Haunted Home: on homeschooling, gothic literature, god,

i was homeschooled so i don’t know how to write an essay ?

Shame, Regret, Embarrassment¹ causes: see above

The thing about gothic literature is that you never really know whether the ghost is really a ghost or just an idea: Like maybe it’s just Words, or Anxiety, or Desire, or maybe it’s a set of walls, a room that feels a little too small, claustrophobic. Actually, a ghost is probably just untethered, ravenous Want.

Anyway, I’m a ghost.

So there’s a theory that the gothic mode is really a way of speaking about the unspeakable. Some say the gothic is the parent — the beta version — of queer theory. So you could say ghosts are queer.

The gothic mode is obsessed with houses, more specifically, The Home. We say mode instead of genre, because gothic is a sort of lens, a series of little signals we can look for in books of various genres to let us know, this is a gothic moment. We say home instead of house, because home is a sort of lens, a series of synapses and triggers we can look for in various places with various people, letting us know, this is a home moment.

Should we call homeschooling house-schooling?

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WINDOW (literature)

The west-facing windows let in a nice golden-hour light. Great for evening reading. Notice the millions of dust particles suspended in the air. Think of all that dead skin piling up in the house. Imagine you’re in a snowglobe that someone is shaking up. A dustglobe. A deadskinglobe.

Breathe in the dust-air. It’s in you now.

Chapter III

Parents homeschool for different reasons.² Usually it’s a matter of control; they want to have a say in what their children learn, they want religious freedom over what their children hear. My own parents wanted to protect me and my siblings from the sort of bullying and general meanness that they felt and saw in public schools. Later, Mom, crying, admitted we would never be able to escape that meanness. It’s always there. Even in the home. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

For my own homeschool, Mom was all about individuality: Each child learns differently, she’d say. For me, it was all about literature. She curated a class plan around reading:

Daniel’s Reading Assignments

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. A young boy comes of age, learns to be a man.

(Content advisory for parents: contains gothic imagery, may frighten some young readers).

Personal note: Ughh Miss Havisham! What a queen! I was obsessed with her, locked up in that house, holding onto her past, the last time she felt true happiness. Too bad that past — its decay and rot — is what kills her.

I was in love with Pip. I loved how he ended up single in the end, how he didn’t have to get married. How he changes so much through the novel, gets away from the countryside, from that little house where his annoying family tells him how to be.

Fitzgerald. F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. A wonderful moral tale of the dangers of excess and hedonism! Mature readers will especially gain great insight into the pitfalls of licentiousness, immorality, and adultery.

(Content advisory for parents: parents may want to censor; deals with premarital affairs).

Personal note: No one can quite decide exactly what The Great Gatsby is about. Whether or not the green light is desire, or “Americanism,” or The American Dream, or Daisy, or morality, we can all agree that it’s a gothic novel: There’s a castle and a double and repression and gay sex. Sooo gothic.

Gatsby has to change his name to escape his past. But he doesn’t escape. In fact, it sends him further back into his past. Ceaselessly.

Halliburton, Richard. The Royal Road to Romance. This travel memoir is a lively tale of a young white man travelling the globe and desecrating holy places in lesser Eastern countries. A wonderful introduction to tourism! Great for geography!

(Content advisory for parents: Nothing! Pure American fun!)

Personal note: Richard Halliburton, a Princeton grad from a “nice” midwestern family, carried on numerous affairs with men. I learned this through the Wikipedia Personal Life section. This book is about as gay as you could get without alerting censorship panels in the 1920s. He describes all of the men he meets as he bounds across the globe, even talks about sharing beds with them, skinny dipping with them, visiting YMCA locker rooms, etc. Halliburton’s desire to run away oozes off the pages.

A lifelong explorer, Halliburton died in a plane crash. He never stopped running.

BLACK HOLE³ (chemistry)

Black Holes don’t exist. That’s a sin. God created the heavens and the earth. Stay out of the west wing.⁴ The west wing doesn’t exist. This is where you find orgasmic thoughts, ecstasy, the kisses you regret after you’re old enough to know howtaste when they’re spat in your face. This place isn’t real. Also here: cigarette packs & joints & cans & the small glances you gave your childhood best friend & how his finger felt tracing the walls of your body.⁵

KITCHEN (oral history)

Oatmeal sputters on the stove in this homeschool house. A large pot for the dozen-or-so siblings. Toppings in little bowls on the counter, laid out by the older sister. The mom’s pregnant again; she sips coffee at the foot of the table. It’s the weekend, but she tells her son to grab his plastic tub of schoolbooks. He spent all day Tuesday on the coast with other homeschool friends, so now he has school to catch up on. He whines as he slams the tub on the table. He slurps his oatmeal extra loudly while his mom reads the instructions in the language arts book. She tells the younger daughter to grab her box too. The sister whines. The mom sighs. (Not sure where the dad is). Another weekend.

Gothic stories usually feature average characters.⁶ It’s creepier that way. These families aren’t superhuman, or half monsters, or emotionless, so when extraordinary things — the visit of a ghost, or an outsider, or an unwelcome stranger — happen to ordinary people, it forces the reader to wonder–

could this happen to me? and

/ if it does /

how will I ever recover?

DAD’S CHAIR⁷ (a catechism, excerpted)

Who made you?

god made me. a house made me. parents made me. is a church a house?

What else did God make?

they made all things. and sadness.

Who is god?

an empty chair I can’t touch and the creator of All Things.

Where is god?

everywhere. we can’t escape.

What is sin?

badbadbadbadbadbadbad

What is meant by want of conformity?

a fifteen-passenger van

Most of the kids I knew who were good at being Christian were bad at being people. Like M., who told me that she never fought with her siblings. She always had her nose in the air, cause she knew how good she was. Said she tried to live like Jesus. She was 10 or so. I told Dad she said this and I added No one could actually live like Jesus, so why try?

I think about that a lot.

Anyway public-schoolers always ask how homeschooled kids make friends. My friends were church friends. The church attracted homeschool families from all over the state. On busy Sundays, there’d be more than a dozen Chevy Express fifteen-passenger vans in the church parking lot, not to count the less-holy-but-still-valid Odysseys, Suburbans, Subarus.

FAMILY ROOM (visual culture)

Probably the creepiest marker of gothicism is the position of the villain: The danger always comes from inside. Dr. Frankenstein creates his own monster. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the same person.

The R. family, who I knew from church, had to convince their parents to finally buy a TV. They’d seen a few movies before, usually at youth group parties.

Once the parents give in, one of the kids will bring something R-rated home. The mom will complain, but the dad will say, “let them,” but then before you know it the family will be in court and the daughters will be accusing the father, and the State will be taking the children away, and the mother will visit the father in jail, and she’ll say, “we shouldn’t have bought a TV.”

Some families homeschool to keep things in the house; other families homeschool to keep things out. Most families try to do both. All families fail.

LIVING ROOM FLOOR (math)

Laminate. Looks like wood, feels like wood. Not wood.

I sprawled huge architect-sized graph-papers across the living room floor in middle school and high school. I designed intricate house plans with secret rooms and stairways and ballrooms and studies, like a Clue board without the murder. They were romantic and gothic homes, and I would imagine all the romantic and gothic stories that would take place inside these walls. Walls I could control.

I gave up on architecture. Too much precision. I preferred walls that could move.

GIRL’S ROOM (career planning)

Written on pink paper with a calligraphy pen, taped to a mirror:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine!

On the desk: flashcards to help her memorize Proverbs 31 (Description of a Worthy Woman)⁸

Women are always being terrorized in gothic fiction. Controlled by villainous men. These heroines usually take their fate into their own hands and fight back against their attackers.

In the real world, it doesn’t always work out that way. PANTRY (chores)

The homeschool moms — since they have so many mouths to feed — are experts at finding the good deals. They also buy in bulk to save, and store tubs of organic lentils and basmati rice here. There’s probably kombucha brewing in a corner. The body is a temple. Goodness in; goodness out.

J.’s family always had broth simmering on the stove; each night, they plopped their chewed-down chicken bones into a toiling pot after dinner. It constantly boiled; constantly new bones, new scraps. It burned all the time, so they learned how to sleep through the smoke alarm.⁹

MUDROOM (biology)

T. would watch her rabbits get railed out back. This was science class. She named each one, some were even named after Bible characters. There goes Jezebel, such a flirt. Biology. Climate change isn’t real; the rabbits like sex.

T. could sex a rabbit from a mile away. She knew the Latin words, the science words. She knew a lot about sex. She was educated. Saved herself for marriage, she said. The cages smelled like shit. One rabbit — I forget her name — always escaped her cage, ended up on the other side of the fence. T. would have to corral her back every time until she eventually gave up. I can’t remember if they killed her or let her run away. Anyway, I forget her name.

T.’s planning on homeschooling her own kids.

BOYS’ ROOM (sex ed)

On the wall, a poster. The mom found it at Hobby Lobby: I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Two boys play with Legos. They’re 15 and not fearful.¹⁰

Other boys would catcall my sisters after church on the playground, or even in the sanctuary. They had no shame, or maybe they weren’t educated — just products of patriarchy. After the prayer meeting, drinking the decaf coffee with the other 11-year-olds, I shouted SEX IS A BAD WORD! and Mom realized it was time to have a conversation.

PARENTS’ BEDROOM (PTA)

These homeschool parents will have about 11 kids here (actually one will be conceived in the hotel room an hour away, when they go to that home educators conference in April). One new one once a year. That vagina’s really doing the heavy lifting around here. But actually, it’s not. Because the oldest son will carry those big Costco boxes of frozen chicken legs and dish soap so the mom won’t have to work a day in her life. What a gentleman!

The kids don’t really know what happens in here. Homeschool parents have pasts. It makes sense; they’re opting for such a revolutionary way of raising their kids because the normal way didn’t work for them. Or maybe they’re just afraid.

At the church camp, C.’s dad unplugged a speaker because Footloose triggered him.¹¹ The swing-dancing stopped.

Walk into a haunted house. The dusty vintage radio plays through static:

Loose, Footloose, kick off your Sunday shoes…

Scream.

OFFICE (U.S. government)

No one actually does work in this room; it’s just for appearances. It’s really just another bedroom, but they’ve added a desk and computer and gave it an official name. Old issues of Christian magazines stacked on the keyboard. A good place to go when you want to hide from your family.

One time, my brother had to wear his too-short, worn-out pajama pants to the homeschool day at the capitol, an annual event when all the homeschool families drop off homemade pies to their state legislators. My brother woke up late; this was his punishment. It was just as much a punishment for me and my siblings. My older sister held my hand and we walked behind everyone else, pretending to belong to some other family.

In an elevator, a woman working in the capitol talked with Mom about ’those strange homeschoolers.’ Mom nodded and agreed with her.

“Mom!” I said, watching the lady as she clopped away, “You lied! You didn’t tell her we were homeschooled too! Why didn’t you tell her?”

The gothic mode — especially in the American tradition — is interested in issues of identity, especially what the Self is in relation to the not-self. How does being an American make you You? How does your family make you You?

I’ve heard the legislators actually throw those pies away and laugh at the weird homeschoolers who bring them.

THE DOOR (SAT prep)

Painted lusty red, with a little window at the top that’s too high to look out of.

K. will do online college; she’ll be able to graduate faster this way, she says. Lots of homeschoolers will do this. Others will work for the family landscape business. Others will take on the farming duties from the parents. D. will beg his parents to let him go to nursing school. The parents will say no. D. has two children now, a third on the way; he’s not even thirty yet. He didn’t go to nursing school.

K. will roll her eyes when I tell her which schools I’m applying to. It’s like you’re trying to get away. Don’t you like it here?

Go to college and lose god. Homeschool parents always said that. My own parents always said: Kids will find what they’re looking for, college or not.

I found what I was looking for.

CHILDHOOD BEDROOM (poetry)

after i came out, stopped believing, went to college, and came back home, my mom said, out of all her children, i would’ve benefitted the most from public school.

too late now, she said

my whole life, i would shut down whenever kids were talking about high school, memories from middle school, where they went, who their favorite teachers were. I hated hearing, “oh you were homeschooled?! I never would’ve guessed!” of course you wouldn’t have guessed! i spent most of my life running from it! hiding from it!

What I don’t often say: what i liked about homeschooling

• Doing schoolwork on the trampoline with books strewn around, the early autumn leaves tangling in the wind.
• Watching Mom’s face as she read the poem I wrote for an assignment, the way her arms felt when she hugged me and kissed the top of my head and told me I wrote well.
• Latin words.
• Windows.
• Watching old black and white movies which my parents sometimes called ‘history class.’ (Why do we call old movies ‘black and white’? There’s so much grey.)
• The night Dad offered to teach geography, the way I could feel Dad’s eyes looking down on me, me on his lap.
• How I could take a break from homework (it’s all homework when you’re homeschooled) to bake cookies or pie.
• The way the backseat of a van could be a classroom, or a kitchen could be a classroom, or a tree trunk could be a classroom.
• How it forever turned the world into a classroom.

anyway, now i’m not sure who’s haunting who,

like can i leave? or is the house in me? like are ghosts real? like are all houses haunted? and what about those public-school kids who are never in their house? who just sleep there and spend the rest of the day at school and sports practice? like what’s a house to them? _________ ________ __ __________ _____?¹² the gothic exists outside of words. Freud wrote an essay about something he didn’t understand, and he admitted he couldn’t understand ________ and that’s the point,

like can we exist beyond

our walls¹³

In Absalom! Absalom! a young man tries to understand his family heritage. This is how it ends:

“I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”