Last week, my daughter Bethesda received her A-level results. It is a fraught time for any devoted parent but afterwards I cried for an hour straight.
Bethesda had been offered a place at Oxford University to study biology. Eleven years of dogged determination, creative thinking and innumerable sacrifices had paid off. She had worked very hard, but I'm also referring to my own inexhaustible efforts.
You see, at her request, I had home-schooled her from age seven, all while juggling work, divorce proceedings and being a single parent.
And yes, she really did achieve her five top-grade A-levels being taught by me at home. She has never had any other tutor.
To think I was depicted as a naive, dangerous crank for removing her from school – ironically, by people whose own expensively educated children have achieved far less.
Historically, home education has been presented as academically inferior, an example of a mother mollycoddling her child or attempting to live her life through them.
But home-schooling rates are soaring, with 92,000 children being home-schooled in the UK this year, an increase of 10,000 from the previous year – mostly due to mental health concerns.
When in 2013 I announced I was taking Bethesda out of school, friends and family were scathing. What did I, a 'creative', know about maths and 'the hard sciences'?
I was told Bethesda would be intellectually and socially stunted. That it was critically important for her to learn to be 'independent' and to 'socialise' eight hours a day.
Others shrugged that I was 'lucky' I could work from home, but luck played no part in it. When Bethesda was born I swapped my journalistic career – travelling the world, appearing on television and mixing with famous authors – for life as a stay-at-home mother, earning far less as a freelance writer.
Rather than resenting the change, staying home with my daughter was the closest thing to ecstasy I've ever known. My former life seemed so trite in comparison.
From birth, I read to Bethesda for at least an hour a day. We didn't own a TV until she was six, and it was only used to watch documentaries and films.
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