Existential Unmindfulness and other ways to fail your child

#7 in the series of light-lift, unworkshopped, and unvarnished motherhood essays.

It can be tempting to conclude you’re doing alright as a parent.

You don’t shout at your child. You don’t end conversations with a “Because I say so.” And you don’t terrify your child with the silent-treatment. You’re doing better than your parents.

Heck you’re going one better. You’ve kept up with the Intensive Millennial Parenting Curriculum. You’ve watched all the reels, and you’ve read The Whole Brained Child, and you know your child is “having a hard time”, not “giving you a hard time”. You don’t apologise to fellow shoppers when your child is melting into the supermarket floor in a puddle of angry tears; you’ve cured yourself of being a people-pleaser. Instead, you calmly collect your baby off the floor and remind her she’s okay to feel angry that she can’t play “open the bottle” with the hormone supplement bottles on display at Aisle 3. You don’t say “good job” when she resumes operating within the realm of reason, and you know off the top of your head that “frustration tolerance” is the key skill to build, thanks Dr. Becky. You’re in a constant conversation with yourself, your therapist, your spouse, and even your own parents about the work it takes to be here, now, for your baby, as a full person.

Until you catch your child catch you catch a break on your phone!

Like I did when I strapped my toddler into her rear-facing car-seat, gave her a soft-ball to keep her busy, opened my phone for the first time that hour to let my brain rot for a minute, only to realise my supposedly rear-facing toddler had pulled her tiny body forward, landing her little hands in the car-seat crevices and pushing against her seat-belt at the chest clip to crane her neck a full 180 degrees towards me — and the front of the car — to get a glimpse of whatever it was I was gazing at.

She saw my phone, looked up, and looked at me. They were wide, beautiful, questioning, sad eyes.

I theoretically knew that awareness bubbles are palpable force-fields. That people can sense when they’re welcome to join a conversation among two others in a gathering. That we can signal unavailability and closedness from our bodies. That I can embody a sense of openness by becoming aware of the space “above and behind me”. I’d fixated over everything

Michael Ashcroft

had written online and practiced my learnings from his Alexander Technique course as much as I could in the little life I lived between mothering and working.

Yet, somehow, I hadn’t anticipated that my awareness bubble would feel so hostile and unwelcoming to my little human, or imagined that I’d be held accountable for it through her puzzled, dejected, little face.

In that moment, I was engulfed by shame, sadness, and some resentment. Was I really cut out to be a mum if I couldn’t even go by an hour of caregiving and babyloving without needing to pick up my phone?

But I was also surprised. I was sure I was doing okay as a parent. I was thoughtful, because I was overthinking everything — I was noticing my triggers, aware of the ghosts of my own childhood, watchful when they reared their heads, and careful to meet my own needs first when I was coming up on the feelings of anxiety and burnout. I was carving time out for my child, away from the manic culture of always hustling to stay on top of the precarious futures we had inherited. I was constantly re-evaluating play, to pave the way for fun that is wondrous and enlivening. I was turning to outdoor and sensory play when I could, and to open-ended play for its own sake when I couldn’t. And I was always there when she turned around to see if I was watching.

Yet, I wasn’t being thoughtful enough.

Or was it that I wasn’t mindful? In the one moment I’d let thought go to the winds, I’d regressed into my flailing, tired, overworked, millennial self.

My days were dotted with moments like these. Some of them were from me trying to catch up with texts and e-mail. Others were me just getting on with my workday or paying bills. Still others were me logging a bird I spotted on Merlin, or reading an acquaintance’s auto-fiction on Substack, or scrolling through Instagram’s algorithmically derived deck of ads for my next slow-fashion post-maternity wardrobe upgrade.

These moments were all different — some of them were chores that needed doing or work that kept the lights on, while others were play or connection or meaning.

But they were all the same — they splintered me into pieces that would queue their way into the Great Dissociative Online Void, in pursuit of cheap dopamine hits.

If I had pockets of such existential unmindfulness in my days, no amount of thoughtfulness could save me from failing my child. Because perhaps the things that we do that fail our children are not the things we intend to do with clear-eyed agency and volition. They are the things we unwittingly do when we are just being ourselves — our dark, tired, overworked, flailing selves trying to go about our days and our lives as we keep body and soul together. And in a life run on devices, that can mean constantly retreating into a place of collapsed awareness, as Michael so beautifully puts it.

Of course my child doesn’t know that we run the world on little gleaming metallic cases of silicon and lights. She experiences all that I do and all that I am in the same way, as directed at her. And if I’m looking at a device, she sees my casual, neglectful indifference to her inner-world.

Maybe she will decide to be different with her kids. To not make the mistakes she felt I made with her. Maybe she will overthink everything on the Intensive Progressive Parenting Curriculum of her time and reach the brink of burnout because she also has lives to lead and work to do and capitalism to survive, and by golly, one fine moment, may she ends up being existentially unmindful…

And so it goes on.