I’ve been working on a long post for weeks about breastfeeding—about, after years of eating food and cooking food and studying food, becoming food myself—but the baby naps erratically and has stopped taking a bottle, so I can’t sit down long enough to weave together the threads of my thinking. After a few aborted writing sessions I no longer know what I want to say, except “Look at this.” (Look at me.)
***
Nursing the baby, I realize my older son is strangely quiet. Is he getting into trouble? I scan the room and lock eyes with him. He is sitting still with a book open on his lap and watching me with an expression of sad resignation I have never seen before, that seems too mature for his two years of age. When he sees me looking at him he smiles wistfully and says, “I’m reading all by myself, Mama.”
***
Sunday morning. We are walking to a café that has blueberry muffins, strong espresso, and a toy box. I pack a bag with two sizes of diapers, two changes of clothes, a sippy cup, a nursing blanket, sunscreen, sweatshirts in case the weather changes. The toddler follows me around the house, sobbing because he wants to go out for breakfast. A text arrives from my grandmother, asking for a new picture of the baby. I comply. We walk for twenty minutes in the sunshine, pointing out dogs and squirrels, adjusting the sun shades on the double stroller. Halfway there, I realize I am still wearing my house shoes. All the way there, I realize I don’t have my wallet. Also, there is toothpaste on my chin.
***
We have invited friends over to watch a World Cup game. I am not a soccer fan but my husband and many of my friends are. I have watched a few dozen games games with pleasure in their company, over French fries and beer in the humid Midwestern summer with cicadas all around, or with prosecco and grissini in a small Italian town. This year we are watching the games in our overlarge rental house, where it doesn’t matter if the baby cries, but we send around an email to friends and neighbors inviting them to drop by for snacks. Four couples come with seven children between them. The kids fan out over the floor with toys, and their parents follow them through the house, mediating disputes and mopping up spilled juice. I don’t notice when the game begins, or when it ends.
“This would be so nice,” a friend says wistfully, “if I could just sit down with a beer for five minutes.”
“What I miss most is paying attention to something for more than ten seconds,” I say over the sound of the oven timer. I leave to extract a tray of nachos and set them on the table. The children swarm over for a portion and then disperse again, munching contentedly. I smile, feeling a wave of the sturdy satisfaction that seems to have replaced pleasure in my emotional repertoire. I am not enjoying myself, exactly, but things are going well.
***
Tristan Harris and others have written about how we are living in an attention economy—how websites and social media platforms, because they are financed by advertising revenue, compete with each other for a share of our eyeballs.
The pool of this attention, though massive, is finite. The websites and platforms can attempt to attract new users or to further fracture our attention, but ultimately there are only so many people on this earth, each with just twenty-four hours per day. In such an economy, Harris argues, your attention is the most valuable commodity you possess, and you should not spend it unwisely.
***
Dinnertime. The baby has been sleeping lightly in his cradle. He fusses and I tense, wondering if he will awaken and scream in hunger. The toddler gulps down his milk in a single draught and requests a refill, and a spoon instead of a fork because his rice keeps falling down, and a fresh bib because there is food on this one, and a story about an animal. My husband is telling a complicated anecdote about polling data for an election five months from now in a state I have never visited.
If attention is the most valuable commodity we possess, I wonder, is a mother’s attention more valuable still?