‘I have an overwhelming feeling of wonder in the power of words’: Catherine Cho

Searching for time: 25% 

I used to commute by bus to Piccadilly Circus every day and I remembered wondering why everyone didn’t do this – once I had kids I had my answer. What a luxury it was to sit on the top deck of a bus and read a book with no concern about what time I would arrive.

I had a six-month-old and a three-year-old when I decided to start my own literary agency. We had nursery, but no family support close by, and I remember one particularly despairing evening sitting on the side of our bathtub, breastfeeding my daughter while trying to bathe my son, wondering how I was meant to do this. 

I spent many night feeds watching YouTube videos of mums (mostly Mormon) showing their morning routines and their grocery hauls for families of eight to see if I could learn anything. I would mostly be distracted by the question of how much time it must take for them to reposition the camera as they moved from room to room. 

I also listened to a lot of Ryan Serhant, a real estate agent in Manhattan who has a manic energy. He describes his day as $1,000, so that each minute is $1, although living this way started to give me a different kind of stress. 

This was five years ago, and I have mostly blanked out the panic of those days, but I remain fascinated by productivity routines.

Minutiae of motherhood: 40%

I often think of the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass who runs as fast as she can just to stay in one place. My brain is crowded by competing questions – did I buy enough groceries? What should I cook for dinner? Are there enough clean socks? Is there fruit for snacks tomorrow? Did I register the kids for club? Occasionally, the minutiae will be invaded by larger thoughts of what the world will look like in the future and should I be making sure they learn wilderness basics or how to solder because what is the world going to look like and… 

My day used to be punctuated by the messages of classroom WhatsApp groups until I finally muted them all. I oscillate between guilt and resignation, and sometimes the guilt wins, which has resulted in me agreeing to things like competing in a parent football league (despite never having played football) or buying boxes of Korean snacks and flags for international day to make sure my kids have pride about their identity. Will they be OK with their identity?

Skincare and ageing: 5%

I have had to delete Substack and Instagram from my phone because I was mostly being fed content about skincare and expensive cashmere. My husband says that the algorithm says a lot about me, his is just physics and sports, but it was starting to shape my worldview that everyone was injecting their faces with salmon sperm and buying £1,000 coats, and I needed to exit from my bubble. 

I hope to be like my mother who has a daily evening routine, although her main product is a generic Walmart brand lotion, and she is very matter-of-fact about becoming older. And so when I read yet another essay about beauty and the bravery of ageing, I imagine trying to explain this to her or to my grandmother. 

The Peace of Wild Things: 10%

This poem by Wendell Berry is one I revisit often, increasingly so these past years. It brings me to tears every time I read it. By the time I reach the line about “still water”, I feel a sense of calm. I have an overwhelming feeling of gratitude and wonder in the power of words. 

Next novel ideas: 5%

I am not one of those writers who has a feast of ideas. For me, it’s more like hearing a brief refrain of something and the more I listen, the fainter it gets. As much as I find joy in writing – when it goes right it feels like soaring – most of the time it is the last thing on my list for the day, and so maybe I’m not listening enough. I try not to feel resentment about not writing, instead I have to trust that I will find the time.

A lifeboat: 15%

I have always been fascinated by space, and I felt an echo of recognition when the Artemis II crew described seeing Earth from space – this lifeboat in a vastness of black. I experienced postpartum psychosis after the birth of my first child, and despite the terror and horror of that experience, of feeling reality fracture, of being removed from linear time, what I felt afterwards was a sense of unity, that we were existing in a shared experience. 

Amongst the noise, the cruelty and the pettiness of daily life, I linger on the moments of connection, of kindness – a knowledge that our experiences are shared.