Stolen Moments

On finding rest in a full life. Not as a reward. Simply as yours.

I used to arrive at school early to collect the children. Deliberately early. Five minutes, sometimes ten, just sitting in the car. I remember the irritation when another parent knocked on the window.

A silence of relief, alone in the car, a few stolen minutes claimed through arriving early for school pick-up. A peaceful moment pre-planned to simply be, to be me, not mummy or wife or student or worker, just me. And then the softness broke as a fellow mother rapped on the glass waving and smiling; the expectation of conversation, my attention, I sighed and replaced the mask I’d let fall to the floor of the car.

I found refuge in my car, those stolen moments. Where, in your life, is your ‘car’? Is it your bus journey, headphones on, eyes half shut? Is it that minute or ten in the waiting room flicking through magazines, allowing your mind to wander through the pages? Or could it be when you’re laying in the dark, enveloped in a duvet, slowing your breathing, drifting into dreamland?

And do you feel as I did? Feeling cheated when life interrupts, jolts you back to the present with a child’s cry or a relentlessly talkative stranger? I felt like a petulant child, robbed of something that should be rightfully mine. Yet I, as I suspect you also do, simply accept and carry on. Allowing our peace and plans to be disrupted because that is what life is, isn’t it?

And yet is it, does it have to be like that, am I really being an unreasonable, petulant child?

At first I thought I was, at first I bought into this poisonous expectation that we (and by ‘we’ I especially mean women) should give everything, sacrifice ourselves to nurture others, never take a moment for ourselves, be gracious, be available, be what everyone else wants.

Until I realised I wasn’t. I wasn’t being unreasonable wanting a small sliver of time for myself. I wasn’t being unreasonable desiring to be a person outside wife, mother, student, worker. It took me a very long time (and I am still working on it to be honest) before I learned that ‘no’ could be a complete sentence.

Through various ways I had found myself amidst the community of ‘wellness’, and being naive and eager to please (ahem!) I felt I had to follow all the instructions. Which in itself caused me to lose who I was because none of them fitted, there were good ideas, sure, but nothing that I felt I could do ‘properly’.

Admonished to ‘do the work’, journal these questions, repeat these mantras. Well-meaning connections trying to help, thinking they were doing the right thing for me. And I tried and failed and tried and kinda failed, and then stopped. I was sick of feeling bad about myself, I was disillusioned. I failed again… or so I thought.

In the silence of dismissal I allowed myself to breathe. And allowed my mind to think rather than react. And in that space I found my answer. Not in blind acceptance, but in careful adaptation.

All the articles, workbooks, coaching that I bought, endured, ignored; all had something useful to impart, I simply had to find the pieces that fit my own jigsaw, not someone else’s idea of how my jigsaw should fit together. Though there was nobody explicitly saying it, curation of the content was what led me to acceptance. I accepted who I was, my limitations, in myself and my life, and then found ways to incorporate what worked for me and felt free enough to discard the rest. Said ‘no’ to what I didn’t want, without guilt or shame.

I reclaimed who I was. Not by burning everything down, but by manoeuvring pieces of my life, by slotting in those moments of peace, moments of me. By constructing a life with flexibility, one that worked with my responsibilities not one that allowed me to drown in them.

So I may not journal every morning, I might forget to breathe slowly when someone annoys me, a gym session might be ten minutes not thirty, I may scroll social media before turning off the bedside lamp. I may not be the poster woman for wellness, but I am an imperfect human being who has a full life and yet still takes care of herself, one silent minute, one slow breath, one line in a journal at a time.

With kindness and coffee, Sharon