While tending to, entertaining, and wrangling two kids under age 5 can feel like being in the crosshairs of multiple tornados while juggling flaming swords. But for me, for the last several years, it has also felt like a relief, like standing in the calm before, or in my case, between storms.
There are so many reasons why being truly present, in the moment, with your children is so very important to those children. Experts in child psychology and development can point to so many benefits to children’s behavior, reducing tantrums and other attention seeking behavior, giving a sense of worth and sense of being truly “seen” and loved, and so much more. Less however, is said about the benefit to parents. Of course, fewer tantrums is obviously an ancillary benefit to parents. But I think the opportunity and incentive to be present in the moment, undistracted by other concerns can be therapeutic to the mental health of parents too.
I feel really lucky that for some reason, by nature or by experience or some combination of mysterious factors, I found it innate and automatic that when I’m with my kids I’m almost always fully in the moment. Maybe it’s because, with 2 kinetically energetic boys only 15 months apart, every moment is an opportunity for incredible athletic triumph or absolute emergency-room-bound catastrophe. And thus, being present and fully attentive is a protective survival strategy. Whatever the reason, long days with the boys, while exhausting and challenging, also feel like a relief. I don’t think about my serpentine work to-do list, the digital pile of draft thesis chapters in my in box to be read and desperately and intensively revised, the half dozen grant proposal deadlines approaching and how much grant money I need to somehow wrangle to meet institutional expectations and support my grad students, the manuscript that has been rejected from one journal and needs to be repaired and resubmitted elsewhere. Anxiety-free. The relief is palpable and in dramatic contrast to the experience of the work week. Being so focused on playing with my boys, enjoying their young years as they speed away like so much ephemera, attending to their wild leaps from furniture with an intense focus so that I might even be able to catch them before they fall like a superhero…this has been a profound and unexpected blessing.
In contrast, for so many years, my working hours have been fraught with a kind of irreducible anxiety, a feeling that I’m running on the back edge of a treadmill, gasping and trying desperately not to fall off. Striving to meet intensive work demands and expectations, the kind that are often met by working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and trying to do it in a 40 hr work week so I can pick my kids up from daycare or preschool on time, so that I can spend the weekend with them and not splitting the time with yet more time in the office. I fear that many of our institutions are set up to create this kind of productivity pressure to an extent that it does spill over into the family time of so many. I do plan to dig deeper into the specific challenges of academia and its norms and expectations in this respect, at some point in the future. But its not only in academia that work demands outstrip the traditional work week, outstrip what normal, capable humans can accomplish with reasonable working hours. The creep of work into longer hours, nights, weekends, can make it hard for parents to not worry about work when they are trying to be present with their families, with their children. I worry that this can be especially pernicious for working women, who have embraced the opportunities opened to us by 2nd wave feminism, to do more in our careers, without the universe having also added hours to the days, weeks, or months in order to also do all the other things we want or need to do as moms and families. We have rightly cheered women to lean in, without also talking about and resolving the inherent trade-offs and conflicts that will consequently and inevitably emerge, something I hope to ponder more in a future post (unless of course thermodynamics, entropy, and the finitude of time cease to exist and 24 hours a day is no longer the zero sum trade off game it has always been).
I worry that the changing norms and expectations of work, for many professions, makes it exceptionally difficult for many parents to be truly present and in the moment with their kids without the pressing anxiety and distraction of work demands. I have seen some conversations about the impact this can have on children and while I think long-term data is lacking, the anecdotal evidence is deeply concerning. I don’t hear nearly enough conversations about how this might affect parents. These potential opportunities to exist mindfully in the moment when we are with our kids, without the pressing inner discourse about the to-do list or the next work project, without the anxiety about work performance and productivity at the forefront of the mind, could be incredibly important for our sanity as adult humans, as parents, as moms.