Elana Kirsh

Tag: working mothers

  • Working from Home is the Enemy of Mindfulness

    On the face of it, I have a fairly ideal work-from-home situation right now.

    For starters, I have a job – already going better than millions of people around the world. And I actually love my job. I feel like I’m doing good for the world, the people I work with and myself every day, which gives me a steady sense of purpose and meaning. Added to this, my husband isn’t working at the moment, so the bulk of childcare responsibilities – of which there are many – fall on him. This means that apart from feeling guilty about not spending more time with the kids, and not helping him out more, I’m able to work largely uninterrupted for hours on end. Not a luxury that most working parents with young families have right now.

    The cherry on top is my workspace – a granny-flat-turned-home-office on the roof of our apartment. It’s comfortable, quiet, and breezy, and our new dog (I’ll share musings on him in a separate post soon) keeps me company while demanding very little. He also never interrupts Zoom meetings and pulls faces behind me while I’m talking to potential clients, so that’s another win.

    My point is – I know I’ve got it pretty good. And I’m grateful for these circumstances every day…

    And yet.

    I’m finding it really fucking hard to ever finish work these days. To draw a line and switch over to family time, to time with my husband, or even *gasp* to me time. I’m constantly thinking about work, going over challenging conversations, mentally fiddling with budgets and ideas, planning future difficult conversations, building road maps. Writing back to texts and emails and Slack messages while the kids are in the bath.

    It’s better on the weekends. Even if I work for a few hours on Friday morning and a couple more on Saturday evening, in the time in between I’m largely able to enjoy time with the kids, meandering walks with the dog, a family dance party on the roof, maybe even a movie on Friday night. Well, the first 20 minutes of a movie before I pass out on the couch. Really I just stay awake for the ice cream.

    But on work days, mindfulness is eluding me.

    I realized yesterday that part of it is the absence of a commute. We bitch and moan about traffic jams and late trains and how much time we waste commuting, yet it serves a purpose other than just moving from us Point A to Point B. Being in physical transition facilitates a psychological transition, too. My drive to the office takes about half an hour, and gives me time to mentally go from home to work, from work to home. After getting everyone up and ready in the morning and dropping them off, the drive gives me time to switch from being “mama me” to “work me.” And even when I rush out of the office on my “short” days, to pick up GG and Little A from kindergarten and spend the evening with them, I’m usually able to process whatever I was working on, mentally leave work, and ultimately be present with the kids until they go to sleep.

    At home it takes me less than a minute to get to “the office,” and I’m usually carrying or dragging some combination of laundry, a whiny child, a dog, dishes and a computer with me, and often already on a work call, to boot. Half of my mind is still downstairs with the family when I’m up at work, and when I come down, say to have lunch with them, a good chunk of me is still in the last call and writing up an email summary and scanning and re-prioritizing my to-do list.

    It’s exhausting.

    And basically the opposite of mindfulness.

    I wish it was just affecting me, but it’s not. My husband told me yesterday that sometimes it feels like I’m not really here, and I couldn’t even argue with him. He’s right. I’m not here. Not all of me anyway. And if he feels like this the kids probably do, too.

    Trying to meditate
    Meditating together doesn’t work, just FYI

    As always my unexpected guru, he made a suggestion that I’m gonna try this week. Sounds silly but I believe in environmental reminders to trigger behavioral changes. He suggested that instead of coming “home” from work through the internal stairs, that I leave the building via the elevator, take a walk around the block – not on a work call – and then walk in the front door. Maybe this way, even in a few minutes, I’ll be able to trigger that transition that I usually get on the commute. To leave work behind, even for a couple of hours, and just be with the kids.

    I also know that – as is so often the case for me – meditation is part of the answer here. My practice has been rocky lately. I still meditate every morning, but so often I find that the bell dings after half an hour and I realize that I’ve basically just been sitting on my ass on a pretty cushion, legs crossed, back straight, face relaxed… thinking about work. When my mind is all over the place like this I find that a stricter, less spacious and all-encompassing technique is more effective at holding and cultivating my attention – so I think I’ll try some body scanning and super-zoomed in attention practices this week.

    None of this is going to change the fact that we’re all kind of going nuts with this social distancing, the kids need their routine, my husband needs to be able to focus on his work, and the extrovert in me is killing to see other people. But something tells me that a bit more mindfulness and presence might take the edge off the suffering. And shine a light on the beauty in every moment, too.

  • Guilt and Mindfulness

    I’ve been feeling guilty lately. Kind of an occupational hazard of being a Jewish mother I guess, especially a Jewish mother who works. Hard. So guilt in and of itself probably isn’t that interesting.

    But this recent guilt has felt kind of different, more nuanced than the never-ending “did-I-do-the-best-I-possibly-could-for-my-child-at-any-given-moment” shit that I think all mothers feel. All parents, probably. For that particular flavor of guilt I’ve had decent success with the “good enough mother” theory, which holds that children actually benefit from having a mother who fails them from time to time.

    My recent batch of guilt is more like this: I work a lot – both at the office and at home. I get home after my kids are already asleep three days a week. I left them with my husband for a few days recently for a conference, and I’ve got a few more coming up next year. But all of that I can deal with; I know we’re setting a good model for them of an egalitarian household. I feel guilty because since starting this new job I’m having a fucking blast doing it. The content is inspiring and interesting and important. I work with amazing people. The energy is flowing – I feel like I could work basically non-stop and not get tired of it.

    And it feels like it’s not meant to be like that. Like if I’m going to be away from my family for so many hours, to put the kids to sleep and then keep working, to find patches of time on the weekend to catch up from the week gone by and set up the week ahead – I’ve gotta at least resent it. And I don’t. Not at the moment.

    A couple of days ago I booked a flight to join some colleagues on a short trip to Amsterdam in a couple of months. Half work half play. I’d been umming and ahhing for a few days and I just decided fuck it, you only live once, right? But something was still niggling. I decided to check in with my husband, to try to work out what wasn’t sitting right. Keep in mind, my husband is somehow more of a feminist than me – he’s not fussed at all by our down-the-middle split parenting arrangement.

    Am I pushing it? I asked. Spending too much time at the office, traveling too much?

    He told me he doesn’t care about that, said I should do what I’ve gotta do. “But when you’re here with us, be here with us. We need you too.”

    Bam, straight to the heart. Straight to my supposedly-mindful-mother heart.

    I took a deep breath, quelled the defensive response welling up inside of me.

    Because he’s right. That’s what I’m feeling guilty about. I text and check my emails during the limited time I have with the kids far too often. I send work emails at 7am in between breakfast and brushing teeth and smoothies. What’s the point of getting up at 5am to meditate every day if I check my emails the second the bell goes off, and leave that mindfulness on the cushion?

    I felt totally ashamed, for my husband to have to tell me this. I mean, I’m meant to be the mindful one. And yet so grateful that he did. Because it’s spot on, and so easy to implement, once I’m paying attention.

    It’s been two days, a full weekend, and I feel so much better. That’s not to say that I didn’t work over the weekend – I did. But I was less attached to my phone, less lost in work in my head, and more importantly – more present. More patient and creative with the kids. More appreciative of how fucking awesome they are, and how lucky we all are to have each other, and what a crucial part of my life they are.

    Even if they’re not the only driving force in my life, or the only thing I think about.

    We’ll see if this flows through the week, and the month, and with me to Amsterdam.

    But for now – I already feel less guilty.

  • My Husband is More of a Feminist Than Me

    My Husband is More of a Feminist Than Me

    I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without my husband.

    There, I said it.

    This exhausting juggle, the delicate balance of being the mother I want to be, having the career I want to have and smooshing in some intentional living and the occasional yoga class in there – I simply wouldn’t be able to do it without him.

    This is not just about chores – though this man of mine does more than his share. It’s about the way he sees our partnership, our family. He’s not helping me out, he’s not babysitting the kids; he’s parenting just like me. We’re running this show together. And somehow it’s simply obvious to him that it should be that way.

    I say somehow, but I have a pretty good idea of why. Unlike most men of his generation, my husband grew up in a household where both parents worked, where both parents had interesting, often demanding careers. The running of the household fell evenly on both parents, depending on who was doing what at the time. And it seems to me that this reality was the starting point for his views on fatherhood, and the way he naturally slipped into the role.

    Ironically, sharing the gig is harder for me. While for my husband the idea that we share pick up and drop off 50/50 since we’re both working full-time is a no-brainer, to me it still feels like a favor, like something I have to say “thank you” for. Something to feel guilty about. And without pointing fingers, I’m sure this is connected to the far more traditional way the running of our household was split between my mother and my father.

    So I’m pushing through those uncomfortable feelings in the hope that it will become second nature for me one day, too. And perhaps even more importantly, so that our children will grow up in a household where this is the norm. Where both mum and dad can be present in the family, solid role models, and follow their own paths at the same time.

    Maybe this isn’t everyone’s feminism. Maybe it’s just where I am on the journey. But this is how I feel. Like I believe in equal rights in my head already, but not yet in my gut. And perhaps ironically, my guide to that next stage has a penis.

    Zooming out of my little house, though, I know it’s not just me. And it’s about something far bigger than equal parenting.

    I’ve been listening to this fantastic podcast recently, The Guilty Feminist, and one of the comedians on the show said something that really stuck with me. She pointed out that the improvement in the status of black people in the US didn’t happen because black people changed – but because white people did. Black people could have done all the lobbying and marching and protesting they wanted, but ultimately white people needed to change for society to change.

    The same must be true for men and feminism. We need men to help change attitudes towards women in the workplace if we’re ever going to be truly equal. We need men to hire women, mentor women and promote women. We need men across the board, in all industries and levels and positions of power, to take sick leave when their children are home from school, to take any paternity leave offered – even if they get funny looks for doing it. We need men to speak out against rape culture, to say “don’t be a dick” when their friends say something gross, to really listen to the dialogue around women’s rights that’s going on right now. To look inside themselves and bring change from within.It seems to me that this is the only way things will change.

    My husband is this sort of feminist, though he probably wouldn’t call himself one. He’s the man who brings his baby with him to meetings – because neither of us could miss work that day and she wasn’t feeling well. He’s an expert in breastmilk handling and storage. He leaves work at 3pm twice a week to be with the kids, and when I get home from work at 9pm the kids are clean and fed and sleeping, the house is in order and sometimes there’s even food on the stove. And to be clear – his job is not cushy at all, and on the days that I’m with the kids he’s also at the office late catching up. He encourages me and makes space for me to follow my path – whether that means saying yes to an exciting-but-demanding work opportunity, staying out late to see a friend, or taking a nap on the weekend.

    Perhaps he’s not more of a feminist than me, maybe it’s equal just like everything else.

    Either way, I couldn’t do any of this without him.

  • I Need an Extra Day a Week

    I Need an Extra Day a Week

    If only I  had an extra day in the week, then I’d be able to get things done. I’d stick it in somewhere between Tuesday and Wednesday, right when things are always starting to pile up. Right when it’s all starting to feel like too much.

    I’d finally have time to exercise, meditate, to write. I’d find the perfect dance class at the perfect time in the perfect location. Smack bang in the middle of my extra day. Boogie all my cares away.

    I’d get ahead of the laundry, organize the piles of clothes that my kids are growing out of faster than I can buy them new ones. I’d cook nutritious food that they’d both love, and I wouldn’t order pizza and eat it in an exhausted heap on the couch watching episodes of Friends for the millionth time.

    This blog would always be updated. And it would be better written, more insightful, and outrageously popular on social media.

    I’d fit in a couple of hours of volunteering, spend quality one-on-one time with my kids, and top it all off with a date with my dear husband in which we have enough energy for a real conversation. And I’d have time to change my clothes and wax my lip beforehand. And we wouldn’t waste half the night speaking about logistics for the rest of the week. And maybe we’d even have sex when we get home.

    But there’s no such day, of course. And if there was, daycare probably wouldn’t be open and I’d still have work to do, so my lip would look just the same, and this blog would still be hanging on for dear life, and the laundry would be peeking out of the basket taunting me the same as it always does.

    So I guess I have to go for Plan B.

    Acceptance and prioritization.

    This is the reality of my life right now: I have two small children, a husband and a fairly intense job that requires a 2 hour plus commute every day. These are the priorities I have chosen for right now.

    So I’ve gotta own them. And stop beating myself up for not fitting in all the shit that I think I “should” be doing, everything I’d do if I had that magical extra day per week. It’s just not feasible right now. I can’t do it all.

    If I heard one of my close friends, a fellow mother, beating herself up like I do in my head, I’d stop her in her tracks. I’d tell her she’s supermum, that she’s beautiful just the way she is, that to her children she is everything she needs to be, that no one at work realizes when she feels like she’s just barely keeping it together and that she totally just zoned out in the middle of that meeting. That she’s doing just fine.

    I’d also tap into the voice of the older, wiser, mother inside me, and tell her what I know to be true, though sometimes it seems like a platitude. That this too will pass. That soon she’ll sleep through the night, most nights, then one day every night. That she won’t be breastfeeding forever. That things will be different, maybe even easier.

    That everything is perfect just as it is. Messy and exhausting and intense, but perfect all the same.

    So screw the extra day, for now. It’s not like I’d get any sleep beforehand anyway.

    Life is perfect, just as it is
    Life. Messy and happy and perfect, every day.

  • Meditation, interrupted

    I finally have a few minutes to myself. The boys are out, the baby is upstairs asleep, and there’s no pressing work to do. It’s Saturday morning. All is still.

    My mind whirrs into action, trying to figure out what to do with this precious gift of time. Do I sit and write? Cook? Clean? Declutter? Do I call a friend? Dust off my yoga mat and move my body?

    I choose to meditate. It’s been way too long.

    I grab a cushion, sit myself down among the toys strewn around the floor. I set a timer for 20 minutes. On one hand it seems like nothing – I used to sit for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening – and on the other hand… 20 uninterrupted minutes? That’s an eternity.

    The bell dings, I settle in. My mind is a mess. Loud and frenetic. But of course, after a few minutes, it starts to settle. I sink into that familiar old sensation of being here. In the moment. In my body first and then in my mind.

    At 9 minutes and 45 seconds a different bells dings – Little A, crying upstairs. At first I wait, maybe she’ll go back to sleep. Not happening.

    So I take my meditation upstairs with me, I notice the cold of the stairs on my feet as I run up to her. I gather her up in her blankets and smell her little chocolate milkshake smell. I notice how my heart swells.

    Something’s bothering her. She twists in my arms. So big and so expressive yet still such a baby.

    For once, I’m actually there with her. Not looking at my phone over her shoulder, not wishing she’d hurry up and get to sleep so I can start getting GG into bed, or get back to work, or go to sleep myself.

    She gets herself comfortable in the nook of my elbow, rests her little head and drifts back off. She reaches for my face in her sleep.

    And I’m still there, still meditating, present with her. I am hers and she is mine. I’m pretty sure I can feel the oxytocin flooding my body.

    I look down at her peaceful face and realize I don’t take photos of her sleeping anymore. I used to do it all the time when she was little. Another reminder that time is passing. As it always does. That it’ll pass no matter what.

    To be honest, at first when I heard her voice as I was meditating I felt annoyed. I can’t even get 20 minutes uninterrupted.

    But as I snuggled her back into her bed I felt so grateful I could cry. I feel so far away from my kids through long days at the office during the week. Through rushed bedtimes and difficult mornings.

    This is the antidote – actually being with them when I’m with them.

    She relaxes into her bed and I come back downstairs, free again. Time to chop veggies, sort out bags for the new week, tidy up a bit. Maybe I’ll finish the meditation later. It’s the usual grind, but hopefully I can be a little more present as I move through it.

  • An Afternoon Oasis in a Sea of Stress

    What a perfect afternoon.

    An afternoon to remind me of the power of one-on-one time. Of observation and connection. Of slowing down.

    Straight after GG’s nap – when he’s often super grumpy – I took him out for a date. And yes, I totally bribed him out of his bad mood with ice cream, I’ll admit it. But watching him eat it was a meditation. He loved every lick, every bite of the cone. He was so in the moment he couldn’t even speak to me while he ate.

    Every meal should be like a 3-year-old boy eating ice cream.

    After the ice cream we ran around an empty mall. Hopped, jumped, fell to the ground at his whim. I showed him how to do somersaults in a baby play area. I fought the urge to play with my phone when his attention wandered from me, and instead kept mine glued to him. Yet another exercise in mindfulness. In staying in the present for once.

    On the way home we stopped to fill the car up with petrol. He got out with me and asked questions. A million “why’s” that for once I had the time and the head space to answer. Or try to answer.

    Why is petrol dangerous for little kids, anyway?

    It was just an hour and a half, but we so needed that time, GG and me. Time together with no agenda, no bathing or dinnertime or bedtime battles. No baby sister or other adults. Just us.

    When we got home, some kids from his new kindergarten were meeting in the local playground, so his dad took him to join them. And so it was just me and Little A at home. Again – a rare treat.

    Babies seem simpler, but I think that’s just because we don’t pay them enough attention.

    Every move this kid makes is an exploration, an experiment, an expression. Every turn of her hand is a preparation for her next move, or bite of food, or request. And I’m her mama, I know her back to front, I can preempt her requests before she’s even made them – but sometimes it’s beautiful not to. Rather, to lay next to her and see the world through her eyes for a few moments.

    We ate, played, bathed. For once I wasn’t rushed as I washed her, fending off GG’s “help” in the form of buckets of water on her head. Instead I watched her examine each toy with her mouth, giggled with her, cuddled and marveled at how big she’s gotten, though it seems like she was born just yesterday.

    It all sounds awfully flowerly, I know. But that’s really how it felt.
    An oasis of joy in a sea of stress, emails, anxiety, drop offs and pick ups.

    A reminder of what it’s all about.

  • On Tiredness

    When I was first learning to meditate, I remember feeling so left out of this tiredness thing that the teachers were always speaking about. I’d see people on retreats falling asleep while meditating, standing up to avoid nodding off, asking questions about how to avoid it. And I just didn’t get it. I was so filled with energy, with movement. I struggled with the opposite issue – with restlessness, the urge to fidget, with excess energy.

    I was so out of touch with what tiredness meant that I couldn’t even label it to observe it.

    Now, some 7 years later, I’m a fucking tiredness master.

    I am perpetually exhausted. I can observe the sensations of tiredness in intricate detail, I can feel it in every cell of my body. I can observe what it’s doing to my mind and my emotional stability. My sex life. My work. My relationships.

    I’ve always been able to function on relatively little sleep. My father is the same, and his mother before him. Six hours and I’m golden. Eight hours and I’m diamond encrusted, sure, but it’s not a necessity. Even as a baby I had mega FOMO, always preferring to stay up to avoid missing any fun over getting my beauty sleep.

    In recent years, largely thanks to my sleep-worshiping husband, I’ve learned to value my rest. To prioritize it when necessary. To identify the times when I’m tired and would be better off refueling than burning the candle at both ends, as is my natural tendency. I’ve intentionally rewired, in a way. A good way, I think.

    Nonetheless, my ability to get by without that much sleep has served me well in the initial months with both my babies. Whereas I know many new parents suffer from exhaustion in the first days and weeks after bringing a new baby home from the hospital, I run on adrenaline through the Fourth Trimester and beyond. I relish the early morning hours up with my babies, the excuse to be texting round the clock, the afternoon naps. I’m tired, sure, especially the second time around, but not exhausted.

    Until somewhere around the 6-month mark. that’s when I hit a wall.

    And right now, I feel like I’ve been running into that wall, reversing, and running into it again, over and over, for about 3 months.

    It was the same with GG. I put it down to going back to work, but I think it’s probably a combination of factors. A hormonal shift, developmental changes in the little one, and a sleep deficit so huge that I can no longer power through it with homemade dark chocolate and a good attitude alone.

    This afternoon when I was driving home from work I was terrified that my eyes were going to give out. I guess I mean I was worried that I’d fall asleep, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like I just couldn’t focus anymore, that I could only see the dashboard and not the road. So I pulled over and set my alarm for 7 minutes – the most time I figured I could afford in order to still make it to pick up the kids on time – and closed my eyes. I woke up with a start to the timer going off, felt much better, and had a nice afternoon with the kids without passing out and leaving them to fend for themselves. That felt like a win.

    This sort of exhaustion is something totally foreign to me.

    If I stop typing right now and pause, I can feel it. In the aching headache always sitting just behind my eyes, like two tiny hands squeezing my eyeballs. In the almost unnoticeable lag in my vision, like my brain is only just keeping up with the information it has to process second-to-second. I can feel it pulling me downwards into the couch, like a sleepy gravity-booster. Willing me to just give it up, to lay down, to become one with the cushions.

    And it’s not just my body. My mind is also a victim. I went back to work after a 6-month maternity leave 2 months ago, to a new job. A job at which a high-functioning brain is a solid prerequisite. And multiple times a day it’s like I can feel my mind trying to think and just stalling, over and over again. Like it knows what it needs to do but just can’t do it. At least not at the required speed.

    And this tired mind of mine, it plays tricks on my emotions. It makes me sensitive and anxious and easily irritated. A winning combination for when I’m already feeling like the stupidest version of myself.

    It’ll get better, I know. Little A will sleep better and I’ll settle back into being a working mama. We’ll all sleep through the night again one day.

    For now, I take solace in being able to call a spade a spade. In hanging onto some last thread of mindfulness in recognizing tiredness and how it feels right now. I’m grateful for the rest that I do get, and I hail its restorative powers by pondering its very absence.

    Enough musing. You get it. I’m exhausted.

    Time for sleep.

  • How to Be a Mindful Working Mama

    How to Be a Mindful Working Mama

    Being a working mama is hard. I went back to work full-time after seven months on maternity leave, and the month that followed was one of the hardest of my life. I was nervous about leaving GG, getting my brain back into work mode was hell, I was racked with guilt, and exhausted to boot.

    Now, one-and-a-half years later, I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on it. I’m sure in a few years time I’ll have loads more insight to share – it’s a skill after all, and this is all just practice – but this is what I’ve learned so far:

    1. Choose Your Job Wisely

    Being an awesome mama and having a thriving career aren’t mutually exclusive – but not every working situation is a good match for the gig. Especially not in the first few years. I had a high-pressure job that required insane hours and dedication a few years back and I loved it – but I recognize that right now is not the time for such a position.

    Similarly, two of my close friends are currently in the process of getting themselves out of work situations that are negatively effecting their personal lives. Two part-time jobs instead of one full-time job sounded like a great idea in theory – lots of flexibility and variety – but it turns out there’s no such thing as a part-time job. Instead, these two awesome mamas are neither seeing their kids as much as they want nor paying the bills, so they’re realizing that it’s time to reel it in.

    A full-time job can sound daunting right after maternity leave – especially if you’re off work for more than a few months, but if you choose a family friendly workplace and set some boundaries it’s actually a lot less work.

    2. Choose Your Childcare Wisely, Too

    This is crucial. If you have an uneasy feeling in your gut about how your baby is being treated, you’re gonna feel guilty about leaving them and going to work. If you feel 100% comfortable about the daycare situation, you’re more likely to feel like you’ve made the right choice. For me, it was even bigger than that. I went back to work when GG was seven months old, and he’s been in a small family daycare ever since. From the first month I realized that not only was this okay – it was great for him. While we all had to adjust to eight hours apart five days a week, the clear reality was that GG was blossoming. He gained so much from making friends, learning how to go to sleep by himself, eating in group and making close relationships with other adults that now I wouldn’t have it other way.

    3. Be Where You Are

    Once you know that you’ve got a job that fits the life you want to lead and childcare that works for your family, it’s all about being where you are. If you’re thinking about work when you’re at home and home when you’re at work, you’re not being the best of yourself. Your work will suffer and so will your parenting. This is where you need to switch on your mindful attention.

    Here’s what works for me: as much as possible, I use the Pomodoro Technique to maximize my efficiency at work. I write detailed, prioritized to-do lists for the next day before I leave the office each day, and then I work in 25-minute time slots to get through the tasks. This is the kicker: I turn my phone onto airplane mode for 25 minutes at a pop, during which time I’m totally focused on the task at hand. I check texts, emails, Facebook etc. in short breaks in between.

    When I leave the office – I leave the office. When necessary I get in a few more hours at night once GG’s asleep, but from when I pick him up in the afternoon until he’s asleep, I’m in mama mode. I don’t answer phone calls, I don’t play with my phone except to take photos of him doing ridiculously cute things and I don’t check my emails. I enjoy every moment we have together – and I’m sure I’m a better mother for it.

    When you’re at work, be at work. When you’re at home, be at home. Leave the exceptions for real emergencies.

    GG visiting me at work last summer. A bad example of boundaries but a very cute photo. 

    4. Take a Mini Meditation Break

    I know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a lifesaver for me. I have an alarm set on my phone for 11:45am every day. If I’m not in a meeting or involved in an urgent task when it goes off, I shut my office door and meditate for 10 minutes. Ultimately I’d like to be meditating every morning/night too, but it’s not happening right now and these mini meditation breaks help me keep a base level of mindful attention throughout the day. Give it a go and see if it works for you.

    5. Reconnect at the End of the Day

    I find mindfulness really important to ease into the transition from work to mothering. I make a point of pausing before I knock on the door at daycare or walk in the door at home if GG is already home with his father or grandmother: I take a deep breath, and ground myself. I make sure I’m fully present for that moment when we reunite at the end of our days.

    Up until recently nursing was our reconnection ritual – now it’s finding a new place. Sometimes I join him in whatever he’s doing, sometimes it’s a long hug, sometimes a conversation. Making that conscious effort to really be with him for those first moments flicks the switch, and I’m home.