The Lunchtime Candle

I’ve been giving myself a bit of a kicking lately.

Mostly about home education.

Am I doing enough?

Are the girls learning enough?

Should we be doing more?

When was the last time we went to a museum?

Shouldn’t we be doing some enormous deep dive into the Romans or the Egyptians or the Tudors instead of putting a documentary on the television and calling it learning?

This week has been particularly bad for it.

The girls haven’t really been out of the house. They’re both full of a cold, my own energy has been low, and there hasn’t been much happening in our little home-ed world anyway.

Normally they’d at least spend time with their grandparents. We’d see other people. We’d go somewhere.

This week, we haven’t.

And somewhere inside my head, that very quickly became:

You’re not doing enough, Fran.

Home education comes with an extraordinary amount of guilt.

There is no teacher sending home a report telling you everything is fine. No curriculum quietly reassuring you that you’ve reached page 47 by October and therefore everybody is roughly where they’re supposed to be.

It’s just you.

And your children.

And the enormous responsibility of wondering whether you’re getting it right.

Most of the time, I don’t particularly care whether my children are at exactly the same reading level as somebody else’s children.

I know children develop differently.

I was one of them.

I was way behind some of my peers at primary school. My reading age was shite. There were things other children could do easily that I couldn’t.

And there were other things I could do that they couldn’t.

That’s partly why I never wanted Hallie and Nell’s childhoods to become one long exercise in measuring themselves against everybody else.

There are lots of reasons we home educate.

This isn’t really a story about those reasons.

It’s about lunch.

Because today I came downstairs and made lunch for the girls.

There wasn’t much in.

Tomato soup.

A cheese sandwich.

Half a Jaffa Cake bar each.

Nothing particularly Pinterest-worthy.

But I did what I always do.

I put their lunch on the table.

Matching bowls.

Spoons.

Napkins.

A glass of water on a coaster.

And a candle burning in the middle.

I do this almost every day.

However ordinary the food is, I try to make lunch feel like a moment.

We sit together.

There are no devices.

No rushing.

No enormous amount of stimulation.

Just food and conversation and a little flame flickering between us.

I’ve always thought there was something important about slowing the body down to eat. About giving ourselves a chance to regulate rather than shovelling food into our mouths while doing three other things.

Years ago, at the Brahma Kumaris, I experienced eating in silence.

We don’t eat lunch in silence at home — God knows that would be ambitious — but something from that experience stayed with me.

The stillness of it.

The idea that eating could be a pause.

And today, looking at this completely ordinary little table, something in my head went quiet.

I’d spent days noticing everything I hadn’t done.

The museum we hadn’t visited.

The activities we hadn’t attended.

The learning I hadn’t organised.

The places we hadn’t been.

And sitting right in front of me was something I had done.

Something I do every day.

I’d made a place for my children to stop.

A tiny ritual in the middle of their day where nothing is expected of them.

They don’t have to learn anything.

They don’t have to achieve anything.

They don’t have to be anywhere.

They just sit at a table with their mum and their sister and eat tomato soup by candlelight.

And suddenly I felt incredibly grateful.

Not because I had somehow proved to myself that I was doing home education properly.

But because I realised that this was part of their education too.

Maybe not the kind anyone measures.

Maybe not something that will ever appear on a worksheet.

But they are learning what it feels like to pause.

To eat together.

To talk.

To make something ordinary feel cared for.

To have a small pocket of calm built into an ordinary day.

And I get to give them that.

Every day.

We live on one wage, which means there are plenty of things I would love to give the girls that we simply can’t afford.

That’s the strange contradiction of the life we’ve chosen.

We’ve chosen time.

And sometimes choosing time means having less money to fill that time with things.

Trips cost money.

Classes cost money.

Museums aren’t always free once you’ve travelled there, parked and fed everybody.

There are home-ed families doing incredible things, and occasionally I look at them and wonder whether I should be doing incredible things too.

But perhaps childhood doesn’t need to be incredible every day.

Sometimes perhaps it can just be soup.

A cheese sandwich.

Half a Jaffa Cake bar.

Two children with colds.

Their mum.

And a candle burning in the middle of the table.

Today, that felt like enough.