In 2010 Jacinta Tynan innocently sparked a media storm when her article in the Sun Herald exposed a fault line in our perception of motherhood. Her premise — that motherhood could be easy — split the parenting community down the middle. Many agreed with Jacinta while others argued that motherhood was arduous and thankless, all were equally passionate in their beliefs.

Four years later, now with two small children, Jacinta takes us on a fascinating journey through her own experiences of motherhood — from being so sick with her first pregnancy that she was throwing up in between her on-air segments, to her doubts about her ability to cope — and shows us her struggle to parent ‘consciously’, using meditation and attempting mindfulness to help her find her path.

While on this journey, Jacinta gives us a compelling analysis of the ideas and philosophies that surround contemporary parenting, as she also tries to understand why her comments caused such a storm. She asks other parents, health practitioners and childcare experts some key questions, such as:

• Why do we feel so strongly about sleep, breastfeeding and discipline for our children?
• Why do some parents find parenting easy and others a terrible trial?
• And why are mothers made to feel so guilty, all the time?

Part memoir about her experiences as a new mum, part passionate manifesto, Mother Zen questions whether society’s default position — that parenting is a tough and unrewarding job — is a valid one and opens up an important debate that goes to heart of our identity.

Here is an extract from Mother Zen by Jacinta Tynan…

Letter to Jasper:

I want to relive those early moments of your life, of the moment I met you. I replay them over and over in my head like the beginning of a love affair. Every detail. The first time I saw you, held you, noticed the light tinge of your hair, stroked your minute foot with its wrinkles and perfect toes, felt your little hand resting on my breast as you sucked. Looked into your eyes and told you I loved you. I tell you constantly so there will never be any doubt, ‘I love you, my darling angel.’

I’m not sure if I would have taken to it so well — being rendered choiceless — if it was to be that way forever. I’d like to think I would’ve reacted the same way, that I could have gone on endlessly in my bliss­ful bubble, ignoring emails and personal hygiene, cut off from the rest of the world and all its preoccupations. To let myself go, knowing it was the one time in my life when, if I disappeared for a bit, everyone would understand. After all, I was in love. But there was the likelihood that being rendered choiceless would, if there was no end in sight, start to wear thin. I wouldn’t know because I operated on the proviso that, with a job waiting for me on my return, this phase was temporary. And temporariness can mess with your mind.

By its very nature, temporariness has a habit of infusing everything with a distorted injection of sentimentality; you’re conscious that even as it’s happening, it’s on its way out. That works in motherhood’s favour, dissipating the fallout of potential irritations. You can put up with anything, come to love it even, if you are fully cognisant that as each moment slips through your fingers you will never get it back. Babies have a knack of not letting us forget that, changing as they do before our eyes. Even more so if we live in the present.

I had spent years trying with all my might to do that, to be present — though not exactly sure of what it meant and certainly to no avail — because I understood (in theory, at least) how staying pres­ent eliminates so much angst. Now there I was, after being no good at it at all, doing it with minimal effort. By having no choice to be any­where but with my baby, the present had become my default position.

Like half the planet I had read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I underlined (lots of) paragraphs that seemed so lucid on the page — ‘Love, joy and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance’ — closed my eyes and tried hard to grasp the concept, but for the life of me I couldn’t let go. I understood the theory — what perfect sense it made: that you can’t possibly find hap­piness when you’re hanging onto past hurts and resentments, that by ‘being present’ we can access our true self from where we can oper­ate with love and compassion. ‘As soon as you honour the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease,’ writes Tolle. How nice would that be.

I could see why Oprah anointed Eckhart Tolle as one of her chosen ones and why his books had sold a gazillion copies. I recommended The Power of Now to friends and lent my own weary copy to someone who loved it so much I never got it back. I didn’t need convincing of its merit. Yet I had decided present-dwelling was not for me. I could manage it for a millisecond and then, boom, back to ruminating on the past or dreaming of a more desirable future, catapulted so far out of the present that it was impossible to claw my way back. I was more comfortable, but not necessarily happier, teetering between the two.

Then along came my baby, ushering in the mighty present.

I was anxious enough about Jasper growing up too fast and slipping through my fingers that there was no danger of me rushing his baby­hood along. I didn’t want to will away one second of it, of this precious time together. That included the crying, the endless nappy changes, the futile hours of rocking him to sleep only to have him wake for an encore as soon as I edged out of the room. I wanted every one of these moments to count, as if each one was a last time. His feet would never be this tiny again. His cry won’t ever sound the same. The way he sleeps with his feet joined like a yogi, or a frog. That will pass. Soon he’ll be rolling over, they tell me. And sitting up, can you believe it? And eating from a spoon. In a highchair. One day he won’t want me to cuddle him — I can’t bear the thought. Thank god for now it is all that he wants.

When he was six weeks old, I wheeled my baby up to our first meeting at the local Early Childhood Centre for the council-gathered ‘Mothers’ Group’, a weekly check-in with other fledgling mums in the neighbourhood. ‘Let’s go around the circle and share how we’re all get­ting along,’ suggested the kind-looking moderator, the same one who had been to our home to weigh the baby and check all was well. When she got to me, I cried. ‘I have empty-nest syndrome already,’ I sobbed. ‘I’m just so sad that one day he’ll be leaving home.’ That breathtaking fear of the future was keeping me rooted in the present. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, but it was working for me.

The best way to be present is to be mindful, what Zen teacher and mother of two, Susan Murphy, calls ‘the gateway out of the steel teeth of time’. I was working on that too. If I could master mindfulness, living fully in the moment, I will increase my chances exponentially of appreciating my baby. Of appreciating motherhood. Even when the going gets tough.

Mindfulness is all the rage. It’s not just Eckhart Tolle on the band­wagon but all the grand masters of progressive thought, both contem­porary like Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama, Marianne Williamson, Maya Angelou and Mother Theresa: ‘Be happy in the moment, that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.’ And old school like Buddha, Jesus and Rumi: ‘Let go of your mind and then be mindful. Close your ears and listen!’

Buddhism for Mothers, the one book that spoke to me most through those early months of motherhood, was of course all for mindfulness too. Author Sarah Napthali, a practising Buddhist and mother of two boys, believes if we can manage to be mindful, we will heighten our experience of being mothers.

‘If we could learn to live in full awareness of our present moment and explore our own “nowness”, instead of rehashing the past or plan­ning the future, we would find more joy in our lives, even moments of unsurpassed bliss,’ she writes.

Before I had this baby to behold, I didn’t get it. I gave myself a head­ache trying to theorise how one is supposed to ‘live in full awareness of our present moment’. There is way too much else going on in any given moment to tune into this one. Now, post-baby, I knew exactly what Buddhism for Mothers was getting at: I might not always remember to be mindful (does anyone, really?), but I didn’t need much convincing that it was the best, healthiest way to be. It was worth my while to per­sist. Nothing was going to drag me away from these baby moments. These moments I had put off and waited so long for. Me as mother.

Except my job.

Having no idea about how I would feel about looking after a baby before I had one, I had only arranged to take six months off work. While I managed to stretch it, after the full glowing reality hit me, to eight, from day one motherhood for me came with a looming dead­line. As mindful and present as I was endeavouring to be, I couldn’t avoid the loitering awareness that I wasn’t going to be doing it, or not just it, for much longer. Jasper and I only had a short stab at this, our days rolling on with nowhere to be. And I wondered how much that informed my state of mind. Was I finding it all very easy (compared to before) to be in the moment, to be present and mindful, simply because I knew it was fleeting? Was I only able to latch onto the here-and-now because I had one eye on the clock?

I suspect that having a return-to-work date fuelled my ecstasy, and my newfound ease with loving it while it lasted. There’s every chance I might have been more apprehensive, less accommodating, less present or able to slip into mindfulness, were I looking down an endless bar­rel of motherhood full stop. Knowing I had a job to go back to might well have increased the urgency of having a good time while it lasted. I would never know but mindfulness might be a bigger ask of a mother with no end in sight.

The security of having a career on pause, mine for the taking when­ever I was ready, I have no doubt also buoyed me with a sense of still being someone, other than a mother. Knowing that I had an altogether other life on hold took the weight off being bored of the one I was in. Much like being able to make the most of your days stranded on a desert island if you know that a rescue boat was on its way. Although that’s a bad analogy because being a mother for me in no way resembled a desert island and rescuing I did not need.

As grateful as I was to have a job to go back to, one that I enjoyed and which kept my brain ticking over, and one that allowed me to work part-time, my return to work loomed ominously. Finicky things such as times and dates belonged to that other world, the one I had left so abruptly the second our baby arrived, and it felt like a vague and distant dream. Time had become relevant only for the duration between breastfeeds and knowing if it was time to get up for the day or go to bed at the end of it. The days blurred into one. In a good way. To brush up on world events — disasters and catastrophes in the main, and politics which, from where I now stood, seemed in the scheme of things so inconsequential — to put on makeup and a fitted jacket, to deliver the news to a few thousand strangers with authority and presence — was way too confronting and otherworldly to even contemplate from where I sat.

And so I didn’t. In the headspace where I might once have filed tsunami death tolls or the gruesome details of murders or bushfires, all the harder to fathom now, I learned the words to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and sang it uninhibited, waltzing my swaddled baby around the room. Whitney Houston’s ‘I-hi-hi Will Always Love You-oo-hoo’ made him giggle, funnier still for being ear-achingly off key. I Googled the lyrics of nursery rhymes as I had lullabies, and somewhere in the receptors of my brain, they came back to me. From when my younger siblings were little, I wondered? Or, comfortingly, was it from my own baby­hood, my own mother’s song cloaking my baby and me in a warm generational loop?

I crooned along to the Jersey Boys soundtrack, a night at the musical the only time his daddy and I had been out since Jasper was born, and all the lyrics seemed so apt, as if written for my state of mind: you’re just too good to be true …

I had no time to read my own books (they piled up by the bed like a wishlist for another time) yet I tucked into Peter Rabbit and the whole Beatrix Potter collection with great sentimental relish, delighted by the excuse to do so. As much for me as for the baby I read aloud every night, adopting all the character’s voices, bringing to life my own childhood and the whole new library of books written since: Possum Magic, The Gruffalo, Giraffes Can’t Dance, How to Catch a Star and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Jasper couldn’t understand a word I was saying but I like to think enjoyed me reading to him anyway, comforted by the sound of my voice (as my mother said he would be), which he had come to know so well over the previous nine months.

That’s not to say I didn’t cry or get frustrated or wish to god, some­times, that he would just go to sleep. It was the only way I could get anything done. But even at those times I didn’t struggle too much to stay present. Opting out wasn’t really an option. You don’t have much say in it really, when there’s a little person relying on you every minute of his life. I found it much easier to deal with that momentous respon­sibility when I embraced it and stayed with it rather than retreating to my bedroom and shutting the door behind me. Although that’s fine too, if it helps!

It’s not like I was actively being mindful. I still wasn’t quite sure exactly how to do that. But in the process of being with my baby and loving him and attending to his every need, mindfulness was kind of happening by accident. Like in those moments when the sun was out and I would lie next to him on a rug in the backyard just beside the Hills Hoist, like two old mates, and chat (me not him), putting everything else on hold. I could think of nowhere I would rather be than right there with him, nurturing him, looking at him, easing his transition, no matter the state of the kitchen.

‘One of the great gifts of having children,’ Tim Brown says to me, ‘is they cause us to be present. They can’t be elsewhere and we can’t be elsewhere with them, and it draws us back into that space. Children are fundamentally in the present moment. They don’t think of the future or past. That’s why we love spending time with them because it reminds us of having had that experience — before we started project­ing into the future and reminiscing about the past — and it brings us back to that.’

Being mindful, and therefore present, is known to reduce stress and increase inner calm, happiness and self-awareness. That has benefits not only for mother and baby, but everyone they come into contact with. As Buddhist nun and mother Chittaprabha is quoted as saying in Buddhism for Mothers: ‘Becoming more aware of the broader mean­ing of my life and of my true nature leads to a deeper sense of joy, con­tentment and equanimity from which everyone around me benefits.’

What I discovered was when I come from a place where all is well, it arms me to deal with it when it’s not. When I remember to be present, nothing my baby throws up (sometimes literally) seems like a prob­lem. Being mindful, present, and surrendering to what is (whatever it is) are the best antidotes I have found to sleep deprivation, frustra­tion, loneliness, boredom, worthlessness — all of which might have knocked me down were I not fortified against them.

My baby taught me how to do that. From the minute he arrived he gave me a lesson in what matters most. I had a vested interest in being present because this was the best gig going around.

I was determined to get good at mindfulness now — to do what Eckhart Tolle calls ‘grow in presence power’ — to get match fit — so I have it down pat for when Jasper gets older. When he will be awake all the time. I expect it will be an even bigger call to stay mindful when my child can walk and talk and make constant demands and protest and draw on walls and throw things when he doesn’t get what he wants, with him, my work and my life pulling me in all directions. But I was giving it my best shot.

I attend a talk, geared to parents of young children, by mindfulness expert, family yoga teacher and author Leonie Percy, who makes it all sound so easy. ‘Mindfulness is absorbing yourself in the moment without any judgement’, she says softly, in that way that yoga teachers do. ‘It is practised by just observing and acknowledging whatever is happening in your mind in that moment and your mind becomes full of the present moment’.

We are told to pick an activity that we do every day, like making a cup of tea (a luxury for most new mums) and make it our ‘mindful moment’. ‘Pick a beautiful cup, smell the scent of the tea and feel the warmth of your cup. Sip the tea slowly absorbing the taste and the moment’, she suggests, almost chanting, giving the humble cuppa new reverence. ‘Chocolate meditation’ is also on offer. Wait. Choco­late’s allowed? ‘Place the chocolate and let it melt in your mouth, don’t chew’, Leonie croons, as we practice with the tiny chocolate we’ve all been given. No time for tea and chocolate? Then breathing will do. ‘Taking a few deep breaths when the kids are pushing your buttons also works well’, Leonie says. ‘Mindful breathing gives you a chance to respond and not react in stressful situations. Your child can be your mindfulness bell. Give them a hug and make this your mindful moment to feel connected to yourself and your child’.

‘What is the point of mindfulness for mothers?’ I ask.

‘Mothers are often disconnected, stressed and exhausted’, Leonie tells me. ‘Mindfulness allows mums to slow down, take a break and live in the present moment. The present moment frees you from the worry of the past and the anxiety of the future. Being a mother means you are often on auto pilot and you lose sense of who you are. Mindful­ness allows you to reconnect to yourself and practice self-compassion, gratitude and acceptance. Mindfulness also teaches mums to practice conscious healthy habits that start to re-wire the brain which over time replaces unhealthy unconscious habits. This is often reflected in the way you parent your child. For example if you were shouted at as a child, you might unconsciously shout at your children. Mindfulness allows you to break this cycle’.

Pass the tea and chocolate.

I meet up with Sarah Napthali, the author of Buddhism for Mothers, and ask her how to do it. How do we stay present and stop ourselves willing time away, waiting for that next moment, waiting until the baby goes to sleep, waiting for them to grow? How is it possible to validate each moment, even the really tough ones?

‘My answer to that might be a bit surprising,’ she replies, hesitantly. ‘One word — brace yourself — death. Buddhists don’t shy away from the concept of death the way we Westerners do. We brush it under the carpet and we don’t bring it up in daily conversation. Buddhists talk about death more because death is a great way to appreciate life; and talk to anyone who’s been through a cancer experience, for example, and if they come through the cancer experience they have a differ­ent quality of life because they’ve stared death in the face and they realise life’s really short and every moment counts, every moment is precious. So death can be a really good teacher. So to remind yourself of it from time to time helps you to not count down a single moment of your day.’

‘A less morbid interpretation might be our children are not going to be with us forever?’ I ask.

‘Yes, and we’re not going to be there forever either. And my child at the age of two, that’s a really shortlived experience and my child at the age of three … They’re changing all the time so you have to appreciate them at every stage or you’ll end up regretting it and thinking “Gee I wish I was there for their childhood, mentally as well as physically.”’

‘We all face challenges as parents — some much harder than others — but do we get to choose how to react in any situation?’ I ask.

‘We do. If we’re awake; if we’re present. If we’re living on automatic pilot we don’t have many choices about how to react because we’re stuck in our habits. But to introduce mindfulness, that’s when you get to decide and you can, as Buddhists say, intercept your karma.’

Meditation helps. Now that Jasper was getting older (and sleeping for longer) I was back to meditating twice a day (for twenty minutes at a time). Between feeding my baby and settling him to sleep and get­ting the washing done and dinner on the table (I read like a character in The Women’s Room, but I don’t feel like one), there wasn’t much time left for anything else. But I made time. I couldn’t not, now that I knew how much better a mother it made me. Meditation feeds mind­fulness, and I needed more of that. So I meditated when he slept and sometimes when he was feeding (although that’s trickier). I got New Dad to hold him (before he left for work) and meditated then. I medi­tated in the car (not while driving) when Jasper fell asleep. During the one plane trip we took in those first months, I meditated while he slept in my arms mid-flight.

Maybe it wasn’t just the temporariness of it — knowing I had to go back to work soon — that was keeping me so enthralled. I should give myself more credit and accept that, quite possibly, I had simply just found my forte. Here was someone, at last, who I could love uncon­ditionally with no possible chance of rejection. (I can only hope.) At last someone who needed me as much as I needed him. Someone who wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet anyway. It was easy to stick around for that.

Lesson Learned

I am convinced of the benefits of being present, through being mind­ful, to enhance my experience of motherhood. I had tried to ‘be mind­ful’ many times in my life before to no avail, my mind wandering to the disappointing past and uncertain future more often than not. But when my baby came along, he catapulted me, by his very nature, into the present moment. Babies will do that. They are purely pres­ent beings. The times when I do surrender to what is happening (no matter how undesirable it is or how exhausted I am), when I, as Sarah Napthali says, ‘remember to remember’, are the times I cherish the most. Because I have made them matter. That part is a choice.

This is an extract from Mother Zen by Jacinta Tynan.

Mother Zen by Jacinta Tynan (Harlequin Australia) is available for purchase  (RRP $29.99) here or in all good book stores nationally.