Finding Time to Write

It is raining thickly outside, the hills of Karori veiled in grey. I sit at the dining table with my laptop, caught between warm air from the heat pump and the cool of the front rooms of the house. Asterix, our great black Labrador, lies disconsolately at the foot of the stairs, one paw curled around a grubby toy duck, his eyes both sorrowful and accusing. He knows something is up, he is unsettled: we have packed, carried some of our bags downstairs. He won’t relax until we’re on the road again.

For the past few days we have been staying at K’s childhood home, in Wellington. The drive down from Auckland is always an enjoyable one, but this time we make a true road trip out of it, taking the Thermal Explorer Highway all the way down to Napier, stopping a few nights at a motel in Rotorua, another night at an old homestead in Hawke’s Bay, before finally – road weary as the initial excitement wears thin – we arrive in the Windy City.

I am snatching this time to write while K showers upstairs. We had aimed to leave by ten, but we but won’t be gone before twelve. We have just eaten breakfast, there is a rustling noise in the kitchen where his mama is packing up rice pockets in newspapers and colourful homemade curries for the road. She shows me the banana leaves she has used to wrap them, soft smooth green and supple. Meanwhile the heat pump hums softly and the rain continues to lash down outside.

Tomorrow we will be back at work again, a heavy month lies ahead. I have been thinking a lot about how to make time for writing again when we return, determined to build it back into my day-to-day. The only hours I have for myself really are in the morning, the dark hours before day breaks, while K drinks black coffee and emerges from sleep. The evenings are too unpredictable, swallowed up by the exhaustion and stresses of the day. Besides, they are the only time K and I spend together.

And so mornings it will be. It is not really a choice; the need to write has become more pressing in past years. When we were younger, my sister Rose was the one forever telling stories, filling notebooks with curly cursive letters. I never took to the fountain pens and flowing French handwriting we were taught at school, I was too old already perhaps when we moved to France, my script to this day a stubborn ball-point scrawl. But these days it suits the urgency required to get words down on paper, to capture and dissect this life I am living.

Finding time to write: I draw comfort from the knowledge that others make it work. I look to mothers at home with their children, other doctors who seemingly balance work and words. For years now I have written in the margins: words of love, loss, longing, offloaded into inbox drafts, scribbled on the backs of inpatient lists, snatched moments in a handover, on a ward round, in those desperately lonely spaces that open up from one rotation to the next. Now I want to see what I can do with a dedicated chunk of time.