015. Take Your Time

A moment of profound relief while standing outside Aldi

Before we begin: I’m delighted to be co-tutoring an upcoming residential non-fiction writing week at Arvon’s (stunning!) Lumb Bank site in Yorkshire. I’ll be working alongside the wonderful Tanya Shadrick, whose book The Cure for Sleep blew me away, with guest tutor Malachy Tallack, author of Illuminated by Water (among others) visiting midweek.

The course runs Monday 27 November through Saturday 2 December. We’re aiming for it to be a generative, supportive week of embodied writing with a watery theme. You can interpret ‘watery theme’ however you like: perhaps you want to write about water, around it, through it, from or to it, or perhaps you’re simply inspired, challenged or moved by water in some way to write.

There are only a couple of spots still available; if you’re interested you can find out more and book here.

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In my freshman year of high school I joined the track team. Before our first practice the coach sat us down and asked us to say what our favourite thing about running was. Some people talked about winning, about the feeling of being fast. I said glibly that my favourite thing about running was having run, which perhaps should have been a good indicator of what was to come: I quit halfway through the season.

Last Sunday I ran my first half marathon. I ran it faster than I thought I would, all things considered. I’m interested in how personally subjective this is: how ‘fast’ means something completely different to different runners. Or even to the same runner at different points in their life. I’ve always liked the bit in Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running where he writes about how he’s past his marathon peak: ‘I can try all I want, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to turn the way I used to,’ he says. Then he adds, and this is the crucial bit: ‘I’m ready to accept that.’

The Oxford Half is the half marathon that I was in training for the very first time I found out I was pregnant. I wrote about that in my book, and about the fact that I didn’t run it, in the end, because I was pregnant, finally, after a year of trying. That was almost a decade ago. In that time I’ve been pregnant five more times, and I’ve had one baby, who is now almost three and a half.

When I got to the end of the race last Sunday, my legs felt spent. I knew I couldn’t have run any faster than I had with the amount of training that I’d done, which wasn’t as much as I would have liked.

I wondered: what would it have been like to run it at twenty-six, not thirty-six? Would I have been faster, would I have felt sprightlier after? Would my bladder have been stronger? Or would I, perhaps, have been impatient? Would I have blown my speed at the start? Would I have grown bored and frustrated? My favourite thing about running was still, at that point in my life, having run.

The fact is that I can run for a lot longer now than I could in my twenties, when I was younger and leaner and ostensibly fitter, because I simply don’t mind doing it. I have a lot more patience and a lot more capacity for boredom and mild discomfort, and truthfully it has felt like a great privilege to be able to go for really long runs this year, not only physically but in terms of time. When you have a toddler and a job and a mortgage and laundry and all that it represents some kind of arrogance, a not insignificant fuck-you to the structures of the modern world, to say that you’re going to take an hour and a half, or two hours, simply to go for a run.

In other words, this year I’ve been learning to take my time.

Historically I’ve imagined the phrase take your time as an almost sarcastic form of disciplining someone: take your time – as long as it’s not too much. But the thought I’ve been having lately is: what if I did take it? I mean really, actually take it? Take it: an expression which implies not violence necessarily but certainly forcefulness, a sense of entitlement.

Last year, on holiday, I read Deborah Levy’s Real Estate and was hit straight in the chest by this quote: ‘Domestic space, if it is not societally inflicted on women, if it is not an affliction bestowed on us by patriarchy, can be a powerful space. To make it work for women and children is the challenge.’ Time, domestic space: things we have to take, rather than allow to be bestowed upon us.

So: what if I did take my time? I mean with going for a run, a swim, a drink or a coffee or whatever – I mean right now, this second, when I know that instead of writing this email I should be preparing lunch, getting ahead on an editing job, tidying up the toys on the floor before my son gets home from football, going for a run(!) – yes, I mean that, but also with other things. This January my book will have been out for three years, and in that time I know lots of people have written multiple other books. My son, as I’ve said, is now nearly three and a half, and in that time I know lots of people have had another baby. For a long time I have berated myself for not working as quickly, for not having any announcements to make, even while I’ve been keen to make excuses for myself: I just had a baby, we have no childcare, now we have childcare but I have a job, my husband is starting a business and we need my income to be stable, etc etc etc.

But honestly: so what if it take a long time to write another book? I’m a slow writer. Slow is as subjective as fast when it comes to running, when it comes to writing.

The other line from Levy’s Real Estate that hit me, and this one shook me to my core, was this one: ‘All those invisible years raising our children … were some of the most formative years of my life. I didn’t know it then, but I was becoming the writer I wanted to be.’ I’ve been thinking about that line now for a year and a half. I’ve been taking my time with it. When I first read it I felt like I was being given permission. I felt like Deborah Levy herself was personally saying to me, in a kindly but also quite forceful voice: It’s OK that you haven’t written another book yet! Pay attention instead to the meal you’re having with your family on the ferry from Cherbourg to Poole on this particular August evening, the chicken and chips and tomato salad, the light hitting the smeared windows and the bob of the boat, the red wine and the book in your hand. I felt like she, personally, had freed me from the binds of my own sense of what discipline had to mean.

I don’t know if that’s what she meant by it, or how she’d like to be imagined. Now, a year and a half on, I still haven’t written another book, I still haven’t had another baby, I still don’t know whether I will do either of those things. But I do also still find something freeing in the idea that I am allowed to take my time. That in fact no one but me can give me permission to take it. Deborah Levy did not give me that permission, as it turns out, though her book did begin to enable me to see how I might grant it to myself.

This year I’ve been paying attention to what running is teaching me because this year has been one long exercise in patience. It has not looked like I envisaged it would at the start. For example: this time last year I was gearing up for another round of IVF, our first since the cycle that resulted in the birth of our son in 2020. By the end of November I was pregnant. By the end of December I’d miscarried. In the immediate aftermath of the miscarriage I was consumed by a sense of urgency, as if by acting fast enough I could catch up with myself somehow – a baby born, OK, not in the summer but the autumn, only a few months’ difference. Perhaps it seemed that if we could act fast enough it would be as if the miscarriage had never even happened. But in time this sense of urgency faded – in fact it began to seem positively unwise. There’s been more than enough uncertainty and stress to manage this year as it is.

The other thing I’m coming to learn, of course, alongside patience, is its cousin concept: that the most momentous things often happen in the least momentous of ways. A moment of profound relief while standing outside Aldi on one of those days in late summer when Oxford smelled overwhelmingly of actual shit (sewage releases or muckspreading? The concerned citizens of Nextdoor will never agree on which). A significant milestone celebrated not with champagne but with an early bedtime. When I crossed the finish line last Sunday I hobbled to the park to meet my husband and my son, and spent the next half an hour trying to persuade the latter to put his trousers back on so that we could begin the journey back to the bus stop and wait for the bus and crawl up the Cowley Road and have an argument, when we got off, about going to the playground, and walk home from there excruciatingly slowly, examining each leaf along the way.

It seemed to take us almost as long, in the end, to get home from the park as it had taken me to run the race. But it wasn’t a race, really.

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ADRIFT, my memoir about uncertainty, (in)fertility, and swimming laps, is out in paperback (and hardback, and audiobook…) You can buy it from your favourite bookshop, or via any of the links below:

Daunt | Blackwell’s | bookshop.org | Waterstones 

If you’ve read and enjoyed it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon, or mentioning it to someone else you think might like it. Thank you! x