I'm a cliché

tapping away in the Notes app

I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting in the front seat of a stationary car, while my daughter naps in the back. I can see her frowning face in the mirror. She’s asleep, but she’s still grumpy about needing to go to sleep. She cried hysterically for six minutes (two goes of her favourite song by Imogen Heap) and then fell into a resigned slumber.

The big Christmas tree is up on the Green in our village. At 3.40pm it is starting to twinkle in the low light.

I’m sitting here tapping away in the Notes app because it seems that this is the only way to write anything while I’m looking after the baby. I have become a cliché. Before I had a baby I heard countless women talk and write about the ‘juggle’ of motherhood and creativity. And it’s not that I didn’t believe them, I absolutely did. But for some reason I never really believed it would happen to me. That I would have ideas and feelings (so many feelings!) sending tingles in the direction of my fingertips and hardly a minute to place them on the laptop keys and let it all out. The idea of which sounds like a big contented sigh to me. Oh how I want a week to just read and write.

The irony is that before I had M I was in an idea drought. Time was on my side but inspiration was not.

As I have alluded to before, the past few months have been hard for reasons unrelated to having a baby, and I’ve been in a state of fight or flight. Each day choosing something different. I’m like a jangling bag of nerves. Exhausted but full of energy. Nervous energy. I’ve looked up the etymology of the word nervous which, it turns out, once had a very different meaning. In the seventeenth century, to be nervous meant to be strong, full of vigour and spirit. The nerves were thought to carry the body’s ‘vital spirits’: tiny channels of energy that kept us alive and responsive to the world. I like that — the idea that beneath all this jangling exhaustion, the original meaning still flickers: energy trying to move, to find its way out.

I remember reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic (which I did not like) and her assertion that ideas journey from person to person. That if you don’t grip onto one while it’s with you, it’ll leave and find someone else. I’ve thought about that quite a lot since reading it. And while I don’t agree with the concept (it’s a bit too woo-woo for me) I do think that you’ve got to use an idea when it’s at its most vivid. So many times I’ve been driving or walking or in the shower and a little spark will ignite — it might be no good at all, of course, but if I don’t use it, try to put something down on the page, I’ll never know. All too soon the spotlight will fade and the idea will dull.

My nervous system has been on fire. That complex network that controls everything alight with fear and excitement and vivacity. All the worrying, hurtful and anger-inducing things that have been happening to me, alongside the intense joy and exhaustion that new life brings, have left me frayed at the edges. On high alert. So aware of every brilliant and awful thing. I’m so tuned into heartbreak and beauty. More than I’ve ever been. It’s a lot, and I love it. But I just need some time to know what to do with it.

So I keep finding those flickers, and little snatches of time, and putting them somewhere if I possibly can. Even if that means sitting in the front seat of a car that desperately needs a good clean (carrot cake crumbs adorn the base of the handbrake beside me). I need to go inside and hang the washing on the heated clothes horse. I need to make a mushroom bolognese that can go in the freezer for the week. I need to wrap presents and buy presents and I desperately need to write and read and soak it all in. This vivid life I love so much.