AS TIME GOES BY

Sometimes it feels that time is moving slowly, but mostly it slips away from us quickly. Can we ever make peace with its passing? Clover Stroud reflects on what she’s learned as the years have rolled by

Can we make peace with the past? Clover Stroud reflects on what she has discovered

During the summer, my eldest son, Jimmy, finished his A levels and left school. Watching him walk away from me into the bright lights of adult life has been both extraordinary and melancholic; wonderful and strange. More than anything, it’s reminded me of the fleeting yet fickle nature of time, which changes pace like a rollercoaster, crawling slowly forwards, before hurtling onwards so fast that I don’t really have time to admire the view. Two decades ago, back when I was 24 and newly, shockingly, pregnant, the thought that I’d one day be a woman in my 40s with a grown-up son seemed like an impossibly distant prospect. I was scared, because pregnancy hadn’t really been part of the plan, if, indeed, there was a plan. At night, I lay awake trying to imagine new life growing inside me, with one question bouncing around my head: should I have this baby? But now that anxiety seems misplaced. A baby? That’s just for a year. The blink of an eye, as they say. The baby grows, time vanishes, and now I’m 44 and he’s 19. I’m grateful for his existence every single day of my life, but watching him grow has also shown me, in the most visceral way, that time has evaded me. I look back at the past two decades and I ask myself that question all parents wail at some point: where has the time gone?

Becoming a mother certainly changed my sense of time, but now, with five children and almost half way through my fourth decade, my conception of it feels more slippery, more elusive, than ever. This isn’t purely down to motherhood. Growing up (growing older) is gradually taking from me the thing that levels us all,

which is time. None of us can beat time; that time will run out and we will all eventually die is the thing that unites us all. Time, in a sense, is very democratic.

The elusive nature of time is also the thing that all my friends, or at least everyone I know over the age of about 25, are troubled by. No one seems to have enough of it. We are all struggling to find time to be the people we want to be, to be present, to lead the best lives we know we can achieve, if we just have the time. We feel that living well takes time. If I had more time, I often tell myself, I’d see more of the friends I love who I haven’t spoken to in months, learn how to grow vegetables and cook Lebanese food, redecorate the bathroom, teach my children to sew while learning myself, read War And Peace, actually practise meditation, and so on…

We are all in such a rush, trying to keep up, with schedules so packed there’s no time to pause as we career from one responsibility to another, as the sands of time run away. It’s an unsettling feeling, for sure. Sometimes, my vanishing sense of time, my inability to hold on to it and make it mine, makes me feel as if I am in a locked room that is rapidly filling with water.

Why does time taunt us in this way? Technology, and the boss almost all of us carry in our pockets in the form of a smartphone, certainly play a big role. My smartphone liberates me, but it’s also a hard taskmaster and keeps me moving, forever updating appointments, running between messages that all need answering, filling every crack of spare time with activity.

Technology means we can work everywhere, which is great, but it also means our time is never really our own. The time that we may once have taken sitting back on the commute home is no longer a quiet moment to watch the world slip by, but instead a 45-minute opportunity to catch up on emails and prepare that presentation for tomorrow. Today, the quiet, nondescript pleasure of contemplation, with nothing to do, feels like a luxury. There isn’t enough time for that!

This strange, silent pressure of time vanishing makes me uncomfortable. It’s crept up on me in the past few years. Some of it comes with age: when I observe my teenage son, I don’t think that he feels it. I didn’t when I was his age, either. Until my mid-20s, time had a languorous quality, as if it was an almost infinite commodity I could bend and shape to my will; it felt malleable, never finite. After I left school at 18, I took two years out before I started university, during which I travelled through Ireland and then England with horses. I lived in a wagon, learning how to light camp fires on the roadside and wash my hair in a bucket; time slowed right down to the pace it took to walk from one village to another. Urgency is physically impossible when your only means of transport is a horse. Also, no one had heard of the internet and even mobile phones were an oddity. Reader: this was the early 1990s. After three years at university, I travelled across America by Greyhound bus until I found myself the cattle ranch I’d dreamed of, and the three months I’d planned to spend in Texas turned into almost two years of working alongside cowboys, riding in rodeos and herding cattle across huge, open landscapes. When I look back, this period has an almost dreamlike quality, a moment in my life that was, if you like, outside time.

But something profound – both sinister and exciting – changed things completely when I returned from America in the late 1990s. Suddenly, everyone had an email address, and www dot prefixed the name of every business. In 2000, I had that baby, and got a mobile phone.

Certainly, motherhood switched on a timer inside me. Pregnancy apportioned time to crucial weeks – four weeks pregnant, eight weeks, 12, 20, 36 – in a way it never had before. The baby arrived and I watched his development, counting his age in weeks, until he reached 12 weeks, and then I switched to months. For the first time, I was acutely aware of the passing of time. Birthdays took on a brand new significance. You are one year old! You are three, a big boy now; five and starting school; nine, so independent; 13, blimey, so big; 15, always out of eye sight and leaving me; then 19, and you’re gone. It’s all passed much too fast.

Realising how fast it has passed is also changing me, in a good way. I used to think of my ‘real life’ as this thing that would happen somewhere in the near future. Like many of us, I was always looking forward to the next bit, unaware that today, this moment, is the time of my life. I am more accepting of the fact that time is confusing; it does seem to change pace. And rather than use that as another reason to chastise myself for not leading my mythical best life, I’m easier on myself about it. Being absolutely present in the moment is a tall demand, something the most spiritually enlightened people in the world have been wrestling with for millennia. I don’t need to beat myself up about the fact that I struggle with it. There’s no harm, however, in forcing myself to put that phone down, a little more often, to sit back and enjoy the train ride home, or the chaotic, messy teatime with my children. Identifying the good moments when they are happening matters, but those moments are often the simple times, not the high days and holidays, when there is more pressure than ever to be having a great time. I haven’t yet managed to master meditation, but I have found myself a mantra to remind myself to enjoy this moment, happening now, before it has slipped past, as much as it’s humanly possible: these are the days.

‘MOTHERHOOD SWITCHED ON A TIMER INSIDE ME’

My Wild And Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story by Clover Stroud is to be published February 2020