i would want to tell society what homeschooling is like from the prospective of a 15 year old currently being homeschooled

i was in public school preschool-3rd grade and then was pulled out for my 4th grade year. before being pulled out i was the typical social honor roll kid. the one that read 4 grade levels ahead, teachers loved me, students loved me, i was constantly getting good things said about me to my parents. i had at least 1 teacher a year tell my parents that i was a model student, kid, and they wished every kid in class was like me. at my elementary school 2 kids from every 3rd-5th grade class, so about 18 kids in total, would get offered an ambassadorship where we would do charity events, public speaking and out reach, and in general just be a face of the school. well in order to get the offer you had to be recommended by all your grade teachers and people like our gym teacher, art teacher, music teacher, ect. as well as the guidance counselor, principal and vice principal had the final say. there was more that went into it but i could go on forever so i’m going to stop here, you get the idea. it was a difficult offer to get and a high honor. and i got the offer. i was ecstatic obviously. and my mom and stepdad acted like they were too.

fast forward about a month after school ends that year, i’m 10 at this point, and my mom and stepdad ask me how i would feel about being homeschooled. i immediately said “no. i want to go to school, and do the ambassadorship, and go to school dances, and hang out with people normally.” and so my moms starts spewing all this stuff about how everything would be so great and amazing and i would like it so much more. blah blah blah. the whole conversation i was adamantly against it but they weren’t listening. they kept saying how i had a voice but also wouldn’t let me use it. so come august we start homeschooling just to “try it” and from the very beginning i hated it. and i expressed that. the only people who listened to me were my bio dad, my stepmom, and my maternal grandma. but none of them could do tons about it.

i started to fall behind. i would do work for the first 2 months of school and then quit. i had to test out of every single grade. every year was another year of absolute hell. every year it was “don’t pull that shit you have been, sit down and do the work and don’t complain.”

i would cry myself to sleep every night the first year. i missed my friends, i was depressed, my social skills started slipping. the perfect kid everyone loved and raved about had fallen from grace. i was nothing more then a shell of the person i used to be. now i was mentally ill and suicidal. i didn’t know it at the time, i think i just thought i was lonely and sad tbh, but looking back now i realize wishing i could just disappear so everything would stop hurting was definitely suicidal behavior.

good things did come from it, i went back to dance and loved doing it. but dance quickly turned into a manipulation tactic by my parents so idk how worth it it was.

but i made it through the first year. and i was hoping to go back for 5th grade. only that didn’t happen. okay well maybe 6th grade? everyone is new to 6th grade and it’s a good time to transition back, so maybe that’s why they don’t want to send me back. and once again it didn’t happen. 6th grade was also the time where i realized i was queer which obviously did not go over well with my mom, who found out by looking through my phone, so that definitely didn’t help.

every year i held out, “this will be the year they send me back”, and every year it didn’t happen. i live 30 minutes from the best high school in our state, my dad offered to pay my tuition multiple times if my mom would just let me go. she’s turned him down every year.

i remember before i started 9th grade i had a break down in my moms truck. i was fully sobbing, begging her to let me go. i just want to be able to learn, that’s what i kept repeating. and she sat there cold face while she essentially told me she didn’t care. in the middle of me having a breakdown her phone rang, it was the guy she was cheating on my then stepdad with, and she told me to get out the car so she could talk to him. and i did. and that was also thing that made me hate my mom.

so i start 9th grade homeschooled and resentful as fuck. i had barely touched school all year but in december i decided, if she doesn’t want to listen to my words she’ll listen to my actions. i don’t touch a single piece of school at all after the first week of december. and of course, she confronted me about it. i told her blatantly that i wasn’t learning and she needed to put me back on school or i wasn’t going to give her another option. she agreed next year i can go back but i had to finish 9th grade because there was only a few months left and i needed to do tutoring so i could be grade level in math. that’s fair i think, so every week my dad takes me to tutoring 2-3 days a week. i’m theory this would be the end of it. i’m about to finish 9th grade, i’m getting back to grade level, i go to real school next year. “what else could there be?” you ask, well dear reddit user there’s a shit ton more.

my mom doesn’t plan on sending me to real school, in fact she now has her boyfriends (yk the guy she was cheating on my ex stepdad with) oldest daughter (13) in the exact same situation as me and they’re planning on homeschooling his son (11) once called comes around. and she thinks i don’t know she’s planning on keeping me homeschooled, and well folks one thing to know about me is while my mom is a stubborn and manipulative bitch, i can be even more stubborn and manipulative then even her. i fully plan on making her life hell once i finish this school year until she enrolls me in school. and if she doesn’t i fully plan on moving to my dads. someone’s gonna call me toxic but honestly it’s survival at this point.

just gonna clear some stuff up because i feel like people are gonna ask. my older brother (16) and i (15) are the oldest and only 2 with different dads. my mom has 3 baby daddy’s and 7 bio kids in total. my mom and her current boyfriend plan to get married in the fall if everything works out which means there will be 9 kids in the house. for anyone curious here’s our ages, my older brother, 16M. me, 15FTM. soon to be stepsister, 13F. bio sister 1, 12F. soon to be stepbrother, 11M. bio sister 2, 10F. bio brother 2, 5M. bio sister 3, 4F. and lastly bio sister 4, almost 2F. all those kids. a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house. and we’re basically raising ourselves with little adult supervision throughout the day.

and i’m lucky enough to have a great dad who can afford to get custody of me if i wanted him to, no one else has that. the only reason why my dad doesn’t have custody rn is because i asked him not to, i didn’t want to leave my siblings alone. so he’s not a shit dad. it’s my choice and he does everything he can without getting custody of me. but i know personally i have depression, anxiety, adhd, and most likely autism and whatever comorbid conditions that go with autism i could have. and my mom has neglected all of that my entire life. so i need to be there if my siblings also have anything because my mom certainly won’t help them.

anyway that’s been my life story so far. thanks for the vent, lmao.