There’s a note in my phone detailing a recent interaction I had with a stranger. I was at the grocery store, looking for the code for cucumbers, when a woman remarked on the baby and told me she and her partner were looking for a surrogate.
The note:
“No matter how you do it,” I tell her, “it requires patience.”
“Ah, well, it’s starting to wear thin.”
I apologize to her, not knowing what I am saying, what I am implying with my comment. Who am I to say anything, I think, to this person, of her life, when we only met just a moment ago, and here now she is telling me that she wants a baby like I have a baby.
“I’m not writing right now,” is something I go in and out of saying, despite keeping record of events like this one. Often, the statement is true, in the sense that I am not always able to sit down at a desk at a kept hour every day to write the things I want to write. I am subject to different types of deadlines: wake windows, pick-ups and drop-offs, birthday party RSVPs.
As a substitute, I cram reading into every corner of my life, in the same way that my dinner is the scraps of my daughter’s unfinished meal, eaten over the sink. I read during naptime, in cars, for a few stolen minutes before bed, and I reflect on that reading—and, I suppose, on what’s going on in my life as I exist in it.
I’ve had to learn that this, too, is writing.
Taking a long walk in silence: writing. Thinking about how to help a friend in need: writing. Resting more: writing. Someone once told me that just thinking about God is an act of prayer—so, I guess, at whatever level you need it to be meaningful, observing how we live is to write. Living is writing.
One of the most common questions I’m asked by other women is but how do you make the time? and I flinch at the witnessing of my own feelings of desperation laid out in front of me, in what is, otherwise, a simple social interaction. Because we know, as mothers of the young, that time is never really on our side. We lament the starting and stopping of our endeavours by the call for someone else’s fulfillment, and we try to fit between the cracks of our lives (as I write this, the baby is sleeping and I am hunched over my kitchen counter eating breakfast and drinking coffee that have both gone cold).
I don’t make time. This season of my life has taught me that I have nothing and everything to do with time. What I have to make room for, instead, is self-compassion and love. When I live outside of the bounds of time and look at the world with care, I build a world to write about. Later, I can write, I tell myself. For now, existence will have to do.
From the word cloud | Minute
I read the description in the dictionary and it says that a minute is both a fixed amount of time and a short amount of time. Can you help me, for just a minute? Its use implies that it is, in fact, nothing at all—what is time, anyway?—and still, we say things like “I haven’t seen her in a minute” to express that it’s been long, hasn’t it, this time around?
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