Call it ointment on the soul

We have been too busy. So this, I have to do. Grimes Graves, Norfolk. One of my most treasured places. Like heaven on earth!

Yes, it is an odd reaction, considering local folklore tells this is where the devil dances.

 

I make for one of the abandoned pits, lay down over the sheep shit, stare up at the sky, and listen to the skylarks. I watch them rise, soar, and fall, performance artists of the air, like they're bursting with helium before they plummet as rocks, and making me wish that I had feathers and might, for once, join in.

The signpost cut like a crucifix doesn't help

Good grief, the view looks bleak. Even I have to admit it, and I am a skilled practitioner in the ways of wilful blindness: always looking on the bright side and seeing the best of everything.

But on our walk today, the wind laughingly slaps my face and spits snow in my eyes. This winter's long lingering - the sunless, joyless, grey, bringing its partner in crime, a hellish bitter cold - they have become almighty oppressive to a woman's spirit.

It has brought out my complaining twinge rotten; on these endlessly leaden days my own mouth has bored me witless; I am surprised my ears have not left home, listening to my mardy whining of When Will This Bastard Weather Improve? while the eyes stare miserably ahead watching the shivering blackbirds stare forlornly back.

Yes, I know there are compensations in the twigs and the pebbles, and believe me I have to find them, but I am looking forward to Spring with a fierce determination. When that first stretch of warm reviving sunshine falls, I shall throw off these five layers of woollen jumpers and the thermal vest with a coffee stain down the front, and I shall dance in slingback sandals, jangle my fake sparkle and wear clothes that make my daughters clasp their fingers to their eyes. The spirit surely needs it.

There's the power of the blackbird

Didja hear the birds today? Didja? 

We're turning now on that angle of winter and spring and I know it with that blackbird song. Melodic and beautiful, it sings, behind us lie cold, grey, shrunken days! Ahead, long evenings, warm nights, bright mornings! 

Then listen to my fantasies. I want white lines about my eyes where my skin folds in from laughter. I want raspberries for breakfast and picnics of cream crackers and strawberry jam scooped from the boot of the car in a field. I want dirt on my feet, scratches on my legs, and my fingernails to break. I want to set out too late, under-prepared, over-ambitious, and without a map. I want to be dragged off hillsides scowling. I want my clothes to tear, my sandals to fall apart and my knickers to lose their elastic. I want to be caught short, wee in bushes, and forget to shave my armpits. I want to come home hungry with sun bristled shoulders that make me wince and I want to lose my wide brimmed hat. I want unwisdom, folly, raw stupidity and temporary bouts of insanity. I want to throw myself about, bring bruises and wounds home to lick. I want there to be hope yet, with my withered soul, my leathered heart, and my thick black sunglasses to hide stupid tears. I want summer, from beginning to end, rain and sun, mist and fog, drizzle and downpour.

Then when autumn comes, I want to look back and say, there was my summer, lived.

A love of life in Tweet Me... when birdsong is music and honey might still be for tea

But look on the bright side

There are moments I despair of our home education journey.

Take the heart-stopped minutes, locked in the mausoleum halls of the Natural History Museum. Where Tiger suddenly rips up her papers and shrieks at me through tears of frustrated rage that she cannot draw an accurate picture of a stuffed woodpecker. She hurls her crumpled woodpecker at my feet and squeals that now she would be better off not existing. Top that with the howl that her mother would be better off not existing either, then a flood of tears enough to drown the vaults.

In that moment, I might have felt able to pick up her scribbledout woodpecker and, with balanced breath, compose myself, had we not been surrounded by a school group of perfectly behaved microdots. Each barely out of toddler stage, uniformed in grey and white, sat neatly in horseshoe arrangement, dutifully completing their National Curriculum Attainment Science Worksheets (Target 3.4). With their perfect synchronised arm movements it wouldn't surprise me if they were composing superior calligraphed joineduphandwriting (Target 2.2) with 100% spelling (Target 5.1).

They, and their staff, turned like one body with sixty eyes to gaze at my feral child. All with the same curiosity and vague alarm that you might feel when you stare at a feral baboon going ballistic in a zoo. Here is the audience to my banshee. She, completely unaware, is howling, clinging to a decorative pillar. I fight the competing urges to smack her round the face, hug her, and use my feeble body as a shield to protect her loss of dignity from the rocks that pack animals might throw at the strange and unacceptable.

That moment happened maybe four years ago. It's just one of the many moments which has burned a hole in my brain. It marks misery and failure. But from it I learn. I learn that we hurt people we love. I learn that Tiger needs me to help her, and she resents that need. I learn that my daughter, the sensitive one, the one who hid in the nursery toilets, needs more tender dealing than I knew before. She is the one who deeply, keenly, knows that wound, even by the flimsy passing thought of it.

I know now from experience she needs a place to go; a place of safety where she can be wonderfully, completely, madly berserk. Then she can sit upright, her anguished face raw and blurred with tears, and nod. From my stand nearby, because I have stayed the course, I gently say for the thousandth time, Do you want a cuddle?

Yes, daughter, I know you do, because we are both from the same mould. You do not take after your father here: have you ever seen him make such an idiotic spectacle of himself as we are both capable of doing? After the humiliation we have both subjected him to, it is a miracle he still loves us.

Yet I think moments like this tell me what home education is about. It is not only the discussion about how society worked in Ancient Greece, and not simply arguing over whether the answer to 7x6 should be Is it time for lunch?

It is about learning through all our experiences; it is about experiencing many things, better to learn.

Such learning and living comes unpredictably in all dimensions, all circumstances, all moments, all places, all feelings. We can learn, even from moments that first seem humiliating, shaming, weird, or downright bizarre. And more. Choosing home education is to explore parenting and childhood. It is to wonder what makes us strange, messy, dangerous, human. It is liberating. It is 100% snot, sweat, tears.

Yes, in this filled-up life I would say this entire home educating family needs the patience of saints. And the compassion of angels; the awareness of therapists; nerves of steel; knuckles we can chew to the bone and - personally speaking - a kitchen bin I can kick the shit out of.

Then there are the other days. I am safe. I know we've chosen the right way, the best way, the most happiest, wonderfully filled, satisfying way. On these days I see my children exploring in freedom, with friends, at ease, feeling happy. They are wise, sharp, outpouring with observation and creation.

It can be a day as simple as a walk over stony fields, by the balancing pond, past the sluice gate, through the woods, over the stones, along the towpath, and under the bright blue sky.