Close Your Eyeballs

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Or something like that.

I’ve been thinking about that saying a lot lately.

It started yesterday when my friend Becky sent me a photograph of two holes in a wall.

Then:

Can I call you?

The last time I’d been at her house, she’d been telling me about all the DIY she needed to do. She’d been watching videos and trying to work things out, but there were jobs she simply didn’t feel confident tackling.

So we had a chat.

What she was trying to do.

What tools she needed.

What she needed to buy.

How she might go about it.

And eventually I said, “Why don’t I just come round and show you?”

Not come round and do it.

Show her.

Because once she knows how to do those first few jobs, she can carry on with the rest of the house herself.

She was delighted.

We arranged Monday.

Then I remembered I’d booked a spa day.

So apparently my commitment to empowering women through practical skills does have limits.

We’ve rearranged it for next month.

But the conversation reminded me of something somebody once did for me.

Years ago, I was training to become a sexological bodyworker.

It was an intensive training, and somewhere in the middle of it we were given an afternoon off.

My friend Karen and I escaped to a pub.

There was definitely a cream tea.

There were scones.

There may have been lunch.

Karen had a couple of glasses of wine.

And we talked.

I was excited about finishing the training, but beneath that excitement was something much less romantic.

I desperately needed to make the business work.

There wasn’t another income sitting underneath it.

There wasn’t a comfortable financial cushion.

I needed to finish the training, qualify and somehow start earning money.

Quickly.

I remember explaining all of this to Karen.

I needed somewhere to live.

Somewhere to practise.

Clients.

Income.

Basically, I needed to hit the ground running while simultaneously trying to construct the ground underneath me.

Karen listened.

Then she said something extraordinary.

She and another woman from our training, Alison, were going away to Greece afterwards.

Karen already had an established practice and a roster of clients in Plymouth.

So she said, essentially:

Why don’t you come and stay at my apartment?

I’ll introduce you to how everything works before I leave.

While I’m away, you can use the space.

You can work with my existing clients.

You can advertise yourself.

Whatever money you make, you keep.

And that might give you enough to start building your own practice.

I remember looking at her thinking:

Is this woman actually serious?

We barely knew each other.

Yet she was proposing that I stay in her beautiful apartment at Royal William Yard in Plymouth and giving me an opportunity that could genuinely change the position I was in.

I was stunned.

Flabbergasted.

All the ridiculous words you use when somebody offers you something so generous that ordinary language feels inadequate.

Then Karen explained something that stayed with me.

She could simply have lent me some money.

She was in a position where she could have said, “Here’s a couple of thousand pounds. Pay me back when you can.”

But she didn’t want to do that.

She wanted to give me an opportunity to make the money myself.

To teach me.

To give me access.

To give me the tools.

To let me work it out.

She wasn’t giving me the fish.

She was handing me the fishing rod.

And I took full advantage of it.

I worked.

I learned.

I earned.

More importantly, I came away knowing that I could do it.

Perhaps that is why the idea means so much to me.

Because long before I became a parent, so much of my own work involved doing exactly the same thing for other people.

I worked in family intervention.

I worked with young people experiencing homelessness.

And much of that work was about helping somebody build a life they could actually manage themselves.

How do you run a tenancy?

How do you budget?

How do you shop for food?

How do you cook?

How do you clean?

How do you wash your clothes?

How do you keep appointments?

How do you make sure there is still electricity at the end of the month?

They sound like incredibly ordinary things.

Until nobody has ever shown you how to do them.

And I think somewhere along the way we have become oddly disconnected from the importance of ordinary competence.

We outsource so much.

We pay somebody to repair things.

Make things.

Cut things.

Grow things.

Clean things.

Fix things.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying somebody who is skilled at something to do a good job.

But I do wonder whether, in becoming increasingly specialised, we have also quietly de-skilled ourselves.

Which brings me to this morning.

I got the dog clippers out.

Gus and Bob are Labradoodles, which means grooming isn’t really optional.

They need regular haircuts.

The problem is that we’ve tried several local groomers over the years and, lovely as many of them have been, the dogs never quite come back how we want them.

Eventually we reached the point where we thought:

Fine.

We’ll learn.

So we bought proper clippers.

We watched videos.

We read tutorials.

We made mistakes.

And gradually, we learned how to groom our own dogs.

Today I spent most of the morning cutting Gus.

Bob is another matter entirely.

Bob considers remaining still for grooming to be a gross infringement of his civil liberties.

So at the time of writing, I have successfully groomed his head.

Just his head.

The rest of him remains magnificently untouched.

He looks ridiculous.

But again, there it is.

A tiny skill we didn’t have before.

Something that once felt like it belonged entirely to somebody else’s area of expertise and which, with some equipment, information and willingness to get it wrong, we discovered we could learn.

And this is a huge part of why I home educate Halle and Nell.

Of course I want them to read.

Write.

Understand numbers.

Know about the world.

But I don’t want education to become simply the accumulation of correct answers.

I want them to know what to do when they don’t know the answer.

I want them to pick something up and investigate it.

Turn it over.

Try it.

Get it wrong.

Change something.

Try again.

I want them to learn kinesthetically — through their hands and their bodies as much as through books.

If something breaks, I want their first thought to be:

I wonder if I can fix that.

If they want to make something:

I wonder how.

If they don’t understand something:

How could I find out?

A lot of our home education looks like that.

Cooking.

Making.

Building.

Using tools.

Learning how things in the house work.

Managing money.

Looking after ourselves.

Understanding food.

Moving our bodies.

Recognising when we are overwhelmed and learning how to regulate ourselves.

That last one matters enormously in our house.

With two ADHD children, life skills aren’t something to tack onto the edges of education once the “proper learning” is finished.

They are the proper learning.

Knowing what your brain needs.

Knowing when you need movement.

Knowing when you need quiet.

Knowing how to feed yourself.

How to organise yourself.

How to recover after things have become too much.

How to ask for help.

How to work something out.

Those things will matter every bit as much in adulthood as anything they could memorise for a test.

I don’t want to spend their childhood simply giving them fish.

I want to hand them fishing rods.

Toolboxes.

Recipe books.

Clippers.

Paintbrushes.

Questions.

Possibilities.

I want to give them enough confidence in themselves that one day, when I’m not standing beside them explaining what to do, they’ll think:

I can probably work this out.

That, to me, is education.

Although I should probably keep my expectations in check.

Because despite all this careful thought about how I’m raising and educating them, today Halle was putting a face mask on me as part of some work we were doing around self-care and regulation.

She looked at me very seriously and said:

“Close your eyeballs.”

Not your eyelids.

Your eyeballs.

So apparently there are still some gaps in the curriculum.