The Cult of Being a Present Parent

This week I described myself to a friend as a C- mum and I still can’t work out if that is self-aware or self-deprecating….

This is the eighth January I’ve been entirely responsible for my own income aka, had no actual job, desk or specific responsibilities to get back to. Historically, I’ve struggled with this month of earning precisely £0, with its near-total inertia and my feelings of thwarted enthusiasm. Professionally re-toxing into the new year is so much harder than detoxing from the old one, simply because it doesn’t happen on my timeline. You can be restored AF, with the ink on your manifestation board bone dry, but no matter your positive intentions, out there, it’s crickets. Staring down the gauntlet of zero confirmed revenue is terrifying, but having done this for so long, I can hopefully comfort anyone in a similar position by saying that things have, as of yet, always picked up. With that experience, I have also better relaxed into the annual fallow period and there’s none of the insomnia-inducing panic of yesteryear. I mutter to myself that the work will come and that my peers and employers have not forgotten I exist over Yuletide. Anyway, as the stoics have taught me, there’s no point worrying about it twice, so I try very hard not to.

What this enforced down-time comes complete with is—of course—extra childcare and household responsibilities. As I’m ‘there’ even more, I’m available to nurture ‘for free’, so of course that’s what I have been doing. And with it being the new year, I always find a renewed desire to be good at it. This year, more than ever before, that has expressed itself in the urge to be present. Every square I scroll, my recommended book releases and inbox newsletters—seemingly everywhere I turn—I am being persuaded that the best present a parent can give is being present and that this seemingly straightforward remedy is the ticket to the future success and happiness of my entire family. The cult of presence, being in the moment, presently living every second of each day has long, deep roots in ancient philosophy and there is little doubt that mindfulness offers many and varied benefits to life and your enjoyment of it. Slowing down, smelling the roses, pressing pause on the infernal, internal monologue and connecting with what’s in front of your face has so many endorsements.

In saying that, I’ve started to find all this talk ebb away at my confidence as a parent, because whisper it…sometimes I don’t want to be present in my reality. Sometimes I want to be far, far away. There are times while looking after my kids that I would prefer not to ground myself in what’s front of my face. Instead, I want to wander in my imagination and think of other things which pique my curiosity and excitement, because I happen to not enjoy every single second of soft play or diggers or trudging through the rain with a buggy or dealing with a screaming two-year-old who has just thrown the well-balanced meal I have lovingly prepared for him up the wall. I hope it goes without saying that I have many wonderful times with my children. But not always being present while looking after them is my coping mechanism to deal with the reality of actually doing it. If I were present for every tantrum, every Peppa episode, every scour of the floor with a sponge post tea time, I cannot guarantee my mental health would still be intact.

Recently I’ve thought how much the pressure to be present reminds me of dieting. On days where I haven’t used my phone much while I’ve been with my kids, when the iPad hasn’t come out, when we have done more to stimulate them than me, I feel saintly and buoyed by the sense I have done something morally good, like I used to feel when I’d been ‘good’ with my food or slogged it out at the gym. Whereas when they’ve had to follow me around on errands or struggled to sleep in a café while I gossiped with girlfriends or I’ve caved to the Pad, or soothed my tedium with scrolling, I conversely feel morally corpulent. I know these moral dichotomies serve no-one and guilt about your performance in the parenting Olympics is never going to win you any medals (spoiler: there are no medals). I also know the least present thing you could probably do is worry about being present. And yet, here we are.

The difficult thing to admit is that I have no problems being present at work. I have no problems flowing in the moment when I write. In fact, during a good portion of the time when I’m meant to be present as a caregiver, I am thinking about ideas, perfect sentences and funny innuendos to finish paragraphs. I understand, from speaking with other women, that not everyone feels this way. I used to think they were lying, but on closer inspection I’ve not found that to be the case. What I do know is that this contemporary focus on constant presence, especially within child-rearing has profoundly impacted how I perceive myself as a parent and I’m sure that many others of you out there can relate. This week I described myself to a friend as a C- mum and I can’t work out if that is self-aware or self-deprecating.

On one hand, without question, I am so much more present than my parents ever were. The statistic that today’s working mothers spend as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mums did in the 1970s doesn’t surprise me. My mum read a lot of books and magazines to while away the time when I was in my infancy and then felt her role was to supervise rather than stimulate us as my brother and I grew. We tagged along with my parents to things they liked to do – with mum that meant BBQs, museums and galleries, with dad, pretty much exclusively beer halls. We both became independent thinkers, and we’ve never relied on either of our parents to initiate our imaginations. But perhaps, that’s why I’m so shit at playing—because no one really played presently with me.

Either way, I can’t shake that it’s my maternal Achilles heel. It doesn’t matter that I cook their every meal, wash every piece of never-ending clothing, plan the lovely days, pack their school bags, stitch them stockings and love them with the passion of a thousand suns, because I can’t manage the supposed ticket to truly good parenting. I just don’t seem to be able to grapple with the repetitiveness of the granular tasks that real presence would require. Blotting an amount of it out, while looking forward to cocktail hour or days working is a far more accurate assessment of how I spend my days caring, no matter how much I try.

What I do know is that everything with parenting culture is cyclical. Generation Doomers (the hellish name for our youngest cohort, let’s hope sociologists reconsider it) may one day be denigrated because of their need for intense engagement. Indeed, their successors’ parents may be schooled to back away from the intensity of dedicated presence. Perhaps in the 2030s, I might be deemed an A* parent. Probs not with the emphasis on gin o’clock, but you get the gist. I’ve written about my quest for self-compassion and in that vein, I’ve decided to tune out of the presence pressure this January and remind myself that we all bring different things to the table—it’s only the value system we happen to be born in which defines the hierarchy of what is worthy. I would even go so far to argue against constant presence, because I do believe zooming out of the moment from time to time, gives you the stamina to be the ‘best version’ of yourself for the long haul. It certainly helps me validate the oscillating emotional range of two under fives (‘I understand you were frustrated by your brother breathing close to your face. That’s tough.’). Either way, I know I’m getting no closer to presence by chastising myself for my lack of mental discipline—so much of parenting is about backing yourself and I don’t need to dwell on anything else that undermines that. Instead, I’ll be spending that energy swimming in the pools of my personal reveries, until the next splat of smashed avo hits the dado, obvs.