You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (4 page)

There wasn’t a tradition in our family to homeschool, but there
was
a tradition to get super-mega educated, especially on my mom’s side. My grandfather had a PhD in nuclear physics and a thick Southern drawl like molasses. He would invent a desalination machine one week and chew out anyone who distracted him from his favorite Nashville sketch show,
Hee Haw
, the next. “Get outta there, Pooch! You’re blockin’ Skeeter Davis!”

My grandmother is a scientist, too, and a nurse and an artist and . . . I’ll
be honest, kinda scary. She once found a dead owl on the side of the road and put it in the back of her pickup in order to analyze the skeleton after it decomposed. I mean, that’s kind of Beth Henley interesting behavior, but seeing a dead owl in the back of a pickup is super creepy when you’re seven years old, guys. Because you start to suspect that if it were legal, Grandma would do the same thing with your corpse, too.

In order to keep the brain legacy up, my mom scrambled to find schooling options for me and my brother before we moved, but the Gulf Coast of Mississippi didn’t have much to choose from. In fact, it had one of the worst education systems in the country, and the only secular private school in the area was a place that made kids wear uniforms, which Mom considered fascist. So we were in a quandary. And because my dad was working twenty-eight hours a day to become a surgeon (scrubs were the only thing I saw him in from the age of eight on), it was up to my mom to figure out an alternative.

So, in a natural leap, she decided to Bob-Vila-DIY our educations herself.

[
 Home Is Where . . . It All Is! 
]

In retrospect—and not to be mean to anyone who parented me—it doesn’t seem like there was a clear plan going into the whole homeschooling thing. At first, the idea was to follow a comprehensive third-grade curriculum that my mom sent off for in the mail, 1-800 style. It was a system missionary families used when they took their children abroad, and I was a fan of that idea, because it seemed
super
romantic. I’d always dreamed about traveling overseas on a ship like the
Titanic
,
and missionaries seemed tragic and special (not like dumb Ms. Rosemary).

Also, homeschooling seemed like something an orphan would do, and I really wanted to be an orphan. Because let’s be real: they have it
so good
in kids’ literature! They’re sad but special, people love them against all odds, and they’re always guaranteed a destiny of greatness.
The Secret Garden
,
The Wizard of Oz
,
Harry Potter
? Orphanhood was a bucket list item for me! Along with being able to communicate telepathically with my dog. Based on the loose association of “no school” and “no parents,” I was pro-homeschooling. Without understanding what the hell it really was.

On the first day of my new educational life, several boxes of books arrived at our house. Weirdly, all the texts were designed the same, with the words “Science” and “Math” on the covers, like boxes on a generic food aisle.

Despite the weirdo curriculum, I was psyched. And so was my mom.

“You guys ready to learn outside the box?” She lifted up the thick “teaching manual” that she was supposed to use daily. (I don’t think it ever got its spine cracked.)

“Yeah!” My brother, Ryon, and I jumped up and down, way too excited, like we were in the audience for a Nickelodeon show. We were ready! Screw the establishment! We were learning on our own!

The next morning I put on pants (even though I didn’t technically have to because I was in my own home), sat down with my new books at my “desk” (the kitchen table we fed the cats on), and got ready to rock my brain!

Just to be clear, my mom did make an actual effort to start our day at 9:00 a.m. sharp and do schoolwork until about 1:00 p.m., before “do whatever you want, kids” time. This lasted for maybe a week. With no one to supervise
any
of us, slowly but surely, the family wake-up time slid to a nebulous “midmorning.” After a few months, we’d miss all studying before lunchtime because we ate out every day (eating at home was for oppressing housewives), and the restaurants filled up around one, so it was better to leave the house at noon to beat the work crowd. And if we got up around 10:30, that meant . . . I mean, showering is a thing that takes time, guys.

Any structure in our lives disintegrated. “Can the doodles in the margins of my geology chapter count as art class? Really? Thanks, Mom!” Schooling became “We’ll get to it later!” around other, more important things, like grocery shopping and going to see the midnight
Rocky Horror Picture Show
screenings. Eventually, my brother and I were on our own. No rules, no tests, and no pesky governmental
supervision for children who had recently relocated and weren’t on official census lists.

I don’t mean to imply that Mom was completely hands-off with our educations. She did stuff. When she got interested in something, she’d say, “Let’s go learn about history!” and we’d jump in the car and drive around the state for a few days visiting all the Civil War memorial sites. (It’s super fun to roll down a grassy hill where thousands of Confederate bodies are buried.) She’d also yell “Study!” a lot from her bedroom while watching
The Sally Jessy Raphael Show
, and during the first Iraq war she made us start learning Arabic because, “You never know what will happen.”

There was, however, one big rule that was enforced during our free-for-all education: We were expected to read. Constantly. All day, every day. Whatever we wanted at the library, the used bookshop, adult or kid section, anything that didn’t have nudity or Stephen King on the cover, we could read.

Naturally, I became obsessed with detective pulp fiction. Perry Mason was my favorite. Not the actor who played him in the TV show, Raymond Burr. I hated him; he was bulky, and his skull looked creepy underneath his skin. No, my Perry Mason was taller and debonair, like Cary Grant, or my second love, David Hasselhoff. I collected all but one of the Perry Mason books (
The Case of the Singing Skirt
eluded me; it was my collection’s white whale), and I arranged all eighty-one of them by publishing chronology on a makeshift bookshelf in the back of my closet. Because of their influence, my life’s dream became clear: to enter the glamorous profession of “secretary,” like Perry’s loyal companion, Della Street. Either that or “moll”—whatever that job entailed.

I was also expected to work hard on math, for my grandpa. Since he was a physicist, he would quiz me on equations when we’d go back to Alabama for our monthly visits. My mom liked to impress him. And I did, too, because he always gave me hard candy when I got something right.

“Tell me the Pythagorean theorem.”

“A squared plus B squared equals C squared?”

“That’s my girl! Now have a Werther’s and scoot to the kitchen.
Hee Haw
’s on.”

According to my mom, there was a pressing urgency for me to learn as much math as I could. An uncredited study she read once said, quote, “Girls become really stupid in science after they get their period, so you’d better learn as much as possible before that happens.” I had such anxiety about this “clearly proven” biological fact that I was studying calculus by the age of twelve. When I finally got my period, I cried, not because I was growing up, but because I had just learned derivatives and really enjoyed doing them. I was scared that estrogen would wipe the ability to do them from my brain.

I guess at a certain point, my dad expressed concern or something about our education. My brother and I didn’t see what the fuss was. I mean, we were FINE with doing whatever we wanted and not being forced to “study” like the rest of the world’s plebes. But to add structure to our lives, my mom shifted her focus, like any smart businessperson, to outsourcing. Our lives became nothing but lessons.

Ballet, tap, jazz dance, youth orchestra, martial arts, watercolor at the local community college (me and a bunch of eighty-year-olds rockin’ the stand of maple trees!), cross-stitch, poise class (held in the back of a department store, for REAL!), my mom basically trained me to become a geisha. With dance lessons alone, I went to class at least three hours a day. Big calves, you are mine for life. So even though it was weird and thoroughly uncomprehensive, my brother and I got an education. Of a sort.

Here’s an average daily schedule to give you some perspective about a weekday in my eight- to sixteen-year-old life:

8:00 a.m.:
 Wake up before everyone and SHUT YOUR CLOCK UP OR ELSE.

8:30 a.m.:
 
Lost in Space
reruns while eating Rice Krispies.

9:30 a.m.:
 Math for an hour. Maybe a chapter in one of those logic puzzle books with the grids. I loved puzzles, and Mom said they counted.

10:00 a.m.:
 AMC movie, hopefully a historical one for studying history, hopefully Technicolor, hopefully
Oklahoma!
If not
Oklahoma!
, 50 percent chance of watching VHS tape of
Oklahoma!
. Or a Cary Grant movie. Half-ass read chapter in history book while watching said movie. CHECK!

12:00 p.m.:
Family time! Lunch out at restaurant, one of four that saw us so frequently, they kept a table reserved for us. No one ever questioned why we weren’t in school. Thanks, society!

2:00 p.m.:
Study Latin because Mom thinks it sounds good to tell people we are learning Latin. Most of the time, read Perry Mason book instead, for “literature.”

2:30 to 8:00 p.m.:
 Geisha lessons.

8:00 to 10:00 p.m.:
 More movies or TV (especially kung-fu movies for PE) while eating either tuna casserole or manicotti (the only two items my mother cooked) or a microwave TV dinner (the one with the postmodern square desserts).

10:00 to 11:00 p.m.:
 More reading, video games, or maybe some Legos. For my brain-shape skills.

After 11:00 p.m.:
 Eh. Go to bed whenever.

[
 Socialization, Maybe? No? Okay! 
]

Since everyone we met always brought up “What about their socialization skills?” like naggy in-laws, my mom tried to find us like-minded people to hang out with. Problem was, our family’s minds weren’t like any others. Especially in southern Mississippi.

My brother and I tried to hang out with other homeschooled kids a few times, but in the ass crack of the Bible Belt, parents who kept their kids home were not going to intersect with our liberal points of view. Ever.

At one awkward meet-up, I was hanging out with a girl around my age on the playground. She was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and an overdress down to her ankles. I kid you not; she looked like a Pilgrim, and her name was Eunice.

I made the first move. Because socialization beggars can’t be choosers. “What books do you read?”

“The Bible.”

“Have you read
A Wrinkle in Time
? Or Perry Mason,
The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse
?”

“No. We only read the Bible.”

“Oh. You’re a Thumper.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Wanna swing?”

“I can’t. I might show my ankles.”

I laughed because I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.

After that, my brother and I were in agreement: being alone was better than hanging around those homeschooled weirdos.

So I didn’t spend much time with other children as a kid. SURPRISE! I actually can’t name one best friend I had during those years outside of a group lesson situation. But it’s human instinct to connect, and eventually I found someone who would listen to me no matter how weird I was: my little pink diary.