What was your educational and vocational experience?

I never went to college. When I finally moved out at age 25, I struggled a lot to support myself. I had little experience interacting with people outside the Christian homeschool community, and very few job skills. I moved six hours away from my family for a job, which I then lost just a few months later because of difficulties communicating with my employer, mostly because her worldview was so different from my own. I was basically homeless for several months, couch-surfing with my best friend and then later with a family I barely knew from a church I was attending.

How did this situation affect your outlook on life?

I felt like I had been cheated. I felt like I had been groomed and prepared my whole life for a job that I couldn’t just apply for (being a stay-at-home wife and homeschooling mother) and I had no other job skills training to fall back on. I felt so stupid and helpless, like I was just supposed to survive somehow until “prince charming” came to rescue and marry me. I hated that feeling. It felt so stupid to have spent years preparing for a “vocation” that I might or might not ever have. I was so scared. I remember walking miles from a job interview back to where I was staying. (I also did not have a car during this time. I was riding the bus to a temp job that paid barely enough to buy me food. Even if I’d had an apartment it wasn’t enough to pay rent, but I was trying to save up for a deposit so someday I could be independent.) At one point during that walk, I went under a freeway and I remember looking at the underpass and thinking to myself that if I didn’t get a job soon, I might end up sleeping there… it was so scary.

What happened next?

Thankfully, my friend and my church came through, so I always had a place to stay. However, if it hadn’t been for an acquaintance of my family, I really don’t know where I would have ended up. He was a business owner, and when he heard about my situation, he offered me both a job with his business and a place to stay in their house. He also loaned me money to buy a car. After a year and a half of working for the business owner, he retired, so I decided to start my own small business. It met my basic needs (though it was really a hand-to-mouth existence), and it also helped me develop some self-confidence, people skills, and life skills. Eventually I did meet my Beloved and we got married. Later we discovered that due to many factors, it is unlikely that we will ever have natural children of our own. We do want to adopt, but even so it is unlikely that we will have more than two children.

How would you say ATI prepared you for adulthood?

ATI in NO way prepared me for real life, or to be independent. I give them absolutely ZERO credit for my survival in the “real world.” All those years of “training” me on how to manage a household full of children? (Actually I was just slave labor for my parents, helping them manage their household full of children…though they claimed they were “preparing me for my future”…as if they knew my future?) In terms of preparing me for my adult life, it was wasted time. In all likelihood, my future will not look like that. I am not all sorry about my childhood; there were good parts to the experience. I am glad that, as the oldest, I was able to give my younger siblings a better childhood than they otherwise would have had, and I became a very good cook. But ATI did NOT prepare me for my future.