The Mess and the Noise
Parenting and pandemicking
I promise this isn’t turning into a mommy blog
As omnicron blitzed through NYC with an intensity rivaled only by Ye and Julia Fox’s big night out, my husband and I decided to keep our 3.5-year old son home from preschool along with our 2-year old daughter. This required extra time away from work so we could parent-as-a-verb before, throughout, and after the holidays. The plan was no family visits and no babysitters for 21 days while the curve flattened.
At the beginning of our self-imposed, better-safe-than-sorry lockdown, I read something by a child-free author that kept running on repeat in my head. The author gave a short list of reasons why some people don’t want to have kids, and one read “…the mess, the noise.”
I was bracing myself for so much mess and noise.
But here’s the twist: when I was able to take a clean break from work and become an archetypal devoted mother, things got less messy and noisy in both the literal and abstract sense. When I decided to be wholly unbothered by a task list that usually runs through my head like the NASDAQ ticker, I got to just be with my kids. Like, sit quietly and do the Play-Doh with them instead of setting them up with Play-Doh and hoping they enjoy themselves while I tap out emails on my phone.
It sounds super-obvious, but it’s also the gist of every parenting book I read over the holidays. There are different schools, styles and strategies — like a million of them if you search parenting books on Amazon — and none of them will put the same simple concepts plainly, otherwise you wouldn’t buy their too-long books. So I’ll do it for you:
When you’re with your kids, try to be as attentive and undistracted as possible. Take yourself out of the equation.
Don’t argue with them about their feelings or what they want because none of those things are wrong. You can validate them without being a pushover. Which brings us to…
Set boundaries and keep them. Inconsistency makes kids anxious.
That’s it, that’s every parenting book in a nutshell. “It’s the same picture,” as the meme goes.
P.S. none of those things are easy and my hot streak is dissipating since we’re no longer “on vacation.” But it got me thinking about attention, distraction, and compartmentalization.
A recent Hidden Brain episode and this Atlantic article feature psychologist Wendy Wood, an expert on habits who says one of the most important factors in establishing a new routine is eliminating the distraction around it. She calls it “reducing friction,” (which also happens to be a marketing term for making it easy for people to buy things). Take the thinking out of tasks (again, removing yourself from the equation) so they become automatic behavior is how you get things done. It’s why people run first thing in the morning, so they don’t get distracted or have time to talk themselves out of running.
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell frames being deliberate in how you spend your time and what you pay attention to as an act of resistance, because there are entities that profit off our distraction (social media) and our obsession with productivity (employers). If everyone redirected their attention and labor toward tasks, activities, or thinking that is more meaningful to them, it would be revolutionary. The “attention economy” would crumble.
As an anxious freelancer who is terrified of blind spots and poverty, being focused on a singular task that doesn’t turn a profit feels like a luxury. I never realized how much class and career anxiety would seep into the time I spend with my kids, along with my regular free-floating anxiety. When I am with them, I am not producing, earning, advancing. There’s a nagging inside that says I should be doing something else, be it cleaning or careering, because if I’m not doing it all right now I’m not doing it right.
If you’re career-focused and don’t feel like a natural-born mother, kids can feel counter to self-actualization. This was illustrated beautifully in the flashback scenes of The Lost Daughter. The movie’s theme around how parenting requires a constant selfless focus was summed up by the (cringe-y) Peter Sarsgard character when he quoted Simone Weil:
When I was able to show rare and pure generosity toward my kids, something shifted for all of us. The work-life “balance” I had tried for the previous four years turned out to be nothing but blurred boundaries and scattered attention. It was a lot of mess and noise.
Focusing on one job, keeping my kids safe and somewhat happy, created an unprecedented harmony in our apartment. I understood all the moms who opted out of traditional careers in 2020. Momming is exhausting, but it’s more lovely when you’re not also Slacking with a product team all day.
Now that I’m back to the grind, the pandemic is still pandemicking, and we had to send our unvaccinated kids (they’re under 5, don’t come for me) back to preschool as a calculated risk, I’m wondering if radical compartmentalization is possible. Doing one thing at a time so I am fully present for the thing. Designated momming hours, designated work hours, and a Berlin wall between the two. Like most ideal parenting set-ups, it’s probably impossible for single moms and people without flexible schedules. Also, no matter how firm your boundaries, kids don’t care about your designated “me time” and will scale that wall if they see it, no problem.
Maybe the next truly harmonious time for our family will be next year’s holiday break, but in the meantime, “full and singular focus” is my newest aspiration. Doing less and doing it well. The mess and noise are not my kids, it’s my phone and a world that demands a specific kind of ambition from women. Reducing that friction is liberating.