Memoir is dead. Everyone says so.

Unless you are really famous, memoir is dead. So where does this leave life writers? How do we get our stories out there when publishers are saying no one wants to read them?

The thousands of personal essays posted on Substack every day suggest that people certainly have plenty to say. There is a market for stories about people’s lives, but currently it’s almost impossible to get them onto the shelves.

I enjoy writing personal essays, but there is something about the deep dive of writing in long form that is special, a particular creative challenge. I love writing books, and I want to write another one.

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Write a novel, people keep telling me. And I’ve started. I’ve got 45k words sitting in a folder, some of them beautiful, but the overall idea is not yet compellingly structured enough to hit hard. Also I need to finish that novel before anyone will look twice. I’m not sure I really want to write a novel anyway.

What I want to write is a Book Of Love. I’ve started that, too. But I’m hesitant because agent after agent has told me that it is unlikely to sell. I am scared to put hours more work into a project that might never see the light of day.

But as I type this, I know I’m missing the point. If I want to make money from my writing I have to write something publishers can sell. If I want to write because I’m passionate about my idea and craft something beautiful, I must write it in the knowledge that it may never be read by anyone else. Either I write a novel with a clear target audience and an amazing hook, or I follow my heart and write another non-fiction book and hope that it will be so incredible it will buck the trend. .

In the act of writing this post, I can feel that I’m persuading myself to return to my Book Of Love, even though I can sense the eye rolls of exasperation from those around me who think I should crack on with a novel. What if this is the book that changes things? What if I can be original and heartbreaking, and make people sigh in recognition and delight as they turn the pages?

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True to say I am exhausted. I’ve just moved house again, and I’m ready to drop. I also need to get another job that pays me some money, alongside the full time caring and educating. Have I got it in me to keep tapping words onto the screen?

Can I build a writing routine in this new flat in the sky, where my desk unbelievably looks out only over trees, despite being in the middle of the city? Can I set my alarm to wake early and write while my children sleep? Or gently close my door against the girls after I’ve fed them tea, summon some energy before bed? Can I trust my knackered brain to seize pockets of time here and there, write in snatches as I have done so often in the past?

This is what it means to be a writer. You just have to keep writing, that’s all there is to it. I’ve always written in the margins. It pisses me off, that I don’t have enough time to write down all of the thoughts that arrive in my head. It’s annoying that my phone is full of half-finished thoughts I’ve typed in traffic jams or in between the dishwasher and the hob. But it’s too easy to use writing in the margins as an excuse not to keep trying. True, I could write more and possibly better if I had lots of time available to me, but also there is something about the constraints in my life that make writing a compulsion and give my words energy.

Perhaps if I step away from the hamster wheel of publishing for a while I can let myself fall back in love with my words. At the moment I am seeing it as a job,. I’m scared I’ll be forgotten if I don’t keep manically writing and trying to secure an agent or get another book deal. It’s no way to produce good work.

If I frame writing another memoir as a treat, a delicious stolen luxury just for me, perhaps I can separate it from the things in my life I absolutely have to do, like caring for my kids, or hanging out the washing, or applying for jobs.

I can light candles while the city is sleeping, put lavender in a vase on my gumtree desk. I can pour myself onto the page and see what emerges. Read books and underline sentences that leap out at me. Dance in between the thoughts of other writers, make myself breathless.

I’m best with a deadline. I’m even better when people tell me no. Maybe this third book will be the one everyone talks about. I’ll never know unless I write it.

I’ve watched from the sidelines in his roles as author and education spokesperson. His first book, Fit, won the 2020 Northern Book Prize. His second book, Exam Nation, was published in 2024 and asks us to consider schools as communities rather than factories. Sammy is Head of School at a large secondary school in Sunderland, and sat on the government’s Social Mobility Commission from 2018-2021.

We’ve been exchanging brief emails over the last year or so, aware that there are crossovers between our work and words. My move away from the North-East of England and both of our busy schedules mean it has taken us until now to get our acts together and arrange a proper chat.

Sammy is keen to support my campaign to sell the remaining hardbacks of Unschooled and get it into paperback. I wrote Unschooled partly to help people like me feel less alone. But I also wrote it as a political tool, to try to change the educational status quo. So I’m delighted to talk to Sammy, because he sits inside the system, and it’s only when we have difficult conversations with people across sectors and society that real change can happen. Incidentally, I write in Unschooled about the relentless kindness of several teachers towards me and my daughters. I have mainly found teachers to be as frustrated with me about the lack of support for children with complex needs. I’m pretty sure Sammy and I will be nodding in agreement with each other.

Despite the years of wrangling I have had with local education authorities, I know that schools can be excellent places of learning. I worked as a classroom teacher for years. Two of my daughters attend school and they mostly love it. But I am also painfully aware that there is a shocking lack of provision for children who struggle to access education in the classroom. This doesn’t mean these kids don’t want to learn - currently I’m in conversations with my quietest daughter, who is lonely and isolated due to the lack of learning on offer for her. She is desperate to be part of a community, but there are many barriers in her way.

Sammy and I agree that it is important to keep redefining success. Success must be more than passing exams. It must be more than 100% attendance.

In Unschooled, I paint a picture of the reality for thousands of children who have been failed by our school system, as well as the desperate challenges facing families forced to fight for support. I’m interested to speak to Sammy about his perception of the SEND crisis from inside schools, just as I know he will be keen to learn more about how it feels to educate on the edge, as I do.

Please join us for this conversation on Wednesday 26th August at 12pm. Here’s the link:

https://open.substack.com/live-stream/326847

Bring your curiosity and your questions and we’ll try to answer as many as we can.

Also, a reminder that if you buy Unschooled this summer, I will gift you a subscription to my Substack. Paid subscribers get an extra personal essay each month, as well as full access to the archive and occasional audio and video treats. Just send me a photo of your receipt :-)

See you next week!

Caro

I’m writing this from the bath. My body is sore from lugging books and furniture up two flights of stairs. I’m very tired.

There’s something different about this move into a new home. Previously I would write essays, or post photos with gritty, romantic captions. Try to articulate what it felt like to make a big life shift. I’ve struggled to do that this time.

Today I received generous, thoughtful feedback on some fiction I’ve been writing. It’s good, but it needs so much work. I sat on the swivel chair in the kitchen and cried a bit because I felt so far removed from the writer inside me.

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The last year, since Unschooled was published, has been a wild explosion of stress, love, fear and adventure. I have clung on tightly to the life I am trying to build for myself and my kids and it’s taken its toll.

It’s a cumulative thing, I’ve decided. Years of parenting and caring alone, against an often hostile background. Two tribunals. An MA during lockdown. Two memoirs published in less than three years. Moving house three times in three years. Fighting to be allowed to leave England and settle in Scotland. Selling a house in a collapsing housing market. Buying a flat in an escalating one. There’s more, but you get the picture.

No wonder my creativity has been shunted to the bottom of the pile. Lying here in the bath, stress seeping into the bubbles, I’m tapping these words into my phone to remind myself there is still a writer in here somewhere.

Tomorrow my new bedroom will be painted yellow, and the next day my family will move into our home.

I don’t regret a single thing about my attempt as a single mother to build a bigger life. It’s knackering and terrifying but mostly it is fierce and glorious. If you are thinking about changing your life and you’re scared of the consequences, or worried that it will be too much, please message me. Despite the exhaustion I’d do it all again. And maybe soon, I’ll sit at my kitchen table, drenched in daughters, and write wild stories onto the page.

Thank you to everyone who has been supporting my Unschooled campaign. Your kindness and belief in my work has meant so much to me. ❤️

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If you buy a copy of Unschooled I will gift you a subscription to my Substack, which gives you access to everything as well as an extra essay each month just for paid subscribers, the entire archive and occasional treats.

From July, I will be writing an essay each month for paying subscribers only. These essays will be intimate and personal, and I want to challenge myself to be as bold as possible on the page. I’ve put a third memoir on hold while I concentrate on my first novel, but I miss writing about LIFE, so I’ve decided to commit to monthly essays where I can excavate the big stuff.

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During July I’m offering a free 6-month subscription to my Substack - Open In The Middle - to anyone who buys a copy of Unschooled (available from everywhere that sells books). You can find out more about my campaign to sell 500 books over the summer here.

This month I want to tell you why love still feels terrifying to me, and why I think that is ok.

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Before I explain why I need a wife, can I first say that there are many things I enjoy about being a single mother. I wrote an entire book that was a love letter to my kids, and a celebration of the fact I had managed to extricate myself from a very bad marriage. Twelve Moons isn’t the pastel, glittery version of mothering four daughters, it is dark and raw in places, but readers tell me they come away from the book sensing the magic we try to thread through our days. The kids and I have a good laugh together, and we are close. I mostly love it that my bedroom door is frequently nudged open and a daughter crawls onto the bed beside me. I love their chatter, their playfulness and the way they are fiercely protective. I am happy I have managed to show them that a family can look different, and that a woman can be enough on her own.

But also, I didn’t mean to have four children and then raise them almost completely on my own. That was not the plan. When I got married nineteen years ago, I wanted to be married forever. I was romantic, idealistic and hopeful. I’m still all of those things actually, but looking back I can see that marriage for life was a tall order. Even if I had married a different person, the likelihood of staying happily married to him for up to sixty years was small. But back in 2007, I imagined I would grow old with the man I married, so it seemed reasonable to have four children because we would be a team. I wouldn’t be on my own.

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Reader, the marriage didn’t work out at all well, and I have lived alone with the girls for eight and a half years. I’ve had at least one daughter learning at home for almost thirteen years, and this has had a huge impact upon my ability to work. I don’t earn much money as a writer and columnist and I’m heavily reliant on benefits. Truthfully, money aside, the other main reason I try to work at all, beyond the many, many hours of unpaid work I do, is that I would go mad from lack of intellectual stimulation and contact with other adults. Mostly I would go mad because I would have no identity beyond my role as mother and carer. So this means I try to forge a writing career in the very slim margins that skirt my days. I would like to have a lot more time to work.

This morning I woke up and made myself a cup of tea. I listened to a voicenote from my friend and checked my social media, because I’m currently running a campaign to sell 500 hardback copies of Unschooled. I got dressed, threw a bowl of cereal and a coffee down my neck and quickly recorded a couple of videos to post on here and on Instagram. I checked my email to see if my solicitor had been in touch about my moving date (she hadn’t). Saw a message about a music performance for my youngest daughter that I need to facilitate. Worried about the imminent contact the girls have with their dad (the lead-up and fallout are often really hard), and wondered what to make for lunch. I tried not to think too much about the unfinished novel that is flying around my head, or the job application I haven’t done, the column I must write. Then I went to the gym, voice-noting pals on the way.

Sometimes when I am in the gym, I start to feel quite emotional. I think the lifting and stretching forces out all of the feelings I try to bury down. It’s healthy, I think, but embarrassing when I start crying whilst doing sit-ups. Easier with press-ups because no one can see the tears. Today though, while I was pulling weights on the lateral pulley, I realised I was tearful because yes, I am overwhelmed, but mostly I am furious.

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asked me during a conversation released this week, are you frustrated by how little time you have to work? And the answer is a resounding yes. I am not only frustrated, I am livid. Mostly I try to pour these strong emotions into my writing, and just now, today, I need to express the unfairness of it all. Sure, there is plenty to be grateful for, but today I want to imagine what it would feel like to have a head that only had to think about myself. Empty of all the noise that invades each day. Free to get lost in thoughts and dreams.

My life as a single mother is further complicated now because I am not completely on my own. I have a boyfriend. He’s a great boyfriend, a kind man. Me and the kids have turned his quiet, lone-wolf life upside down. He has rocked my world. You can read more about how I met the Glaswegian in Unschooled, it’s a wild love story and it keeps getting wilder. But now we’ve clarified that I’m not always alone (we don’t live together), I still stand by the title of my essay: I Need A Wife.

When I was researching this piece, I was reminded of Judy Brady’s classic essay I Want A Wife, and then instantly depressed that it was written in 1971 - 55 years ago. The essay was written several years before I was even born. As I cried on the lateral pulley, it became obvious that my tears were angry tears, as they so often are. I texted my boyfriend - I don’t think I can do that job application - and he asked me what he could do to help. Could he watch the kids for a couple of hours, would that be useful?

And I thought about the waterfall of jobs and demands slooshing through my head, the emails, the messages, the daughters, the chemist, the empty fridge, the unwritten novel, the universal credit deadline, the job application, the column to file, the hospital appointment to reschedule…and I texted back no, two hours won’t be enough. I need a wife.

Needless to say, the message didn’t go down brilliantly. Angry text messages rarely do. He messaged me back, perplexed, wanting to help, but not understanding what I needed. This happens often, this Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus scenario, and it’s because I’m bad at saying what I need, after years of my needs being near the bottom of the pile. Also, it feels like too much to say that I Need A Wife, a person who will carry the invisible load entirely for me so that I can focus only on myself. And if it feels like too much to ask, then surely too much is being asked of me?

My second memoir, Unschooled, was published in hardback last September. Just in time to ride the publicity wave surrounding ‘back to school’. I was featured in The Guardian, Sky News, The Scotsman, The Mail on Sunday (the grim comments this piece attracted was a publicity coup all of its own), and packed out my local Waterstones in Glasgow at an event to celebrate the book’s launch. I recorded podcasts, made a keynote speech at an education conference and visited bookshops to sign and take photos that I used for social media posts.

Ten months later, almost 2000 copies of Unschooled have been sold, or are hiding on shelves in shops, but I need to sell the remaining 500 before it can go to paperback. Hardback books are becoming increasingly problematic for publishers and their authors. Their high cost is prohibitive - readers are frequently happy to wait for the paperback, or buy the e-book. Audiobooks are more popular now, although also expensive to produce (more on that another time), and they poach potential hardback customers. Libraries - a lifeline for so many unpaid carers and parents - prefer to stock paperback, because they are cheaper.

For a book like Unschooled, which tells the story of life as an unpaid carer - a single mother - a hardback copy is extremely hard to access. Unschooled has sold really well as an e-book. I know it would sell well as an audiobook too, because all of the single mothers and unpaid carers I know pour stories into their ears while they go about their hours of mothering and unpaid caring. The audio of my first memoir, Twelve Moons, has been really popular.

But currently Unschooled is only available in hardback, and my brilliant independent publisher, Little Toller, can’t release it in paperback until the remaining hardbacks have been sold. I have sat on my hands for while and wondered if I should let my beautiful book go. But firstly I am stubborn and don’t like to be beaten, and secondly, I know that my book is not the problem. I am proud of my book, and I know it is good. Here are some of the things people have said about Unschooled:

‘Barnstorming’ The Guardian

‘Distinct and purposeful. Unschooled made me want to be part of this extraordinary family’

‘An essential story of modern womanhood. Simply breathtaking’

‘Addictive. read it, it’s wonderful’

‘Powerful and vulnerable, furious and tender. I loved it, and feel changed by reading this remarkable book’

I receive weekly messages from readers who see themselves in my story and feel less alone as a result of finding Unschooled. And perhaps this is the point I want to make most strongly: often the quiet books, the stories written by people who are marginalised and have to fight hard to get their words out into the world, are the ones that are meaningful to many, many people.

The SEND crisis is only getting worse. Tens of thousands of families, like mine, have no access to funded education for their children. Parents, mainly mothers, are being forced to give up careers they love, face financial uncertainty and the constant pressure of having to educate a vulnerable child.

I wrote Unschooled in order to shine a light on this issue. I wrote it in order to let other mothers, other carers, know that they are not alone. I wrote it for every woman who has been told to stay small, who is overwhelmed by caring responsibilities, to tell them that they can build a big life, despite the hurdles in their way. My book is a rallying cry for a kinder society, and for a world where everyone can thrive. Unschooled is not only a book about education and caring, it is a book about female identity, about falling in love, and about taking bold risks even when we feel terrified.

People tell me that Unschooled feels like a friend. It is isolating being an unpaid carer, forced to step outside the school playground and misunderstood by hostile systems. Words can make life feel easier. The feeling of being seen on the page is one I never tire of. I have so often been lonely and found solace in stories. That is the beauty of books.

So I want to ask if you can help me. I am notoriously bad at asking for help (ask my mum and my friends) but I’m trying to be brave here. In order for my book to reach a wider audience in paperback and audio, can you do any of the following?

• buy a copy of Unschooled from Little Toller, the place no one is allowed to mention, Waterstones, or any lovely local indie bookshop

• ask your local library to stock Unschooled. Better still, gift a copy to your local library

• buy a copy of Unschooled for a friend who is battling with the education system

• stock Unschooled in your shop if you are a bookseller

• if you have already bought and read Unschooled can you leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads? Or can you share it on your social media?

I have over 2000 followers here, and over 5000 on Instagram. The laws of mathematics tell me that even if only 7% of those people supported me in some way, Unschooled could have a longer shelf life, and more people could enjoy it as a ‘friend’.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading this piece, and for taking time to listen. I’m off to chase some daughters around the park now, and hope I’ll hear from some of you in the comments. Publishing is hard but, as ever, I’m willing to try to beat the system.

Caro x

I have a new desk. I don’t subscribe to the idea that a writer must have a desk, A Room Of One’s Own, but this desk is very meaningful to me. It sits in a bedroom, facing the window of a ground floor tenement flat in the west end of Glasgow. I’ve known this flat for almost two and a half years, but until now I couldn’t call it mine.

Beyond the window is a scrappy right-angled triangle of grass. It hasn’t been mown yet this year, so the dock leaves and buttercups are calf-high. A washing line is strung overhead, and blue recycling bins are lined up neatly against the wall. Fuschia-pink roses climb high above the black railings, and elder trees are heavy with flowers. When I lived in Northumberland, my oldest daughter would forage for elderflowers and make sticky cordial. I’d find bottles in the fridge, half-filled with a golden liquid. I think the foraging was the point, not the drinking. She hasn’t foraged since we moved to the city.

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I like looking out onto the back court, running my eyes up and down the drainpipes. Every window represents a different story waiting to be told. For a few months last year an opera singer poured arias into the air that bounced off the tenement walls. I didn’t live in Glasgow back then, and her serenades made my double life feel even more surreal. As I type today, the soprano tones of a John Taverner song soak through the flat. I wonder if it’s possible that I have conjured the opera singer with my words, but when I open the window, I hear only the white noise of drizzle on leaves. The music must be floating through from the living room, where my quiet daughter is reading with our cat, and the Glaswegian is working.

I’ve had a few desks over the years. The first one was a white Ikea table that sat on the landing in the Northumbrian house where six became five. Often a daughter or two would perch at the end as I typed, colouring or drawing or doing puzzles. There were no curtains at the window, so I could see out over the rooftops when I forced myself out of bed while the kids were still sleeping. I watched the sky growing lighter and obsessed over the moon. An old bookcase that my parents gave me when they downsized ran beneath the windowsill and I would run my finger over the spines of books, knowing that I was writing one of my own, but not daring to believe it would one day sit alongside them. I’d painted the landing yellow while I was still married, and after he’d gone I wanted to cover the walls in another colour, try to wrestle back some autonomy, something that was just for me. I chose a calamine pink that felt fresh and calm and clean, and I wrote Twelve Moons at that desk, watched myself appear on the page.

The year Twelve Moons was published, I moved myself and my kids across the back lane into a slightly bigger terraced house. There was no landing, and I couldn’t fit the Ikea table in my bedroom. I asked a friend to build me what was no more than a wooden ledge in the corner of my bedroom. It was barely wide enough for my laptop, but it was something. I wrote Unschooled at that desk. I have a thing about needing to see the sky when I write, I think it helps me to dream. This tiny ledge afforded me a view across different rooftops, beyond which the North Sea tugged on the sand, and in the morning sometimes the world would burn pink and I would feel my wildness simmering inside me.

I moved to Glasgow less than two years later, and maybe the story of that move is my next book, although most people I speak to tell me that Memoir Is Dead, which I don’t understand because I have never felt so alive.

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But this brings me to the desk I am sitting at today, in the flat that I couldn’t call mine until now. In the literal sense of ownership, this flat is not mine. It does not belong to me. But I also don’t own the flat I live in with my kids, and yet we call it home. It doesn’t feel like home, but we call it that because it’s where we live. My kids are my home, and the guy sitting in the living room playing melancholy songs is my home, and I am his.

The walls in this room, in the ground floor tenement flat, are also calamine pink. Until a week ago they were a kind of olive green. The green was harder to cover up than the sunshine yellow in Northumberland, but the Glaswegian has never shared the bedroom in this way before, and the walls were stubborn to let me in. But now it’s calamine pink, and there are several pictures on the wall that are his, one that is both of ours, and some gaps where we’ll put some more that are mine maybe, that currently sit in storage. I’ve put peonies in a vase and stacked some of my books next to them on the window sill. I brought a spider plant over from my flat, and its babies hang from the wardrobe. My cat, who is staying in this flat at the moment, jumps from my new desk onto the wardrobe and nibbles at the spider plant’s leaves.

The desk itself is precious. I have never properly owned one, only the cheap table and the pieces of wood screwed into the wall. I found it on Gumtree, and drove to an industrial estate in a little town north of the city to collect it. I paid £140 in cash to a guy who had salvaged and restored this desk that feels grainy when I stroke the surface. There’s a leaf that drops down, and I can extend the desk by pushing two pieces of wood out from underneath. It can hold coffee, candles, toast books, laptop, a speaker, everything I need.

I’d like to write a whole book on why I don’t live with the Glaswegian in any traditional sense, and this essay only scrapes the surface of how I live and love. But I can say it’s important to me that we painted this bedroom pink, and that he cleared away thirty years of history so that I could put this desk against the window and write. It was his way of telling me that I am his person, and also that my words matter.

I’ve written before about how I am the sunshine to his night sky, and even now he just walked in and asked me why I had the blind pulled right up, why I had revealed so much of the world. I told him I need to see the sky, to imagine endless possibilities, and he told me he prefers the dark, as if I didn’t already know. It’s one of the big differences between us, the way he holds everything deep inside him and I am an open book.

I can’t sleep in this room very often, so my desk feels like a place holder. The other day he told me he sat down at my desk and his long legs wouldn’t fit comfortably underneath it, and he realised that this desk can only be for me. I like that it makes him think of me when I am not here, though probably he doesn’t need a desk for that.

My life is still turbulent, as the economics of being a carer and a single mother threaten to trip me up. And it’s why this space is especially important at the moment. I can sit here and plant my feet on the floor and feel grounded. Held, even. If my first book was an attempt to write myself back onto the page, perhaps my third one is an attempt to stay there.

My daughters and I love to watch Mamma Mia. During lockdown, when it was just me and four little girls aged between 5 and 12 years old, we used to plan a Greek Night at the end of the week. I’d sizzle halloumi in a pan, grill pitta bread, chop salad and stir pots of tzatziki. We’d lay our picnic out on the coffee table in the lounge, sit cross-legged on the sofa or stretched out on cushions on the wooden floor. We’d stare at the TV, sing the songs, marvel at Meryl’s dungarees and laugh at Pierce Brosnan - ‘he’s so cheesy mama’. When Slipping Through My Fingers arrived, towards the end of the film, we’d fall quiet, and I was so drenched in daughters that I couldn’t imagine a time when my arms would be empty.

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Those lockdown days, when I wrote an entire book about our life, started off intensely, every day pricked with the fear that I might die. But they also sit in my memory as precious pockets of stolen time. It was just me and the kids, no appointments, no conflict with their dad, and everyone in the world was on their own, so I felt less lonely. Later, when my oldest daughter contracted covid and had to be hospitalised, the lockdowns became dystopian and exhausting. Single parents were not considered, just as disabled people were forgotten, and carers were forced to draw on invisible banks of energy in the absence of any external support.

But back to Mamma Mia. One Friday lockdown night we watched both films back to back, just because we could and there was nothing to get up for in the morning. We’ve always been good at making our own rules. Afterwards we trailed upstairs and the girls piled onto my creaky bed, in the smallest room in the house. Back then I wasn’t hungry with desire or seeking romance, but I was wild when I ran up hills, feral in the waves, and that was how I sated my body’s soft curiosity. Perhaps I was still revelling in the newness of feeling safe, and a house free from shadows.

It wouldn’t last forever, this glorious exhale. Not long after those Mamma Mia Fridays, I’d be dragged reluctantly back into a world of scrutiny and criticism, and it was hard once more to remember what safety felt like. It’s difficult to be the safe place for your children when a racing heart reminds you daily of the precarious place you are inhabiting, close to the edge.

These last weeks, months, have been defined by uncertainty, as the bricks I am carefully stacking in order to build a solid life for us all have stubbornly refused to stand firm. I’ve been tearful and exhausted, and I’ve bought ready meals more often than I’d like. I have an almost constant pain in my pelvis that I think is ovarian cysts but no one knows for sure.

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Rats started to visit my basement flat, rustling in my kitchen at night, and running down the corridor to the bathroom, where I discovered a huge hole behind the toilet. Perfect for rats. I think the rats have gone now, but they haven’t helped. I still wake and listen when I hear a noise in the night. My boyfriend stayed with us while the rats were still visiting becasue I was scared. I loved that he stayed but I hated that I needed him to. Now he has gone back to his flat across the park, and I’m not sure how I feel about that, about our unconventional life. The past has been weighing heavy on me in recent days.

Last night was light though, and I leaned into the joy of being surrounded by my children. I made a Caesar salad and everyone ate it, except for the vegetarian daughter who was sewing sequins onto a pink dress in the living room. My quiet daughter joined in with our chatter at the dinner table, and everyone stacked their own plates in the dishwasher. Progress.

This morning I fried eggs for my two school girls. When I played random tunes in the kitchen my 16yo asked me why I was playing sad songs, and I said I wasn’t listening to the words, which is unlike me. As they came in to say goodbye to me, the 16yo spoke the entire first verse of Slipping Through My Fingers at me as I pulled her head in, kissed her shiny hair and laughed.

I took a photo of the door that closed behind them, because it still feels like a miracle when any of my kids leave the house and step out into the world on their own. This is the type of school morning I adore, and each one cancels out a little bit more the hundreds when I had to peel a terrified child from the footwell of my car. I am happy when they slip through my fingers, because I’ve held on to everything for such a long time.

It’s cloudy in Glasgow. Beautiful though, because trees across the city are exploding. Pink and magenta rhododendrons are in full flower. I always remember the birth of my second daughter at this time of year. Almost sixteen years ago she arrived, and the rhododendrons were incredible. This is the first year I won’t get to kiss her on her birthday. I’m happy she’s spreading her wings but also I miss her. Cloudy but beautiful.

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It’s easy to lose yourself as a mother, to disappear. Motherhood is vast and all-consuming. It’s hard not to be defined by it, because it’s the biggest role there is, which is why it’s weird that mothers rarely feel like main characters.

I’m in a cafe just now, drinking mint tea and listening to Big Thief while I type. I feel fragile and rebellious. I’ve left my daughters who can’t go to school at home for a couple of hours. I’m worried I should be doing something educational with the younger one, even though I know she needs to be quiet and read a book or play with her dolls. I’m a bit emotionally breathless because this two hour window is all I have and how can I use it well?

My boyfriend sent me a text earlier telling me he’d collect my littlest daughter after school so I could daydream. I sent him back a laughing emoji because why would I be daydreaming in the middle of the week, but he wasn’t joking. I’m scared I’ve forgotten how to daydream - the last few months have made my nervous system scream, and I’m struggling to turn down the noise.

But daydreaming is crucial. It’s crucial if you are an artist, because often the best thoughts arrive in the gaps between reality. They also frequently arrive when I’m cooking pasta or doing the school run, and that can be frustrating. But sometimes, if I have a moment to stare out of the window, I can get lost in myself. In a good way.

Recently, I’ve wondered if I might have lost myself, and that’s quite a different thing to getting lost in myself. I’m worried about getting lost in motherhood, lost in caring, lost in love. Where is Caro in all of these scenarios? Who is she?

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I don’t know how to separate myself from motherhood and give myself a break. I find it so tricky to give myself permission to leave my kids to their own devices for a while. Give myself a hard time when I know I should be kinder. I think it’s because I’ve been scrutinised or criticised as a mother so often: by CAMHS, by benefit officers, by local authorities, by my ex-husband. I’ve been glancing over my shoulder for as long as I can remember.

My identity as a mother has been fraught and fabulous in equal measure. There are the moments when all four girls pile onto my bed and we cling onto each other and stroke each others’ hair. Or one of the kids asks to play a song in the kitchen and we dance and sing until we’re laughing so hard we can’t breathe. Or when we decide to do a Greek Night and I cook prawns in garlic, drizzle olive oil into humous and grill salty halloumi, and we sit in front of Mamma Mia for the millionth time and cry when Meryl Streep sings Slipping Through My Fingers. These are the fabulous mothering moments, and they help to cancel out the fraught ones. These are the times I feel mighty.

As a carer and an educator I’ve experienced the same scrutiny. Those roles are fraught and fabulous too. They’re physically and emotionally exhausting, but also I’m a better person because of them. I’m more open-minded, more thoughtful and I’m galvanised by my anger to try to make the world better for people like my daughters. Sometimes though I wonder what happened to my dreams before this became my life.

I guess I was daydreaming when I decided to move to Scotland. My desire to live in the city had everything to do with wanting to make our world bigger and something to do with falling in love with a wild Glaswegian. Throughout this move to Glasgow I’ve needed support from my boyfriend whilst simultaneously pushing him away. He’s frustrated by my inability to ask for help, to clearly state my needs, but he doesn’t know how frustrated I am by myself too. I want to stop equating needing help with being too much, but it’s not easy. I have put myself last for too long. I know it has to stop.

My life in Glasgow is becoming more real. Before I sold my house in Northumberland, when the sale was dragging on and I didn’t know if anyone would ever want to buy it, I used to occasionally imagine running back to my house by the sea. I held it in the back of my mind as an escape route in case the city dream shattered into pieces. In case I was stupid to think I could have a love story. In case I was selfish and my dreams made my children ill. It was ridiculous of course, my kids were settled in new schools and I had nothing to return to really, just an old life that no longer fitted me inside it. And now the house is sold and the escape route has definitely disappeared. The kids are mostly really happy about our new life. I don’t think I was selfish or stupid. I will make Glasgow work. I can write my own story.

My two hours are nearly up and somehow I’ve managed to daydream. Maybe I haven’t lost myself. Maybe I’m just a person who sometimes feels a bit lost. Who weaves words in an attempt to find herself.

It is a new experience for me. I am walking down Eglinton Street on the south side of Glasgow. I drive up and down here a couple of times a day on the school run. It’s sparse and grey and urban and when we first moved here I kept talking about how green Glasgow is, how Glasgow means the dear green place so the kids didn’t think that the whole city was concrete and pavements.

The street isn’t the new bit though. I know the car wash and the petrol station, Kashmir Store and June Brides. My car has bumped through every pothole and each time we pass the O2 Academy my youngest daughter borrows my phone, so she can google the name of the band on the reader-board.

What feels new is the numbness invading my body. I’ve dropped the girls at school and the car felt sluggish and tired. Halfway down Eglinton Road a red light comes on telling me that the oil needs topping up and STOP THE VEHICLE NOW. My brain flicks into the flight and fight mode that has become my unwelcome default over the last month. I turn right into a car park and think about phoning someone. Anyone. Change my mind, reverse the car, spin around and drive back up Eglinton Road to a garage.

The mechanic tells me the car will cost £180 to fix and I nod. Tell him I need the car to pick up my daughter just before 3 and stumble out into the city. That is when the numbness starts to kick in.

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I’d spent the previous night not sleeping. Awake at 2.30am with a bird in my chest, like so many nights. On my laptop sending emails to a care support worker and my MP. Blue light shining out at me and a restless man next to me trying to ignore his desperate girlfriend. When the shit hits the fan it’s bad for the people who love you too, and this knowledge makes everything a bit more painful.

At breakfast time, I cook eggs for my daughters on autopilot. Don’t wash my face or put contact lenses in. No attempt to look pretty. This is the beginning of everything shutting down, my brain and body doing only what is absolutely necessary. On the way into school, the car lazy and thirsty for oil, my 15 year-old plays motivational pop songs to get herself in the right frame of mind for a maths exam. She makes me laugh and that surprises me, because life doesn’t feel funny.

I forgot to say that before the eggs and the not washing my face, I had left my 19th message on my Universal Credit journal. For weeks I have tried to be just the right balance of desperate and polite. UC claimants are warned very frequently that abuse will not be tolerated. I used to think it is sad this needs to be pointed out, but this month has made me realise that desperation is steeped in frustration, so no wonder it often emerges as shouting or swearing. I hadn’t received any of my benefit payments since the middle of March and the night before I’d been told that my mortgage application would no longer be accepted. The money I had declared from the sale of my house in England had forced my case to be reassessed and no one would tell me when that might happen.

Universal Credit assumed I could live off the proceeds from my house, but my bank account will quickly drain in the absence of me being able to work more than a few hours a week. City rents are more than double what my mortgage would be. I know that owning a home is a privilege, and I know there are many people in much more precarious positions. But it is frightening not being able to work when you have a child who can’t learn at school and no one is willing to fund an alternative education. The state simultaneously shafts me and saves me. I feel out of control and desperately reliant on my benefits. When they stop, I have no way at the moment of replacing them with a decent income. I wrote last week about the shame that can accompany needing state support. I would like not to need anything from anyone. I would like to be completely independent.

Back to Eglinton Road, I have no mortgage, no income and now no car. And I have spent weeks being ignored, or told me that I am not a priority. My children are not a priority. They are my priority though, and I am sinking. The cool spring air stings my skin, as my body tries to feel something. I’m shutting down though. I text my mum. I haven’t even got the energy to cry. Anyone who knows me knows this is a bad sign. I cry all the time. This week though I’ve become robotic, machine-like, in an attempt to field the hostility surrounding me. And now, walking towards Bridge St metro station, I have stopped feeling anything at all. There is nothing left.

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At home I make a coffee and call Universal Credit. The phone operator tells me he cannot escalate my case but he will write a message for my case worker. I know this will not make any difference because I’ve tried this before, but I go through the motions. The operator asks me what I want to say. I tell him about the cancelled mortgage application. The disabled daughters. The lack of educational support. The housing crisis. Anything else? he asks. I don’t know how to come across as desperate enough to trigger a decision on my benefits. I am trying to be calm and polite and I know I don’t sound as desperate as I feel. He posts the message on my online journal and I thank him. He has been kind to me and I am grateful.

Later that day I will walk with my quiet daughter up to the nature reserve by the canal. For the third time someone will say to me have you had a good week? and I will shake my head and she will raise her eyebrows and I don’t know her well enough to explain so I quickly tell her about a good thing that happened, a swim in a loch, and hope she won’t notice that I’m falling apart on the inside. I’m still numb which is helpful - the falling apart is hidden deep down. I watch my daughter pressing a stone into a square of linen, as green and yellow from leaves and petals bleed through the fabric.

An hour later I am back at my flat. I open the Trainline app on my mobile so I can buy a train ticket to Edinburgh, where my two youngest daughters will meet their father. I buy the wrong ticket, back to front, a return from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and hope I can still use it. I drop my metro ticket on the floor and have to race back to the flat to find it, leaving my daughters standing in the street next to their suitcase. My boyfriend is outside with his bike and I don’t even look at his beautiful eyes, don’t want him to see this version of me. Throw a comment over my shoulder and run back to the kids. Behind me, he is looking at my retreating figure and feeling helpless. Later we will argue a bit and it’s lucky I didn’t know that would happen, because the knowledge probably would have broken me.

But I manage to stay numb on the metro. Numb at the ticket office when the woman tells me my ticket will be fine. Numb as I sit at a table seat with my two daughters and bring out biscuits and nuts from my bag. I am glad the girls can leave their frozen mother behind for a weekend. Sit back in my seat with an audiobook in my ears and watch their sweet faces. Even in this state I know that I love them and that this love is the thing that keeps me going.

My phone pings and it is Universal Credit telling me to check my online journal. I open my laptop and log into my account for the hundredth time that day. A PDF is attached with the outcome of my case review. I am so numb that I’m beyond the sick feeling in my stomach. Beyond shaking hands. Beyond everything. Scan the letter. I have six months to find a home. They will keep paying me an income. Text my boyfriend. Add a crying emoji, even though there are no tears because the girls are looking at me and I flash them a pretend smile. He messages me straight back and he is a mess. I know the thaw is on its way because I feel bad in my heart that I have caused him so much worry.

Text all of the friends and family who have held me so tightly, wrapped me in fierce love. Get off the train at Waverley and hand the kids over to a man who still can’t look into my eyes. Get back on the same train that takes me to the city that feels like home. To the man who feels like home.

There has been a huge cost to this experience. It is impossible to take away a family’s security for any period of time and for the pain and fear not to ripple out. It’s why I believe that every tiny action means something. Every smile at a stranger. Every carefully chosen word. Every leaf that hangs on a breath then falls to the ground.

I am not the same girl that I was seven weeks ago. I am more scared. More cynical. I already knew that it doesn’t matter how good you are, how kind you are, how hard you work. Sometimes none of this will be enough. But now I’ve also learned that it’s possible for one bad thing to happen, and for that bad thing to knock into another, until bad things are spiralling and life is a cyclone, spinning out of control and destroying everything in its path.

The numbness is subsiding now, although I think I’ll stay frozen for a while yet. I’m less trusting, and I think perhaps a permanent armour has curled around my sensitive soul. This the cost of trying to thrive inside cruel systems. Over the next few days I will melt. Tears will pour from my eyes once more and I’ll soften. I refuse to become hardened and brittle in the face of hostility and indifference. Instead, let me be a river, caressing the rocks that stand in my way and flowing fast and hard towards the sea.

Yesterday I sat on a patch of rewilded grass just above the Forth & Clyde canal, in Firhill. The canal lies north of the west end of Glasgow, where we live, and this nature reserve is a hidden escape for dog walkers, runners and dreamers.

The air was sweet yesterday, thick with the scent of spring. My quiet daughter and I curved willow twigs into circles and threaded wool in zigzags to make dreamcatchers. It felt like an act of hope, an attempt to capture something ephemeral and magic and infuse it into our life together.

Later that evening, I pulled the dreamcatchers from my rucksack and asked my daughter to tie them up at our windows. Then I got distracted by my dinner being ready and the fear that has taken up residence in my chest since my benefits have been stopped. I played songs, lit a fire, lay down on the sofa with my legs stretched out over my boyfriend and thought for the millionth time how every time I stare at his face I want to look at it forever.

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It was late when I kissed the children in their beds. Later than usual. I felt bad for hiding away in the living room and pushing the mother out into the hallway while the woman curled up on the couch. The girls were fine of course, they orbit me like little moons. They know they can call any time and I will come running.

We were going to watch something on the laptop in bed, but it was almost midnight and my head was heavy. I slept without taking off my make up because I thought my face looked pretty and I wanted it to stay that way.

Three and a half hours later I suddenly woke up. My breath was being stretched tightly across my chest. I lay still, felt my boyfriend wriggle his fingers towards mine. Placed my other hand just above my breasts and blew air out into the room. Noticed heavy darkness all around me, apart from the green glow of a plug.

When we first met, my boyfriend and I found it very hard to sleep together. We are both light sleepers, and neither of us had opened ourselves up like this before, so everything was new and scary. In those early days, or nights, we would lie awake in the witching hour and talk talk talk until we felt able to sleep once more. Sometimes we would become characters and create funny scenes. Other nights we’d confess dark secrets or awkward fears, and it felt ok to do that because those hours before night gently tipped into day helped to take the edge off how exposed we both felt inside this wild new love.

Those night time encounters arise less often now. He still wakes most nights. Read the news on his phone or a book on his kindle. I wake too, if he stirs, but mostly I go back to sleep, happy in the knowledge that he will turn around and cradle me, stroke my hair away from his face, breathe me in.

Last night we laughed a lot after the fear inside me had subsided. After we agreed that life certainly is very precarious and stressful at the moment. After I told him I so much want to wake up one morning and not be forced into battle. No more tribunals or solicitors. No more poorly children or horrible appointments. No more wondering how I can be everything to my daughters and still be something to myself. After he said come on, give me a cuddle, and I cried a little bit. Then he made us both cups of tea and we looked at stupid words in an urban dictionary and made up names for albums we will probably never write.

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The light was seeping under the curtain by then, day chasing the witching hour away. He wanted to read. I wanted to have sex. We compromised by curling into each other and eventually falling asleep. And that is when the dreamcatcher worked its magic.

Two hours later I was about to wake up, still inside a dream. My boyfriend was pulling me into a dusty outbuilding. There were mice and spiders. When I was a little girl I was terrified of spiders. These days I get anxious around mice. In the dream, I didn’t want to be near the mice or the spiders, but somehow it felt safe. I sat down at a table. The windows were coated with dust and I could only see because the door was ajar and light spilled into the room. My boyfriend kneeled down in front of me and took an envelope out of his bag. Inside were two pendants. He put one around my neck. It had opened to show two ovals that were empty. I think one side was for him and one for me, maybe to hold photos of our faces. The other pendant was shaped like an apple. I remember thinking that each pendant held a different purpose, and then I woke up.

I almost never remember my dreams. But I turned and talked about the mice and the kneeling, the pendants and the apple, and when I got out of bed to draw the curtains I saw the dreamcatcher that had been hung there the night before by my daughter. I looked out at the gull strutting on the lawn and remembered weaving the wool around the willow. My boyfriend was on his phone looking up the meaning of apples in dreams, and when he said they indicated prosperity, success and love I kissed his sweet face because I wanted to believe him.

I wake with a bird lodged in my chest, fluttering against my sternum and straining against my throat. I have slept deeply, alone in this rented bed that creaks and roils. The view outside my window is one I have grown to like, but not love. Trees that reach towards the tiled roofs of these rusty tenement blocks. Sun hiding just beyond my eyeline and casting shadows across the hedge. I didn’t think I would still be here to see leaves return to the branches, but here we still are.

My heart is racing because I’ve suddenly realised, in the immediate act of waking, that I may not be able to get the mortgage I need if my benefit payments do not resume very soon. Hard to know how I have forgotten this crucial fact, but my brain is on survival mode and must be forgiven for not functioning at full capacity. I am spending my days trying to stay utterly inside each moment, but now and again I am hit with a sense of terrifying panic that takes all of my effort to wrestle back into its box.

I fill water from the tap into the kettle and press down the switch. Tea will help. Pad to the toilet and, without warning, begin to imagine myself somewhere else, a flat across the park. My boyfriend lives across the park, but it is not his flat that I find myself in.

The place I’m dreaming of has a tiled floor in the hallway. A front door that nudges up against its neighbour. Inside, the floorboards are old and grooved and I imagine my bare feet walking across them, making them my own. The kitchen is painted orange and white, the cupboards a little tired but no worries I will stick postcards up to hide that. There’s a shared patch of grass below and beyond the window, and I want to see my daughters sitting there, eating Sherbert Dib Dabs and playing cards. I want this so much that I can see them now, seared onto the back of my eyes, long legs bare, blonde hair falling over their faces. Maybe the cat would like it out there too, and my quiet daughter could bury her face in her thick grey fur. I really want my cat to come home.

Opposite the kitchen there is a living room. In my mind my big bed, the one that is currently lying dismantled in a storage unit in Ibrox, is pushed against the wall and a table sits in the corner where I can write. Eventually there might be a sofa too, if I can afford one, and my kids can sit and talk to me while I work, or friends can have a coffee or a glass of wine in the fading daylight. Outside, the street is busy with students and tourists, people having a drink after work. I feel held by their presence, less lonely. And that has been the point of moving to a city.

Downstairs, two bedrooms are wedged into the basement, and they cradle my four daughters. It is not perfect, but it is safe, and I will do anything to keep this roof above our heads. A little outside space has been created beyond the sash window, and I imagine my daughters creeping in and out, having adventures without me knowing. I urgently want this for them, a chance for them to have their own adventures, move beyond the edges of mine. I have fought hard for this, to give them a big world.

On the other side of the park I make a cup of tea and return to my bed. Take out my laptop and sign in to the journal for my Universal Credit account. I type a message for my case worker, as I have done almost every day for the last week, and I tell him that I am starting to feel quite desperate. That if my payments do not resume I may not be able to buy a home for my family, and that renting is unsustainable. I want to tell him that if he just gives me a few more months to get sorted I will do absolutely anything. I will work anywhere. I will do everything possible to continue educating my daughters without funded support, care for them with their complex needs and earn enough money to keep us all. But I don’t say tell him this, because it is obvious surely. No one wants to be forced to beg and justify their life. No one wants to be just another number.

I close my laptop. There is nothing more I can do. I check the volume on my phone, make double sure I will not miss any calls from Decision Makers. Then I listen to a message from a friend. She is an online friend I have not yet met, a face on a screen, a voice inside my phone. She has gifted me some money and I am uncomfortably grateful. I haven’t told anyone because I feel both ashamed and humbled. This friend has been in the same situation as me. She is not rich. But she knows.

The horrendous stress of these weeks has had the beautiful flipside of reminding me that I am loved and regarded with care. My closest friends make space for me in their busy days, leaving me messages of hope and resilience. My mum tells me she will lend me her savings for a flat, she just wants to see me and the kids settled. And strangers write to me and tell me that my open-ness around money and housing has made them feel less alone. There is so much kindness in this world, amongst the casual cruelty.

My bedroom door pops open and a daughter walks in. Her face looks like sunshine. I arrange my own face so that it is calm and reassuring. The type of face I want to see everywhere at the moment. A face that says it will all be ok. When I look in the mirror my eyes are tired and those who know me best would notice the haunted look hovering inside them. But I brush mascara on my lashes and tie my hair up into a ponytail that bounces. Hope is a waking dream.

People often ask me if writing memoir is a form of therapy. I usually tell them that the act of pouring thoughts onto a page can be therapeutic - cathartic even - but it’s not the same as therapy.

Writing memoir is not journalling. Making something beautiful from the mess of ideas in my head is something that requires creativity and imagination. No one would want to read the narrative running through my head on a daily basis.

The therapy I’ve done over the years is nothing like my approach to writing, though it does give me an insight into myself that sometimes informs my work. But therapy is transactional: I pay for the opportunity to show up messy and unfinished. It’s one of the only places I can feel completely safe in my vulnerability. Writing memoir leaves me exposed and open to judgement - in that sense it is not therapeutic. I share thoughts about my life because the connection it brings me is more important than the criticism my work can sometimes invoke. All this is to say that writing is difficult.

People who are familiar with my words know that I write against a backdrop of considerable challenge. I’m not the most marginalised person in the world, but I face more barriers than many - to be honest, those barriers fuel me. I wrote Twelve Moons in between lockdowns, alone with my daughters, including one who was seriously unwell. My second book, Unschooled, was written in snatches of time while I was in the middle of tribunals and legal battles, trying to move my world with four children in tow. I know how to write when life is busy.

But writing also demands that I am emotionally open. My style of memoir writing - urgent and raw - suits my crammed, chaotic life: I know I’m good at translating the race of my heart onto the page.

I’m working on my third book now and it is taking much longer than I’d like. I’m trying to create something a bit different to my previous work, and it requires me to explore and research. I’ve mostly relied on my big feelings to inform my stories until now, but I want to dig deeper this time. I need space and clarity inside my head to form the ideas of this third book into a proposal, and I have neither.

There is something, too, about starting a new book, however many books I might have written or had published in the past, that means I am not sure I can still write, and that doubt is unhelpful. Currently, my imposter syndrome is compounded by a precarious personal life and a growing sense of shame. One of the reasons I haven’t been writing or sharing much recently, is because my life is in disarray.

As a full time carer, I’m heavily reliant on benefits. Universal Credit is my main source of income. I also earn a little from my magazine column and the odd writing commission. I educate one of my daughters full time, and receive no funding for her. She is a lost child who no one wants to claim. Too complex for school, and there is nothing else on offer. I would love to work every day, have a proper career, but I can’t. And so every month I declare my ingoings and my outgoings, type them into an online portal, and my benefits are calculated. On the 14th of every month I receive a payment and I am grateful. I am also disappointed and ashamed, because I want to pay my own way, but mostly I am grateful. I need my benefits.

Earlier this month I finally managed to sell my house near the sea. I know it is a huge privilege to own a home and again, I am so grateful. It took a year to sell and caused me a lot of worry. In the interim I’ve been renting a flat in the city. My cat is not allowed to live here, so my daughters and I walk across the park to visit her at my boyfriend’s place. One daughter prefers not to visit the cat at all because she misses her so much. I ask my boyfriend to send videos or take photos, but it is not the same.

In this rented flat we are not allowed to put pictures up. I am trying to make it feel like our home, especially for my autistic children, but it’s not easy. I want to splash colour everywhere, hammer nails into the wall. Instead I light candles and fling blankets over the sofa. Try to create an illusion of home. I am desperate to build a home.

Occasionally I dream of returning to Northumberland, where I was safe, even if I was often isolated, bored and lonely. Those dreams don’t last for long - I love the city, and my kids are thriving here in a way they couldn’t before. I have done the right thing for us all. I want this big life for us all, but a little voice keeps creeping into my head telling my I want too much, I should have kept us all small.

I thought it was really great when I sold my house, because it meant I was finally free to buy a little flat for me and the kids. Our cat could come home. I did what I was told by the benefits people, declared the sale of my house and explained that the funds would be used imminently for a new property. And then my benefits stopped.

It’s happened before, the sudden stop. The glaring absence of funds needed to pay the bills that don’t stop coming. I felt the sickness in my stomach, the lurch in my chest. The next day the phone rang and it was a Decision Maker. Decision Makers are the top dogs in Benefit Land. Only a Decision Maker can restart your benefits. Last time the Decision Maker was a woman, and she said ‘oh bless you’ when I started crying with relief. It must be a wild job, wielding that amount of power over a family.

This time though, the phone has not rung. I was ordered to visit my local job office over a week ago to show evidence of my finances. The guy in the office was apologetic, acknowledged the stress this must be causing me. Hopefully this will sort everything out for you, he told me, and I walked out into the sun and the blossom feeling hopeful.

Ten days later my hope is darkly tinged with desperation. I have left message after message on my online journal, which is the only way I can contact Universal Credit. The system is set up so that it’s impossible to see any one face to face. There is no one to tell my story to. I am not a number, I want to say. I am a person. I want to work. I don’t want to be grateful on the 14th of every month. I want to be in control of my life, not reliant on you. I want my children to be able to access school so that I can have a career.

No one wants to hear this though, because it would humanise the issue. And so I type messages into my journal that I hope are just the right amount of desperate. I am warned that Universal Credit will not tolerate abuse, and it’s terrible they feel the need to say this. But I am starting to understand more why people might completely lose their shit with the system. I’ve always been a good girl, polite and respectful, but my perfect manners are getting me nowhere right now.

I have appreciated this weekend as a chance to jump off the hamster wheel of life and hide away. Universal Credit is closed on Saturday and Sunday, I am powerless to do anything until Monday morning. Even then, all I can do is type another note into my journal and hope it doesn’t irritate my case worker so much that he de-escalates my claim.

I want to write my next book, which is about love, desire, convention and wild abandon. I want to lose myself in stories. But right now all I can do is contain myself inside each day and try not to spiral. I am ashamed that I can’t do more to provide for my family. I am angry that we live in a society that has so little regard for families who look a bit different. And I am too distracted by my troubles to write anything beautiful at the moment. I am only writing this in an attempt to challenge the shame that so often accompanies a reliance on state support. Pinning these words down makes me feel a little more in control. It helps me to harness my anger instead of sinking inside my shame. I know that I am not less than because I am not wealthy, but it’s easy to lose sight of our value when the safety net is pulled away.

For now, on this sunny Sunday, I will drink one more cup of coffee and keep playing gentle melodies. I’ll be surprised once more that my youngest daughter is so tall, pull her head towards me so I can kiss it, smell the shampoo in her hair. I’ll try not to feel like this horrible mess is a reflection of me and my personal failings. I’ll close my eyes and think about my cat and my boyfriend across the park. And I’ll remember that we tell each other every day that we are poor in some ways, but at least we are rich in love.

• place writing and psycho-geography

• why I wrote Unschooled

• the problem with our education system

• why inclusion isn’t always the answer

• a plea for more flexible learning

• why it’s crucial to support the family, not just the child

• the highs and lows of home education

• memoir as a craft

• our creative processes and why we write

• why the moon belongs to everyone

• writing in the wilderness versus writing in the city

You can find my books here - Twelve Moons and Unschooled.

Also ’s books - The Outrun and The Instant.

I’m really enjoying engaging with readers in this way, thanks so much for the questions last night and do add any more in the comments.

Next Wednesday lunchtime I’ll be in conversation with from . We’ll be discussing all sorts, from the different ways we tell stories and people-pleasing, to whether soul mates exist and why brave is a difficult word. Please join us…

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Sarah is a powerhouse. She’s an experienced educational leader, consultant, and author with over two decades of expertise in emotional well-being, behaviour, and systems change in education.

Sarah’s philosophy centres on a strong belief that all children have a right to an enriching and engaging education, and that we must dismantle the systematic barriers that stand in the way of this. This belief is at the heart of everything she does.

I thought we’d just chat about our experience of working with young people forced to learn in the margins. But our conversation was wide-ranging and stretched far beyond the world of education.

We discussed

• the joys and challenges of raising many daughters

• how we look after our bodies and minds

• mental health challenges, including OCD, Tourettes, anxiety and depression

• TW: sexual assault and raising awareness of violence against women

• the many forms creativity can take

• the importance of raising our voices

I’m so grateful to Sarah for her candour, and for sharing her expertise. I hope you enjoy watching.

If you enjoy my words, you can buy my latest book, Unschooled , described as ‘a searing memoir about the resilience, love and true grit of a family forging its own path…an urgent expression of resistance, demanding a more inclusive, compassionate education system.’ Readers say it is beautiful but it also makes them cry - the best type of book!

Next week I’ll be doing a live interview with , followed by the week after. I have a long list of brilliant people I want to talk to, do let me know if you’re enjoying these creative explosions, I love to hear from you all.

Caro x

This was a relaxed and thoughtful conversation, covering the concept of home, creativity, body image, love and female friendship. I hope you enjoy it.

If you liked our chat and would like to read more of our words, links are below…

Unschooled is my most recent book, and is described as ‘a searing memoir about the resilience, love and true grit of a family forging its own path…an urgent expression of resistance, demanding a more inclusive, compassionate education system.’

wrote that Unschooled is ‘powerful and vulnerable, furious and tender. I loved it, and feel changed by reading this remarkable book.’

Twelve Moons is my first memoir, about how I learned to navigate as a single mother of four daughters. A year spent caught between the wild sea and the changing moon of the wide Northumbrian skies.

described Twelve Moons as ‘a beautiful, absorbing story of what happens when a family doesn’t fit the mould, and how solace can be found in the elements.’

Clover is the author of four memoirs: The Wild Other, My Wild And Sleepless Nights, The Red Of My Blood and The Giant On The Skyline.

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It’s hard to find time to write. This is not news to anyone who is trying to write in the margins. I like to challenge my own frustration by reframing what a period of writing might look like beyond getting words onto the page.

When I am overwhelmed by everything I have to hold, and when a quiet few moments feels impossible to find, I try to be kind to my creative self. During the weeks when I know I will not meet my desired word count, I find other ways to build stories in my head.

I do a lot of thinking - on the school run, when I’m collecting meds from the chemist, while I stack the dishwasher. I type notes into my phone, or scribble them onto post-it notes. I take in everything around me, and if I think a story might be hidden in a detail, I record it and save it for later.

I also do a lot of talking. I leave voicenotes for friends mostly, because I spend my days caring for my daughters. Occasionally I will meet friends for a drink, a coffee snatched after the school run, or a rare glass of wine in the pub round the corner. When I see friends in real life I usually don’t come up for air. I am nourished by these conversations, by the version of myself I reveal when I am not surrounded by my children. We rarely talk about the mundane, the domestic. I prefer not to speak about my kids. I want to dive straight into the illicit, the radical, the terrifying. I want to get right to the heart of this wild life, and I surround myself with friends who want to do the same.

I’ve planned a series of conversations with women I know - in fact I have only met two of them, the rest of them exist only as voices inside my phone. These women all have one thing in common - they are hungry for life. These are women with massive care responsibilities, managing huge life challenges, and yet they continue to create and plan, to live boldly with curiosity. I am excited to talk to each one of them and to share our conversations with you all.

HERE’S THE SCHEDULE PEOPLE:

Thursday 19th February 2.30pm: Substack Live with

Clover Stroud needs no introduction. She is a bestselling author, loved by readers everywhere for her urgent, passionate prose. I’m excited to talk to her about her creativity, about the state of the world right now, and to compare notes on mothering many children. Clover and I will be doing an event IN REAL LIFE later this year, so watch out for that.

Thursday 26th February: Recorded interview with

I met Sarah Johnson at an education conference in London last year. Immediately I knew she was someone I wanted to spend more time with. She is the president of PRUsAP, the voice of alternative provision and the author of five books. Sarah works with educators across the world. She also has many children and is, like so many of us, mistress in the art of juggling. I can’t wait to talk to Sarah about what it means to raise children who need something beyond the mainstream and share our thoughts what inclusive education shoud really look like.

Wednesday 4th March 8pm: Substack Live with

Amy Liptrot is a bestselling author, whose star rose stratospherically when her debut memoir, The Outrun, was made into a hugely successful film in 2024. Amy was very kind to me when my first book came out, and we’ve stayed in touch. We will talk about using real life for inspiration, our passion for the wilderness and what learning really means.

Wednesday 11th March 12.30pm: Substack Live with

Salima Saxton is a powerhouse She’s an actor, a writer and co-host of the amazing podcast. Her Substack manages to be both heartbreaking and hilarious, which is the best type of writing in my view. We are going to have a no holds barred conversation about life and love and I already feel like I’m going to spill my heart because Salima has that effect on me (last time we chatted on the phone I started crying in the street in the rain like I was in a bad film).

I hope you’ll join us in the weeks ahead. I’m confident these conversations will change the world, if you believe, like me, that connection is how we learn and how we grow.

Unschooled is still bubbling, starting conversations and helping to validate people everywhere whose families do not fit in. You can buy it in all good bookshops, and it would mean the world to me if you did. Let me know what you think…

C x

I didn’t set out to write a clickbaity title today. Mostly I choose titles for my essays that are lyrical and melancholy, pointing towards the nature of life and love. I don’t pretend to be an expert on either, but I can be good at writing emotionally. I can move my readers and make the personal universal.I enjoy writing urgently, pouring my head and my heart onto the page as the feelings come. For me, it is a way to make sense of the world, as well as creating a crucial connection with people outside my own mind.

But today I want to tell you how hard it is for me to write a book. I want to be honest with you, because you read my work, you connect with me, and your support is an important part of my creative life. Your comments and messages lift me up.

My personal situation is specific and challenging. It’s hard for me to find time to write, although I think the many constraints I have upon my time often force me to the page. To suggest I feel gratitude for the challenges I’m juggling would be pushing it, because they have caused a lot of pain, and I’m angry at the way my family has been harmed and failed by various systems. But I am a storyteller and a word-weaver.

I managed to write ‘a beautiful, absorbing story’ during a lockdown spent alone with four children, and then ‘a searing memoir’ whilst caring for my daughters and navigating tribunals and endless appointments. Later this year an essay I wrote, in between promoting Unschooled and settling my family into a new life, will be published as part of an anthology about rural living. I also write a monthly column in Psychologies, usually early in the morning or late at night, while daughters roam the house and I try not to let them distract me. On paper, I know I look like someone who is winning, although it doesn’t always feel that way.

My first book, Twelve Moons, arrived fairly easily onto the page. I say that in the context of writing a book, which is never an easy thing to do. All I mean is that the story was hovering on my pen and poured out quite quickly. It took me fifteen months of sitting at my desk while the sky was still dark, and didn’t need huge amounts of rewrites or edits. I chose a simple structure, took many notes each day as life whirled around me, and wrote the story of my life. Some nostalgia was added for context. I started that book in January 2021, and by January 2023 it was in bookshops across the UK.

My next book, Unschooled, was a trickier beast. I parted ways with my agent, and struggled, in the flailing memoir market, to find a home for my story. By the time my proposal was accepted, by the wonderful Little Toller, time was of the essence. In order to get the book into people’s hands at the start of the school year, and garner as much publicity as possible, I had about six months to finish the book.

In case it needs to be stated, Unschooled is not the same as Twelve Moons. It has a similar urgency to it, but the structure is less straight-forward. The three timelines were woven together so delicately I was scared the whole thing would disintegrate every time I edited it. It was a relief to have an excellent editor for this second book - Adrian has a light touch but is insightful in his thinking and gave me the confidence to have faith in my ability to tie the loose ends together neatly.

As a memoirist, I was less scared when I wrote Unschooled. I wasn’t worried that I was opening myself up to personal attack from anyone I was writing about in the book. I didn’t disguise my kids in the same way I did in Twelve Moons. They were not folkloric characters playing a supporting role to the wild landscape around them. I simply gave them pseudonyms. They were essential to the story, because the book is about how they haven’t fitted into school. But it was all written through my eyes, designed to convey the impact of our failing education system upon the family as a whole. I felt, and still feel, that the greater goal of Unschooled is to highlight the need for radical societal change if we are to meet the needs of every child. And I wrote it to give voice to other parents like me, who often feel marginalised and forgotten. My kids were not collateral damage in an ego-driven project, because I revealed as little as possible about them in order to pin the story to the page.

And I will always argue that women’s stories must be told. We are so often hidden away due to care responsibilities. We shove our creative desires to the bottom of the to-do pile and carve space for others to shine. I write in order to understand this state of affairs. I write from my own point of view, and inevitably the people I love will creep onto the page. I’m ok with this. I’ve been told no so often that the tapping of keys sometimes feels like my only act of defiance.

As I dive into a third book, I am less scared than ever of what I put onto the page. I think I need to lean into this fearlessness if I want to write something breathless and fresh. I also recognise that there are limitations to my own thinking. This third time I need to excavate my own curiosity and challenge myself to think more deeply.

But my life still doesn’t offer up swathes of time that are only for me. I don’t have the luxury of a room of my own, in the sense that when I close my bedroom door it is liable to pop open at any time. This new world we are building in the middle of the city is still new. The edges are frayed and the foundations I need to be in place for us all are unsteady, though I have done the right thing by moving us all. I hope.

All this is to say that, in order to write this third book, I am forced to be strict about how I spend my precious time. My mind needs to be allowed to dream, an almost impossible task at the best of times. I will still draw upon what is happening now, what is urgent, the emotions that bubble on my surface, but I need to save these words for something long-form.

On a practical level, I also want to work on something now while I have a fairly new book in the shops. I don’t have an agent and, whilst I know that is not an imperative, I’d like to get this next manuscript in front of as many eyes as possible. It’s hard to do that when your work is unsolicited.

So moving forwards on Substack there will be less musings on life and love, but I will still be engaging with my community on here. I will post interviews with other creatives like and , share progress updates and share personal readings from Unschooled in the lead up to its paperback publication. I will still be here, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I save some of my thoughts and my words for the next book.

More soon x

Last week I had an operation to remove some cancer from my forehead. It wasn’t the bad type of cancer, although some frantic Googling told me it also wasn’t a very good kind. I expect there probably isn’t a good kind of cancer, but there are definitely less bad ones, and that’s what I’ve been dealing with.

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I’d had this cancer before, on my cheek. The day I went for a biopsy it was cold. February. Just before Valentine’s Day and I’d been ghosted by my first Bumble encounter. I lay on the bed and the nurse was kind to me while I cried. She thought I was reacting very strongly to a small procedure that would not leave much of a mark. This happens sometimes. Professional people are kind to me and I am not used to it because often they have been unkind. I fall into an uncomfortable but seductive sense of security and pour my heart out. This happens less now, because I’m not always so alone, but back then I was drowning in loneliness and the last thing I needed was a puncture wound in my cheek. I felt tears dribbling down my neck as one nurse injected anaesthetic into my face and another held my hand. I told them I had no one to look after my poorly daughter, and had left her with another daughter. I told them I was a full time carer, that no one would help me educate my child. The nurse looked worried and asked who was looking after me, and I cried a bit harder, because I didn’t know what to say. My village was rickety and broken and now I had a hole in my face.

It turned out to be cancer, but also the biopsy removed it all, so that was that. Apart from a soggy, depressing night in a hotel on my own in Tynemouth where I desperately wanted to be having sex with someone who adored me, and not bingeing One Day on Netflix and howling, the cancer at least had been sorted out. The next morning in Tynemouth, still utterly miserable, I took some selfies of myself with my biopsy wound hidden by my hair. I was thin and sad but I hoped perhaps I was still a bit beautiful, and maybe someone out there might love me properly One Day. I’d had a tiny taste of passion (with the Bumble date who ghosted me) after many, many years of nothing at all, and now I wanted more. I felt sexy, but I also had a hole in my face, so I took selfies then drank coffee on the beach and wrote about how miserable I was. Such a cliché.

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Cut to a year later and I’ve been spoiled for passion. I’ve been to Italy where I drank Prosecco in Casanova’s bar and rode through Bologna in a tiny black dress on an electric bike. I’m having an intense love affair with a wild Glaswegian, straddling two countries, dancing across the border between England and Scotland trying to work out who I am and what the hell I am doing.

One morning I’m looking in the mirror, and I notice a waxy bit of skin on my forehead. It’s a bit bumpy and shiny and it looks just like the cancer I had on my cheek. I wear sunscreen in the scant Northumbrian sunshine, but it turns a bit pink as the weather gets warmer and I know I need to sort it out.

This time, when I go to my hospital appointment, life is better in some ways, and worse in others. I am madly in love, but this means I want to keep looking sexy and pretty, not have wounds all over my face. I’m also in a horrible legal situation that is one of the most stressful things I’ve had to handle, and I’m still being fucked around by the local authority and juggling four daughters on my own. So once more, as I sit in the hospital, I cry. The consultant dermatologist looks at me with concerned eyes and asks me if I’d prefer to delay the biopsy. I try to explain how hard it was for me to get to the appointment and find childcare for my daughters but I’m still crying, and I know I don’t look like a woman who is fully in control of her life. I suppose I’m not. I likely have more cancer on my head, and to make it worse, the consultant looks at a suspicious mole on my cheek and tells me it is a suspected melanoma, which is definitely NOT a good cancer. I cry a bit more and tell her I can’t have melanoma because I have four children, even though I know that’s not how life works.

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By the time I have these two biopsies I’ve stopped crying, and the two nurses looking after me are hilarious. We talk about ex-husbands being arseholes and why single mums are amazing, and I’m hopeful that I might not die quite yet. This time, I am going home to my boyfriend, who has travelled all the way from Glasgow to look after my kids while my face is sliced into once more. He picks me up from the station after the appointment in the city and when I cry and ask him if he will still love me if I have a hole in my head he tells me he will probably love me even more, which is the right answer.

A week later, a phone call from the hospital. The weird blue mole is not melanoma, so I won’t die from that at least. But the big waxy mark on my forehead is a not-so-bad cancer, and it will need to be taken out. The consultant puts me on an urgent list, because it’s a fast growing cancer, although I don’t find this out for several more months.

I’m living in Scotland by the time my operation date comes round. Strategically it is very challenging to get this cancer cut out of my head. I have to be in Newcastle at 8.45am and two of my daughters have to be at school in Glasgow at 8.45am. Another daughter requires full time care and my oldest daughter is also floating about and must be thought about, if not actually looked after. My boyfriend tells me he will sort everything out and, not for the first time, I don’t recognise this feeling of being able to rely on a man. I keep wondering if it is a mirage and if this love will shimmer in front of my eyes then disappear without a trace. I sit on his knee the morning I have to leave and he stares into my face. Looks too hard at my forehead and I tell him not to because I’m trying not to think about how he will look at my forehead when I come back.

My friend shows up for me in the best way. Books us a hotel room, and after I’ve travelled down on the train we strut about in the hotel gym, eat Greek food and fall asleep laughing.

The next morning, we arrive at the hospital full of optimism and I’m keen to get on with it. I’m slightly embarrassed to see the same consultant I cried in front of calling my name, and stand a bit taller, smile a bit harder so she doesn’t think I’m a wreck. I perch on the edge of the bed and the Sikh doctor tells me I can get a turban or a bindi to cover up the wound. Isn’t that culturally inappropriate? I ask him. And he tells me no, people will love it.

The consultant wipes gel on my head, and I fleetingly remember all the pregnancy scans I’ve had. She peers at my head through a microscope and tells me she can’t easily see any cancer but it might be hidden under the scarring. She tells me I can just have my head monitored for four months, but the cancer might be growing quickly underneath. She tells me I could have radiation but I’m very young to have it and it might cause more problems. She tells me to take some time to make my mind up and get a cup of coffee with my friend.

I’m thrown by this development. I am geared up for the procedure and fairly happy to accept the inevitable scar on my face that will follow. But what if there is no cancer and I have the operation and I have a scar for no good reason? My friend, who is a doctor, googles my specific cancer and tells me that even though it will not kill me, it could spread quickly and cause problems. If I leave it and it does spread, I will have an even bigger wound to deal with in six months time.

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I start crying in the hospital cafe. This place reminds me of the time my oldest daughter had Covid and couldn’t walk and we had to be there for nine days while my mum looked after my other daughters, and I was worried she would also get Covid and there was no vaccine. All of this, along with trying to decide whether to have cancer cut out of my head, is making me cry. My friend jumps up and buys me a large coffee. I have pen marks on my forehead to show the surgeon where she will cut into my skin and I am wailing. I ask my friend what will happen if I want to get married next year and I have a hole in my head. I have never said this out loud before - the thought is coming from somewhere deep in my psyche and I will laugh about it later. But for now it’s not funny, and my friend is kind enough to reassure me that I can still have my imaginary wedding even with a hole in my head.

I phone my boyfriend and he is more worried about me than I am so he’s not very helpful. I end the call. After more googling and a cup of coffee I know that the right thing to do is to have the procedure and get over myself. So that is what I do.

It takes over six more hours to cut out the supposed cancer, test the cells, cut out a bit more in the middle to be sure (so it was the right decision to go ahead, phew), test that bit, and then sew my head up again. It’s a procedure called MOHS, for anyone who is interested. It’s amazing actually. If you have a Basal Cell Carcinoma on your face, this is probably the surgery you will have. My surgeon tells me while she sews me up that, in America, this type of surgery is the best paid because they can do the anaesthetising themselves too. It’s all done under a local anaesthetic while the surgeons and nurses chatter above my head in the glare of a very bright light.

Finally, just before 5pm, it’s finished. There is no cancer left in my head, only a stitched-up wound running from my hairline to just below halfway down my forehead, all covered with a huge plaster. I put on a grey beanie hat gifted to me by a sweet friend and am grateful it’s cold outside. I’m going back that evening to my family in Glasgow with my sore head and it’s a long train journey but I just want to get home.

Four hours later I walk through my front door and the house smells of cooking. I’m starving. I eat spaghetti bolognese while my boyfriend reads The Hobbit to my younger daughters. I take paracetamol and ibuprofen, climb into bed and fall asleep almost immediately.

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The next day is not too bad. He takes the kids to school so I can rest. I walk along Great Western Road to the bridge with my often-quiet daughter to help her think of some ideas for writing about rivers. It’s only a ten minute walk, but on the way back I feel faint and am shuffling along like an old woman. I lie on the sofa and sleep while my daughter makes me cups of tea and feeds me shortbread biscuits. Keep taking painkillers even though my head just feels tight and weird, not really sore.

On Friday I manage to drive across the city to watch my littlest one sing festive songs with her school choir. It’s damp and windy, and Christmas light switch-ons are not very autism-friendly so I’m clinging onto a tense daughter, covering her ears when people are ordered to clap louder. I still feel ancient and creaky and it’s good to get home.

The next morning I have to take off the massive dressing on my head. I do not want to do this. I stand in the bathroom in my t-shirt and pants and peel the sticky dressing from my skin. A piece of bloody gauze is all that remains and I howl. My boyfriend walks in, cuddles me and tells me it is going to be ok, my head is not going to fall off. I tell him to go away, and I look at my head in the mirror as I pull the gauze away. It’s true, my head doesn’t fall off. And actually the wound is not as bad as I thought it might be. It’s a kind of comedy Frankenstein vertically stitched line, almost completely in the centre of my forehead. So at least it’s symmetrical.

I walk back into the bedroom and my boyfriend agrees it’s not bad at all. He doesn’t flinch and his eyes seem kind, so I’m hopeful he still finds me cute. But then, over the next half hour or so, my eyes slowly disappear into my face and the skin around the bridge of my nose swells up. I look like I have been punched. I do not recognise myself. You can’t tell when you put your glasses and a hat on, my boyfriend tells me helpfully, but I can bloody tell. I do not know who I am. I want my old face back. My big shiny clear forehead and my eyes that are my favourite bit of my face.

I know. It’s not serious. People manage worse things than a bit of not-bad cancer and a wound on their head. I know this. It’s why I called this piece Vanity and Vulnerability. I feel vain writing about it. A friend texted and told me it is not bad to be vain and I told her I know. But I don’t really. My face does not define me, but I do like it. I spent years not enjoying it as much as I should, and now I do, now I am only a couple of years away from fifty, I want to look at it and paint my eyelashes and gloss my lips and watch my boyfriend’s eyes soften when I walk into the room.

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I tell my daughters over and over again that they are beautiful, but I hope they know I mean it in a holistic sense. Not that they are pretty. I don’t want them to be defined by their appearance any more than they already are as girls in a world that tells them they are worth more if they make themselves attractive to men. I’m confused about why I’m worried about my boyfriend not finding me sexy anymore when I don’t ever want to be with anyone who will consider me less than because I have a scar on my head. I spent the years following the end of my marriage running along the beach and swimming in wild waves in an attempt to stay strong. I tell my daughters that a strong body is more important than a sexy one. A thoughtful head is more important than a pretty one. My face does not define me, and yet…

The definition of vanity is ‘excessive pride in one’s own appearance’, so actually vain is not even the right word for what I am trying to understand. I am not excessively proud of my appearance. I just like it.

As I write this, eight days since the surgeon sliced into my head, my eyes are no longer puffy. My face mostly looks like me again. People look at me and glance up at my head with a confused look on their face before they remember it’s rude to stare. It’s not so tender now that I can’t wear a cap that casts a shadow over the wound, and on Saturday night I tried a Joni Mitchell thing with a scarf that was quite successful. But I am trying to lean into having a scar on my head because it means that I’m here. I’m lucky. I’ll be glad when it fades though.