, she has learned that pursuing relationships with jocks and other haters will always be a waste of effort.  The extra effort she puts in to keep up with such people is not even noticed, much less applauded.  Yet she herself is not a hater.  She is welcoming to all, only later weeding out the people who prove to be more harm than good to her.  Love tempered with wisdom, you could call it.  I  greatly admire her for managing to keep her love alive.

So, just so you all know, I am very proud of my daughter. In fact, she is my hero.  I admit she is a better person than I, and I am lucky to have her in my life.

Mulan's Big Win

Did you know that Tim Burton has Asperger's?  I didn't.  Did you know my daughter has Asperger's?  I didn't, not for sure.  I suspected it, starting when she was about fifteen, but I was so horrified by the possibility that I put quite the negative spin on it.  Stop being that way! I would demand.  You don't want have Asperger's, do you? You do NOT want to have Asperger's.  Stop acting like you do.

(Some of you may hate me now.  Go right ahead.  I deserve it.  But I am not the only mother to react this way to her suspicions, I'll bet you dimes to the dollar.  I am just one of the few honest enough to admit it.)

When my daughter was sixteen, I paid cash to visit a child psychiatrist to consult about whether I should seek a diagnosis.  The doctor listened patiently, asked very pointed and appropriate questions, and then offered me a solution.  She rightfully pointed out that seeking a diagnosis would only prove beneficial if my child wound up in need of special assistance to succeed in life.  If that were the case, then and only then would it be the best course of action.  She gave me a checklist of teenage social developmental milestones, and a timetable of six months.  If all, or even most, of these criteria were met, I should just relax.  If less than half were met, I should seek an appointment for my daughter to be evaluated.

Six months came and all the blocks were checked off the list. I breathed a sigh of relief.  My daughter did not have Asperger's, I reassured myself.  It had all just been a phase.  *whew*

Wrong.

My daughter, being the hard-working, beautiful-hearted, amazingly talented person that she is, just worked extremely hard to compensate for her neurologically atypical wiring.  I am in awe of her accomplishment.  Here, in someone else's words, are what it took for her to pull this off:

http://archive.autistics.org/library/more-autistic.html#analogy

An Analogy for Some Kinds of Autistic Skill Acquisition

The following is only an analogy. The real world is much more complicated than this, and this is not true for all autistics.

Pretend there is a way of measuring doing a certain skill, so that there is a "resting performance level" in that skill and an "active performance level" in that skill. The scale is from 0 to 10.

9 or 10 is the way people are expected to perform in that skill.

Most NTs have a resting ability of 7 to 10 in a skill they have either learned or been born with.

Many autistics have a resting ability of 0 to 3.

In order for an NT to do that thing, it takes either very little effort or no effort. If their resting level in that skill is 10, then they don't even realize that they are using that skill.

In order for an autistic to do that thing, it takes considerably more effort. It takes the degree of effort that it takes NTs to do things that they usually have a resting ability of 0 to 3 in, such as multiplying large numbers in their head.

But when an autistic gets practice, they get used to pushing themselves.  They may push themselves so that in public they are functioning at between 7 and 10 in that skill at all times.

The NTs around them, taking for granted that 7 is the lower limit, don't even recognize that the person maybe had to climb all the way up from 0 to get to 7. They start taking for granted the autistic person's ability in that area, because it is within the limits of the only range of abilities they even know. The autistic person's effort gets unintentionally ignored, and NTs wonder what's going on when the autistic person gets exhausted and overloaded from doing "normal" things, or suddenly stops being able to do something they were "good at" before.

One example of a thing that NTs are usually at a 10 at is recognizing the objects in front of them. Unless they have had brain damage (at which point they're not technically NT anymore), they usually can easily and effortlessly perceive and differentiate between familiar objects and name them.

Some autistic people, in order to do that, have to do things like decide to look at something, see a garble of shapes, start differentiating individual shapes, focus in on one of the shapes, figure out that the shape is a Thing, figure out what the Thing is, and figure out what the Thing does. And that's all just to get to the bare minimum of what NTs do automatically, and it's leaving out things like differentiating one sense from another and doing this in a non-passive setting.

Doing that kind of thing all day with all your senses can be very tiring and overloading. That does not mean doing all the things NTs do to function all day, mind you, it just means understanding our surroundings. That's the background that a lot of autistic people have to work up to to then do the "ordinary" things like go to school, obey teachers, do schoolwork, housework, and stuff.

Some autistic people can get extraordinarily good at holding this together to the point where it becomes pseudo-automatic (doesn't require conscious effort, but takes a huge energy drain), or can devise ways of dealing with the world that don't involve having to perceive all of it all the time, but there are usually things going on that an autistic person is doing consciously that are a lot more basic than what you're used to thinking about. It's not necessarily always in the area of sensory perception; that's just one of many things that can be like that for us.

It doesn't often get recognized that even if an autistic person gets up to a metaphorical level of 7 to 10 in a skill, and performs that skill in that manner on a regular basis, in all likelihood they are still performing all of the complex maneuvering consciously. We are less likely than NTs to just get used to things, and even when it becomes pseudo-automatic the drain on our resources does not necessarily go away.

The natural inclination of many NTs when they see an autistic person at a 7 to 10 in that skill is to believe that that skill has been "mastered" and is now fully automatic, requiring very little effort. They then push the autistic person to pile more skills on top of that skill, into a really big stack. The problem is that the more skills get added that the person then has to monitor and deal with, the more likely that the lower-level skills will falter and bring the whole metaphorical "house of cards" down. That can look like overload, shutdown, or meltdown when that happens.

When it happens for a long time and some of the skills do not get built back up again, then it often gets called "regression", which is not a word I'm fond of. I suspect that's one reason that autistic people sometimes shut down on skills we've supposedly mastered a long time ago when learning new things. Skill mastery simply doesn't work the same for us.

Nightmare Before Christmas

Tim Burton’s movie entitled “The Nightmare Before Christmas” was released to the public in 1993.  My daughter was three years old. 

I was a fully committed fundamentalist Christian mother at that time.  Determined to pass on my faith to my precious daughter, I filled our home with Christian books, Christian videos, Christian music, and Christian toys.  I took her to Sunday school.  I took her to Mother’s Day Out at our church.  I took her to Vacation Bible School each summer.  Every day in every way, I sought to fill her environment with words of faith and love.

Faith and love were my intention, but faith and law were instead often the result.  So many things seem to be like that in parenting.  We embark on a course of action with every positive intention, and when the course is run, we are stunned to find that we are nowhere near where we intended to end up.  Like the many parents you can see each week at Disney World waiting for the evening parade, the frustration of having all our good intentions stymied can be maddening.  We put all this money, time and effort into trying to create this magical experience of wonder and amazement in our children’s childhood, and then they instead experience something entirely different and not always pleasant.  Who wouldn’t be upset?

Most parents’ initial reaction is anger.  They (we) scold the children for being (fill in the blank) ungrateful or selfish or rude or ugly or call them whiners or sissies or other unpleasant names, when they are experiencing our efforts as a negative instead of the positive we intended.  Good parents catch themselves and stop, apologize, and do a logistics check to look for the cause of distress.  Hungry?  Tired? Sunburned?  Cold? Thirsty?  Sick?  Over-stimulated?  Need to go to the bathroom?  Activity age appropriate?  I liked to think I was a good parent, especially when my daughter was very young.

But then, when my daughter was somewhere around eleven or twelve, things went awry.  I was doing all the right things- Christian devotions, daily prayers, fun activities, church socialization, teaching to her interests and strengths, providing lessons outside the home, exposing her to social groups (Girl Scouts in this case).  Why was my daughter so depressed?  Why was she so “rebellious”?  What was “wrong” with her? 

Looking back now, the signs are everywhere obvious.  She needed me to stop with all the religion and constant moralizing and spiritualizing everything and listen to her. I should have listened to her, and listened without any idea in my head of what the “right” answers were, the “right” feelings were, the “right” thoughts were.  I am sad, truly sad, to say I did not do that.  I was full of Christian culture claptrap, up to my eyebrows, and I knew what were the right answers, the right feelings and the right thoughts for all good Christians.  I was quick to point out to her where she was wrong, why she shouldn’t feel the way she did, and why she should not think the thoughts she was thinking.  I called her thoughts and feelings evil and demonic.

To those of you not up to your eyebrows in Christian culture claptrap, I know that sounds heinous- it is heinous to say that to a child!  But to those of you steeped in Christian culture, it will sound right and good doctrinally.  We are always being tempted by the devil and his demons to think evil thoughts and hold on to evil feelings like fear, resentment and jealousy.  These are not perfectly normal or understandable human emotions and reactions. They are sin.  If a person does not repent of them right away, then they are under the power of the demonic.  That is the spirit at work “in the children of disobedience”.

 Ephesians 2:1 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; 2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: 3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. 

Poor kid.  She was having a hard time figuring out who she was and how she fit into this world, and she was getting no breaks from me.  I thought I was the most loving and supportive Christian parents a child could hope to have, and I was.  I was living the Christian version of the Eagle’s “Life in the Fast Lane”.  I knew all the right people; I took all the right "pills".  I had the scriptural answer to everything. 

But she did not need a Christian parent, she needed a loving parent. She did not need religion to tell her how she should feel and think.  She needed a loving mother to listen to her express how she did feel and think, and without shaming her for having the “wrong” thoughts and feelings.  That she did not get.

She did get tolerance. That was the best I could come up with at the time, but she did not get that tolerance shame-free.  Oh no, there was still plenty of shaming and prodding to do the “right” thing and think the “right” way and feel the “right” things.  Is it any wonder that my daughter’s favorite song to play at the time was “Reflections” from the movie Mulan?

“Look at me

I will never pass for a perfect bride

Or a perfect daughter

Can it be

I'm not meant to play this part?

Now I see

That if I were truly to be myself

I would break my fam'ly's heart.”

(http://www.fpx.de/fp/Disney/Lyrics/Mulan.html#Reflection)

So, she quit talking to me.  Most of the time, she just hid in her room.  We didn’t always fight (disagree, clash, hurt each other), but it was still a daily occurrence.  For reasons I now understand, but did not at the time, we just could not connect.  I tried, in my own fashion, every day.  My daughter tried, in her own fashion, probably just as often.  But I was not really trying to understand her.  I was trying to change her.

I wanted to mold her into what the Christian culture said she should be and it was not taking. She appeared to be something else entirely, much to my dismay. While appearances are not always what they seem, she seemed to be (in my estimation at the time) mean, self-centered, uncooperative, pretty much the opposite of the cheerful, obedient, pleasant Christian girl I was expecting.

I was embarrassed by her, because I knew that we would be judged harshly and rejected by our Christian peers.  But I did not forsake her, as I have watched so many other Christian parents do to their children whom they could not control. I give myself some good parent points for that.

The best I could do, the very best at the time, was stand beside her.  I allowed her to express herself in the ways that she chose, though I was not really happy or supportive about it.  I tolerated it.  Not a best case scenario by far, but really the best I could come up with at the time.  I was willing to bear the shame of being her mom, even though I did not understand her and was incapable of trying, because I knew that God loved and accepted me as I was, without condition. I would love my daughter the same way.

The day came when my daughter became fascinated with Goth culture.  She was already depressed, I reasoned.  No wonder she would fall into a depressing and dark subculture.  I didn’t want a war over everything, so I picked and chose what I could tolerate and what was just too far over the line for even me.  So, when she asked to watch Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” I stuck my nose in the air and agreed to tolerate it.  *I* would never watch such garbage.  I am quite sure I made some comments about not understanding what she saw in such dark entertainment, but I allowed it. 

I thought that was the farthest stretched out limit to the love of God any reasonable Christian parent could reach- to allow her to watch it.  I would not sully my own happy Christian bubble by watching it with her.  I was too pure for that.

Fast forward to this year.  My daughter is now a grown adult. She was home for the holidays, and I asked her and her brother if they wanted to watch a Christmas movie.  “Yes!” came the happy answer.  “Let’s watch ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’!”  Her father and I, being less religious than we were ten years ago, agreed.  Ironically, we are still both infected by Christian culture enough to only agree reluctantly. J

Oh, my dear Lord, why did I not watch this movie earlier? 

This movie is a beautiful fictionalization of my daughter’s experience of life. Like Jack Skellyton, she wanted to belong to the magical world of Christendom (Christmastown).  She was enamored by it, and tried her very hardest to make it work.  But like Jack, she was doomed to be forever on the outside of that to which she so wanted to belong.  Ten years ago, when she asked me to watch this movie, she was trying to get me to understand her heart.  What a religious fool I was to turn my nose up at the opportunity.

There’s a scene in the movie, where Jack is pretending to be Santa Clause and failing miserably. The townspeople are employing anti-aircraft guns to shoot down the imposter.  They don’t understand that Jack has a good and loving heart and wants to be a part of the gift-giving love-fest that is Christmas.    All they know is that his gifts don’t look right, and he doesn’t look right, and when he tries to “ho ho ho” it sounds like the frightening cackle of a Halloween ghoul.  So they take aim and shoot him down.

Jack falls out of his downed aircraft and lands, appropriately, in a cemetery.  Even more poignant, he comes to rest on the outstretched arms of an angelic statuary.  I am tearing up at this point, and I look at my daughter.  Tears stream down her cheeks, and yet she is smiling.  “Yes,” she assents out loud, “because God loves us, too, even the ones who can’t ever fit in.”

My heart broke in that moment and it still hasn’t fully recovered.  I hope it never does.

More thoughts on Home Schooling

This is the very last week of my last year of home schooling.  All that's left is to prep my son for his final shot at the SATs.  I am so proud of him.  He is doing extremely well in his dual-enrolled classes and is well-liked at work.  I love the passion in his heart for justice and love.  He has taught me so much in the past few years about what it really means to be a good person.  <3 <3 <3

I love being a parent, and I loved home schooling.  However, like all human endeavors, home schooling is full of dangers and pit falls that can snag unprepared parents and ruin the lovely life they had planned.  Libby Anne, a home schooled graduate from a Christian home schooling family, has initiated a forum series where she is giving eight graduates of Christian home schools an opportunity to answer questions about their experience.  These Christian home school families adhered to the Quiverfull philosophy.  You can find her blog series here: Raised Quiverfull

This is a wonderful opportunity for other home schooled parents, and those considering home schooling, to see how home schooled graduates feel about their experience.  It's a rare gift, and I for one find it fascinating.  I hope it is widely read.

Here are some of my thoughts after reading the responses to Home Schooling Q.2:

1) No matter how good the intentions of the teaching home school parent at the start, multiple pregnancies and more children mean that the quality of home education will suffer.  In fact, it sounds like the end of academic challenge, at least for the oldest students.  It seems that Sierra, who had no other siblings, got the best education as far as time and attention from the adult in her life. Libby's education sounds more like our family's, with the exception being that while my teens also studied more independently as time went on, when they did, it was not because I was too busy to help.  It was because they didn't want my help!

2) What religious home schooling parents crow about as "socialization" does not appear to be about meeting student's social needs at all.  It's mostly about meeting mom's social needs and reinforcing the family rules (spoken and unspoken) by bringing in other families with very similar rules to underline the boundaries in black ink.

3)  Peer pressure is a horrible foundation for choosing how to raise your children.  I figuratively threw up a little in my mouth when I read the words "Keepers at Home".  Poor Melissa!  I am so sorry.  My heart broke a little as I read Lisa's story too, about how all of her social needs were to be met within the family, and she was not encouraged to dream beyond her mom's dream.  No SATs!  That is just SO WRONG.   All this happens, this religious one-upmanship, because your PARENTS are PEER DEPENDENT! That is the biggest irony of all.  These home schooling parents are all trying to outdo one another in religiosity because the approval of their peer groups is more important to them than the mental/emotional/social/physical well-being of their children.  They sacrifice their children’s lives on the altar of peer approval. 

I was sorely tempted to go there myself.  Who doesn’t want approval and acceptance?  But there were too many things I refused to bend on.  I saw no need for home school specific sports groups, unless it was just for more exercise and fun in addition to the community league sports.  My daughter is so low social needs that I was always pushing her to get out and meet people.  I encouraged her to try Girl Scouts for a year before she was willing to check it out. 

Our Girl Scout troop was all home schooled, but at least it WAS Girl Scouts, not the hideous brainwashing of Keepers at Home.  All I could think about as I looked over that web site, was how heartbroken those girls will be if they don’t marry or can’t have kids.  I thought about the two old women who lived next door to us in our tiny Great Plains town when I was a child.  Beulah spent her whole life caring for her mother.  She was in her sixties, her mom was in her nineties, when the mother died.  Beulah decided to travel for the first time in her life.  Finally, she had the chance to live!  Beulah went to see her brother in far off California.  While there, she became ill.  She discovered she had cancer and died within a year.  When I saw the web site for Keepers at Home, I wondered how many Beulah’s were being asked to give up their whole lives to meet their parents’ needs.  I determined I would not support that cruelty!  I had no kind words for Keepers at Home. 

4) Latebloomer, thanks for sharing your experience at not really knowing anyone at your high school graduation. The truth is that as people grow, they change and develop new interests (they should anyway) and old friendships don't always fit.  So if you have no opportunity to make new friendships, you will become more and more isolated through the years.  That’s why it’s important to join youth groups, clubs, study groups, work part-time, join a sports league, etc.  It’s important for all teens, not just home schooled teens!  If public school is hell for your teen (and it is for some) then work hard to help them find other groups that do accept them. 

That is why when my daughter wanted to go to youth group, I was thrilled.  She needed to get out and expand her social network.  Now as a young adult, she gets what I meant when I told her that, in order to have a good life, a person needs several circles of friends based on different activities and interests.  That way if a friendship goes south, you aren’t devastated.  The BFF of Lifetime movies is fun while it lasts, but in real life, it is EXTREMELY RARE that people can be each other’s only friend for a whole lifetime.  People are too complex for that.

5) Fear is crippling and contagious.  Even as my daughter was attending youth group, I was always choking back my fear.  I had a critical eye towards all the youth my daughter hung out with, and I evaluated their families with suspicion.  Why?   Well, because even though I wasn’t as crazy religious as the Keepers at Home crowd, I was still an evangelical Christian.  Fear was preached to me from the pulpit, from the radio, it came in the mail as requests for money to fight the culture wars, it was shared on the Christian forums I would visit online.  It’s only now, when I am no longer going to church at all, that I can see how all-pervasive fear was in my life. 

I think one of the last Christian books I bought was “And the Bride Wore White” by the Ludys.  I didn’t even read it for myself, I just gave it to my daughter.  I told her that I wasn’t going to read it, as I didn’t want to nag her about anything contained in the book, but that I trusted the Holy Spirit to guide her into what was right.  That was in 2008.  I was only beginning to understand how totally screwed up our family life really was, although I did not yet realize how much of that had to do with religion.  That was my last half-hearted attempt at controlling who my daughter was and what she would choose for her life.  

Fear is crippling and contagious without having anything to do with religion, either.  I do know secular home schooled moms who have shared with me that fear was a big part of other home school support groups: fear of public school, fear of non-organic produce, fear of the medical professions, and the most damaging fear of all:  Fear of abandonment.

I have met home schooled parents who seemed determined to keep their children at home as adults because they (the parents) had some serious abandonment issues.  I am related to one such family.  They brought their children home in late high school, sent them to non-accredited colleges, arranged their marriages and made sure they were all anti-birth control.  Those children, now adults and parents of QF families themselves, have no job prospects and no place they could ever survive financially other than working for dad's "ministry" and living on the grounds.  

On the secular side, many of my son's peers are quite worried about a girl who has dropped off the social radar completely.  Her single mom  was already always at the girl's side, and limited her social activities so she could pile on her own expectations: the girl will be a published author, no college necessary.  The main source of this family's fear is green: raw vegan diet is the only safe way to eat.  The young lady's facebook account is shut down, she won't return calls and no one has seen her for months. Religion may be a big fear producer, but the fear itself is the real danger.  

There you have it, whether you wanted it or not: my thoughts after reading Libby Anne's latest Raised Quiverfull post.  I hope you will all choose to live courageously, love freely, and balance all the bad news the world throws at you with things that make you smile and give you hope.  Oh, and say a prayer for the missing home schooled teen.  Someone must be in contact with her somewhere; pray that person will become the friend she needs to break free of the fear (and mom's control, though it is presumptious of me to write because I am only relating what I have heard from the teens, not personal experience).

Peace and good will, SS

EMDR and moving on with life

We just got back from a family vacation.  It was so nice to have both of my children and my husband with me, enjoying the relaxing days and nights.  It was also something of a milestone.

Two years ago on vacation, my husband was  not the man he is today.  He was (had been) an abusive bully for many years, but I was just waking up to it.  I was only beginning to read  Passive-Aggression: A Guide for the Therapist, the Patient and the Victim and visit web sites about domestic abuse, putting it all together.  For years I had been accommodating my husband's behavior (I am such a forgiving person) and putting it all behind me, only to have new painful letdowns occur every few weeks.  Since he had only been physically violent once, I was still unsure that what I was experiencing was abuse.  In fact, this blog is the story of my awakening to that fact, and how I have chosen to respond in light of this knowledge.

Two years ago, he engaged in behavior that was unmistakably, straight off of the checklist, abusive behavior. When I was terrified, confused, and shrinking against the wall, crying and praying, he snuck up next to me and snarled a loud "BOO!" in my ear.

I had my answer. No question about it: this is clearly intentional emotional abuse.  Who DOES that to someone they love?!

Now two years later, I have good news.  My husband lived a life of love and self-control on our vacation.  Any request I made, he happily complied.  Any time I was concerned about anything, he listened and adapted.  We actually had a very good time together, all the time, the whole week.  And now that he's home?

Still good.

What are the factors to his healing/improvement?

Well, I am more independent in every way.  I am well on my way to achieving my career goals.  I was accepted into the school to which I applied (I was told only 15 are accepted out of 500 applicants).  I am maintaining a high GPA.  I am in therapy, on the final stages of EMDR and soon to be done with that.  I think this determination to take care of myself, and not be dependent on my husband for anything is key.  I don't need him emotionally.  If I go to talk to him and he is aloof, I just stop what I'm saying, get my inner bearings straight, and walk away without a word.  Sometimes he apologizes and chases me down, wanting to know what I was going to say.  The thing is, it doesn't hurt me anymore.  I really don't care if he wants to be there for me or  not.  I am well capable of hashing out my thoughts on my own, or with a friend. I don't NEED him to be there for me.  Oddly enough, this inspires him to be there for me.  Weird, huh?

He is in trauma therapy and on anti-depressants.  He is getting healthier, and while it may have all started out as a mere attempt to save the marriage, now it is to save himself.  This makes both of us very happy.  He has stopped jumping when his parents call, and we don't go to church anymore.  I think these last two are milestones in his healing at this point.  When he sees his parents next, it will be on his terms.  When he goes to church again, if he ever does, it will be because he wants to, not because he should or as proof he is a good person.

Every night we read together.  Right now we are reading Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer.  He plays golf, something he does for himself.  I study, something I do for myself.  I also do yoga now, which I love.  I started out with Brooke Boon's Holy Yoga and am exploring the discipline from there.

Some things are sadder.  No one in my family goes to church now.  So much for the home school promise of daily devotions turning out model church-going Christians.  Lolz.  As far as the Christian part goes, though, everyone in my family has a genuine faith and a personal relationship with Jesus.  We are just each and all so burned by organized American Christianity that we are not in church right now.  Prove everything, hold fast to that which is good.  =D

I wish I had a fellowship of believers to take communion with, and to spur one another on to love and good works.  If it's out there, though, the Holy Spirit will have to lead me to it as I live my everyday life.  Visiting churches is such a bummer so much of the time.  So, we'll just see where it all goes from here.

I like where we all are now.  I love my daughter.  I love my son.  I love my husband AND it even looks like he might be fit to live with, not just for the time being, but for some time to come.

This makes me very happy.  Namaste, ya'll! (Loosely translated: the light in me honors the light in you- a yoga version of the song we used to sing in Charismatic church while holding hands and looking into each other's eyes:  "Yes I love you with the love of the Lord, yes I love you with the love of the Lord, I can see in you the glory of my King, and I love you with the love of the Lord."

Peace and good will,
SS

Both Hope and Regret:How is that possible?

I feel both hope and regret today.  It is the weirdest thing.  I don't feel them both at the same time, but I do feel them both within the same ten minutes.  I think EMDR is working, as before I would likely just be crushed with guilt and shame, and only be able to cultivate hope through a lot of tears, bible reading and journaling.  Now I just feel hope.  It's totally cool to be hopeful without extensive work to get there.

So here's the deal: I was a sorry ass mother in many ways to my little girl.  The irony is that my number one desire was to be a good mother!  It was both my deliverance and my curse.  My deep, deep desire to be a good mother is what led me to buy all those Christian books, go to all the seminars and Bible studies, put my kids in all the children's programs and include such a huge dose of "wholesome morality" in my home school.  That is the curse part.  The true sincerity of my longing to love my children in the way that was best is the deliverance part.  Isn't it ironic that what I meant for good turned out to detour me in the wrong direction, and actually put up a barrier between my daughter and myself?

You know the saying "better late than never"?  I really hope it turns out to be an absolute truth. My daughter  needs it to be,  and I need it to be true for her.  Yesterday in tears, as I was making these confessions to her, I apologized for not being the mother she needed me to be.  She, also in tears, replied to me that I was the mom she needed me to be NOW and that she loved for me that.  (Okay I'm getting all misty-eyed again now. Deep breath.  Exhale.  Carry on.)

I feel like I should reiterate here that I love Jesus still and always will.  I don't find fault with the Bible as much as with the way it is used.  Lewis Wells calls it "bibliolatry" and he is so right.  I was hoodwinked by the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.  It is a heresy, in my opinion.  The Bible is a record of people whose lives were affected by the Divine, and while it may be a true record of what they experienced, believed and taught (my opinion) none of those people are/were Divine themselves, except for Jesus.  Proverbs are just that, proverbs: generalizations that are true much of the time.  The history books are just that: a historical record of what people thought, did, said, felt and heard.  They are not encyclopedias of fact.  Whoever wrote Genesis was recording the stories of early Judaism.  It is not eyewitness testimony, and if it were, we would still have to consider the character and motivations of the witness.  The poetry is poetry; the gospels are four written records of what was remembered of the life and words of Jesus in the decades after his death (and resurrection!  Yes, I believe in the resurrection.); the epistles are letters written to congregations of the early church and the book of Revelations is apocalyptic writing meant to encourage the persecuted church.

But when my daughter was growing up, I thought I believed in the inerrancy of scripture, and I went to churches that taught the Bible from that perspective.  I listened to nice, wholesome, middle-class Christian teaching- nobody who dressed funny (like Mennonites, the Pearls, etc.) or acted too strange (IBLP, for example).  Nope, the people I associated with and to whom I listened dressed like everyone else and was appropriately integrated into the culture at large.  You could wear makeup and dress nice, as long as you didn't show too much skin.  You could watch television and movies, as long as you were selective about what you saw.  You couldn't cuss or drink, though, and of course you should go to church every Sunday and, generally speaking, seek moral perfection in all you do.

Ah, and therein lies the curse.  Do you know what moral perfection is, boys and girls?  It is when you look, act, talk and feel, in a word, Christian.  In order to become that kind of person, everything has to be a moral lesson.  One should be appropriately emotional- cry at the right times, smile at the right times, all that sort of outward proof of your inward transformation.  You should feel the right feelings and if you are a good Christian you will feel these right feelings at the right times.

For example, really holy people will cry at the showing of mission films.  How can you not feel despair and sorrow at the nice people on the screen who are all going to hell?  Also, you should choke up with regret and remorse at sermons calling for repentance.  If you are unfeeling, you must be some kind of amoral monster, though no one will come right out and tell you that.  And if you are reading all those family devotions, you know that these moments calling for appropriate emotional responses happen all the time.  Good Christian children will respond in the good Christian way to the sermonettes popping up in all those "teachable moments" that good Christian parents are forever alert to recognizing. Not to mention the extras the church throws in unintentionally, like athletic prowess is godly (Awana) and being beautiful is also godly (check out the casting on those plays and musicals, we all know it's true).

So here I am, earnestly wanting to be the best mom ever to my children, relying on the Christian parenting industry because I could not rely on experience, so grateful to have married into a truly godly Christian family, because in my naivete, I thought Christian was synonymous with love and nurture.  For the record, I do believe that Christ is synonymous with love and nurture, and that it is possible to be a good and loving parent by putting into practice the commands of Christ.  My mistake was in thinking that the evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity being marketed was at all about obeying the commands of Christ.  Not even close.

See, I bought into the line of reasoning (insane that it is, in my now much more humble opinion) that since the Apostle John called Jesus the Word of God made flesh, and since Christians called the Bible the Word of God, that following Jesus meant trying to obey everything in the Bible.  That is insane, because Jesus actually gave precious few commands in his life on earth, and all of them centered around empathetic love for others.  The Bible, on the other hand, has commands out the wazoo about everything from what you can eat, to how to greet people, and everything in between, much of which are contradictory to one another and very few of which actually involve empathetic love for others.

So, my daughter was pretty much screwed from the get-go.  If she had been a neurologically typical child, she might have been better able to comply.  But, unbeknownst to me for many years, my daughter is Aspie.  She doesn't feel things like other people. She doesn't experience life like other people.  I might have known that if I had been asking her questions about her experience of life, without a mental template of what was good and acceptable with which I measured everything she said and did.    If I had been parenting with the idea that there is a wide range of human experience, and all of it is acceptable, I might  have learned much earlier what kind of mom she needed me to be.  As a Christian mom, I was never encouraged to ask that question. The Bible had the answer to that question, and there were plenty of Christian authors to explain it to me, should I need more than the weekly sermon and a good look around to get it through my thick skull.

I didn't need to try to empathize with or understand my daughter: I needed to demand that she empathize with and understand others.  If she couldn't (when she couldn't) do that, it was plain enough what was going on.  She had a sinful, selfish heart, and was in rebellion to the Word of God.  There is only one right way for a Christian child to be: cheerfully obedient, appropriately compliant to whatever was expected in the moment.  Everything else is rebellion, and can be trained out of them with the right effort.

I am ashamed to admit that I punished my daughter for being who she intrinsically was.  I shamed her for being who she was, as who she was did not fit according to the template of acceptable evangelical Christian thoughts/feelings/actions.  If I could go back in time and change it, I would.  If I thought there was any depth of remorse I could feel that would undue the damage, I would dig deep into depression and regret and stay there as long as it took.  Since that won't help at all, I won't go that route, though that also is an unhealthy ideal I picked up along the way in Christianity.  Sackcloth and ashes- if you are really, really sorry enough, long enough- moves the heart of God like nothing else, at least according to some Old Testament stories.

Thankfully, I didn't have the stomach to keep it up forever.  When I saw my daughter hurting so badly in middle school/high school, I backed the hell off.  I was willing to suffer the shame (yes, I wrote shame- sad but true, it's how I internalized it, and that's how the Christian community dished it out, too) of allowing her to be herself, because it was plain that she needed that freedom in order to know she was loved.  In my evangelical delusion, I thought that such sacrifice on my part would result in healing for whatever hurts she was suffering, and THEN she would transform into the perfect Christian girl!

Little by little, over the last eight years, I have come to understand who she really is inside.  She is beautiful, inside and out, just as she is.  She does not need to change.

She doesn't need to feel anything she doesn't authentically feel.  Not feeling on cue does not make her an amoral monster.  She is as loving and sweet as anyone else, just not on cue.

She doesn't need to clean up her artistic bent.  She is an amazingly talented artist, and while her style isn't as dark as it used to be, there was nothing wrong with her earlier darker images.  She was expressing dark truths, which do also exist you know, as surely as sunshine and rainbows.

She does not have to become an athlete.  She will never be very athletic, and who really cares?  Adults aren't put into high pressure athletic events against their will. Awana is over, finally and forever.  I just wish I hadn't made her try to fit in there as a child.

There are ways in which her neurologically atypical brain will always be at a loss.  She will always have trouble navigating through space in an absent-minded professor sort of way.  She will dress in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing to her, and if it burns someone else's moral or fashion sensibilities, they had better not tell me about it.  I think she is freaking amazing, and I will back her up to anyone, anytime.

I hate that she smokes, because I love her fresh pink lung parynchema and want it to be nurtured forever.  But since she likes it, I accept it.  I refused to feel shame for anything about my daughter ever again.  I am proud of her in every way.

Thank God (literally) that I quit trying to make her into something she is not when I did.  I just wish I could have back all those early years to enjoy her for who she is, and be better equipped to help her find her place in this world without all the shaming and yelling and frustration on my part.  I don't have a time-machine, but I will pay for her therapy, and pray that somehow the love of God can heal the damage I did back then.

She'll never be evangelically fashionable, which was what I was striving to produce in her all those years.  Nope, she is much better than that.  She is authentically who she is, and I love her for it.  Shine on, beautiful. Someone cue up Katy Perry's song "Firework".

Happy Happy Day

I am so freaking happy!

My daughter, my amazing daughter, is living her dreams! She has the career she wanted, the job posting she wanted, her own apartment, her own car, a full social life, beautiful art she continuously creates, and she is getting her degree studying the language she loves. I. Am. So. Happy!

She has roommates of her own choosing, activities of her own choosing, romantic interests of her own choosing, and when she truly leaves our home- meaning all the way out of state, where we can't meet up for dinner or drop by to see her latest art project- she will have a well-paying job and can easily afford her own place, food, clothes, everything she needs. And she is looking forward to that new experience, not afraid of it.

I am deliriously happy!

You see I had none of those things.

I was on my own at eighteen, aged out of foster care. I had no car, no job, no family support, no hopes or dreams, other than to just make it through another day. Oh, and I feel compelled to add, I went to twelve years of public school. (That was for my cyber-friend and reader who claims that public school is the golden key to finding your place in this world.) My daughter was home schooled from birth until she went to college. She is living her dreams at an age that I was hanging on to a minimum wage job and praying my car would hold together. Too sweet.

My other "children"- my son's best friend and the daughter of a former friend of mine- are also living their dreams. I KNOW I had a hand in that too.

My son's best friend spent more time with me from middle school on than he did either of his own parents. His dad was home, but not exactly a nurturer, and his mom was working late hours bringing home the bacon. They are his parents, and they love him and of course support him. But I was there encouraging him to hold on to his dream until he had the courage to tell his parents what that dream was, since it did not match the plan they laid out for him. He did, and he excelled at it, and when he got an audition for an arts school, his parents were ready to listen. Being the wonderful people they are, they finally caught the vision, and he is excelling with their blessing and support. Booyah.

My former friend's daughter came to live with me for a semester. She was flunking math so her mom sent her to me for a semester, to help her catch up. She was easy to teach, and caught up and moved ahead quickly in math. But more important, she learned about love, forgiveness, and what real family support felt like. She is still considered a sibling by my two children! Her mom was telling her she was ugly, fat and would never make it. When she left our house, she knew better. Instead of returning to her mom's, when she left our house she went to live with her dad and his boyfriend. She is now a happy sophomore in a major East Coast university, and I saw her post a picture of her beautiful self in a bikini on a social network this summer. Live the dream, young friend!

Then there's my youngest. I love that kid! He was sharing a poet with me today- amazing stuff! He is such a deep thinker with such a big heart- both the poet and my son! (But mostly my son.=)

He has his first job and they love him! He is still doing school, so he applied for 10-20 hours a week, but it's always at least 20. He is a really good musician. When he was really young he played cornet, then baritone, but now it's electric bass. He has a duo with another home school friend of his, a sweet little vegetarian rocker who is in public school this year. (Incidentally, it was taking a Brit Lit class in my house that I facilitated that inspired her to go to the arts magnet school. I'm just inspiring like that. I wrote her recommendation letter. =)

In addition to his music, work and school, he also kick-boxes and does Tae Kwan Do. He beat his kick-boxing instructor in all three rounds the other day. He came home glowing that his instructor said he had taught him all he could. Since his instructor is ex-military, currently a police officer, that made the teen feel pretty good.

He applies to the local private university on Monday, and then he's applying for their biggest scholarship. I hope he wins. His big dream is to be a doctor, and I believe he will make it. He's always been an enthusiastic leader, starting with playing center on community league football when he was eight years old. He was the unofficial leader of his team of volunteers in Dominican Republic this summer, and made some lasting friendships there both with his public schooled peers and his college student sponsor.

Politically, he keeps me informed and opens my mind to new perspectives, which I love. Anyway, all my praying friends, keep him in your prayers next week. Also, he's trying to get a donation of shoes to the kids in the D.R., so pray for success there too. And my non-praying friends, just send good thoughts his way.

No time to edit this. I have to go to bed. I have a TON of school tomorrow! Goodnight!

Buddy Wakefield: Human the Death Dance