Jessica Rowe gets into the here and now, and finds she's loving every precious moment.
Vibrant splashes of purple have been cascading everywhere in my neighbourhood, and my daughters and I hop over the fallen lilac leaves of the jacaranda trees, careful not to slip on the damp petals.
"Look Mummy, look!"
"Come on, we need to go!" I'm grumpy and desperate to wipe off my television make-up. The padded, underwire bra I've been wearing all day is digging into my back. I'm busting to rip it off and change into my daggy, cat-patterned pyjamas. Plastic shopping bags are starting to slip from my sweaty fingers, the bags full of the familiar dinner ingredients of ready-crumbed chicken schnitzel, corn and potatoes.
Dinner, bath and bed. This routine is something I yearn to fast-forward. It's a moment that I don't want to be in and a moment I get stuck in every afternoon.
"Oh, it goes in the blink of an eye! Make sure you enjoy every moment," is a refrain I often hear from older relatives and kind strangers. But I'm not enjoying every moment: is there something wrong with me?
"I don't like it, I'm not eating it!" says my youngest daughter, soon after we get home.
"What do you mean you don't like it? You told me you wanted it for dinner tonight!"
A little later: "Stop it, don't hit your sister. I don't care who started it. Someone will lose an eye ... Put that Barbie down right now!"
"Mummy, why can't I get my ears pierced? Can we have dinner in front of the TV?"
With a wiggle of a Bewitched nose, I want to time-travel to a Greek island, ringed with a turquoise sea where the only sound I hear is the water lapping gently on the pebbly beach. Does that make me a bad, ungrateful mother?
A negative soundtrack that questions my mothering skills has become all too frequent. And that voice becomes the next layer of my mother-guilt, the fear that I'm not living in the present and missing every precious, often tedious, moment.
I've tried deliberately losing my mobile once I get home with my girls. However, it hasn't been enough. I've been on the hunt for something else that will help me be more present. More and more I draw on "mindfulness" - a term I'd discarded as being too hippie, before discovering the oodles of science explaining it. I just had to be prodded in the right direction by my psychologist.
I also stumbled across a book written by comedian Ruby Wax, called Sane New World, that's devoted to the topic. Essentially, our clever brains can retrain and rewire themselves to throw out the damaging thoughts that hold us back.
For me, I have learnt to take slow, deep breaths and focus on either what I can see, feel or taste as a way of short-circuiting those destructive thoughts. It also helps bring me into the present.
Another day, my girlfriend, Pip, and I sit on a picnic rug in the garden, trying to help each other negotiate work politics and pushy school mums, when I notice it's raining cats and dogs. A large black cat, with a long tail and a fluffy white chin, lands gently on the grass, right next to us. It's quickly followed by an orange, stripy cat. Next comes a black, tufty Scottie dog. Then a little grey rat spins out of the upstairs window. Pip and I let out loud guffaws as we fall back on our yellow rug, looking skywards and laughing as even more cuddly toys descend.
The next day, a small, warm hand drags me back under the jacaranda tree. My daughter points out a silver lizard, frozen in the shadow on top of the fence. Suddenly I notice a flicker of movement: there is a family of lizards living here.
I make a conscious effort to stop, to be in the right-now. And for that moment, the present, I am filled with joy.
