Post by Deleted on Nov 20, 2009 3:43:06 GMT -5
I found this forum the other day and I figured I should introduce myself.
I grew up in a more mainstream homeschooling family, my folks started homeschooling in the mid-80s when the whole homeschooling thing was still a pretty fringe movement. I think we lucked out in a lot of ways because my mom didn't like homeschool conventions because the moms proclaiming how perfect they and their families were made her feel inadequate and didn't really want to spend a weekend hearing how she was doing the wrong thing since she didn't get up at 5am for her quiet time and didn't bake all of the family's bread and didn't like to sew and wasn't doing all of the incredibly creative crafts for each unit in the curriculum, etc. As a result, we managed to avoid a lot of the craziness, though I think that unless you're aware of it, it's well nigh impossible to be part of the Christian homeschooling universe without all of the patriarchal stuff having some sort of influence. Looking back, I wonder about why we didn't immediately realize that all of the bs about courtship and betrothal was just that, bs, and that what they were really talking about was the ownership of women first by their fathers and then their husbands. My family wasn't like that at all, my mom hated it when she'd invite another woman to do something and get back the response "I'll have to see if it's ok with my husband first," but I guess it's like a boiling a frog and the longer you're around it, the less twisted it seems.
Ironically though, because my folks were running the private umbrella school for homeschoolers in our area (for some reason, my parents seem to wind up getting put in the position of running things whether they want to or not, I think because they're competent and know what they're doing), my mom ended up on the phone a lot with worried new homeschoolers. Between that, the fact that my parents were looked to as leaders in the local homeschooling community, and the fact that my siblings and I are all intelligent and thus considered homeschool success stories, we became the model homeschool family in the minds of the rest of the local homeschooling community. Of course, if they'd known about the times while she was on the phone with worried new homeschoolers that my mom was tossing shoes out the bedroom door trying to get our attention because we were running around crazy having taken advantage of the fact that she was on the phone to get into the sugar, they might not have thought my siblings and I were such saints, but since that didn't happen, we remained firmly on a pedestal. My parents never realized at the time that other families were doing that, it wasn't until my siblings and I complained about it years later that they even knew that our relationships with other homeschool kids were hampered by the fact that their parents were holding us up as such shining examples of brilliant well-behaved model homeschool children that they were afraid to talk to us. It was hard because while I loved the life that I actually had, I hated the image of how other people thought things were, but I couldn't figure out a way to rebel against it because then I was up against the fact that the non-homeschooling population was judging everything too and I didn't want to do anything that could possibly be interpreted as "look at that weird homeschooler". I can't imagine the pressure that would have been there if I'd also had to be the perfect patriarchal daughter on top of everything else.
Anyway, today I've graduated college, worked, traveled the world, lived and worked overseas and now I'm trying to figure the next step in my life. I look at the whole patriarchal/QF part of the homeschool movement and it makes me sad for all of the daughters who don't have any of the options that I had. What's being done to girls is no better than what happens in the fundamentalist Islamic world. Actually, it's worse, because at least conservative Muslim women are allowed to wear cute shoes.
I grew up in a more mainstream homeschooling family, my folks started homeschooling in the mid-80s when the whole homeschooling thing was still a pretty fringe movement. I think we lucked out in a lot of ways because my mom didn't like homeschool conventions because the moms proclaiming how perfect they and their families were made her feel inadequate and didn't really want to spend a weekend hearing how she was doing the wrong thing since she didn't get up at 5am for her quiet time and didn't bake all of the family's bread and didn't like to sew and wasn't doing all of the incredibly creative crafts for each unit in the curriculum, etc. As a result, we managed to avoid a lot of the craziness, though I think that unless you're aware of it, it's well nigh impossible to be part of the Christian homeschooling universe without all of the patriarchal stuff having some sort of influence. Looking back, I wonder about why we didn't immediately realize that all of the bs about courtship and betrothal was just that, bs, and that what they were really talking about was the ownership of women first by their fathers and then their husbands. My family wasn't like that at all, my mom hated it when she'd invite another woman to do something and get back the response "I'll have to see if it's ok with my husband first," but I guess it's like a boiling a frog and the longer you're around it, the less twisted it seems.
Ironically though, because my folks were running the private umbrella school for homeschoolers in our area (for some reason, my parents seem to wind up getting put in the position of running things whether they want to or not, I think because they're competent and know what they're doing), my mom ended up on the phone a lot with worried new homeschoolers. Between that, the fact that my parents were looked to as leaders in the local homeschooling community, and the fact that my siblings and I are all intelligent and thus considered homeschool success stories, we became the model homeschool family in the minds of the rest of the local homeschooling community. Of course, if they'd known about the times while she was on the phone with worried new homeschoolers that my mom was tossing shoes out the bedroom door trying to get our attention because we were running around crazy having taken advantage of the fact that she was on the phone to get into the sugar, they might not have thought my siblings and I were such saints, but since that didn't happen, we remained firmly on a pedestal. My parents never realized at the time that other families were doing that, it wasn't until my siblings and I complained about it years later that they even knew that our relationships with other homeschool kids were hampered by the fact that their parents were holding us up as such shining examples of brilliant well-behaved model homeschool children that they were afraid to talk to us. It was hard because while I loved the life that I actually had, I hated the image of how other people thought things were, but I couldn't figure out a way to rebel against it because then I was up against the fact that the non-homeschooling population was judging everything too and I didn't want to do anything that could possibly be interpreted as "look at that weird homeschooler". I can't imagine the pressure that would have been there if I'd also had to be the perfect patriarchal daughter on top of everything else.
Anyway, today I've graduated college, worked, traveled the world, lived and worked overseas and now I'm trying to figure the next step in my life. I look at the whole patriarchal/QF part of the homeschool movement and it makes me sad for all of the daughters who don't have any of the options that I had. What's being done to girls is no better than what happens in the fundamentalist Islamic world. Actually, it's worse, because at least conservative Muslim women are allowed to wear cute shoes.
