Junk Drawer

12 June—Unfinished pool piece

Luna and I go swimming on Wednesdays at 3.

We go to Forest Hill Pools, a ten minute walk from our flat.

There’s a little pool and a big pool.

I swam in the big pool once, on my one perfect day of maternity leave. My last few weeks of pregnancy were full of appointments and uncertainty, and I only ended up having a few days between finishing work and being induced. This day fell in that window. I booked a swim, waddled to the pool, and changed into my polka dot maternity swimsuit. I hadn’t done laps since required swim lessons at school and for leisure, ever. There was a Fast, Medium, and Slow lane—I wished they had a Barely Moving option but I had to settle for Slow. I gingerly stepped down the ladder and lowered my 38 week belly into the water. The cool relief was quickly replaced by anxiety about lane politics. How do I keep the maximum distance away from someone so that no one gets stuck behind me? What if someone catches up to me and gets stuck behind me? What if there are too many of us, a traffic jam forms, and several people are stuck behind me?

12 June

I started writing today but once I started I realised there was a lot more to say. I want to keep up with the exercise, but what do I do if I find something I want to put more time into?

13 June—Lessons

However you start writing doesn’t need to end up being how the piece actually starts. The first words on a page are just the way in. They’re for you, to get you to the place you need to be. You can delete them, move them, change them. I started my first post talking about how many times I had tried to start. That got me into writing about why it was so difficult to start, which got me into why I write in the first place. Reading it back, it felt like treading water before getting to the good stuff, so I cut it out. But it’s the thinking I needed to do to find a flow. Let that thinking happen on the page.

Whatever you write doesn’t need to stay that way. Get the idea out in whatever words you can then you can figure out where it fits, or if it fits at all. In the swimming piece, I wanted to include the detail of my polka dot swimsuit. I didn’t know how to insert it naturally so “I changed into my polka dot maternity swimsuit” stood as a standalone sentence for a while. As I developed the piece, it became clear where I could fold it in.

It’s okay to delete entire ideas. At first I was terrified to do this, thinking ideas were finite and I didn’t want to lose any. If it’s important, it will come back. And you will find a way to phrase it that works in that moment. I deleted many paragraphs from my first post because they didn’t quite fit, or I didn’t like how they sounded. Those ideas will stick around and find a new home if they need one.

20 June—Hospital

I went back to Lewisham Hospital today, for a follow-up appointment to the gallbladder surgery I had in January. It was the first time I’ve been back since Luna was born there in October. It felt strange to be pushing her around the halls in a stroller when I used to waddle around with her inside me. Today I had to look at a map several times and check the confirmation text to see which colour zone, which floor, which suite? I used to navigate this maze with speed and confidence. I often helped direct lost-looking pregnant people clutching appointment invitations. Maternity Day Assessment Unit? Green Zone, 5th Floor. Antenatal? Green Zone, Ground Floor. Birth Centre? Pink Zone, Ground Floor.

I never made it to the Birth Centre myself, aside from on a tour. That’s where I wanted to give birth, but Luna had other plans.

I spent a lot of time at this hospital. I had a complicated pregnancy. I was so determined to get through it and stay relaxed, I never appreciated the toll that took.

The early visits were thrilling, our first glimpse of this new world order. A tiny, supernatural body in a chamber on a screen, that chamber inside me. The fetus wasn’t in the right position for the sonographer to get one of its measurements, so I had to thrust my pelvis into the air and wiggle to try to get it to move.

At 26 weeks I stayed for two nights after several bouts of mysterious, extreme abdominal pain. By this point, paramedics had been to our flat, I had been to A&E. It took three attacks in 48 hours including one on a trans-Atlantic flight to get me admitted. I had a stream of blood tests, blood thinning injections in case it was a blood clot, an ECG. They tried an x-ray, a claustrophobic scan in a tomb-like vessel that left me radioactive for a certain number of hours—both not advised in pregnancy unless medically necessary and then it’s okay, don’t worry about it. On the last day, a student midwife tried to take blood for one more test. My veins in both arms were shot because of how much blood had been taken over the two days, so she tried from my hand. She couldn’t get any, so she tried again. And again. I started sobbing—my resilience had run out. I was tired of being poked and drained and told they didn’t know what was wrong.

20 June—One sunny day can change everything

It’s been a grey, chilly June, which obviously means summer is slipping away and it was a terrible idea to start this blog.

Today, the sun came out, I wore shorts and felt hope for the future. Setting out for the day under blue sky, Luna hung out with a fellow baby and looked at alpacas, I ran into two different friends on two different streets, I scavenged some charity shop bangers that will be wardrobe staples for the next five plus years. I’m having a sour beer on the couch and putting some words together that might not sit in the drafts folder.

Today I also went back to Lewisham Hospital for the first time since Luna was born. I started writing about what it felt like to be in the hospital now versus then, how much time I spent there over the course of my pregnancy, how I maybe underestimated the impact of that time. I found myself deep in the summary of a blood test from June 2023, when it was my stop and I needed to get off the train.

Something similar happened last week. Luna and I went swimming, as we do every Wednesday. I started writing about the routine of our Wednesday class, our time in the pool together, my one solo swim when I was pregnant, the many sweet, momentary but profound interactions with local strangers I’ve had there. And then she woke up from her nap.

Both times, I had cracked something open. I wasn’t finished. But my writing time slot was.

The task of posting every day has quickly turned out to be unrealistic for my life right now. But the exercise of asking myself “what will I write about today?” has helped me discover where I’d like to turn my attention. Often something from my day taps into a deep well of material that I’d like to dedicate this space to exploring.

But I’m struggling with the tension between quickly capturing time as it happens and taking a longer, in-depth look at something over time.

I want to be better at firing something off based on the whims of the day without paining and fiddling. I also want to stick with a piece long enough to say what I need to say, even if that means working at it over several sittings.

And I’m impatient. I want to say it all. NOW.

I know that analysis of this process has taken up more word count than any other subject so far. But I’m finding writing about writing a useful way in when I feel stuck. I’m taking a look under the hood, figuring out what’s going on. I’m trying to be curious rather than judgemental.

And I’m telling myself: it’s all okay. The small and big, short and long. It’s all true and real and important. There’s beauty and tragedy in not being able to capture it all.

24 June

Two sunny days and we have entered the phase of London summer when British people complain that it’s too hot after they were all “finger’s crossed we finally get some sun” last week. I refuse to participate in this discourse because this is what I wait for all year.

On this sunny day, I met Amy for lunch. Luna tried her first croissant. Then she played with (grabbed at the hair and face of) some baby friends and napped while they ate muffins. I texted Amy to wish her a good weekend, and she informed me it was Monday.

It’s just past midnight and I’m my favourite kind of grimy. Sweaty just from being outside, too sun-tired to take a shower.

I’m usually asleep by now. I usually read before bed. I usually leave my phone plugged in in the kitchen. But this is bothering me. There is one week left of June and I’ve published three pieces. I teeter between being kind and unkind to myself about it, but if I’m honest, once I let myself off the hook for writing every day, I stopped trying.

I have four pieces sitting in the drafts folder, many more ideas that never made it onto a page. I had a swell of “fuck it” energy that has been replaced by a sluggish self-consciousness.

25 June

I’m sitting on the couch in warm, morning air. Breeze cuts through the window at just the right moments.

The heat has evaporated the sip of coffee that was left in my mug, so only dry, dusty grounds coat the bottom. Cracks in the dust, desert in a cup.

It’s 10:07 and I’ve been awake for four hours. I live a full life before 10am now.

Daniel’s at the gym, Luna’s asleep and I would like to enjoy the quiet. But I’m preoccupied with the blog and my own self-sabotage.

So I’m going to publish my drafts, all in one go. They are mocking me. Taunting my inability to move forward.

I would like this to be easier. I would like to think less about “the project of writing” and actually do it.

But I think it might not be easy for a while. I will always be battling my neuroses. But I hope that by exposing them to the air, they will lose some of their power.

This is a sketchbook. It might be messy, it might be boring. My sketchbook cannot be curated to be effective.