Teaching has changed my parenting
Guys!! I am waaaay stricter now
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is: I’ve worked for myself for a long time, mostly writing novels, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries (!). I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my books - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.
(pssst! I just revealed all the details about my summer 2025 book. Please do consider pre-ordering: it’s the single best way to help authors you love!)
I’ve been super low-key and chill about my new job and hardly even mentioned it and in fact you’re likely reading this thinking wait, what, she has a new job??? and I know, I know, I should have spoken up sooner, my bad.
Lol, joke, I know it’s the opposite, that you probably want me to shut up about it. But I can’t! The picnic blanket of my life has been held at the corners and the sandwiches of my days tossed into the air and a beautiful mess has been left behind because of it. We’ve got trifle and tuna-mayo and home-made drinks all over the place, now, because some changes (arguably the changes worth being brave or stupid enough to pursue??) do that. Flip your world upside down. But to labour a metaphor that I’m not sure made much sense to begin with, I think we’ve just invented new, better, picnic foods. The ice cream has ended up landing in the lemonade and now I’ve got ice cream floats, the trail-mix littered over the ground has invited in a flock of birds for us to marvel at. Beauty has come from pain, happiness from frustration, a desire to actually get dressed and leave the house from ongoing and inexplicable ennui.
So yeah, school is cool, and honestly, if I was a millionaire I would still get up and do this job every day. That’s how happy it makes me. My kid has settled into our new routine now, but when he was struggling to adapt and I wondered will I have to give this up my whole body said NO! THAT WOULD BE BAD! That’s how I knew I was vibing with it. I mean. Not all day, every day. Last week I had a Tuesday that was such a doozy I didn’t want to speak for the rest of the day. But all in, each day is ending in a net positive and spiritually speaking, if I may be so bold, I feel very aligned. That’s nice. Spiritual alignment is why people take endless cocaine, or persue ultra-marathons, or go to church, right? We’re all just searching for the thing that makes us feel like we are where we’re supposed to be. And I’m supposed to be in the English block rallying fourteen year-olds into getting excited by Roald Dahl’s The Landlady, or on bus duty, making sixth formers walk the long way round to the gate like everybody else.
A dogged commitment to finding the lesson in ev.er.y.thing. means of course I’m taking mental note of how my thinking is being altered by what I do everyday, aka ~What Things Mean~, and I am here today with My Thoughts™.
(This is an exhausting character trait, very Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love saying that whilst an unexamined life might not be worth living, she’d at least like to have an unexamined lunch. God, I feel that.)
My latest thing is that woah, the way I have been raising my son is not conducive to him thriving at secondary school. What a shock that realisation has been! We’re a long way off that yet, but obviously the seeds must be sown now. Long story short I go way too easy on my kid. If parenting is a sliding scale from Kourtney Kardashian (permissive) to Khloe Kardashian (authoritative), via Kim (benign neglect), I’ve been Kim-to-Kourtney-ing whereas actually what kids need, IMO, is a Khloe. Basically, I am AGOG at the number of students - and I am talking from fresh baby year 7 classes all the way up to GCSE 16-year olds - who do not know how to help themselves, and I do think it’s a case of having been a bit too molly-coddled…
(Sorry! But I do!)