Hi I’m Layla. I write about how it feels to live on this beautiful, tattered planet right now. I explore both the small day to day beauties of life and the tough, gnarly challenges and hurdles we face as part of being human. Upgrade to paid for early morning writing sessions, live ideas salon calls, seasonal sessions & more.
Coming up this month for subscribers:
Sitting in the Dark early morning writing sessions : Start Friday September 19th 6-7am IST
Element Sessions : Earth : Late Summer : new recording of physical practices and writing prompts
MULCH meeting : An ideas salon : date coming soon!
Long read article: On life moving faster than thought
Earlier this week myself and
sat down to have a conversation about her wonderful new memoir Unschooled: The story of a family that doesn’t fit in. We could have spoken for another hour on all she touches on in it, we had so much to say, but I think we managed to cover some really fascinating topics in the hour we did have together !I have a copy of Unschooled to give away to one of my lovely subscribers. To be in the draw, simply share this conversation tagging myself and Caro on Notes (and if you find me on instagram and share my post there too, I’ll enter you twice!). I’ll post to anywhere in Europe and announce winner in next weeks post :-)
Unschooled is a book about trying to advocate for your children’s needs in an education system that does not serve them and describes the often Kafkaesque bureaucracy Caro is forced to navigate to access basic supports for her children, two of whom have a diagnosis of autism and can’t access the traditional school system.
It is a book about not being heard - as a woman, a mother, a carer - and how sometimes it is hard to work out how these roles can fit together.
It is also a love story - written to her children and to her partner who she met after seven years single parenting and feeling very alone.
And it is a book advocating for thinking outside the box, for being a little bit wild, for dreaming big and, above all listening and being kind.
I have a copy of Unschooled to give away to one of my lovely subscribers. To be in the draw, simply share this conversation tagging myself and Caro on Notes (and if you find me on instagram and share my post there too, I’ll enter you twice!). I’ll post to anywhere in Europe and announce winner in next weeks post :-)
We spoke about so much during this call.
𓇸 What unschooled can mean - both educationally and in our own lives as women
𓇸 The challenges and hurdles Caro faced trying to advocate for herself and her four children, two of whom are autistic, within the UK education system.
𓇸 The unfortunate trope of a single mother that still exists in our society
𓇸 What it can mean not to fit in and how when Caro reached her mid 40’s she started to ask why she had gotten lost in other people’s ideas of who she should be
𓇸 Why the education system in the UK needs dismantling and why so many are afraid of that
𓇸 Why what we want for our children is a microcosm of what we want for a wider society
𓇸 Redefining what success looks like
𓇸 How and why we are losing our villages of support
𓇸 What masking is and how it has affected Caro’s children as well as her ability to advocate for them
𓇸 How so many women are raised to keep the status quo and people please
𓇸 What it means to have a voice and how to listen for other voices and the forms they might take.
𓇸 Being ‘too much’
𓇸 The split between mother and woman
𓇸 and so much more !
I loved this conversation and I’m sure it will lead to more - we were stamping out tangents left and right!
Here’s a little more on Unschooled and on Caro
Unschooled, written by a trained teacher with years of experience, exposes the governmental and societal faults which paint all children into one corner and fails to cater for those who cannot fit in, but have much to give. Unschooled has much to say about an education system on its knees but it has hope at its heart – that it’s possible to live and even, with much effort, thrive outside the system. Finally, Caro realises that to be Unschooled can mean also to be spontaneous, natural and unrestrained, a way to reclaim her identity as a woman.
As
Unschooled is highly recommended, whether you’re a mother or whether, like me, you’re just obsessed with the many shades of women’s experience and all the ways in which we struggle to understand who we are
Caro Giles lives in Northumberland. In 2021 she won the inaugural BBC Countryfile New Writer Award. She is the author of Twelve Moons (HarperNorth) and writes a monthly column for Psychologies Magazine and her Substack Open in the Middle. She writes of the everyday act of mothering - of caring & advocating for her children with unassuming, humble, raw grace.
The book is available to buy or order from all good booksellers now.
