“Too Cool for School”

Five pairs of eyes stared at the colorful mass in the center of the carpet. I sat cross-legged, a strategic choice ahead. A sea of toys, organized in its chaos of color, shape, and number of items. At the head of it all, my oldest sister Abby sat poised with a notebook and pen.

“OK. All present?” She named us each, beginning with her name: Abby, Megan, Daniel, Becky, Benjer, and finally, Andrew. We all call roll, as we would if we were in school on this weekday morning. Abby continued, “For houses, the youngest goes first. Which house do you want, Benjer?”

“I want the yellow one.” It was the most popular house, with the only pool, a basketball hoop, a built-in table that would save you a piece of furniture, and a parking spot. I loved imagining what it would be like to shrink to our toy Little People’s size and explore the house. I remember trying to find solace in the fact that I got to pick the house with the jail downstairs. We were always locking up the clown there; he could never behave. A house and a job in one pick, which meant I could lock up my siblings at will. What could be better? A pool, my younger self would have said. A pool would be better.

In our “dividing” of our Little People, small plastic figurines without limbs, we split each of the homes, cars, furniture, and Little People. In doing so, we collaborated, compromised, and problem-solved. All the while, Abby kept a running balance sheet of each household’s income and expenses. It was all very educational. Abby, as the eldest, would step in to organize some of the chaos of six children under one roof at all hours of the day. We usually needed a mediator with the big toy items. Those had to be traded in for another; otherwise, our mother imagined the house would be filled with toys, and she would likely lose her mind. Give up Legos for Little People, and when that got old, we traded Little People for Lincoln Logs and Army men. We learned warfare and social issues on the uneven battleground of our Army men. I always played the three lone Native figurines, hopelessly outnumbered by the green soldiers and fighting with bows and arrows. To even the playing field, I usually persuaded my brothers that my tribe had won over the Army man with the bazooka. 

“Don’t you think he feels bad for them?” I asked. I was eight.

“Maybe,” My brother Benjer adjusted his men so they were in an even line, “Why?”

“There are only three of them,” I pointed out, “And if they have a bazooka, it will be more of a fair fight, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” he said. The trade was made, and my little band of men lived to fight another day. They had spunk, just like us.

***

Beeville, Texas, was a small town with a population of about 13,000 people the year I was born. Churches and Mexican restaurants were plentiful throughout the town, with mesquite trees outnumbering people. We were born into a lower-middle-class family. Our parents, socially awkward themselves, raised their children isolated in the country–the perfect recipe for well-adjusted children. My mother chose to homeschool us, and my father contributed to our household with income from his small machine business. 

I was the youngest girl and the fourth child of six Proffers. Until my nickname became “Becky,” I was known for about two years as simply “Baby Sister.” I came at the same time my parents bought a cumbersome video camera with a slot for a small tape. Consequently, there are hours of footage of me as an infant “swimming” on my parent’s bed. Whenever we watched these family videos, the sight of me prompted whatever sibling with the remote to say, “Ugh! Becky again,” and to fast forward to more interesting sibling antics.

My older siblings were Abby, Megan, and Daniel. Abby was the sibling my parents called “bossy,” but to us, she was simply THE boss. We followed her orders because her way was always more fun, such as filming stop-motion films of our toys with our childish voices narrating. She had the best ideas for games and was adept at convincing us to follow along with her grand schemes. Abby, only fifteen, even managed the neighborhood children and created a day camp for them. She planned all the expenses ahead of time and sold tickets to the neighborhood parents. I remember helping her pick out the best juice boxes from HEB, “These, Abby! We NEVER get these!” Abby organized the games, created prizes, and entertained her siblings and the neighborhood children for an entire week of “camp.” It was a smashing success. 

Megan was three years younger than Abby and very relaxed compared to Abby’s micromanaging. Quick-witted and sarcastic, I was always aware of wanting to be on Megan’s good side. I shared a room with Megan for most of my life, and her superior size usually ended with me without a scrap of the comforter to myself. I became very good at making do with less. Daniel, by comparison, was a rambunctious child with endless energy and a streak for mischief that made the rest of us look like saints. Nothing was unbreakable to him. He wasn’t a malicious child; he just had poor impulse control. 

As the youngest of three talented, confident siblings, I struggled for a niche and came up with “sweet.” When all else failed, I could rely on Mama responding to me with an affectionate, “sweet girl.” Being a middle child undoubtedly made me the people pleaser I am today. I found my sweetness endeared me to our mother, and Abby remembers me as Mama’s favorite, or as Abby remembered, “You were such a suck-up.” But to me, Mama was the perfect mother. She listened to me, didn’t get frustrated or short with me like the mothers in films, and met my fierce need for love and affirmation with frequent “I love you”s that thrilled my sensitive little heart. She was my world. Daddy was our idol, even more so because he worked so much and was frequently gone from home on business trips. When he came home unannounced with bags of groceries over his arms, we swarmed him like a pack of mad dogs, tackling him with our flying hugs and the unspoken question of whether we would ever be able to knock his bear-like figure over. In the evenings, he quickly fell asleep in a yellow La-Z-Boy with a slightly broken and squeaky footrest, much to my mother’s consternation. This is how I remembered evenings, my father asleep in the chair with a Louis L’Amour book in his lap, with my mother spending her evening hours like she spent her morning ones, with us children. She, frustrated with him, mocked him for his inability to stay awake, and he, unknowingly to us, a diabetic, felt no one understood him. 

My younger brothers Benjer and Andrew were too young to get much attention in my earliest memories. Benjer was quiet and well-behaved; consequently, we began framing him for anything we stole or broke, “I didn’t eat any Oreos, but Benjer did!” Andrew, or “Bubby,” was a baby, small and loud, and would take Daniel’s record for creating chaos and shatter it throughout his childhood countless times. With Bubby’s birth, we became off-brand Brady Bunch, except our parents were crazy enough to choose six children.

Our mornings were slow. One by one, we would wake and drift towards the kitchen, serving ourselves bowls of Cheerios and taking our time getting dressed. Other mornings we all found ourselves piling together in Mama’s bed, snuggling against each other and quietly chatting to our hearts’ content. She would read to us in the morning, from novels like Peter Pan or teaching tools like Everything Your Fifth Grader Needs To Know. Sometimes before bed, I laid out my clothes for the next day to feel like I was going somewhere important, knowing nothing important ever did happen. Regardless of the morning, the inevitable moment came when Mama would lead us into our workbooks. It was hard to manage six children at different points in their education, and workbooks were the easiest avenue. With pictures of either children in old-fashioned clothes or depicting scenes from the Bible, these textbooks contained oral vocabulary drills, workbook exercises, and even duller stories. One day I took a Bible and found the story my workbook included and was annoyed to find a story consisting of a small paragraph that had been stretched to fit many pages. This sustained sitting and page work bored me. The boredom and my rebellious streak encouraged me to find ways to evade the work.

Our schoolwork each day was split between the different subjects, and each had a workbook with a specific lesson for each day. We were trusted to follow instructions and be responsible for our learning until we were confused about a question, which I was often. “A suffix? What is that?” A hasty lie to Mama, “I already did my work!” could lead to a question, “May I see your work?” One occasion had me hiding in the den under the counter, hastily finishing up a drawing and shaded alphabet letters. Coloring was one of the few activities I enjoyed. Then there were the more active days. One day my mother let us put our workbooks away to listen to a direct spelling lesson from her and then a spelling quiz. Daniel heard what he was missing out on and rushed to join us, “Me too!”

Megan overheard him getting involved and ran in, bringing in the rest of the herd of Proffers, as new activities always did, “What are my spelling words?” It was a family gathering, each of us clutching our number two pencils tightly and waiting for the next word. My mother gave the older kids different words after looking through their math books, such as “algebraic” and “parallelogram,” words that still make me nervous to this day. Afterward, we went to the library, and I got some non-fiction books about bears and pioneers. My mother judged it a well-rounded school day subject-wise, and we ended the day watching “Mail Call” and mimicking the loud man’s yells, “Answer the questions, maggot!”

Our schooling was unique. The choice of a Mennonite curriculum is something I still don’t understand today, as my family was not Anabaptists at all but good ol’ Southern Baptists. Maybe it was the most religiously conservative “safe” curriculum they could find. My mother says that while the readings may have been dry, “There wasn’t anything bad going to be in them.” Unsurprisingly, until eight, I was a reluctant and poor reader. More often than not, I read my elongated Bible stories as slowly as humanly possible to my mother when required; each word choked out of me through gritted, stubborn teeth. When her eyelids began to droop, I didn’t let up, continuing in my passive-aggressive monotone, “Moses said to the rock, bring forth water…” until her breathing was smooth and even. Then I left the book on the couch and slipped out the sliding glass door to our yard to play with my younger brothers, who were too young to be worried about reading and Moses’ striking of the rock. What a stupid man, I thought; he couldn’t even follow instructions correctly.

It was outside that I felt like myself. I came up with original stories and worlds for us to explore. There was never a shortage of playmates, whether my siblings or the Outten girls from next door. The tall grass that had sprung up from the last rainfall became jungle grass in which tigers stalked. The rotting firewood pile nearby grew to be a meeting place; we held mock trials for captured villains such as animal poachers and held a congress to the fading light of the day. These were the stories I loved, the stories that I lived. My younger brothers and I would explore those stories together, traipse about the neighborhood, and when the Outten girls got out of school, they would join us in digging for buried treasure and hunting tigers. The digging required treasure to be buried, so I gathered my wheat pennies for burial, only to lose the coffee tin in the hole somewhere. I suspected my rival from next door, but no accusations were thrown. 

There were plenty of things to keep us entertained indoors as well. Every time we read or watched something new, we acted it out in hastily produced plays with a script that came about as we did the childhood form of “yes, and.” We obsessed over stories of fantastical worlds, especially worlds like the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire. We pleaded endlessly to be allowed to buy McDonald’s so we could have the magical necklaces the Atlanteans owned. Fantastic events unfolded in our own home. After we all became fascinated with the 1973 film The Borrowers, ordinary items began disappearing from the house. Small notes began to appear, scribbled in tiny writing, thanking us for the items and swearing us to secrecy. While I had forgotten these stories in my adulthood, my sister Abby confessed to me she had written the letters and taken the buttons, “I wanted to make things more exciting.” Exciting times they were.  

There was a life outside of our home. Our chief outings were on warm Fridays when my mother would take us to the brightly lit library to pick out books, and before the age of eight, I would choose the same intriguing dragon picture book filled with words I couldn’t read. Benjer and I would spend what felt like hours looking at those glossy, colorful pictures. From there, we went to Sonic to get slushies and then to the park to play. Every other outing was either errands or church. Mainly Sundays were my social time, to chat with my friends, and was the only “school” I attended. I liked the schedule of our church once a week; always something to look forward to. I got to dress up in my fashionable sister’s hand-me-downs that hung loosely on my tiny frame, my young self oblivious to it. One Sunday, I even wore the tiara I got for my birthday, but I didn’t like Frankie Gutierrez laughing at me, so I took it off. 

“What do you mean you don’t have tests?” a friend asked me before Sunday school once.

“Well, we do, just not all the time.”

“Can you use your book?”

“Yeah.”

“Sweet!” I basked briefly in this comment, enjoying the attention my superior education was getting. She thought for a moment and then asked, “Could you go to school if you wanted to?”

“I…don’t know,” The thought had honestly never occurred to me. Why would I give up being able to sleep in, do my work whenever I wanted, and do school work in my pajamas? Her comment bothered me for the rest of the day, a sense that maybe being homeschooled meant I was missing out on something. At home, I made the same inquiry to Mama.

She didn’t look up from the folding towels, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Disappointment welled in my throat, but I didn’t argue. Arguing did not work in our house, and “We’ll see” was the constant refrain when an answer was avoided, but an outright no was accepted. At least by me, the middle child who instead wondered what it would be like to go to school with my best friend. I sufficed with daydreams of what could be, and now I wonder why I didn’t try and if I ever thought about it again. It would later turn out that one of the six of us was thinking along those lines.

One of the periodic adventures to look forward to was our road trips with Daddy. He owned his own small business, lending and selling machinery for machine shops. He was the one who made the deliveries, and with our conveniently open schedules, we were free to join him. I was always thrilled when it was my turn to go, and I valued this alone time with our father as highly as any of my siblings. Even if we left in the dead of winter, I would pack my Little Mermaid suitcase with a swimsuit – just in case. My priorities were always Hershey’s or Twizzlers, sharing long talks day and night with Daddy, tossing orange Tic-Tacs in my mouth and avoiding them when they were cinnamon, and swimming in pools. The actual work time was very dull, and Daddy would leave me in his truck while handling the equipment. He often left me with his tape player and headphones so I could people-watch in the truck and keep myself entertained. Sometimes he would bring me to the office if they had an office or the delivery was already handled. I remember one woman complimenting Daddy from behind her desk, talking about his impressive “muscles.”

“That’s all fat,” I told her, annoyed she could be so oblivious. Daddy chuckled at this, and I narrowed my eyes at her when she did. I had seen awkward flirting with dads in Parent Trap and was no longer interested in having Daddy around this woman. “Can we go, Daddy? I’m hungry,” I said, heading out the door.

***

In Beeville, we were different from other families. My parents were faithful Baptists like everyone else in our church but went the extra mile in keeping us safe from the evils of the world that were present in schools, like evolution, and other things, of which I couldn’t be sure but assumed must be drugs. There were different reasons. When adults asked my mother why she was homeschooling six children, it became more of “It’s not the government’s job to educate my children.” We felt independent. We didn’t need to be taught in schools when my mom knew it all. She was our source of knowledge, the gatekeeper of outside reality. Our happy little family life continued, the center of our universe, my mother in her soft-spoken wisdom and endless answers to endless questions about the world, “Why is the sky blue, Mama? What makes it snow? Why doesn’t it snow here? How do you spell ‘persnickety’?”

The expectation for our futures was high. When our oldest sister Abby entered college at the age of sixteen, this single instance was taken by me as the norm. Homeschooled children were naturally more gifted and mature than regular children because of the depth of their studies and moral character. My sister was a mysterious figure, bright and gregarious, with friends who came over and braided each other’s hair and painted their nails bright colors. The door was shut if I peeked too long, and I would be left to my imagination of the unfathomable world of teenage girls. I was eager for the future sixteen-year-old me who would enter college and have my own room and phone connection. After seeing fictitious film girl characters with even computers in their room to themselves, I took it upon myself to make one. Taking a pencil basket and drawing the background of a monitor, I taped it over the basket to give the appearance of a computer. I sometimes “played games” on it, drawing more possible screens of my invented computer programs. Going without, I used imagination to create a different reality and manifest my own entertainment. 

Eight people in a house created boredom, yes, but also intimacy. We were close, and we did everything as a family. Dating was something off-limits to us, and I heard all the time. “When you’re sixteen, you won’t date. You’ll bring someone to hang out with our family.” My sister Abby brought two boyfriends around. I distinctly remember her driving away “not dating” and returning at night only to delay coming in with her boyfriend. The headlights of his lifted truck shone into my window for what seemed like hours. Still, at every meal, we displayed a strong unit. It was made clear to us that family was forever in our household. Divorce was a dirty word – not only in our home but in the homes of other homeschooling families. Each family in our homeschooling group had at least three children, and the larger ones with children close to each other in age earned my mother’s comment, “That’s wonderful. They’re letting God plan their family.” Mama’s tune changed swiftly after the birth of my youngest brother Bubby, who, when he began to learn to walk, was a reminder of how boisterous and destructive some boys can be. Benjer’s and my adventures outside climbing our favorite tree would usually be interrupted not by our mother telling us to come in and do work but by crashes and a yell, “BUBBY!” A Garfield hairbrush through the window was helpful in another way. When my mother put cardboard in the window to replace the glass, I could decorate it with my drawings.

But what my family and the others believed came down to the belief that the family is everything to Christians. The husband leads the family and supports it, the mother feeds and clothes it, and if the marriage fails, it is because they did not allow God the control He requires over their lives. Our family worked because we were following His plan. At least, that’s what my mother said, as she made the decisions for our family. I took God’s word on this to be a suggestion. My parents were a unit, certainly, but my father was the silent agreeable partner to my mother’s decisive and opinionated ways. They worked well together in that way. My father went along the same way he did with everything she decided. My mother had been the one to want to homeschool in the first place. 

The laws that allowed my parents to homeschool clearly state the expectations for the schooling homeschoolers receive. First, the instruction must be “bona fide” and not simply an excuse to break child labor laws. Second, the curriculum must be in a visual form, such as a textbook, easily done. Third, the curriculum must include reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics, and good citizenship. One must be literate, be able to handle money, and have the know-how to follow laws to function in our society. Skills that just might get you a menial minimum wage job with little future. Science and history are suggested on homeschool sites merely because those subjects are taught in college. Sex education was ignored. My sex education was looking at a diagram on Wikipedia of the female reproductive system at the age of fourteen, which led my brother Daniel to shout, “Becky’s looking at inappropriate stuff!” I considered Abby’s to be getting caught in flagrante while she was supposed to be at Bible Study at the age of sixteen. Like any red-blooded American teenager, when offered the choice to stop or be married, she allowed herself to be suitably married to her older boyfriend. She was not happy about getting married before her actual wedding and felt shamed by Mama.

When my mom taught us science, she sometimes read from a brightly colored text titled something along the lines of It Couldn’t Just Happen, and we had to share one thing we learned at the end of each session. She taught us about the red woodpecker, which without any one of its vital body parts, wouldn’t be able to survive, “He couldn’t have waited for his tongue to grow long!” This was our “win,” confirming our belief that evolution was a lie misleading millions of school children in the country. I wondered then why scientists would hate the idea of God so much that they would actively look for answers to life other than Him. The sin of pride – hubris, if you will, was often used to explain questions like that. I felt sorry for them, that they went without my assurances. I was told our Creator loved us, and He looked out for us and always would. I prayed for every atheist I met, a great uncle I had only spoken with on the phone, and mostly strangers. I wanted them to be saved from eternal damnation and know the happiness I felt from our spiritual life. 

We were often reminded our education was a gift, rare and precious. It allowed us to learn secrets about the world ordinary school children had no access to. My friends at church had to endure lessons of lies and not the truths the scientists didn’t want them to know. The poor souls. I knew Christianity was banned from schools, and students couldn’t pray in schools. I knew this in the way many people “know” prayer is banned from schools. Privately, being homeschooled didn’t matter much to me; I merely liked sleeping in and doing my work in my pajamas if I felt like it. That seemed to be the chief object of my friends’ jealousy. There were social costs to homeschooling, but my parents tried to mitigate those as well as possible.

One of the ways my parents tried to socialize us was a homeschooling group in town, TEACH (Texas Education Achieved in Caring Homes). Likeminded Christian adults and their various children gathered at each other’s homes, and while the children played, the adults had time to be around fellow adults. The homeschooling group went on field trips together too – I remember an aquarium and an orchard. As a child, I couldn’t comprehend the sheer number of apples I saw and that the owners could have fruit whenever they wanted. 

Homeschooling groups allowed us to experience social rejection we otherwise would have gotten at school. The older girls were nine, and I was only eight, a valley of a difference in maturity, wisdom, and know-how. I was stuck sharing a scooter with the smaller boys until I met Alexis, a girl of the same age who was likewise left out. She said, “They won’t talk to you either, huh?” Besides our church, this was our only social life, and our parents could be assured their children were socializing with fellow good Christian children. Our church was in line with my parents’ beliefs; our previous church had been too much like a “country club.”.

Alexis’ family was also very large, and I was over there often, though she told me years later that her father didn’t like me, “You had so many ideas and knew so much. He wasn’t used to debating with someone who had something to say or asked more questions.” Her mother was a nursing student and often read a textbook while Alexis cooked and cleaned in the kitchen. Her mother spoke about marriage as my mother did, and in this situation, I felt safer questioning her logic.

“So, the husband gets to make all the decisions?” I asked. The often-repeated rule was absent in the world of my home, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the two.

“Yes. When man makes the decisions, your house is blessed by God. God reveals himself to the husband so that he can be the spiritual leader of his home and his wife,” Alexis’ mother said.

“What if he’s not as smart as his wife?” I asked. “Or a bad person? What if he’s not a Christian at all? How does it make sense for him to call all of the shots then?”

“You just have to trust that God will show him the way,” she told me. She spoke in the patience of a parent who knew better than foolish children full of questions, and still, I questioned her. I asked my mother questions at home, but I didn’t argue the point when she answered. With Alexis’ parents, I felt free of the apprehension that kept me from questioning my own. I didn’t get the answers I wanted: an answer that would settle the doubts I held about entrusting my future to the hands of an unknown man I would meet one day. I knew better than anyone what would be best for me.

Our studies at home did answer the other questions I had about life and prompted some too. My intense curiosity for the unknown as an adult can easily be traced back to the innumerable questions I had as a child. Then there were school days that didn’t go quite right, at least as schooling was concerned. We knew that if we got along and played fun games outside, Mama was less likely to make us come inside and do work. My brothers and I negotiated over bumps in happy play, reminding each other to get along or else we would all be at the workbooks in a minute. Those days, we did academics in our way. On one such occasion, I gave the directions, and my brother Benjer and I gave the youngest brother a pretend haircut while he was tied to a chair using bungee cords as a prisoner. We read to each other from our readers, “There was a man named Bob. Bob has a wife. Bob has a job.” I soon abandoned the reader to weave more interesting stories for my younger brothers’ entertainment. At eight years old, my reader was a second-grade one, and my mother wrote on her blog about not wanting to push me too much. She believed that my reading by choice was better than her forcing me. She knew I would find some way to write down my own stories. She was right.

And so our world came and went.

Continued….