Just 20 minutes

I have no time to write.

Which is rather a problem, considering the fact that I'm trying to make a living off writing.

🗝 Key points:

• Parenting asynchronous kids is really hard
• A tiny amount regularly is good enough
• Have faith, and just keep building

The weary evening closes in once again, and exhausted and creaking, I gaze with despair at the wasteland that used to be the living room.

We didn't even spend much time here today, how has the Christmas tree collapsed again?

Despite this, the entire ground floor of the house looks like a grenade has gone off, and it's unclear whether Barbie or the Stegosaurus threw it.

I just want to write

All I want is to just sit down and start writing. A cup of tea would be a bonus.

I have all these ideas, thoughts, memories swirling messily around in my head having accumulated over the course of the day with the kids. Things I just can't wait to splurge onto the screen, both as my own form of reflective meditation, and also and share with those going through a similar challenge to us. Writing is my therapy.

But the house ain't gonna clean itself, and for the rest of the evening Marie is going to be pinned to the bed by an eight month old that refuses to fall asleep unless lying on mum, nonchalantly feeding the entire time.

So I begrudgingly pick up the hoover and get to work, lamenting the fact that despite having spent the whole day with the kids, providing, encouraging and entertaining, I still can't sit for a moment and just do the thing I want to do most.

Is it so much to ask?

While lazily shuffling the vaccuum around the sitting room I make the mistake of glancing at my phone. My colleague at work has posted a picture of the cookies they'd baked during their evening of uninterupted free time, because their 10 week old baby is sleeping through the night already.

I narrowly avoid throwing my phone through the window.

I pause the vaccuum, unable to tell if that noise was the 2 year old crying or a piece of lego wedged in the hose. Ten minutes later I've retrieved the smug Playmobil farmer from the mechanism of the disastrously overworked appliance and can finish off the room and make a start on the pile of washing up.

Once the house is in a vaguely reasonable state, I try my luck. I pop the kettle on, reach for the laptop and slide it tentatively onto the thrice-cleaned-but-somehow-still-sticky dining table.

I usually get the notepad app up just in time for the 2yo to start crying. This time, however, I've made it so far as to write an entire paragraph. I count myself lucky, take a deep breath, and sprint up the stairs to fluff her pillow, remove the pea from under her matress or whatever other demands she's cooked up on this occasion.

I'm actually proud of her

She's realised that if she just lets out a series of exasperated grunts, gradually increasing in volume over a series of minutes, she can demand anything she wants, in return for being quiet.

She's figured out her maximum leverage point - waking everyone else up - and will use that leverage with gay abandon, demanding tuck-ins, pillow adjustments and sparrow-esque sips of water until finally she reluctantly succumbs to the sweet release of sleep that they all seem hellbent on fighting off until as late as possible. She knows I have nothing on her and likes to remind me of that fact, usually on a twenty minute basis until around 11pm.

On some evenings, it's every five minutes that one of them wakes up, and it is torture.

The complete inability to have even half an hour of our own time, our own thoughts, or a hot cup of tea is mind-bendingly hard work and it's difficult to stay calm and rational when it's happening day after day.

Even when they're silent, we're on edge, because we know it's coming. Needless to say for any future job interviews, I've got a splendid answer to "When did you have to demonstrate resilience?"

I'm currently, and stupidly, trying to revise for a professional anaesthetics exam. It is mandatory for my progression in anaesthetics training, it's blisteringly difficult with a pass mark of around 40-50%, and it costs £600 just to sit it. That's six hundred of my own post-tax pounds just to sit a mandatory exam, and if I fail, I have to sit it again, throwing a family holiday, emergency car repair, or six week's food shopping down the drain.

I think I've bitten off more than I can chew here.

This is where just 20 minutes comes in

Here's the agreement I've made with myself:

1. Forget the evenings, forget any meaningful productivity or progress, just survive and get through it, whatever you need. This too shall pass.
2. If you do get a few minutes or even an hour, then prioritise revision, because the exam has direct financial and professional consequences
3. When you're tucked up in bed, just do twenty minutes of writing, every day

Don't try and write a whole post, or finish something in a rush, or get carried away and write for three and a half hours like yesterday...

But just write something for twenty minutes, every day.

Let's see how this goes.