It has now been two full years since I officially finished my long-loved career as a practising home educator. Our adult children are rocking the world of work, our third-born starts university in a couple of weeks, and our youngest enters Year 11 in a few days, where she’ll spend the next ten months or so studying before sitting her GCSEs next summer — our UK national exams.

This is the second summer that I haven’t been planning our course of study, sharpening pencils, or rearranging our learning space (which we never really stuck to — you know, the world is our classroom!). But the most exciting task of all was always curating our book list for the year, or at least the term ahead.

First, I’d shop our shelves; then the local second-hand bookshops; then, if I must, the online booksellers. I’d ask kindred friends and forums for recommendations. We’d share and swap and flick through the pages of those glorious books as they sat in our hands before being placed in baskets or stacked on tables, ready for the minds that were going to absorb their wonder.

For any parent or educator, books form an important part of our routines and are a beautiful tool for literacy and connection. For a Charlotte Mason educator, books, alongside other “living” stimuli, make up a third of the essential foundation for the large room of learning. The other two are the atmosphere of the home or learning environment, and the regularity of habits that build a child’s life and character.

But books! Books, and in particular living books, become the soil in which ideas grow, imagination thrives, and a child’s contribution to the great conversation of life begins to take shape.

My fascination with good reading material wasn’t new to young home-educating Leah. My childhood was strewn with vintage poetry compilations, biographies, books on tape, and stories told whilst piled onto my parents’ bed with my siblings. I had a traditional English school education, but my childhood was filled with food for the imagination, with brimming shelves and open books making up the visual memories of all our childhood homes.

So, my early introduction to Charlotte Mason’s teaching and philosophy of learning was more of an “of course” moment than an “aha” one. I began curating our home library as quickly as you could say The Burgess Bird Book for Children(iykyk).

But more important than becoming an eBay book-buying ninja was learning to discern what a living book actually was. Away from the lists, recommendations, exhortations of particular curricula, and expert ideas, I needed the humble ability to know my own children, to have my own convictions and philosophy of education, and therefore to choose independently the books that would support what I could see forming in them.

This was absolutely trial and error. I wasted money impulse-buying what everyone else was using. We picked up books and put them down again because they were boring — point blank!

Even today, I’m wary of giving absolute recommendations because you, dear educator, must learn to discern not only what a living book is, but which living books will speak to the hearts and minds of your children.

Now, I’ve spent the last fifteen years or so teaching on this, so please enjoy the various complimentary video links I’ve dotted throughout this post. And if you haven’t already, go ahead and buy my book Modern Miss Mason, which shares my approach to Charlotte Mason’s ideas. It’s all there, so I’m not going to go too far into the weeds here in this essay.

But I implore you: please make it personal. By all means, buy a curriculum if that eases you into this educating life, but know why you’ve chosen it. Put the teacher guide aside when you need to, and use the books that come alive when you open them up with and for your children.

Here’s what I’ve learned. We can’t force our children to love reading, despite the numerous posts I’ve seen offering ten top tips for doing just that. We can’t coerce our grown children into picking up a book rather than their phone. Judging or shaming won’t reawaken their reading life or drive them to the nearest library — just saying. But we can lay the foundation in childhood and keep inspiring them through our own lives and habits.

Our home library is now scattered throughout the house. Most rooms have a bookshelf that has been rehomed from our old learning space, which has since become a bedroom for Samaritan’s Purse interns. Our coffee tables have books and coasters scattered across them; the books are open, dog-eared and annotated. We don’t tidy them away. They are part of us.

This past summer, my two younger children decided to raid the C. S. Lewis shelf in my office, which is heavily populated after writing and publishing Chronicles of Wonder: The Story-Formed Life of C. S. Lewis. One chose The Four Loves and Surprised by Joy, while the other picked up The Screwtape Letters.

I delighted in seeing these beloved texts left open on the sofa, beside their beds, and hearing the enthusiastic, “Can I just read this quote to you?”

My children know my genuine delight in books. I hope beautiful and inspiring words will be stitched into my life for the rest of my days, read and written. They’ve heard my squeals when I spot a second-hand bookshop as we’re wandering through a new-to-us city on holiday, and they know I can’t hold a vintage book without sniffing the pages and inhaling that lignin scent.

I’m not asking them to be like me, but I hope my decades of reading aloud, repeating poetry, and our book-stacked home will be something they return to in their minds for comfort and inspiration. I hope they will always raid my shelves, buy books for birthdays, and repeat these patterns with their own children.

Life goes on after home educating. You wonder how it will, but slowly you begin to unpick the blanket stitches of morning time, daily walks in wellies with little ones, copywork, and map memorisation. Then you stand back and realise you have lockstitched something far deeper into their lives: a habit of looking closely at the natural world, an attentiveness to the voices speaking to us through books and beauty, a confidence to bring questions to the meal table, into car journeys, into those late-night lingerings, and FaceTimes from afar, alongside a work ethic that will help them keep their heads when others don’t.

These things remain, and for these I am truly thankful.

I’m no longer producing live teaching content around Charlotte Mason’s philosophy, but a membership to The Mind Gallery on Substack gives you access to more than three years of archived material: workshops, book conversations working through Charlotte Mason’s volumes, discussions around The Parents’ Review articles, Q&As, and so much more. If you’re looking to go deeper, there is a rich library waiting for you there.

Subscribe now

You can read Part One of And These Things Remain: Life After Home Education here:

Katharine is a bestselling author, speaker and Director at Care for the Family, and has spent more than twenty years speaking and writing about marriage, parenting and family life. She has addressed thousands of people across the UK and internationally, appeared across national media, and before joining Care for the Family worked as a solicitor specialising in family law and served as a magistrate.

In other words, she has spent a very long time thinking deeply about families — but she also comes to this conversation as a mother of adult children and now a grandmother herself.

We’ll talk about the real issues facing parents today, confidence in our parenting, the pressure to get everything “right”, creating a family culture where children feel secure while growing in independence, and the changing seasons of motherhood as our children grow.

Katharine has also written extensively about children’s emotional wellbeing and raising children in a digital age; we’ll talk about her books and the wider work of Care for the Family too.

As always in the Guest Room, this won’t be a formal Q&A as much as a really good conversation — one I think will be practical, wise and deeply encouraging.

Join us live tomorrow, Thursday 27 August, at 8pm BST / 3pm EDT / 2pm CDT / 5am AEST (the next day)!

Join Here: Thursday 27th Aug, 8pm BST

Mind Gallery members will also receive the video and audio replay afterwards, so if the time zone makes joining us live impossible, it will be waiting for you in the Gallery.

I hope to see you there!

Leah x

It’s not too late to fulfil your summer school dreams 😂 You know the ones: I want to do one thing this summer, while the kids are off, that’s just for me, for my own growth and development. And then somehow it slips your mind, and suddenly we’re in August.

Well, I’m here to help!

Thank you so much to those of you who have already booked in. I can’t wait to see you.

Tomorrow I’m hosting my inaugural writing workshop, From Reader to Writer, which has been brewing in my mind and notebooks for many months. We’re going to spend time thinking about how our reading informs our writing, how we gather and curate the things that catch our attention and, most importantly, how we take all of that beautiful material and actually begin to write.

We’ll have around 90 minutes together for the workshop, followed by an hour of online co-working, where we’ll stay together and actually get some writing done. And if you can’t make it live, you’ll get the replay to watch whenever you like.

So, there you go. Summer school sorted. Bring a quote or short excerpt that has caught your attention, a pen and your curiosity, and come spend a couple of hours reading, thinking and writing with me.

Book Your Place

See you then!

With beauty and blessing,

Leah x

You love literature, dabble in poetry, delight in a bit of good dialogue, and sometimes you wake up with words. Your imagination starts firing, or you stand in the shower and come up with the opening lines of an essay. Then you crack on with your day and tuck it away in the deep recesses of your mind, where all your other good ideas are stored.

This summer, I’m inviting you to come and hang out with me as I share my very first writing workshop with the world.

We’re not going to get technical or la-di-dah. We’re going to discuss paying attention to the world, to what we’re reading, and how we respond to both. We’ll take the lines you’ve scribbled in your journals, the quotes you’ve tucked away in your commonplace books, the observations you’ve made in your nature journals, and explore how they can grow into something beautiful. Together, we’ll journey from a quote in a closed notebook to something you might one day want to share with the world, or at least your grandchildren!

We’ll spend 90 minutes learning together, followed by an hour in my digital co-writing space, where you can process what you’ve learned and have a go at writing. I think it’s going to be the loveliest of afternoons, and there’s a seat for you.

Can’t make it live? Or can only join for part of the afternoon? No problem! Your ticket includes lifetime access to the replay, so you can enjoy it whenever you have the time.

I’d absolutely love to have you there.

Timings, FAQ’s and tickets are available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1993536106158?aff=oddtdtcreator

P.S. If this made someone come to mind, send it to them. Even if it’s just to share this cute photo. But we all know a friend who talks about writing but never gets started. Maybe this is the nudge they've been waiting for.

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Grab your ticket here!

See you there!

Have a fabulous weekend,

Leah x

Many years ago, whilst sitting in a Wetherspoons pub with two friends, we found ourselves sipping coffee after our meal, talking about "what's next". We'd walked similar faith journeys and were now busy with homes, husbands, children, and serving in the local church.

At the time, we were in our late thirties or early forties, talking about the dreams we'd tucked away for another season. One wanted to train as a midwife, another wanted to open her home and become a foster carer, and I wanted to write and publish.

We talked about our aspirations and the barriers to them. For my friends, it simply wasn’t quite the right time in their stage of family life.

Then one of them turned to me and asked, “So what’s stopping you?”

I paused before replying, “I don’t know. I can’t get past the feeling that writing is... indulgent.”

Reflecting on that conversation now, I’m horrified that I ever said that out loud when words have become as essential to me as air and water. But I can also understand why younger Leah, a mother of many and trained for ministry, saw writing as gelato on a hot Mediterranean afternoon rather than bread for the hungry.

❧

I’m embarrassed to tell you the excuses I’ve voiced and allowed to reside in my mind about why I didn’t sit down to write. I mean, some were legitimate, like the baby was crying and needed feeding. But when you tell yourself you can’t write because your office isn’t tidy, there’s laundry on the landing, or, even worse, I have a meeting at 2pm, so I can’t possibly start now (it’s hypothetically 9am, for the sake of the example), you begin to realise something else is going on. I can’t think straight. I haven’t showered. I can’t find a black pen; therefore, I must sort out all the pens in the house.

To add insult to injury, I somehow come up with the most detailed, intricate homemaking plans whenever I have a writing deadline looming.

Words on a page have felt important to me for as long as I can remember. When I was fourteen, I wrote letters and kept a diary. In my early twenties, I wrote poetry whilst travelling across America and Australia during my university summer breaks. In my late twenties, I wrote songs and blog posts. In my thirties, I wrote website articles and workshops, and as I tipped into my fourth decade, I self-published an eBook of essays about motherhood (don’t look for it; it’s not there anymore). In my forties, I wrote conference talks and published four books with two major Christian publishers.

I didn’t fall into writing. It didn’t just happen. No. This beautiful privilege has been worked for, thought about upon waking, and has remained impossible to shake through every decade. But it hasn’t been easy.

My fight to write was contended for in the fringe hours of family life and thought about whilst washing dishes. I’ve written essays in my head while driving children to singing lessons, poetry whilst waiting to collect them from youth group, and vignettes whilst walking the dog for the third time that day. I’ve woken with words and ideas and tapped them into a note on my phone, knowing they might one day be woven into a sentence when time and responsibility allowed. And at 5pm, no matter whether I'm in the flow or have just had the best idea of the day, I stop. Dinner must be started. Vegetables need chopping, sauce needs stirring, and the table needs setting.

I became fully alive to my desire to write just as children were added to our family. As my family grew, so did my longing to put language to my life, and I found myself living in the tension between creative yearning and maternal responsibility.

Most mothers are gifted with a heightened sense of responsibility. The midwifery team hand it to you with your Bounty Pack and Emma's Diary,* and there's an absolute no-returns policy! I'm very aware of my own heightened sense of responsibility. I've also spent more than enough time, both in person and via voice note, exploring my fascinating "do all the things" personality with friends. According to some birth-order theorists, my brother being five years older than me more or less resets the birth order, giving me eldest-child vibes, which, bless our hearts, apparently puts us in charge of the world. But no matter what Myers-Briggs, Alfred Adler, or the Enneagram says about your personality, when you have mouths to feed, lives to keep alive, a home to clean, pets to tend to, and a community to cultivate, these acts of making are often pushed further away, leaving a deficit in our souls and our hands.

❧

Perhaps the questions ringing in my mind were echoes of the youth camp altar calls and the missionary books I had devoured as a teenager: How could writing be missional? Helpful? Transformational?

How could writing possibly compare to bringing babies into the world and caring for postpartum mothers? How could it come close to welcoming neglected and lonely children into your home and your heart, only to face the gut-wrenching task of letting them go again?

Perhaps I’d misunderstood what beautiful words were for. If someone like Dostoevsky, a man acquainted with suffering who once stood before a firing squad believing his life was over, could write that “beauty will save the world,” then perhaps even my words could offer a little hope too.

Thankfully, there was hope for this writer. When I sat down to write the Tales of Boldness and Faith series, I was slowly emerging from what had felt like a lifetime of home educating back into the world of work and publishing. My assignment was to write three books for middle-grade children in eighteen months, and I quickly realised that my old mindset wasn’t going to work. I had to silence the excuses and take the sage advice of Anne Lamott:

“How to write: Stop not writing. Get and keep your butt in the chair.”

So I did.

I took my laptop to Starbucks. I’m not a huge fan of their coffee, but everyone seems quite happy for you to write there. I wrote on the sofa, in bed, in my lunch breaks from my part-time job, in my park view office, and at the dining room table after moving the pile of laundry vying for my attention to one side. I see you, I’d say. I know you’re there. I’ll get to you next. I opened my MacBook and picked up where I’d finished the day before. I stopped waiting for the perfect conditions and began writing wherever life did or did not allow.

As the words came, and the lives of C. S. Lewis, Charlotte Mason, and Sara Forbes Bonetta opened up before me, so did the realisation that this, too, was missional. This, too, was an act of service. This, too, had the capacity to transform.

With each book I write, once the pages are printed and there is no going back, I dedicate it to the Lord and pray over every reader I will never meet. It was at that point, through these books, that my eyes were opened to the fact that writing, like midwifery or fostering, has the capacity to carry hope into places I will never reach myself.

Soli Deo gloria.

❧

And for the curious, my Wetherspoons friends are indeed living out that conversation; in fact, we all are. One has welcomed many babies into her home until they found their adoptive families, and the other is a fully trained and practising midwife. And I? Well, I still think writing is a delicious and necessary indulgence. It's in my thoughts and dreams, my fingers, veins and my breath, and I'll do it until my last.

_{*For my non-UK readers: Bounty and Emma’s Diary are the complimentary packs almost every new parent receives in UK maternity units, filled with baby samples, vouchers, and parenting information.}

Need a nudge?

Perhaps this is your invitation to stop waiting for the perfect conditions and start writing.

If you’ve spent years gathering beautiful words, filling notebooks with quotations, or wondering whether you should write, I’d love to spend some time with you.

In my brand new workshop, From Reader to Writer: Reading Widely. Writing Thoughtfully, we’ll explore how the books we love, the observations we make, and the words we store can become writing that nourishes us and encourages others. Then we’ll gather in my digital co-working space, The Brontë Room, for an hour of writing together, putting into practice what we’ve learnt and permitting ourselves to begin.

All the details are on the Eventbrite page. If you can’t join us live, don’t worry—you’ll receive lifetime access to the replay, so you can enjoy the workshop whenever it suits you.

I’d love for you to join me.

Grab Your Ticket Here

£19.99