In 2007, when I was 14, I appeared on Kids by the Dozen , a reality show that aired on The Learning Channel and featured my family and other large families like mine. Our part of the series was shot over nine days that year, just long and short enough for us to keep up appearances as one big happy family. My father, Chris Jeub, controlled both my education and my occupation. A Gen X middle-class man, he first carved a place in my small world by controlling the uterus of my mother, Wendy, who gave birth to me and my 15 siblings.

I am the third child born in our family my mother had my two older sisters as a teenager, and my dad adopted them when my parents married. My two older sisters had already endured the consequences of questioning my familys beliefs. Alicia, who is nine years older than me, committed the unforgivable sin of wanting to date boys. Alissa, who is six years my senior, converted to Islam when she was in her 20s, making her dead to our family. She would later reconcile with my parents after capitulating to my parents demands and undergoing Christian counseling.

Kids by the Dozen led to a staged reconciliation between my parents and Alicia. In the eyes of our tight-knit Christian community, a rebellious child is a great shame and failure on the part of the parent. To address and compensate for the shows strict depiction of their parenting, my parents self-published a book called Love in the House: Filling Your Home With the Greatest Commandment. In it, they highlighted Matthew 22:36-40, in which Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love God and others. For us kids, this meant we had to give unconditional love to our parents without questioning their beliefs or authority. For our parents, it meant that God wanted them to have more children. I know, thats not what love is at all, but, sadly, I didnt know that for the first 23 years of my life.

The cult-like beliefs that shaped my upbringing belong to what is known as the Quiverfull Movement . It is based on Psalm 127, which reads, Children are a heritage of the Lord, and fruit of the womb is his reward; happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. The metaphor of a quiver full of arrows defines children as weapons to be used to win the world for Christian conservative values.

My parents believed that God created the universe in six days about 6,000 years ago, and they refused to have my mother give birth in a hospital or to vaccinate me or my siblings. I was home-schooled from pre-kindergarten through high school, and my curriculum touched briefly on science as a subject that merely magnifies the handiwork of God, while for history I was taught that divine providence had bestowed America to Christs faithful.