My daughter asked me this question last weekend as we sat in the car at a particularly long red light, and I {gasp!} had pulled out my phone to check my email. The light had turned green, and my daughter noticed it before I did. “Mommy, are you paying attention?”
“No, I wasn’t paying attention.” I answered, putting down my phone. “But I should be.” Her question gave me serious pause. It just sounded so wise coming from her. Maybe it was the exact phrasing of what she said. Not “Mommy, the light is green!” Not “Mommy, it’s your turn!” But Mommy, are you paying attention?
And it especially hit me that the mom blogging about mindfulness got called out by her own daughter for not being very mindful!
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
Jose Ortega y Gassett
Time in the car with our children ~ to and from school, or dance classes, or Target ~ could be time spent paying attention to them in conversation. One of my colleagues once told me that she had some of her best conversations with her children while driving ~ they’re a captive audience in the car with us! And yet I had been checking my email. I’m sure I had been chatting with my daughter as well, but likely in a conversation peppered with “Uh-huh”s as opposed to genuine conversation as I drove, literally, on auto-pilot.
My daughter’s question made me think of something I had read in Real Simple a few months ago. The question posed to readers in that issue was “What is the best compliment you’ve ever received?” One mother wrote the following:
I’ll never forget what my eldest daughter told me when she was eight. The two of us were driving home from a day at the lake when she said, “Mom, you’re not like the other mothers. When I’m in the water and I say, ‘Watch me do this trick!’ you really watch. The other moms just say, ‘That’s nice,’ and don’t even look.”
How often had I been one of those “other mothers”? A few weeks ago, I was working at my desk and my three-year-old sat at the desk with me, coloring with his dry-erase markers and chattering constantly. I’m sure I was doing lots of “Uh-huh”s and “Okay”s and “Really?”s, but I wasn’t really listening, as I instead focused on my own work. At one point I remember hearing, “I need to get some tissues,” and then, “I need more tissues from the roll,” and finally, “Mommy, we need another toilet paper roll.”
“Uh-huh, okay…. Wait – What?! Another roll? Toilet paper?” And sure enough, I discovered an entire roll of toilet paper had been unraveled in his search to find a tissue to wipe off his dry-erase board! He’d been asking me, and telling me what he was doing, and I wasn’t paying attention. {And I think I remember a “I’m coloring my hand!” also being uttered at one point, as his hand was indeed covered in blue dry-erase marker!}
Yes, our jobs, and emails, and bills, and maybe Twitter, are important. But what had I missed by not paying attention? What message was I sending to my children by what I was paying attention to? I could have been spending the time in the car with my daughter talking about her week at school… but I was checking Facebook. My son wanted to share with me his drawings and tell me about them … but I wasn’t paying attention.
I vowed the next day to pay attention. On our short drive to work and school, my phone remained tucked away in my work bag. I pushed away the thoughts about work and my to-do list, and focused on my children. My daughter talked about the school buses she saw and how much she likes riding the bus. My son saw these trees {the phone remained put away ~ the photo was taken later!} and remarked, “Mommy, that is the biggest Christmas tree ever!”
It wasn’t magical, we didn’t have epiphanies, or discover insights into each other’s souls; it wasn’t deep or profound. But isn’t that what most of life is? The small moments filled with the mundane and the routines of living ~ and on that morning drive we were paying attention to all of it, and to each other.
On second thought, maybe it was magical.
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
