This weekend my family and I went away on a retreat to the mountains with a number of other families with young children. We had all been encouraged to leave our cell phones off, and I was happy to comply. It was easy to do because I wasn’t worried about getting things done or making plans for the weekend; my “job” while we were there was to hang out with my family and friends and take care of my kids.

The time away reminded me of a valuable parenting lesson: in order to be present with my children and tuned in to them (as well as myself), I need to find ways to turn off my mental list of everything I “need” to get done, if only for a few minutes at a time. It’s so easy and tempting to respond to one last work email, unload the dishwasher, answer the phone, put one more load of laundry in, or sort the mail. Look at me! I’m being productive!

But at what expense? At the expense of quality time connecting with my children? Sadly, the answer at times is yes. Now, certainly, I can’t give my kids 100% of my attention 100% of the time; it’s not good for them and it’s not good for me. They need to learn to play alone and navigate conflicts without Mommy stepping in constantly, and my sanity and career would go down the drain and our house would end up looking like a bomb hit it after about 24 hours. The key here is balance.

The question is what exactly do we “need” to get done? In the days before I had children, the answer was everything. I needed to check off every task on my to-do list, whether it was for work or taking care of our home or my personal health or connecting with family or whatever else I was working on at the time. After my daughters were born, my to-do list got even longer: do all of those things AND buy diapers and wipes and make …

“Fine. If you’re going to pee your pants again, then you can’t sit on the couch anymore tonight.”

I said those words to my four year-old daughter last night. She’s been potty trained for over a year now, but it’s been a bumpy road. Things had been going really well for a few months, and then the accidents started again just over a week ago. I’d been doing my best to stay patient, but it all fell apart yesterday. Thanks to a bout of insomnia, I was functioning on two hours of sleep. And by functioning, I mean not at all. Quite frankly, I was a mess.

My little girl cried; the couch is her preferred spot in our living room. I was conflicted. I felt terrible about how upset my daughter was, but I was at the end of my rope and I felt like I needed to make a point. I needed my daughter to understand that there are consequences to her actions.

She looked at me through her tears and said, “I wish you wouldn’t get angry at me, Mommy.”

Last week I wrote a post for Kveller.com about how much I didn’t want my daughters to take ballet. Even though I didn’t use the word “mindfulness,” the post was essentially about mindful (and mindless!) parenting. My initial reaction to the ballet issue was based almost entirely on my angst about my own terrible experience with ballet in my childhood and my worries about the future and what ballet might mean for my daughters.

I was totally unable to see what was right before me: two little girls who love dancing and a dance school that is fun, supportive, and kind to them.

The ideas of mindful parenting and mindfulness can get all tangled up in more specific words and theories about parenting and meditation and how should we respond to tantrums and whether or not we should use our smartphones around the kids. While those are all valid questions, when it comes down to it, mindful parenting is just about paying attention to what is in front of us.

That’s all.

At least once a week one of my friends or family members jokingly accuses me of mindless parenting. Chances are, they’re right. I first became interested in mindfulness and mindful parenting because I was unhappy with how often I was reacting to my daughters out of frustration, anger, or boredom. They’d whine or dawdle or throw tantrums or do something that is completely normal for a preschooler or toddler to do, and more often than not, I would snap or even yell at them.

I’m a year into my mindfulness practice, and I can honestly tell you that I still do snap and yell at my girls.

The difference is that now I have tools. Instead of constantly repeating a cycle of conflict and apologies, I know I can choose a more intentional way to engage with my kids. I am getting better at catching myself (sometimes before I lose my patience, sometimes right as it is happening, and sometimes well after the fact), taking a few deep breaths, and making a choice to respond differently. Sometimes I spend much of the day repeatedly reminding myself to breathe (and yes, I do feel like a bit of a crazy person on those days, probably because I am a bit of a crazy person on those days) because that’s what it takes to get me through each moment.

When I do lose it, I am less likely to berate myself for not being a better mother, which was my common reaction in the past. I used to convince myself that I was the only mother on the planet who yelled at her children, and I would sink into a place of deep shame and regret. Those negative feelings made it virtually impossible for me to come to a place of kindness towards myself and my kids.

Now, I try to forgive myself and remember that each moment is a new opportunity to make a different choice in how I want to respond to myself and my daughters. I try to remember that when I can create a little space in the …

Last Friday morning my nearly-three year old announced that she was done with diapers. She wanted to wear underwear, preferably of the Hello Kitty variety, thankyouverymuch. Fortunately, we had a few pairs in her dresser drawer that had been left untouched for almost a year, so off we went.

Let’s just say the weekend was messy. Very messy.

After we put the girls to bed the other night, it occurred to me that potty training is the ultimate challenge in mindfulness. I spent most of the weekend wanting to be anywhere other than where I was; during one particularly nasty accident, I literally left my poor husband to deal with it while I ran to the grocery store.

Potty training is all about getting past where we are now and moving on to the next stage of life. While there are certainly moments of joy in the middle of all of it (YAY! You pooped on the potty!), most of it is offensive to almost all of our senses. The thought of staying in the moment, of paying attention to what we see or feel or smell, is quite frankly, disgusting.  In addition, we all have thoughts about how it should proceed. They shouldn’t have poop accidents. They should figure out how to pee on the potty within three days. They should be dry overnight within a month.

Rarely does it happen the way we want it to, and we end up feeling frustrated or defeated, anxious and worried that our kid is never going to figure this out, or at least not according to our schedule.

There’s no question in my mind that mindfulness can make us all better parents, both by helping us to stay tuned in to our own thoughts and feelings so they don’t unconsciously dictate our actions AND by giving us the skills and tools to truly connect with our children so we can best respond to their thoughts and emotions with kindness. I have found that my own meditation and informal mindfulness practices have made a noticeable improvement in my ability to stay calm and choose how I want to respond to my girls, rather than reacting to them out of frustration or anger. I’m definitely not perfect, but it’s getting better.

To be honest, though, I had always thought that mindfulness was going to require more effort in my parenting. I worried that all of that awareness, all of that figuring out what is going on inside my crazy mind (as well as my daughters’ minds!) was going to be an awful lot of work. I decided to do it anyway, because the way I saw it, parenting is hard work no matter how you do it, so you might as well try to get it right, right?

Turns out I was wrong. I just read two studies by Karen Bluth and Robert Wahler at The University of Tennessee looking at the relationship between mindfulness and parental effort. They asked mothers of both adolescents and pre-schoolers to fill out scales measuring how generally mindful they are and also how much effort they expend in parenting. Not surprisingly, they found that “the mothers with high mindfulness scores reported less parenting effort and lower problems with their youth than did mothers with low mindfulness scores” (2011a, p. 177).

I am currently re-reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn. It’s a long book, but well worth the time. I came across this quote and wanted to share it:

“In the Zen tradition of meditation, people are fond of saying that the practice is nothing special. The practice is nothing special in the same way that being a mother or giving birth is nothing special, that being a father is nothing special, that being a farmer and bringing things forth from the land is nothing special, even that being alive is nothing special. That is all true in a way, but try telling that to a mother or a father or a farmer. ‘Nothing special’ also means ‘very special’. The utterly ordinary is utterly extraordinary. It all depends on how you see things, and whether you are willing to look deeply, and live by what you see and feel and know.”

Want more mindful parenting? Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

“Wow. I’m never going to get this right.”

Those words passed through my mind last night as I sat on the floor trying to focus on my breathing. I was in a conference room with nine other people, nine other parents who had also signed up to take a mindful parenting class at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts, Worcester.

As I heard my classmates talk about their struggles with raising their children—most of whom are much older than my own—it hit me. Hard. Parenting doesn’t get easier, and I’m never going to get it right.

Those seven words reveal a tremendous amount about how I have come to understand my role as a parent, for better and for worse (but in this case, mostly worse). On the harder days, the days when the girls and I seem to be taking turns throwing tantrums, when I am exhausted and can’t seem to get anything right and they can’t seem to do anything right, I beat myself up. I’m a bad parent. I’m too harsh on them. I should be nicer to them. Everyone else is a better mother than I am.

We’ve all been there. We’re standing in line at the grocery store or the pharmacy with a baby squirming in our arms and a toddler pulling at our pants when the person in line next to us (usually an older woman, but not always) looks over the scene of barely-controlled chaos before saying something along the lines of “Enjoy every minute. It goes by so quickly.”

I ‘ve heard some version of that little ditty more times than I can count. I usually respond with a weary smile, but what I really want to say is, “Really? REALLY? I’m exhausted, my four year’s old diet currently consists of boxed macaroni and cheese and blueberries, my two year old pooped in the tub again last night, they’ve both been tantruming like it’s going out of style, I can barely find my bed under the laundry, my husband is traveling again this week, and I am completely behind on all of my work deadlines, but thanks, yes, I’ll go right ahead and enjoy every minute.”

Perhaps a more mindful mother would be able to find the beauty in each moment of life (except the poop in the tub. There is nothing beautiful about poops in the tub). But the Dalai Mama I’m not, and statements about enjoying every minute with my children just leaving me feeling as though I’m doing something wrong because the truth is that there are far too many minutes when it’s all I can do to stay present, take a deep breath, and not lose it completely. And sometimes I can’t even do that.

Yesterday afternoon I made banana bread with my four year old daughter. To be honest, I’m not much of a cook and she’s not particularly interested in food preparation either, but we had a great time anyway. I didn’t snap, she didn’t whine, and neither of us threw a tantrum. After it was all over, I took some time to reflect on why it had worked out so well. I realized that it had nothing to do with what we were doing; I think we could have had just as much fun reading books or playing with blocks or baby dolls. The key was that for that hour, I gave her my undivided attention as we worked on a project together.

In all honesty, this is not a regular occurrence in our house. Even though I am alone with my daughters for several hours each afternoon, I’m usually trying to get dinner ready, giving them a bath or putting them to bed. While we may be doing these activities together, I’m either multi-tasking or  trying to teach them how to behave at the table or generally making them do something they would rather not do, like brush their teeth. Some days are more pleasant than others, but I wouldn’t usually call it fun.