Time to begin

There’s a brilliant scene in The Wire, when Lester tells McNulty – who lives from case to case – to get a life: ‘The job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole…boy, you need something outside of this here…a life. A life, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.’ It’s a brilliant line (Lester gets many of those) and reminds me of one of John Lennon’s: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’

I have never been very good at living in the moment. I wonder (and worry) a lot about the future. I’m the first to admit it’s not a healthy way to live. It can rob you of life in the present. Now. The only life you really have.

This tendency is made more acute by two things. First, my family wrestled for about a year with the question of whether or not to move. And now, having made the decision to go for it, we’ve been waiting about a year for our house to sell. The future really is up in the air and limbo seems to be the status quo.

Second, I’m a forty-year-old mother of two small children, and the wife of a busy journalist; and while I’m ok with the demands of domestic life I also wrestle with the questions and choices that accompany it. One of them -- ‘what will I be when I grow up?’ – has morphed into ‘what will I be when they grow up?’

This angst can distract me from the stuff of the present. So I’ve started to write about it. What I’m jotting down here is an effort to embrace, celebrate, and reflect on the stuff that happens while you are waiting or making plans.

I’ve adopted ‘Ordinary Time’ from the Christian Year. It refers to the days that pass between the special seasons and festivals. I spent a lot of time on an academic trajectory doing research in the theological concept of Christian worship. So, inevitably, some of that will shape what I write.

As I drove my husband to the train today so I could keep the car and shuttle children to gymnastics, I shared my idea. Given his trade, he’s much more savvy on the technological revolution. His advice – ‘start a blog’. So, driving home through the thick Derbyshire fog, it struck me: do it. And do it now.

After all, delaying contradicts the very thing I am hoping to embrace, right? But there’s another reason. I know I will have at least one avid reader right now.

A few weeks ago, my dad sent me an email expressing how much he enjoyed reading about me watching over my kids. I sent him one back bemoaning the frustrations of limbo. His response was an effusion of encouragement and biased, fatherly love, imploring me to start writing.

Seven years ago my dad was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. That threw a spanner in my works. My plan to postpone having kids until I’d finished my PhD no longer made sense. I wanted my dad to know my children. I remember bathing my children the day I sent my thesis for binding at a shop in London and was so happy I hadn’t waited.

This week dad started a three-month course of chemotherapy to fight the cancer. It’s hard to live an ocean away while he’s got poison in his body. I wish I could do what my brother and his wife did yesterday, dropping in on dad to give him some cinnamon buns.

I can’t. I’ve got the kids to take to gymnastics later. And I live a good nine-hour flight away. What I can do is write some thoughts, and let him in a little more on my life.