Stomach-curdling shame

For 20 years, I carried that story as one of the worst things that I had ever done.

My mother opened the library door and I slammed the answer key shut. Not fast enough.

My stomach churned as she instructed me to come into the dining room and grade my math lesson in front of her. The result wasn’t good. It certainly wasn’t the 98% or 100% scores that I had been giving myself all year.

I am the oldest of 9 children and I was homeschooled all the way through 12th grade. Homeschooling parents brag about personalized education for their children, but in my community, that wasn’t the case. By the time my peers and I reached high school, our parents would hand us a stack of books with instructions to finish before the end of the school year. Individualized learning meant that the size of our book stack depended on how much unpaid labor our parents needed from us.

New York is one of the few states that requires actual reports and tests from homeschoolers and we were required to complete a set number of instruction hours each school year. Life always got in the way, so our school year ran pretty much year-round.

And so I found myself on that early summer morning with 5 math lessons to complete before I could go to a friend’s house. 5 days' worth of math so I could catch up to what my mother had promised the school district I would do.

It was a daunting number of problems, but I had a trick up my sleeve. Earlier that year, my mother decided she didn’t have time to grade my work, so I should do it myself. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that the fastest way to get the work done was to sit down with the Saxon math textbook on one side, the answer key on the other side, and just fill in the answers as I wrote the problems in my notebook.

Somehow, it took my mom almost 9 months to notice that the girl who had cried because math didn’t make sense had suddenly turned into a student who got all the problems right all the time. (I sometimes got one answer wrong for believability.) 9 months for a woman with an elementary education degree to pay attention to her daughter’s math progress.

But now she had finally caught me, and I thought I might faint or throw up. Would she beat me? Even worse, would she have Dad beat me? Perhaps she felt guilty about her educational neglect because somehow I escaped a spanking. Instead, I was grounded, left to punish myself until the shame disappeared. Two weeks later, we went with my grandparents to their Methodist summer camp, and I hung back, still unsure if I was allowed to have fun after committing the gravest sin.

For 20 years, I carried that story as one of the worst things that I had ever done. I cheated. I lied. The shame curdled the contents of my stomach. And then, as I finally examined what happened in therapy, I realized that I wasn’t the villain in the story. Yes, I had done something objectively wrong (cheated on my math lessons for months at a time), but I had also done it out of an instinctive need to survive.

At 12, I was already cooking most of the family meals, caring for my siblings, and cleaning the house. Faced with the unrealistic expectations of full-time housekeeping on top of my homeschooling, I found a solution to get through the schoolwork quickly.

The sad thing is that my mother was fully capable of teaching me. When I needed to test out of a college math class, she taught me enough calculus in a few weeks to pass the test.

I just wasn’t a priority.

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Today is Day of the Homeschooled Child, an observance held every April 30 to raise awareness of child abuse and neglect in homeschool settings and to call for laws that ensure homeschooling is safe.

I was fortunate to be homeschooled in New York, which held my parents to common-sense standards for education. Without those standards, I might have finished high school with no math or science education at all.

Most homeschooled students aren’t so lucky. They might live in a state like Illinois, where it’s impossible to account for homeschooled children because their parents don’t even need to notify the state that they exist.

Homeschooling can be a liberatory experience for children. Homeschooling can help students who face anti-blackness, bullying, or a lack of accommodation for neurodivergence at their schools.

That opportunity cannot come at the expense of children who are trapped in households that abuse and neglect them.