I was raised in an evangelical Christian household in rural Ohio and was homeschooled until the fourth grade for religious reasons. I recall that after I transitioned to public school, I asked to be excused from science lessons on evolution and was completely bewildered that my teacher was upset with the request. Church and religion dominated my childhood, but I did not then realize how different my life looked from the lives of those outside my particular enclave.
Because my dad is a pastor, I, along with my three siblings, was under a great deal of oppressive scrutiny within the church. My personality and behaviors were continually monitored both within and outside the family. Because of this, I had little privacy and felt that my parents valued the opinions of other people, or perhaps even their wants and needs, more than my fundamental needs or development. I desired recognition from my father as an authority figure and struggled mightily with the fact that I continually failed to meet his (often shifting) expectations. In that way, at least, my story is not an unusual one. But, atypically, since I was educated at home and my dad was an authority figure at the primary institution where I was socialized, I did not have a competing authority structure or system to provide insights about alternatives and opportunities for change.
I remember that I was obsessed with proper etiquette and bodily comportment—I thought all the time about making myself as unobtrusive as possible—and with abstract concepts like purity and goodness, a preoccupation that I now understand was racially-inflected, among other things. This was true even while I subverted rules and tested limits. I think that I wanted to prove that I was lovable even if I was “immoral;” but, I was, at the same time, also hyper-aware of rules and believed that one’s value came directly from rule-following. Long before I became a teenager, being appropriately feminine and growing into what the church understood as Christian womanhood was a major, daily issue that I had to confront, plan for, and control. I received the strong message that I needed to hold myself accountable to those norms or risk a variety of punishments, both immediately and in the future.