I have spent this week working really hard on the promotion surrounding the paperback of Twelve Moons. On Friday lunchtime I recorded an IG Live with
, barricading myself in my bedroom to record it and feeling slightly anxious because the light was really bad and showed how knackered I was. The conversation was lovely - nourishing, insightful and positive - and the response was warm, but I could feel my children needing me and I was chasing myself in circles. That evening I collapsed in front of Star Wars with my littlest one and buried myself under a blanket. At 10pm I left the older girls chattering and turned my bedroom light off because I couldn’t stay awake any longer.Yesterday afternoon I was in the local supermarket with two of my daughters. We bumped into a woman I used to see on the school run in a past life. She also has four children, and as we were apologising for not being in touch for a while, she described life with her children, ‘you know what it’s like, clubs after school, ferrying kids around’. Her youngest children had recently started nursery, and she described those windows of space, the unfamiliar silence hanging in her home and how she might fill the time. I tried to empathise, even started to explain that my life looked a little different, but sensed discomfort as I reminded her my children cannot all attend school and can find social situations stressful.
As we said goodbye, with my smile not quite reaching my eyes, I wondered if people worry that the complexities of my children and my care situation are contagious. I posted something over on X this week about Twelve Moons being ‘for anyone who dreams of a bold and beautiful life’, and I believe that. But I’m pretty sure when people look at me, although they might wonder how I do it all, they don’t want a slice of my type of life at all.
The tribunal hearing with the local authority for my 11yo’s EHCP (Education Health Care Plan) is looming. In early March I will join a Teams call with a judge and a local authority representative. The judge must decide if my daughter is entitled to an EHCP, or whether her needs should be met at her local high school. I hope I will win the appeal, and that I will receive funding to support my child’s learning. I must hope that I will find myself in the 96% of families who do win. But even if I do, the fact remains that my daughter can’t attend school and requires extra care. Even if I lose, I can’t send her to school, because it broke her once, and it would break her again. I would not even be able to get her into the car.
This means that until my child is old enough and well enough to be left on her own, or for longer periods of time with anyone other than my mum, I cannot work more than a few hours a week. I cannot leave the house easily or without a plan in place for my daughters. I do not have the luxury of another adult who will step up when I need them. I don’t know how to unravel this for the people I work with, for friends, or for the people I have yet to meet.
I want to tell everyone that my time is as precious as the cowrie shells I search for on the beach, that I am hungry for conversation and time spent in the wilderness, for dreaming and laughing. Instead, I find myself tightly wound up, trawling my brain and my online calendar for childcare solutions, and trying to weigh up whether I should spend a ‘free’ hour writing or calling a friend.
I am not a person who wants to have to plan so meticulously, I want to tell the friend in the supermarket. I don’t want to be that person who says no. But I am also not that person capable of arriving at an online discussion at no cost to herself. Not when there are children needing me and prescriptions to collect and emails to send and forms to fill out and money to earn and no one else to do it except me. But also. Also. I promised myself as the year turned that I would no longer be half a woman.
’s recent post about ageing was brilliant and it made me angry. I think it made me angry with myself actually. Every evening I rub cream into the skin around my eyes, on my neck, and every morning when I wake up I look at my face in the bathroom mirror and make sure I can recognise myself. Try to love the older me more than I loved the younger one. I walk back through to my bedroom, where my Grannie’s mirror sits on the chest of drawers. I can tilt it so that when I lean in I can see my face really clearly. When I run my hands over my cheeks they are smooth, and if I’ve slept for more than five hours my eyes are bright. I don’t want any of this to matter, but of course it does. I feel invisible for two reasons - because I am a full-time carer and because I am a woman in her forties.After I read
’s post I exchanged messages with . Nic is my social media guru, and if you want to know how to use SM to your advantage and without losing you mind you should follow her. She is also one of the most thoughtful and articulate people I know, and her writing about life in general is beautiful (example here). I said that growing older as a single woman made it harder not to feel invisible, without the reassurance that a romantic partner might give. She replied that if we are seeking value beyond the male gaze, how much reassurance should we be seeking through romantic relationships? I don’t know the answer yet. None, I guess, but I’m not sure everyone has read the memo. Communities like Substack are really helpful for starting discussions like this, and maybe it will help them spill over into the real world too.I suppose what I am trying to say is that it cannot be only down to those of us whose lives look a little different, those of us who live on the edge, to fit into the world. We need to be met half way. I cannot do it all, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t strive for something bigger for myself. I listened to Nihal Arthanayake and Amol Rajan discuss ambition this week, as I drove down to the city for a parents’ evening. They were talking about the way that ambition can be seen as a dirty word, and why that is wrong. And I subscribe to that - whether the ambition is professional or personal, it is ok to say this is what I would like please.
But we were not meant to do this alone. Just because society tells us that children should go to school, that children who do not speak are less than, that single mothers are culpable, that a life full of challenge is less attractive, that does not make it true. I still believe I am building a life that is bold and beautiful.
I called this Substack Unschooled for obvious reasons, but there is another one: unschooled also means natural or spontaneous. I want to be both of those things. It is hard to share the vulnerable, less palatable sides of ourselves with others. Easier to revert to the default position of ‘warrior mum’, or ‘multitasking parent-carer’. I can play both of those roles, but I am more than that. The person I most want to be is me, whoever she is.
This is very powerful Caro and I feel your struggle. It's funny when you described the women in the shop complaining of her life and the hardship of ferrying children to 'after school clubs' I was thinking of your response before you wrote it. And you were subtle. What came into my mind was far harsher. It's very difficult not to get caught up in comparisons with those you come across when you are feeling so pushed and pulled, when for reasons out of your control you are not given the space to breathe, and when you have such an important and scary weight of a decision - again out of your hands - looming. So much of this is about relinquishing control, which is near to impossible when there is so much at stake. But maybe we can give in to the small things. A life of honesty, and of speaking up, of writing, of standing by your truth accounts for so much - it shows the whole of you, not just a face, a forced smile, a hidden life. That is what we do when we write about the challenges that we face each day. You are a woman in her 40s who is full of power and talent, galvanised to make a difference to the lives of your girls but also to those who are in a similar bind of caring, but might not have the courage or ability to speak up with as much clarity as you do. Keep doing what you are doing. It's exhausting, I know. But you are listened to and you are heard.