One of the wisest women I know recently told me something about parenting. You want to be attuned to your child. But not too attuned. In fact, it’s very good for everyone involved, parent and child, if you are sometimes very much unattuned.
I told a friend this and she said, ‘oh good, because being unattuned to my children whenever possible is basically how I’m surviving parenting’.
The woman gave as an example a memory from her own childhood. Playing at home one day she was standing on a chair exploring the contents of a cupboard. Her mother was elsewhere in the room in an armchair reading her book. Every so often the child would tell her mother about what she had found in the cupboard, and she would reply, but distractedly. Even as a child she knew she didn’t have her mother’s full attention, but she also know if she really did need it, if there was some kind of emergency, she would have it.
Her mother was unattuned. An unattuned parent is one who can sit near where their is child playing, but not feel the need to fuss or hover over them. The parent is there if needed; the child might come back and forth to their side, not even necessarily interacting just touching base, momentarily resting an elbow on the parent’s knee, before going back to what they are doing. The parent stays where they are, keeps doing what they are doing, talking to a friend maybe. They know the child is fine. And their very lack of concern probably transmits to the child that they too are fine.
I find it can be a bit tricky to unattune when you are a single parent with one child. When she was smaller, as the evening drew in my daughter never wanted to be on a different floor from me. When there is only two of you in the house, it’s trickier to unattune, there is less distraction.
I remember telling my friend Betsy Cornwell, also a single mother, about how anxious I could be sometimes in playgrounds (much less so now that my daughter is older and does gymnastics). How I was that parent hovering below the wooden climbing frame seeing all the open sides out of which she could fall, or the webbed rope climbing frame upon which she could climb too high and possibly get stuck.
We were sitting in her Connemara kitchen. I had interviewed her for my book about dating in rural Ireland on her experiences of being a bisexual woman dating in the West of Ireland, and afterwards, we sat over a pot of tea, chatting about single parenting. Betsy runs the Old Knitting Factory, a retreat for single mothers, and she wrote this absolutely beautiful essay for the New York Times Modern Love series.
Truly, I annoy myself at times, I told her.
I could see by her face that she immediately understood. Oh yes, she said, that’s because you’re doing both. What she meant was, when you’re a single parent, you are typically in the role of two parents at the one time. The fun but also the safety net, but also the only one there if something goes wrong. Betsy gave the example of wrestling on the bed, the next minute they fall off, and then you’re dealing with that. You’re on your own. If something goes wrong it is all on you, and so it’s hard to switch off, to unattune. It can put you into a sort of hyper vigilance.
She’s exactly right, and it was one of the most comforting things anyone has ever said to me about the experience of single parenting. That the anxiety, while not necessary, was understandable, and I shouldn’t beat myself up about it.
It’s one of the reasons I love hanging out with one of my closest friends, her husband, and their boys. They’re really good at letting their children climb the thing, or run about slightly out of view, without anxiously hovering. When I’m with them I can say to myself, it’s ok she’s doing that, because Seb thinks it’s ok that the boys are doing it. Which maybe sounds a bit demented, but I don’t always trust the voice in my own head about what is an actual threat, because anxiety warps what is really a threat and what is just anxiety. I outsource my parenting concerns, I guess. Rely upon the opinion of someone else I trust completely. You need other people sometimes to unattune you.
The anxiety is because the general wear and tear of being a single parent, the tiredness, means your worry-fear levels can at times be slightly higher than they might otherwise be, which then can feed into having a tighter grip on things than you might otherwise wish to have. It’s a sort of self-feeding circle.
Maybe it’s also an only child thing, as well as a single parent thing. I interviewed the composer of Riverdance, Bill Whelan, recently, and he spoke about how his mother, who had come to motherhood late for Limerick in the 1950s - 40 when she had him - and also having lost a baby before he was born, was very protective of her only child. As a teenager, what he knew was an expression of love became irritating because he wanted to do his own thing. But he “never doubted” her, he said, which I thought was a beautiful, and compassionate way of saying you always knew you were loved, even when your parent wasn’t getting it quite right.
Earlier last year, we got a new cat, Minnie.
We had had two cats for some time, sisters, Mavis and Rose. In 2022, Mavis was tragically run down near our house. Mavis was one of the all-time great cats, sleek black, and elegant, with a wonderful personality. When she died I realised all of the neighbours on our terrace knew her, she used to enter any open window to pay a visit, they all commiserated.
On one occasion she walked beside me to the local shop, stood outside waiting when I went in, then walked home trotting along beside me, to the utter astonishment of a local dog owner, whose greyhound, on a lead, began barking hysterically at the sight of this cat approaching. Mavis, not on a lead, refused to budge from my side, staring down the dog and its owner who were forced to cross the road.
Mavis was hardy, and it never occurred to me that she would be in any danger until I looked out my bedroom window as I was putting away laundry one day and saw her poor little body lying in the road at a weird angle, and then my brain caught up with what I was seeing. A neighbour heard me screaming and came out and we stood together over her, both of us sobbing. She told me that when they’d moved in they’d hoped Mavis, who had immediately paid a visit, was a stray so that they could adopt her. She knew a great cat when she saw one.
When we got Minnie, our new second cat, last year, I kept her indoors for over a year. I have had cats all my life and I can say with confidence, Minnie is the greatest cat of all time. She thinks she’s a human, she certainly thinks she is the boss of our house, bar maybe me, with whom she is obsessed; she follows me around the house. When I get up, Minnie gets up, when I have a shower, Minnie waits outside the bathroom door. In truth, we are obsessed with each other. She sleeps beside me, I once woke up with her paw in my hand.
My daughter and I have taken to telling people we especially like that they have strong Minnie energy, by which we mean they are strong willed and incredibly charming. I’m not sure the compliment, a comparison to our cat, translates in the way in which we intend.
She is also an absolute thug, having determinedly showed Rose, our older, much larger cat, from day one that she is boss. If Rose tries to eat before her, from her own, separate bowl, Minnie head butts her. Now, when I open the back door, Rose knows Minnie must leave first, she stands back as the significantly smaller cat trots out ahead. If they sit on my bed, Minnie will only allow Rose a space at the bottom corner, while she sits almost on top of me, setting out the hierarchy.
It took over a year for me to let Minnie our because I could not face the thought of anything happening to her, and I dreaded the anxiety I would feel once she was out and about- the laneway behind our house is popular with large, somewhat feisty cats.
I was overly attuned, in a big way.
In fact, letting Minnie out has been a revelation. In the same way that she assumed instant superiority over the older cat when she arrived in our house, she is doing the same with the neighbourhood cats. The daughter and I watched from a bedroom window the other evening as Minnie summonsed a much bigger local cat from a neighbour’s garden by way of a commanding yowl, then proceeded to stare the cat down, until it awkwardly, almost apologetically, shuffled backwards and scarpered on its way. From the window, we cheered and clapped, like the cat-lunatics we are. Minnie is having none of being overly attuned to, and it’s wonderful.
Am I comparing parenting a human child to having a pet cat? Maybe I am.
I think as a single parent of one child, unattuning can be a different process because there are often in the home no other people to force you to be distracted. Other children needing attention. Another adult with whom you are speaking. Luckily for me, my daughter has a naturally independent spirit, so is inclined to do her own thing. This year she started walking to the shops on her own. She sometimes stops at my aunt’s house to chat, she loves talking to our local butcher. Where initially I hummed with anxiety when she was gone, now I relish the ability to get her to go buy the milk I have forgotten to buy. And she has started mocking me gently for being overprotective on occasion, which I like. If I’m going to be overly attuned at times, better she thinks it’s silly, than necessary. She turns ten tomorrow. Double digits. She no longer needs to be on the same floor as me when the evening draws in.
Bill Whelan said something else in that interview, when talking about abut his own children. How because of work he had been often absent when they were little, but despite that, he still thought he had a good relationship with them all now. He said, “I hope my children never doubted what I felt about them or how much I cared about them, but they may not have had me around as much as people with conventional jobs.” Again, the idea of a child never doubting a parent’s love, even if it wasn’t always shown in an entirely straightforward manner. The hope that they knew you were doing you best.
Sometimes we show our love by being overly on, sometimes by slightly ignoring. Sometimes we can’t be there, sometimes we’re there too much. You hope they will know you were always doing your best, and that it came out of love.
**Since I began working on this piece, a neighbourhood cat has started chasing our cats, Minnie and Rose. Last night it raced through the house after Rose, in the back door, up the stairs, a brief scrabble in my room, then back out again. Even Minnie has been chased up to the house. I am researching water guns online because I am rubbish at being unattuned. My daughter now does an impression of me with a machine gun that is scarily like Al Pacino as Tony Montana (in a film she has, needless to say, never seen).
"Just try to find that balance"...said the best parent who never had children...
I LOVE this and Minnie sounds positively divine. I think I’m going to examine how attuned or otherwise I am with Lydia - it hadn’t occurred to me before but I might need to tune out a bit more…