I haven’t had to answer questions about my education for years at this point.

In the past, I would say something like, “I was partly homeschooled and partly private schooled,” and sometimes the other person would have questions, but sometimes they’d be too confused to explore further. It’s a lot of details that don’t matter so much.

Lots of people I’d be fine with never seeing again.

I went to a private school in New Jersey for kindergarten. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Kizer and she made such an impression on my young mind that I still have a card she wrote to me. She was the first person to start encouraging my interests, and when I wanted to make a project about horses, she found me magazines with lots of horses in them. Up until that point in my life, it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I’ll always remember my time there.

I and my siblings were then homeschooled until we moved to Pennsylvania. I was nine, and it was the middle of the school year. I entered Canaan Christian Academy for the second half of fourth grade.

There were about 200 students there from kindergarten to high school. Most of the students had attended the school since they were five or six years old. I was unprepared for the challenges that came with being the outsider, a role I still hold with every move to a new state, every new community I try to infiltrate.

Teacher. Missionary life. Pastor’s wife.

Canaan Christian Academy was an odd place to be. There were limited career options available to Christians, by my childhood understanding. As a woman, there were three acceptable ones: teacher, missionary, or pastor’s wife.

I didn’t want any of those, and I knew that firmly.

I wanted to be a journalist, a writer. I got my first journal when I was 11 years old, a gift in my first and only Easter basket when I spent Easter weekend at my best friend’s house in New Jersey. Art was — is — my escape, my salve for difficult things, and I intended to pursue it relentlessly. There was something magical about stories. History, fiction, I didn’t care. There were whole worlds I could explore, and I did. But even as I grew my creativity, the art programs at CCA were cut almost completely. History was a good enough interest, especially after a fourth-grade journal project that allowed me to write from the perspective of a nurse in the Civil War.

But CCA was an odd place to be. There was a lot of purity culture, with a strong emphasis on covering young girls’ bodies, since the weight of responsibility for the male gaze was on the female children. There were cliques and there was cruelty. There was legalism and there was very little forgiveness. There were predators. There was anti-Semitism.

I never quite fit in.

We lived 45 minutes away from school, and I was in fifth grade at ten years old when Margaret was born. She was born with a lot of hair, and she was very cute, and I was very proud of her.

When she was old enough, I took her to show and tell at the school. She wore this cute burgundy outfit with this little burgundy hat, and none of my classmates were as impressed with my new baby sister as I was.

And there was the drive. Schlep found a church and a school apparently after he bought the house, and with so much time in the car, making friends was nearly impossible.

It was another great abusive tactic.

Isolate.

My mother spent an hour and a half in the car every weekday with the two youngest at the time, David and Margaret. Often, after picking us up, Margaret was done for the day, and she did this scream cry that nothing stopped, except a song.

We watched a lot of Veggie Tales and other tame, wholesome Christian things like it, and the Cheeseburger song we had on CD was the only thing that calmed her down when she was a baby. She’d even sing at the end, that high note. She loved it. And the rest of us in the car would get peace for those few minutes during that forty-five-minute drive.