Author: Grace
Click here for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Ages 15-18 (2021-2023)
Yet another move
My entire life had been defined by the cycle of my family’s moves. In January of 2021, we left our large city in Texas for a coastal town in Connecticut. We drove northwards into increasingly colder and snowier weather and then had to quarantine ourselves in our new home for two weeks. But although it may have seemed gloomy at first, Connecticut turned out to be nice. When spring came, I realized what a beautiful state it truly was, with its beaches, old buildings, and winding roads through the woods. Living in New England came with the advantage of being close to a lot of extended family, including my great grandma. Also, I should mention that mom had another new little baby this spring. For some reason it seems like the baby years and the moving years often lined up!
I knew that this move to Connecticut was the final military move. The next one would come in three years when my dad retired, and my family relocated to our forever home out west. I also realized that I would turn eighteen in Connecticut. It was hard to imagine it as a fifteen-year-old unpacking my stuff into the bedroom my sister and I would share, but before we left that house, I would be a legal adult. Perhaps I wouldn’t even be living in that room anymore.
Finishing homeschool
My school routine looked different now than it had as a younger student. Since eighth grade, I’d done much of my schoolwork independently. Every week Mom handed me a chart with all my assignments. She would still help with math lessons or essays when I needed it, but I was teaching myself to some extent. I had to. It was similar for my brother closest in age to me. Mom couldn’t be a full-time high school teacher for us while she was simultaneously homeschooling three other younger children and managing a baby and a toddler. I believe this is a common situation in large homeschooling families. My high school curriculums were designed for students to use them independently, like the creators knew this would be necessary. If you’re a homeschooled high schooler your options are pretty much to be a self-sufficient student, or give up on schoolwork, or give up on homeschooling and go to school. I was a compliant teenager who happened to be good at teaching herself from textbooks, so my parents probably saw no reason to even consider the “go to school option” for me.
Thankfully, my parents did take academics seriously and wanted me to complete all the advanced subjects they had in high school. I read physics and chemistry lessons from old science textbooks and solved endless equations in my notebooks. It may not have been very interesting but at least I was good at it. My advanced math lessons got a bit confusing, but I kept pushing through. I didn’t quit Saxon math until senior year when I attempted the calculus curriculum and started failing math tests for the first time in my life. Once, I found an article online about racist homeschool curriculums and realized that one of the books quoted was an earlier edition of my American history textbook. I didn’t share this with Mom. How could I explain that I was worried my history book might be wrong? That I was worried my senior year geography curriculum that assigned children’s novels as reading might be too easy for me? That I was having doubts about the age of the universe after developing an interest in astronomy? I wasn’t sure how to have these conversations, so I didn’t.
I do have some positive memories of my learning during these final years of homeschooling. In junior year, I wrote a research paper on homeschooled characters in young people’s literature. (Yes, I have been obsessed with this topic for a while. Eventually this interest would turn into the Homeschooled Voices Book Award. In senior year I was given a choice in what to study for science and picked astronomy. I got into stargazing and night photography (which is surprisingly hard). These were a couple of interests I enjoyed in high school.
It just didn’t happen
My social life was lacking during my last few years of high school. This was partly due to having limited access to peers. At first, none of the activities in Connecticut had anyone close to my age. Admitting that I was in tenth grade made me feel ancient compared to the other kids, even almost embarrassed about my own age. In the fall, some other teens finally joined my co-op, which only met a few mornings per month, and where the kids spent most of that time separated into classes. A few co-op lunch hours a month is not enough to build a friendship upon. Besides co-op, I had my troop, where I was the oldest girl by about three years, and my orchestra where the focus was on rehearsing, and the other kids kept to themselves during breaks. Despite their limitations, I truly expected these activities to be enough for me socially. Whenever something changed- the co-op started meeting more often, a new homeschooling family moved into our neighborhood, I went to a teen summer camp- I hoped I’d make better friends. But then I failed to. I often felt that I didn’t connect with people, that I couldn’t keep up with conversations, and that I was behind for my age. Mom assured me that I was more mature but deep down I feared that I was less socially competent than some of the younger kids I knew. I probably wasted the little windows of social time I had each week. Close friendships just didn’t happen.
I’d heard something that seemed to explain the scarcity of homeschooled teens in Connecticut. Apparently, a lot of them went to school in ninth grade, because the public high schools wouldn’t accept homeschool credits (although my family ended up knowing other Connecticut families whose teens transitioned to school after freshman year). I assumed that were I to switch to public school, I might be forced back into the ninth grade. Thus, I no longer wondered if I might someday end up going to school. That ship had sailed. At sixteen, I thought I would simply be too old. School was a place I understood through the media and through the words of others. It was a common cultural touchstone that I could picture in the abstract but had no personal memories of. One day I was sitting at my desk when it struck me that I had never been to school. I could picture countless fictional schools in my head but there was no such thing as “my school”. That felt a little weird. Still, I wasn’t desperate for public school, and I couldn’t quite picture myself being there in real life.
The real life I could actually live was that of a homeschooler, and I tried to make the most of it. I was proud of being able to work independently and knew I was keeping up with my studies. My SAT scores proved I was just as capable as any other high schooler. I spent my free time reading, riding my bike, and picking berries in my neighborhood. Sure, I knew that other kids my age were driving, dating, getting jobs and stuff like that, but oh well. I was interested in schools and educational theory, and this made me feel more confident that I was doing the right thing. The books I read about public school focused on all the problems there, but the ones I read on homeschooling only mentioned benefits. Looking back now, I can still agree that there are potential benefits to homeschooling, but I can also admit that there are potential downsides, and that I experienced some of both growing up. I cannot know for sure if going to traditional school would’ve made me turn out better, worse, or about the same, because that’s another thing that just didn’t happen.
Finally old enough?
When senior year came, I began thinking seriously about what would come after. My parents encouraged me to apply for colleges. For the first time in years, getting older felt promising. I wasn’t just perpetually aging into new levels of awkward boredom; I was aging into new opportunities far beyond anything I’d done before. I got accepted into a college out west that I wanted to attend, and that would be much closer to my family’s future forever home than Connecticut was. So, my parents and I came up with the slightly crazy plan for me to go straight from homeschooling to living by myself in a dorm across the country. I knew it would be a big change and that I’d miss seeing my family. Honestly though, I was still excited.
Soon, the school year was almost over. I had my final concert with my orchestra, and had a graduation ceremony with my co-op, which had somehow accumulated a total of five seniors by that point. I didn’t graduate alone! Around this time, I earned an award in the scout-type program I did. The ceremony for that was the day before my eighteenth birthday, which felt symbolic, like my childhood was coming to a close. The next day my parents gave me a diploma as a birthday gift. I was officially done with homeschooling forever. It was the end of a journey that had spanned fourteen years, during which I’d lived in eight different cities. Through it all, I was fortunate to have had supportive parents and all my younger siblings. Lots of good memories were made through those years of my unusual childhood. From almost as far back as I could remember up until I was no longer considered a child, my experience had been a unique one of growing up homeschooled.
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