I had to start school again a couple weeks after my mom’s funeral. We were starting to get phone calls about it, and I was trying to push it as far as I could. And by start school again I mean continue being educated in my own home by tutors provided by the school district (and supplemented with classes at the local community college). I hadn’t been to school in the sense of getting on a bus and going to a building filled with other kids since the middle of junior high, aside from an attempt at high school for the first few weeks of 10th grade.
There was no requirement that I be seen by any mental health professionals. There wasn’t even a phone call from a guidance counselor to check up on me. I had to start with my tutors again or I’d be kicked out and need to be re-evaluated for my homeschool situation (which meant making doctor’s appointments I didn’t have the authority to make, with money I didn’t have, on the health insurance policy of a dead woman). The risk of being stuck in a house with my dad and without a high school diploma for any time longer than necessary wasn’t worth it.
Before the teenage years hit, I liked school. I didn’t love it, but I was very good at it. Mostly because my mom did a lot of work prepping me, and the rest because the system was set up for kids like me. I was already reading by 3 and writing in cursive by 5. My mother knew what education meant in my younger years and used her teacher network to get me into a year of Montessori preschool which I really liked (except for nap time).
One day we had a bring your pets show-and-tell day and someone brought a horse. They brought a fuckin’ horse onto the wood-chipped playground. My mom had gotten the day off work to put our cat, Mooch, in a carrier and bring him to school. But you can imagine most everyone felt a bit upstaged by the horse. I don’t know how much my mother (and grandfather) paid to get me in for just that one year of preschool, but it was enough to be going to school with people who owned horses and could take the day to bring a horse to visit a pre-school.
My time in elementary school was mostly positive. Though, there was the nuclear power plant that we could see from our playground, which didn’t make for pleasant scenery. There were drills for what to do if there was a “meltdown”. I wouldn’t compare this to the traumatic active shooter drills currently forced on our kids in the U.S. right now, but I probably could have done without the nagging fear of being a victim in the next Chernobyl.
(And while we’re on about existential dread, I’d like to point out that as a child I felt like Ferngully: The Last Rainforest meant that the grown-ups had this whole environmental/climate thing under control. Way to fuck that up, grown-ups.)
I was in all the “advanced” classes including the special vocal ensemble, advanced art class, and the highest level math classes, and then within a year I was unable to even go to classes for more than a few days at a time.
It was only later that I realized how many symptoms of various mental and emotional issues were manifesting as obsessive or stimulation habits. For a long period of time, between around 7 years old and 12 years old, I had a problem with where my feet pointed. I had some sort of mental hang-up where I didn’t feel comfortable having my feet pointed toward something I didn’t like.
My hair had to be pulled back exactly and if it didn’t feel even or became that way throughout the day, I would become extremely anxious and wouldn’t be able to do anything until it felt better. I have more than one memory of going up to teachers when I was very young and asking them to fix my hair before I was old enough to do it. This still bothers me sometimes when my hair is in a ponytail. (You’ll notice throughout this book that there are no photos of me with my hair down, because none exist.)
I would chew the side of my tongue, shake my legs, pick my cuticles. (I still do all of these, why am I saying “would”?) I know some of these were picked-up habits from my mom. I can still hear my dad mocking my mother in the other room: “You picking your feet again?” Any time I touch my bare foot, I hear that voice.
I managed to “grow out of” some of these things, or they lessened greatly over time. I don’t point my feet away from things anymore, but every now and then I still get the impulse.
It wasn’t until the transition from elementary to junior high that things started to affect my performance in school. I still enjoyed the learning part, but the social part was immediately taking its toll. My quirky disposition, coupled with being sick and missing school all the time, made me a target for all sorts of things. There’s nothing like compounding the trauma of teenage anxiety and depression with daily performative social interactions.
I also had trouble being away from home for any amount of time. I always felt like I needed to be home, even though home was where my dad was and I decidedly didn’t want to be around him. I’ve never figured it out. To this day, I have horrific, sweating through clothes and feeling like I’m gonna barf kind of anxiety when trying to leave the house. I don’t know why, but I always feel like I’m in a game of tag and home is “base.” That relief of closing and locking your door behind you when you come home is a special kind of good feeling.
I was diagnosed with depression at 13. I cried a lot. I slept a lot. I struggled to get along socially at school, but most of the kids were horrible. By 8th grade, half of my mornings began with my guidance counselor having to come out to my mother’s car in the parking lot and coax me out of the back seat with the promise of only needing to go to their office or the nurse’s office and chill out. My mother often ended up late for work, not to mention emotionally drained before 8am. And I was getting physically ill all the time. At this point it became a chicken or egg question. Was the mental and emotional abuse at home making me so sick I couldn’t go to school? Or was being so sick and missing school all the time so stressful that I was too stressed out to go to school? Whatever the reasons, I clearly could not physically, mentally, or emotionally handle going to school anymore.
Sometimes my home school tutors were young student and substitute teachers, and they were always the nicest. My math teacher one year just dropped off tests with me and would pick them up the next week. She and I had a private understanding that neither of us wanted to waste the other’s time, and not in an unfriendly way. Other tutors weren’t so nice, and they were mostly the full-time teachers who felt put-out by having to come to my house and/or didn’t understand why they had to. But either way I got to sleep in and only worry about school for a couple hours a day and that’s hard to complain about.
Though, while being afforded the accommodation of home schooling made things easier in general, having people come into your home days after your parent dies to ask you where you are in your Social Studies reading and math worksheets was as awkward as you can believed. And it was only one week before we’d be off a week for Thanksgiving anyway. Couldn’t I just have a few more days? I was tired. I was in shock. I was in the midst of a near-constant panic attack that was lasting weeks.
All this while my dad was being peak dad, high as hell, hovering around the dining room table we were sat at and hoping one of my tutors would pay him some attention because he had a narcissistic habit of extracting validation from strangers by roping them into listening to carefully edited sob stories about how hard his life was. It was not a conducive learning environment. But it was this or no diploma and so the tutors came and went that week.
I had been in and out of counseling, since I was 10. First, my mom had convinced my dad and I to go with her to family counseling. Sometimes I was made to sit outside of the room in a dimly-lit, burnt orange waiting room while the therapist or counselor or whoever talked to my parents without me. Mom soon gave up on trying to get my dad to do anything, and concentrated all her efforts on me. I saw multiple therapists but I wasn’t getting any “better.” Instead, I was starting to fight back.
One of the major symptoms of my depression (and really, “depression” could be interchanged with “living with my father”) was anger. It was frustration that had welled up inside me from 14 years of being a victim of and witness to abuse. Being in a powerless situation for long enough will make most anyone snap.
I started to physically lash out. I would slam doors. I once broke our glass front door with a booted kick. At barely more than 5 feet tall and at most 96 pounds, there was only so much damage I could do. But I knew not to use my feeble arms and wrists and instead used my newly-aquired punk aesthetic to give my feet the steel-toed enhancement they needed to truly do damage.
Due to the general rage that had set in, I was taken to a psychiatrist and put on Zoloft. I was on it for a month, maybe two, before I realized that I wasn’t angry anymore. In fact, it dulled just about everything. I felt like nothing. Soon, I was upset over the fact that I wasn’t upset. My father wasn’t being any less terrible to me or my mother. Our situation wasn’t any better. But I couldn’t react to it anymore. And the injustice of being drugged into submission so I could endure more abuse became unacceptable to me in a very short period of time. I stopped taking the drugs and my mother went looking for other options.
Mom was struggling with me struggling. At one point she contemplated sending me away to live somewhere else, which I took as a horrific insult. I still kind of do. I just could not imagine what sounded to me like choosing her abusive, drug-addicted husband over her only child who didn’t do any drugs or abuse anyone. I wasn’t the one who needed fixing.
Well, I needed some fixing, but I wasn’t the one who needed to leave.
And as it turned out, I was right and that one week back before the holiday was a bad idea.