What Love Looks Like

I was 17 and had no idea what love was. Whispering to my best friend that all these emotions I couldn't explain were baffling and scary and wonderful all at the same time. Trying to deny and reject them, but finally embracing them and all the complexity and struggle that I knew would follow because love wasn't allowed when I was 17. And I felt lost yet strangely safe. His smile, that special one reserved just for me, sent butterflies alight in every part of me. The feelings were too big for me; my heart had not yet been enlarged by love and this was only the beginning.

I was positive I knew what love was, that hot July day when I was 20. It was devotion and longing, and commitment and desire and excitement and overwhelming joy that hurt in a good way. It was "for better or for worse" though we glossed over the "worse" part because who really wants to think about that or acknowledge its existence on their wedding day? Our relationship had never been easy and we had fought for it and knew we'd continue to fight for it no matter what. Because that's what love did, we said triumphantly.

I stood on top of a mountain, watching him cast a line into a pristine lake. Living together only 2 months, and my heart seemed like it couldn't get any bigger. Love surrounded me, enveloped me, was everywhere, and I thought I knew what love looked like. But my picture was still so small.

Life was awesome and difficult and babies came and home burned down and jobs came then were lost and home built and another home lost. Two people, joined together so very young, had to find themselves and figure out who they were, both individually and together. It was messy and scary and bewildering. When I was wandering, he waited for me; when he was angry, I stood my ground; when I was lost, he found me; when he was despairing, I held him up. We constantly showed each other how we saw one another, how we believed in each other even when we couldn't believe in ourselves. Hope left for a while, in the nitty-gritty of life between diaper changes and paychecks and spiritual wanderings. Life turned into daily survival and love, as mixed-up and incomplete as it was, still held on and held together. Dreams came and died; hard decisions made; time kept marching on and life kept happening. Hope came back and we started to dream again, to plan, to go down paths we never thought of traveling. To take each others' hands and say "walk with me, I want you near". When others couldn't handle our journey and rejection hit hard, we banded together, us against the world.

Now I am 30 and while I think I can say I know what love looks like, I'm also mature enough now to know what I don't know and what might yet come in our love-journey. I think love looks like daily mundane tasks, small simple gestures, the getting up and the working and the going to bed together day in and day out, the rowdy adventures and the sitting quietly in the backyard after dark and kids asleep, breathtaking desire, the bravery of both saying and accepting difficult things, honesty, trust lost and regained again, celebration of each other as autonomous people who have chosen to walk together, acceptance and support, authenticity, rest and satisfaction in the knowledge of seeing and being seen and adored for who we truly are.  And a decade passes, just like that.

There is something so terrifying about letting someone in to see every part of you that no one else has ever seen. To give another person the freedom to wound you in ways that no one else could possibly do. To be trusted with such things by another and know you have the ability to utterly destroy them just by being an imperfect human. Vulnerability given and received. Broken and rebuilt. Over and over again. Scars in the open, nothing hidden, nothing too ugly that it cannot be redeemed. I think this is sometimes what love looks like.

I recently stood on another mountain-top, looking over vast beauty indescribable. We are not the same two people, this man and I, as those two people who confidently said "I do" ten years ago. We feel to have lived a lifetime in only a decade. Taking his hand, he smiles down at me then turns back to watch the small versions of us running through the wildflowers, shrieking with laughter and discovery. Physical representations of our love; pieces of our hearts walking about outside our bodies, slaying us, reminding us, keeping us young while making us old at the same time. My heart swells with love and joy, having been enlarged by sorrow and pain and joy these past years. He laughs at something a child says, then grips my hand tighter. I am still undone when he smiles at me, like I am 17 all over again.

People ask me how to accomplish a successful long-term relationship and I'm not sure how to answer; I am just a baby compared to some who would have better answers after several decades of loving another person. I can tell our story, but it's our story and not a How-To list for marriage. It's quirky and messy and wonderful and maddening and it's ours. We are asked how to keep the "spark" alive, how we can be so obviously in love still, and we look at each other unsure. Did we just get lucky, or is there something to the idea that love nurtured grows instead of dies? That two good-willed people who respect and love and support can fall in love over and over again, years without end. Maybe the answer is a little bit of all of those and more.

~To the man that won my girlish heart years ago, my soul-mate, my best friend still. Thank you for sharing life with me. The next 10 years will be the best yet. 

I Was Not Supposed to Happen

My most popular post ever, the one on courtship and emotional purity, is making the rounds again, as it does every few months. And with it come the loads of ridiculous assumptions, explaining, excuses, and outright dismissal of everything from my character to my experience to my beliefs. This isn't anything new. It's been happening since I started telling my story. It happens to all of my friends from Homeschool Land who also tell their stories. It's woefully predictable.

"She wasn't really raised Biblically."

"He isn't a good example of proper homeschooling."

"She's bitter. " (Because obviously being bitter means you're making stuff up. Or something.)

"His parents obviously didn't do it right."

"She's not indicative of all homeschoolers."

"He obviously courted in a legalistic way, but that's not the right way, the way we will do it."

"The experience she writes about is extremism and not the Godly way of raising kids/homeschooling/courtship/whatever."

And after every dismissal, an explanation of why they're different, they're doing it right, they know better. Their kids will turn out as promised. They have it all planned.

But what these people that comment on our blogs fail to understand is that my parents had it all planned too. They did everything "right". They read the right books and followed the right teachings that explained how to raise their kids in such a way as to ensure they will grow up to be Godly offspring. People who are the exemptions. People who are whole and full of light and unstained by the world. The next generation of movers and shakers. People who are super Christians.

Had these people who so easily dismiss us met my family 15 years ago, they would've wanted to BE us. We were the perfect family. We dressed right, acted right, said all the right things. People used to ask my parents to help their family look like ours; to help them make their kids as good as we were. They called us "godly", "a refreshment", "a good example", and so much more. These people who now turn up their noses in disbelief at me now would've been our best friends back in the day.

I think that these people, who are overwhelmingly current homeschooling parents, have to have some way of making sense of the phenomenon of the so-called Homeschooled Apostates. They have to find some reason why what they follow and believe to be "God's Plan" didn't work. They encounter people like me and have no idea what to do with us.

Because I was not supposed to happen.

We were not supposed to happen. Every last one of us who was raised in a culture that promised abundant life and Godly children and have now since rejected all or part of our upbringings were not supposed to happen. Sites like Homeschooler's Anonymous, with it's stories of horrific abuse, neglect, and everyday pain were not supposed to happen. We shouldn't exist and our stories weren't supposed to sound the way they do. Not according to all the promises made to our parents, made by our leaders and the authors of the books and the speakers at the homeschool conventions. Yet, here we are.

We who have grown up, evaluated, rejected, and chosen a different path for us and our children....we are threats. Our very existence is a threat to the happy little paradigm that is the conservative homeschool movement. We are realities that threaten to unravel the idealistic fabric of their worldview. They have no idea what to do with us.

So they dismiss us. They make excuses. They say "well your parents did it wrong, but we're doing it right!" as we watch them practice the exact same things that damaged and hurt and broke us. We're desperately waving red warning flags only to be completely disregarded, blamed, and even attacked. Our lives and real stories are no match for the rosy promises of the perfect life, couched in beautiful scripture and Christian idealism. Instead of critically thinking through anything we have to say, evaluating and considering the experiences of countless numbers of people, instead of re-evaluating their own choices and philosophies, against all reason and logic they dismiss us. Pretend we aren't how we say we are. Convince themselves and others that we and our parents aren't like them; we did it all wrong and the formula isn't broken, we're the ones who are broken.  Even after the formula keeps producing the same result, they cannot let go of it.

But we aren't going away. We happened, we exist, we aren't abnormalities.....we're just people. People who all lived similar lives in a movement our parents all followed for very similar reasons. Every day there are voices added to ours. When I first started blogging, there were very few people telling the story of the homeschool alumni. We had only begun to grow up and process our lives and many of us thought we were alone in this. In the last 5 years, that number has grown exponentially and I predict will continue to do so.

Homeschooling parents today have two choices: ignore the now thousands of warning voices of experience, or carefully listen, reconsider and change direction. I often wonder how many children of the people who dismiss us will end up on our blogs or with blogs of their own that are just like mine. Parents, don't fool yourselves. You aren't "doing it right" any more than our parents were "doing it right" when you're doing the exact same things they did and following the exact same teachings. Your children are not more special than we were. They're people with free will who will grow up to make their own choices, either because of you or in spite of you.