how I escaped being the homeschooled Mormon kid
because I felt like trauma dumping
I have grown into the attention whore that I am today through dedication and hard work. I love nothing more than being in front of massive groups of people who all have to watch me and clap, a far cry from my younger self who was an endearing knot of worry and anxiety. My former shyness was most likely the byproduct of happens when you tell young children there’s a man in the sky watching every sin that has ever been committed, even the sins that only exist in your mind. I digress.
Now that I have just a year and a half left to go on my prefrontal cortex, I have learned that it just so happens that I am one of the most extraverted people to ever have been invented. I grew up in a family of six and thrive best in densely populated cities where there is cross-cultural exchange and pockets of genuine community.
I study best in a crowded library, I dance hardest when the club is packed to the brim with people. I adore a bustling atmosphere. I inhabit a neighborhood that cares about each other, that notices when things seem awry. I see the same people at the store, on the street, at the gym, The Bar, the other bars, and all around town participating in various nightlife.
For people like me, connections are frequent and easy, and the ones who are meant to fall to the wayside don’t tend to linger or keep me awake at night. Friendship is something I craved my entire adolescence, I think because of how shitty of a Mormon I was.
Pretty distinctly, I remember an argument I had with my mom when I was nine or ten years old. In the LDS church, girls this age attended Activity Days once a month to do little crafts or learn how to be the most subservient wife possible as their future husband will undoubtedly demand. I really fucking hated Activity Days, including the other girls and the stuck-up adult women who ran them.
The congregation that our zip code landed us in was Yakima’s fourth ward. At the very edge of the ward boundary, we stuck out against the pale, pale background that was the Mormon families of West Valley.
Not only did my white ass dad and Samoan mother make us the only mixed race family in our ward for years at a time, but we were definitively several tax brackets beneath the majority of our zealot peers. There exists a plethora of Mormon chiropractors and orthodontists, for some reason. In contrast, my mom took up caregiving during the recession while my dad worked full time as a gunsmith for a crazy drunk named Paul. We were the poorest, the least white, and just to make us even more intolerable to the Mormon masses, my mom insisted on homeschooling all four of us. I had absolutely nothing in common with 95% of the people I came in contact with the church simply because I knew they thought they were better than me. I could feel the superiority complex in the pitiful little smiles they’d show me. I’m sure they prayed for me to be something I’m absolutely not and never will be, which is obedient.
As for the argument that erupted, I was begging not to go to Activity Days to my mother’s chagrin. I was being stubborn, a skill of mine. She finally asked, exasperated, “Why don’t you want to go?”
“I know where I’m not wanted,” I said to her. Quite the drama queen move. But it was true. That’s how I felt. None of those girls liked me, nor was I particularly fond of the bland beige aura that envelopes sad Christian girls.
Mom one-upped my little diva moment. I often forget that she’s where I get my drama from. She stormed out of my room, and just when I thought this episode was over and she’d just let me stay home, she burst back into the room, landline phone in hand, mid-conversation with the woman called to serve (Mormon parlance) as the Activity Days leader. I was mortified.
“So why does my daughter say she doesn’t fit in? The other girls don’t like her? What? What is it? Why does she say she doesn’t belong?” I pleaded that she stop and put down the phone, but she didn’t. Mom kept on shouting at the phone. I was a nervous wreck; this was going to make everything worse. My plan was to lay low until I was 18 and never see the inside of a church again, but Mom just announced to Sister [insert Mormon surname here] who would probably blab to the rest of the women in our ward about how little me didn’t want to come to church, thus making the decade of church attendance ahead just a tad bit more nightmarish. It was also the thing that made me stop caring about whether the rest of the congregation gave a shit about me or not. In my soft little brain that knew so little, I felt that I’d earned a permanent mark on my nine-year-old reputation, so there was nothing left to lose. That was the first time I ever truly thought about dying.
Later that night, my big sister and I talked about it because I was getting to an age where my mom and I would be fighting, a lot, and the only person who could ever successfully mitigate harm between us is my sister. She experienced all the same pain and discomfort growing up in the church as an outsider that I did and more, and years before I also had to process those same feelings.
As a fat, poor, homeschooled girl-thing with less than perfect parents, Mormon ones no less, it was hard for me to fit in anywhere. The only people I socialized with for years were church affiliated, and this is done by design in cult settings. We shared the vocabulary, the social ties, the responsibility, the forced obligations and rites of passage. It was all a trap, one that I was born in, and had zero idea what life could be like once I got out.
One morning, seated in cold metal folding chairs arranged in a circle facing our teacher and a chalk board, my Sunday school classmates began talking about the third grade sock hop.
“What’s a sock hop?”, I asked.
“You’ve never heard of a sock hop?” asked a girl named Alyssa with an incredulous tone and one cocked eyebrow. Fuck that bitch.
Turns out, a sock hop was “a boy-girl dance party and everyone gets dressed up and there’s snacks and music and stuff”. But I was homeschooled. So I didn’t get to go. Every one of the cute boys in my Sunday school class were going to a party, and I wasn’t invited. There may have been an Aw, gee, we sure wish you could come!, but my memory is only so great. Regardless, I was tired of being on the fringe of society. I was tired of the kids at church ousting me, I was tired of hearing about god all the time, and I was really, really, really tired of being lonely.
After months of begging, my mom finally let me start public school in the fourth grade. Even at nine, I knew being cooped up in the house wasn’t good for me. I had no friends. I wasn’t even learning very much. I literally hid the math textbooks I was assigned behind the living room couch so I wouldn’t have to do them. My homeschool years mostly consisted of waiting for our parents to both leave for work so we could play video games all afternoon. Minecraft. TF2. Zelda. Quality stuff. Nevertheless, I wanted more in life than to speed-run Super Mario Sunshine.
My first ever day of school was in August of 2011. I was terrified and sad, and I cried on the sidewalk while I waited for my mom to pick me up in our forest green Toyota minivan. I didn’t let my mom see I was crying, though, for fear she’d pull me back out and sentence me to homeschool forever. I wiped my tears before climbing in the back seat, smiled, and told her all about my wonderful day in my new school. Sometime after, I stole my sister’s concealer from her vanity in case I cried too much as school and needed to hide how red my face got. I often felt the need to hide the fact that I’d been crying, a habit that persists even as an adult. I don’t want people to think I’m manipulating them. That’s a brain worm to dissect another day.
In the fall of my fourth grade year, I finally hit my stride. I made friends! I was well-liked and an excellent student, which is miraculous because my homeschool education felt severely lacking. I remember asking a girl I was friends with, Grace, if she thought a boy in our class liked me.
“Ugh, why would he like you?” she asked, almost indignantly.
That night, my sister held me while I cried into her shoulder snuggled together on our bunk bed. She told me all the ways I was pretty, and special, and smart, and that boys are stupid anyway and next time a girl says that to me I should tell her off and that they’re just jealous of me. It helped. I love my sister.
I discovered my personality little by little. I learned that when the bell rings, that means recess is over, and that snitching to the teacher is socially frowned upon. Once terrified of being perceived at all, ever, I actually branched out and built some confidence within myself. I even learned swear words, and how to use them in a grammatically correct fashion. Our library cards in elementary school were laminated pieces of construction paper with a series of stickers indicating our reading levels (red star=first grade, blue star=second grade, etc.) following a standardized exam. Grace and I both had twelfth grade reading levels in fourth grade, and competed constantly. We may have even scored higher than that, but there was an apparent lack of undergraduate textbooks for Grace and I to peruse in the library of our elementary school. Competing academically was much better for my personal development than stressing about if some dumb little boy in my class thought I was pretty or not.
I did sports, I made art, I felt well liked. If I sat with the boys at the lunch table it was strictly because humor brought us together. We’d have milk chugging contests and say stupid shit and laugh about said stupid shit. We watched the same YouTubers and liked some of the same music.
The price I paid for male friendship at this age was the internalized message that I was ugly, because the young boys in my social circle would constantly make fun of my appearance that I then had to laugh off. The price I paid to play soccer and four square and basketball was the occasional sting to the ego from a male classmate calling me fat or ugly or Mormon or a lesbian or homeschooled. Mostly, they just kept finding new and creative ways of calling me fat. I suppose I had more “boyish” hobbies and tendencies as a kid, which I guess wouldn’t have been a problem if I just had the genitals to match. It sounds so odd when you say it how it is. If I only were born with a dick and balls, I could play four-square with the boys without wanting to sob afterwards.
The ways in which men platonically put women in their place so to speak varies wildly from how women do it. If a woman thinks you’re beneath her, it’s displeasing. If a man thinks you’re beneath him, it reeks. It reeks of contempt and jealousy, if not outright hatred. At the end of the day, I could give a shit what an idiot’s opinion of me is. I am loved, I give love, and I think that is enough.