Coffee, a cold, and Presentism

I’ve caught M’s cold. After a week of little sleep punctuated by hourly wakeups with a very sad and congested baby, I am feeling weary. I had this time scheduled in though — to get a coffee by myself with my laptop and my notebook, and write some words that have been percolating for days. One of the things that has changed since having a child, and I’m only just slightly getting to grips with this, is that my time is simply what it is. I cannot change it, I cannot pause to feel better, more in the mood, I cannot use time like it is mine to abuse. I must just take it. Make the best of it.

I’ve just finished reading Heart the Lover by Lily King, one of my favourite writers, and in it the narrator introduces the concept of ‘presentism’: the view that only the present exists. “It feels okay to just have this moment and nothing else… it feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here.” I like that idea. It helps me feel grounded while time seems to be slipping through my fingers.

Well-intentioned people keep telling me: you’ll never give this time back, your baby will only be this small once, enjoy it! And I’m trying, I’m really trying. Most of the time I’m succeeding. But life has also been really hard these past few months (nothing to do with M, actually) and there’s this part of me that is terrified of looking back and seeing only that: the negative. Rather than the vast, open, beautiful now.

While my baby has been ill this week, I’ve spent a lot of time lying next to her in bed, singing to her, feeding her, stroking her tummy until she falls asleep and her breathing calms. She stirs often and lets out a cry. Sometimes I need to feed her again and sometimes she just needs to know I’m there and she’ll settle and fall back to sleep. I was lying there one night, looking at her little face and her rosy cheeks, smelling her sweet musty head, worrying about something work-related. And I wanted to give myself a shake. A good talking to. These are very much the times when I needn’t let that other stuff in. That if I notice the vastness of these moments I won’t look back with sadness, I’ll remember that I was there and that though time was moving, fast, I let the important stuff — the singing to my child — be the big stuff.

I’ve always had this morbid fear of time passing. I think since my parents got ill and I realised we are all, in fact, mortal beings, I’ve been trying to cling onto the hours with a desperation I’ll probably always need therapy for. I was listening to a podcast this morning about the covid report (on how utterly incompetently our government dealt with the pandemic) and the journalist saying 2020 was five years ago felt like a personal attack. Ridiculous to think that it was five years ago. Ridiculous that my little niece is going to be six years old next month and she was born like, yesterday. Remember being a child and older relatives saying, ‘I remember when you were this big!’. I am that older relative. I am baffled by the passing of time, and I often feel scared and angry about it.

I didn’t quite realise that having a baby would be exposure therapy for a fear of time passing. But it is. M is four months old today and though it feels like I’ve known her forever, I cannot get my head around the fact that she is no longer a newborn whose tininess strangers remark upon. She is changing constantly and is a visual reminder of our march towards death every single day. Or at least, that’s how it feels when I’m my existential dread era. And alongside all the utter joy I’m feeling about being a mother to this perfect little human, I very much am in that era.

It’s been interesting, therefore, to read the novel On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle while having these thoughts and feelings. Apparently, Balle said of her inspiration for the novel (which will be a seven-part series in which the narrator gets stuck in the same day — a Danish Groundhog Day): “The thing that fascinated me most was the question: how can one day be so voluminous?” What a beautiful question to start from. And the book (I’ve only read vol 1 so far) asks it again and again in unexpected and nuanced ways. On the one hand (given everything I’ve written so far) an opportunity to live within one day again and again — no one getting older, time to read every book on your shelf — would sound like a dream. We don’t have to push too far, though, to see how quickly it would become a nightmare.

The loneliness in the novel is striking — the way she describes the growing distance between herself and her husband with each new 20th November she experiences. At first, she tells him every morning what has happened, so they can think on it together, but it turns out that telling him isn’t enough. The fact that they’re no longer on the same timeline becomes a crater between them, gaping wider each day.

Being in time, with everyone around us, the people we love – for good and for ill – is perhaps what binds us. There is simply nothing we can do aside from be here, in this moment. Together.