And That's What Gets Results...

“It’s been an UNBELIEVABLE cross-country season,” said a man over a loudspeaker, but I wondered what his definition of unbelievable was. Because I wasn’t finding it at all unbelievable, standing in muck in the middle of a field. I didn’t have the right shoes. My pony-effect leopard print cowhide-leather sneakers from a cult French brand weren’t going to make it. Everyone else was in wellies. I was wearing a coat from Zara that couldn’t even begin to describe itself as waterproof. I was surrounded by dry robes. And I definitely didn’t have the right attitude. I’d already made my child cry because I was in a long queue for an inside toilet and with three-quarters-of-an-hour to go, she still needed to collect her number and walk around the course, and she had no compassion for my bladder because she hadn’t given birth four times. “I am not using the portaloo,” I said as she wept. But it was all my fault that Google maps had directed us off the M50 into a housing development and that we’d ended up in the wrong part of the park due to lack of signposting and that there was zero communication about where exactly to meet the rest of her team. “Can you Snapmap them?” I said as I disappeared into a cubicle.  

They were huddled together at the starting line, the minor girls ready for their 2000m run, and they had to push and shove each other as the pistol was fired at 12pm and then they thinned out and the leaders got away, and only one would win and someone would come 92^nd or 115^th or last and it was supposedly the taking part that counted but that’s just what we tell the losers. And I googled cross-country tactics and it said to stay with the pack because once you lose sight of them, it will be psychologically hard to catch up with them because you can’t see how far ahead they are.

It was 2.17pm when the race finished but it had been 2.17pm for a while now because my battery had stopped but I kept glancing at my wrist anyway, like I was expecting to see something different, and all I was doing was continually looking into the face of a clock that was stuck. And two-and-a-half years after leaving my job, I was still nowhere near where I’d hoped to be. And I needed to understand why.

It was a six-hour round trip for a ten-minute race and it was time I’d never get back again and as we approached a roundabout and home was in sight, it was 2.17pm again and also 1982 and Fun Boy Three were singing and I was struck by the lyrics and I said to my husband, do you think they mean social media as they sang “It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. It ain't what you do, it's the time that you do it. It ain't what you do, it's the place that you do it. And that's what gets results”. “Life is like a game of chess,” they said and there was something about only getting results when you could control your next move.

This week, Lily Allen got into trouble for saying her children had killed her career, and she was accused of being selfish and subjecting her daughters to mean taunts in the playground, as if those who aren’t in double-figures yet listen to the Radio Times podcast. “The Internet has thoughts” said one article and the motherhood police jumped on her and said having children was truly a blessing and she should apologise immediately to her family. And what she’d actually said was that she’d never had a career strategy and that she loved her children, and they completed her, but in terms of pop stardom, they’d totally ruined that, but now she’d turned her attention to other things like acting and comedy and the West End which didn’t move unlike concert venues across the world. And she hadn’t judged anyone else when she’d said that some people choose their career over their children and that’s their prerogative and her parents were quite absent when she was a kid and that left some nasty scars that she wasn’t willing to repeat. She was glad she’d stepped back to concentrate on her babies because now they were pretty well-rounded people. And the interviewer agreed that we are fed this narrative that we can have it all. “I don’t have kids,” she said. “I couldn’t do my job with two children at the moment”.

And then it was Mother’s Day, and I was underwhelmed because there was no rush of gratitude from my four babies for stepping back and not giving them nasty scars. And because the eldest daughter always gets lumbered with being the eldest daughter, she had bought and arranged flowers and signed a card on behalf of her sisters who had grunted and continued to blame me for everything including the lack of food in the house and it was 2.17pm or maybe 7.17pm by the time I got my dinner because my husband who has a career but is also in charge of groceries discovered there were no Sainsburys online delivery slots left and so, it had to be click and collected, and now there were two empty crates that were going to sit in my garage forever. And there was no basking in the glow of mothering because the teenagers were yelling things across the table like “you’re talking chav” and retaliating with “and you’re talking baby”.

I wasn’t sure if I’d produced well-rounded people, or if it would have been better if I’d been absent and I don’t know where it came from, but words just fell out of my mouth, and I said how about we do – star of the week - and I promised that the winner would get a tenner. And the money caught their attention but it all went downhill from there because it became about proving who wasn’t the worst and I got sent video footage of one standing on top of another and one of the middle children promised to tidy her room if she could win and I was alerted to a lot of past misdemeanours and by Tuesday, they had all decided they were bored of it and that it would require too much additional effort. And I was so fed up with the fact that there was nowhere to stand in the shower and that hours of my life were consumed doing their laundry that I removed every single beauty product from every single surface and every single cupboard and I put them in the Sainsburys crates because they might as well serve a useful purpose  and I remembered how I used to go face-to-face shopping after work, and I quite liked it, because I could put off coming home.

I thought about what Lily Allen said and I knew exactly what she meant because when I was standing in a field supporting my child, I wasn’t focusing on my career and when I was being an eldest daughter, I wasn’t focusing on my career and when I was being a good friend, I wasn’t focusing on my career and when I was serving at church, I wasn’t focusing on my career. And it wasn’t just my children that killed my career. I never made it my priority, and I hadn’t pushed and shoved enough, and I hadn’t stayed with the pack, and I hadn’t controlled my next move and there were many other things that killed it like all the multiple roles I played but mainly what killed it was me and how I prioritised my time. And I decided it was ok to accidentally kill one career you didn’t want, but never ok to willingly kill another you do. If I was to get results, I’d need to put more words down on paper until I had so many words that it became a whole book. It was 2.17pm and it was time to start.

And I went to the gym, and forgot my Apple Watch, and like a tree falling in the woods, I wondered if you can’t prove you’ve used your time well, does it not exist.