by Felicia Day
Any structure in our lives disintegrated. “Can the doodles in the margins of my geology chapter count as art class? Really? Thanks, Mom!” Schooling became “We’ll get to it later!” around other, more important things, like grocery shopping and going to see the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. Eventually, my brother and I were on our own. No rules, no tests, and no pesky governmental supervision for children who had recently relocated and weren’t on official census lists.
I don’t mean to imply that Mom was completely hands-off with our educations. She did stuff. When she got interested in something, she’d say, “Let’s go learn about history!” and we’d jump in the car and drive around the state for a few days visiting all the Civil War memorial sites. (It’s super fun to roll down a grassy hill where thousands of Confederate bodies are buried.) She’d also yell “Study!” a lot from her bedroom while watching The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and during the first Iraq war she made us start learning Arabic because, “You never know what will happen.”
There was, however, one big rule that was enforced during our free-for-all education: We were expected to read. Constantly. All day, every day. Whatever we wanted at the library, the used bookshop, adult or kid section, anything that didn’t have nudity or Stephen King on the cover, we could read.
Naturally, I became obsessed with detective pulp fiction. Perry Mason was my favorite. Not the actor who played him in the TV show, Raymond Burr. I hated him; he was bulky, and his skull looked creepy underneath his skin. No, my Perry Mason was taller and debonair, like Cary Grant, or my second love, David Hasselhoff. I collected all but one of the Perry Mason books (The Case of the Singing Skirt eluded me; it was my collection’s white whale), and I arranged all eighty-one of them by publishing chronology on a makeshift bookshelf in the back of my closet. Because of their influence, my life’s dream became clear: to enter the glamorous profession of “secretary,” like Perry’s loyal companion, Della Street. Either that or “moll”—whatever that job entailed.
I was also expected to work hard on math, for my grandpa. Since he was a physicist, he would quiz me on equations when we’d go back to Alabama for our monthly visits. My mom liked to impress him. And I did, too, because he always gave me hard candy when I got something right.
“Tell me the Pythagorean theorem.”
“A squared plus B squared equals C squared?”
“That’s my girl! Now have a Werther’s and scoot to the kitchen. Hee Haw’s on.”
According to my mom, there was a pressing urgency for me to learn as much math as I could. An uncredited study she read once said, quote, “Girls become really stupid in science after they get their period, so you’d better learn as much as possible before that happens.” I had such anxiety about this “clearly proven” biological fact that I was studying calculus by the age of twelve. When I finally got my period, I cried, not because I was growing up, but because I had just learned derivatives and really enjoyed doing them. I was scared that estrogen would wipe the ability to do them from my brain.
I guess at a certain point, my dad expressed concern or something about our education. My brother and I didn’t see what the fuss was. I mean, we were FINE with doing whatever we wanted and not being forced to “study” like the rest of the world’s plebes. But to add structure to our lives, my mom shifted her focus, like any smart businessperson, to outsourcing. Our lives became nothing but lessons.
Ballet, tap, jazz dance, youth orchestra, martial arts, watercolor at the local community college (me and a bunch of eighty-year-olds rockin’ the stand of maple trees!), cross-stitch, poise class (held in the back of a department store, for REAL!), my mom basically trained me to become a geisha. With dance lessons alone, I went to class at least three hours a day. Big calves, you are mine for life. So even though it was weird and thoroughly uncomprehensive, my brother and I got an education. Of a sort.
Here’s an average daily schedule to give you some perspective about a weekday in my eight- to sixteen-year-old life:
8:00 a.m.: Wake up before everyone and SHUT YOUR CLOCK UP OR ELSE.
8:30 a.m.: Lost in Space reruns while eating Rice Krispies.
9:30 a.m.: Math for an hour. Maybe a chapter in one of those logic puzzle books with the grids. I loved puzzles, and Mom said they counted.
10:00 a.m.: AMC movie, hopefully a historical one for studying history, hopefully Technicolor, hopefully Oklahoma! If not Oklahoma!, 50 percent chance of watching VHS tape of Oklahoma!. Or a Cary Grant movie. Half-ass read chapter in history book while watching said movie. CHECK!
12:00 p.m.: Family time! Lunch out at restaurant, one of four that saw us so frequently, they kept a table reserved for us. No one ever questioned why we weren’t in school. Thanks, society!
2:00 p.m.: Study Latin because Mom thinks it sounds good to tell people we are learning Latin. Most of the time, read Perry Mason book instead, for “literature.”
2:30 to 8:00 p.m.: Geisha lessons.
8:00 to 10:00 p.m.: More movies or TV (especially kung-fu movies for PE) while eating either tuna casserole or manicotti (the only two items my mother cooked) or a microwave TV dinner (the one with the postmodern square desserts).
10:00 to 11:00 p.m.: More reading, video games, or maybe some Legos. For my brain-shape skills.
After 11:00 p.m.: Eh. Go to bed whenever.
[ Socialization, Maybe? No? Okay! ]
Since everyone we met always brought up “What about their socialization skills?” like naggy in-laws, my mom tried to find us like-minded people to hang out with. Problem was, our family’s minds weren’t like any others. Especially in southern Mississippi.
My brother and I tried to hang out with other homeschooled kids a few times, but in the ass crack of the Bible Belt, parents who kept their kids home were not going to intersect with our liberal points of view. Ever.
At one awkward meet-up, I was hanging out with a girl around my age on the playground. She was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and an overdress down to her ankles. I kid you not; she looked like a Pilgrim, and her name was Eunice.
I made the first move. Because socialization beggars can’t be choosers. “What books do you read?”
“The Bible.”
“Have you read A Wrinkle in Time? Or Perry Mason, The Case of the Fan Dancer’s Horse?”
“No. We only read the Bible.”
“Oh. You’re a Thumper.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Wanna swing?”
“I can’t. I might show my ankles.”
I laughed because I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.
After that, my brother and I were in agreement: being alone was better than hanging around those homeschooled weirdos.
So I didn’t spend much time with other children as a kid. SURPRISE! I actually can’t name one best friend I had during those years outside of a group lesson situation. But it’s human instinct to connect, and eventually I found someone who would listen to me no matter how weird I was: my little pink diary.
I called myself Leesie as a kid because I guess my family couldn’t think of a more unattractive nickname. Oh wait. My grandpa called me Pooch. That one I won’t embrace in print.
But the way I wrote to this diary, you’d think I was writing on the mirror to another little girl who existed on the other side of the page.
“Dear Diary, it’s been a month since I wrote. I know, I’m a bad friend.”
“. . . I finished the Emily of New Moon books this week, but I mustn’t bore you.”
“Today’s our first anniversary. Happy Birthday to us!”
I confided everything a weird sixth-grader would share with other children and definitely be rejected for in a typical school situation. Big dreams like, “Wouldn’t it be neat to go back to 1880 and there wasn’t any kidnappers and progress, and the streams and fields and everything were beautiful?”
I made super-serious vows in the margins, like, “Vow: I will never kill an animal if I can help i
t.” “Vow: I will never marry a man for money.” “Vow: I will never let my children live in a slum.” Real personality-congealing self-work.
My mom was a big political activist, and that rubbed off on me in a big way, too. The diary is awash in bold political statements and social consciousness.
“We have a new president. George Bush and Dennis the Menace for vice president.”
Most of all, the diary was a safe zone. A place where I could share my innermost thoughts, work out a semblance of an identity, analyze my likes and dislikes, and work through my relationships, like that with my brother, Ryon, in a thoughtful, mature way.
That little pink diary is a tome for the ages.
My mother wasn’t totally blind to the fact that we needed exposure to other kids. She made efforts. But none of them seemed to stick. Probably because my attitude toward other children was like a seventy-year-old spinster’s.
“This girl Kate from violin lesson came over and I told her about my books. She doesn’t read. Stupid. I won’t explaen [sic] them to her. She has no imagination.”
“We went to eat with Miss Molly’s two kids today and they were putting forks on the floor and stepping on them like hoolegans [sic]. We also took Samantha (10) who is fat and obnoxious, but nice when she isn’t giggling insatatiabley [sic].”
“I went to an opera-ballet by myself. Behend [sic] me were two 7-year-old giggling brats. Well, gotta go!”
The only kid in real, close proximity to me was Erin, a thirteen-year-old who lived next door. She taught me that owning a trampoline was the most glamorous thing a girl could have, and that jelly shoes were haute couture. I learned all this through spying on her through my bedroom window, because she didn’t like me and wouldn’t spend any time with me, physically.
Despite our strained relationship (or because of it), I did have strong thoughts about her lifestyle choices.
Then I went on to apologize about criticizing her behavior, because I think my diary started chiding me about my judgmental attitude. Somehow.
Upshot to my bizarre upbringing: I got super-hyper-educated in many odd areas but was pretty lonely for many years. Sometimes achingly so. They say that the root of everything you are lies in your childhood. Every emotional problem, every screwed-up relationship, every misplaced passion and career problem you can blame on the way you were raised. So I can be kinda smug when I say, “Boy, do I have some excuses!”
Sure, I could have avoided a lot of problems as an adult by being raised like everyone else. I might not have had as much performance anxiety, I might be better at maintaining relationships outside of hitting “Like” on a person’s Facebook post when they have a baby. But here’s the part I unapologetically embrace: My weirdness turned into my greatest strength in life. It’s why I’m who I am today and have the career I have. It’s why I’m able to con someone into allowing me to write this book. (Hi, Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster!)
Growing up without being judged by other kids allowed me to be okay with liking things no one else liked. How else could a twelve-year-old girl be so well versed in dragon lore and film noir? Or think it was the height of coolness to be able to graph a cosine equation? Or long to play Dungeons & Dragons but never get the chance until adulthood because her mom saw that one article on how it made you a Satanic basement murderer?
Most school situations would have shamed all those oddball enthusiasms out of me REALLY quick. Those bow-girls would have snubbed me for them, for sure. But during my childhood my fringe interests remained uncriticized, so they bloomed inside of me without self-consciousness until I was out in the world, partially formed, like a blind-baked pie shell. By then it was WAY too late. I was irrevocably weird.
I’m glad I didn’t know better than to like math and science and fantasy and video games because my life would be WAY different without all that stuff. Probably “desk job and babies” different. Not that there’s anything wrong with babies. Or desks. I mean, I’m sitting at one now, so my analogy really doesn’t . . . I didn’t mean to insult anyone with those things, I just . . . oh gosh, panic sweats.
Anyway, thanks for all the weirdness, Mom and Dad!
P.S. I don’t have a GED. I have two college degrees, but I don’t actually have a high school one.
It took writing this chapter to figure that out. Fuck.
- 2 -
What Avatar Should I Be?
Forming my identity with video game morality tests. And how that led to my first kiss with a Dragon in a Walmart parking lot.
Knowing yourself is life’s eternal homework. ( Another coffee mug slogan!) We have to dig and experiment and figure out who the hell we are from birth to death, which is super inconvenient, right? And embarrassing. Because as teenagers we do all that soul-searching through our clothing choices. Which we later have photographic evidence of for shaming purposes. Hippie, sporty, goth, I have an adorable sampling of all my more mortifying phases.
That “mom jeans” picture calls for a postview eye bleaching, huh?
Because I was homeschooled, there are huge holes in my identity that I constantly have to trowel over. Answers to basic, “truth or dare” questions like:
▪ If you could trade places with one person for a day, who would it be? (I guess Beyoncé because . . . amazing hair reasons?)
▪ If society broke down, what store would you loot first? (A drug store for tampons? Sorry, dudes, for mentioning tampons in the book.)
▪ What kind of tattoo would you get? (Um . . . a hummingbird-fairy-dragon creature? Legolas on my right ass cheek? I HAVE NO IDEA, STOP PRESSURING ME!)
I AM covered in the “What superpower would you wish for?” area. I’ve been asked that question a million times, because, you know, the nerd thing. I would want to be able to speak all languages. I don’t even know ONE other language outside of key menu items like “tamale” and “fondue,” but whenever I hear a tourist who can’t speak English struggling to get directions, I dream of being able to step in, no matter what the language, but especially German since it’s emphatic, and fix the problem. Then I accept their thanks with a wave of the hand. “Es ist nicht, mein freunde!” In my imagination, I meet a lot of amazing people this way, especially heiresses of castles whom I visit in Europe the following year, anointed as “The American who saved my vacation last summer.”
Moving on.
As I grew up, I was bothered more and more by the bigger picture of “Who am I?” Science didn’t seem to have much guidance except for one section about personality disorders in my dad’s college psychology textbook. And those were a disappointment, because I didn’t seem psychotic enough to qualify for any of them. So around the wise old age of twelve, I decided that fortune-telling was the key to learning about who I was. The obsession started with a Teen Beat magazine personality quiz, “What perfume are you?” (fruity, BTW, no surprise) and rolled onward from there.
I studied graphology, the art of handwriting analysis, which confirmed that I was an introvert and inspired me to start slanting my words to the right instead of the left. (According to the book, left was the mark of a serial killer.) Numerology, where the letters in your name add up into a single number, told me that I was a “1,” which gave me the great excuse to go around saying, “I’m a number one!” I liked that subject a lot. And later, the lost art of phrenology told me that one of my skull bumps was linked to an excess of philobrutism (fondness for pets), which is totally true. My favorite movie is Babe, and if you even hum the theme song to it, I WILL start crying. One time I was introduced to James Cromwell, who played a gruff farmer in the movie, and I burst into tears when I touched his hand. Because it was so big and warm and he DANCED FOR HIS PIG.
But out of all the esoteric techniques I played around with, my favorite ended up being Western astrology. Because I loved space. At the time, my TV crush was Commander William T. Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He traveled the stars, I was studying them, those things seemed to add up to, “FATE CALLING! DISCOVER WH
O YOU ARE SO WE CAN TRAVEL THE GALAXIES TOGETHER, BELOVED ENSIGN!”
At first I was disappointed that I’m a Cancer, and my birthstone is the pearl. I mean, one’s a deadly disease, the other is a gem for grandmas. I wanted to be born in October, because opals are the prettiest, but what could I do? My parents did the deed in September. Hello, unfashionable June baby. Aside from those problems, though, everything else was spot-on. My sign said I was a homebody. Check. I was sensitive. Sobbing double check. My Venus was in Taurus, so I would be a constant lover, which I already knew, because I’d read Hawthorne. I understood what happened to ladies with loose garters.
From start to finish, the astrology thing was so convincing that I went ahead and let the rules of Cancerdom become the rules of my life. I started doing all the chores for the cats and dogs because I was a “nurturer.” Whenever I got into a fight with my brother, I’d scream, “I can’t help it! You crossed into my COMFORT ZONE!” Of all the recommended Cancerian jobs, I settled on “antique dealer,” and started collecting books on pottery patterns from the 1920s in order to get a head start on my future career.
“Mom, for Christmas I want this Roseville calla lily vase. The pattern is just MARVELOUS.”
I yearned to spread my new cosmic knowledge to other people in my life. Which . . . weren’t many. My only option beyond my brother (who was SO Leo) were the girls I knew in ballet class. We’d exchanged words while waiting to do piqué turns across the floor a few times, so we were pretty much besties. I brought my astrology books with me to my next lesson and, in between tap class and pointe class, tried to transform a few fellow young lives.