The Conveyor Belt

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. My boys made me cards. One of them was a folded piece of construction paper with a heart that had been erased and redrawn four times until it was symmetrical enough to meet the standards of a 6-year-old perfectionist. The other was a scribble with the word MOM in letters so large they ran off the page, as if the word itself couldn’t be contained.

I teared up, obviously. Then I made pancakes and we went to the park and I watched them run and I thought: I am doing a good job. I buy them Legos and books. I read to them at bedtime. I signed them up for breakdancing. I am present.

And then, sometime around Sunday afternoon, sitting in the grass while they climbed a tree, I realized I wasn’t present at all. I was watching them the way you watch a pot of water — waiting for the next thing to happen so I could move us along to the next thing after that.

That realization hasn’t left me yet. I don’t think I want it to.

The schedule that runs us

Let me describe a weekday morning in my house and see if it sounds familiar.

7:15. Alarm. Black tea. Pack lunches. Wake the kids.

What follows is not a morning. It’s a conveyor belt.

Brush teeth — you have five minutes. Change out of pajamas — not those pants, the other pants, we don’t have time. Eat breakfast — please sit down, please use your fork, we need to leave in ten minutes. Maybe a few minutes kicking a ball in the yard — but not really kicking a ball, more like watching the clock while a ball gets kicked, counting down until I need to herd everyone toward the car.

Every interaction is a transition. Every moment is a waypoint to the next moment. The morning isn’t lived. It’s managed.

The evening is the same sprint in reverse. School to home. Home to dinner. Dinner to the thirty minutes of TV that buys me time to clean up and take a shower myself. TV to bath. Bath to teeth. Teeth to pajamas. Pajamas to book. Book to lights out. A series of handoffs, each one optimized for efficiency, none of them optimized for connection.

I thought I was doing slow parenting. I’d read the articles. I bought the open-ended toys. I chose the wooden blocks over the plastic ones with batteries. I limited screens to a set time (albeit, some days quite generous). I made sure we had books — Enchantably books, library books, the ones from the bookshop that caught my eye. I thought the materials of slow parenting were the same as the practice of slow parenting.

They’re not. Not even close.

The thing I can do for six hours but not for six minutes

Here’s the part that stung when I finally looked at it.

I can get lost in Enchantably for six hours. Completely, blissfully lost. Tweaking a story arc, refining an illustration prompt, rebuilding a page layout until it feels right. Time disappears. I surface and it’s midnight and I haven’t moved from my chair and I feel alive.

I can spend eight, ten hours at my day job — building decks, writing white papers, answering emails, sitting in back-to-back meetings — and while I wouldn’t call that “lost,” I’m fully absorbed. My attention is total. My focus is real.

But I cannot — or have not — given that same quality of attention to watching my kid build a Lego tower.

Not because I don’t love him. Not because the Lego tower isn’t interesting. But because somewhere along the way, my nervous system learned that productivity looks like output, and watching a 5-year-old place one brick on top of another at the speed of continental drift does not look like output. It looks like waiting.

And I have been, without realizing it, optimizing my entire life around not waiting.

That’s the broken thing. That’s what I saw on Mother’s Day, sitting in the grass, watching my kids climb a tree while mentally calculating how long until we needed to leave for dinner.

Ten minutes that broke the spell (and then weren’t enough)

I read something recently — I wish I could remember where — that said ten minutes of genuine connection with a child carries more developmental weight than an entire day of ambient togetherness. Not ten minutes of being in the same room. Ten minutes of eye contact, full attention, active listening, nothing else happening.

So I tried it. I set a timer on my phone — not for the kids, for me — and I sat on the floor with each of them, one at a time, and I gave them ten minutes.

No agenda. No “after this we need to...” No checking my phone. No half-listening while mentally composing an email. Just: I am here. I am looking at you. Tell me things.

My 6-year-old told me about a kid at school who says he can run faster than a cheetah and how that’s “obviously not true but it would be cool.” My 5-year-old showed me a rock he’d been keeping in his pocket for three days because “it has a face, see?” and held it up to my nose so I could see the face, which, if I’m being honest, did sort of have a face.

And here’s the thing — those ten minutes were magic. They cracked something open. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I felt the full weight of being someone’s mother. Not the logistics of it. The reality of it. These are small people who are becoming big people, and they’re doing it right in front of me, and I’ve been watching the clock instead of watching them.

But almost immediately, I felt something else: ten minutes isn’t enough.

Not because the research is wrong. It’s not. Ten focused minutes is better than ten distracted hours. But the timer itself is the problem — or at least, it’s a symptom of the same problem. I was still scheduling presence. Containing it. Giving connection a time slot between “finish emails” and “start dinner” as if my kids were a meeting I was fitting into the calendar.

The ten minutes showed me what real connection feels like. And now I can’t unfeel it. I don’t want presence to be a practice I do for ten minutes. I want it to be the way I move through an entire afternoon. I want to stop treating attention like a resource I’m rationing and start treating it like... breathing. Something I just do. Something that doesn’t need a timer.

I’m not there yet. Not even close. But I know what it feels like now, and that’s the thing about those ten minutes — they didn’t solve the conveyor belt. They showed me how much I don’t want to be on it anymore.

The productivity trap that parents don’t talk about

I think there’s a version of hustle culture that has quietly infected parenting, and it doesn’t look like hustle culture at all. It looks like being a good parent.

It looks like a schedule that’s full of enriching activities. Swimming lessons, soccer practice, art class, the nature walk you planned because you read that kids need unstructured outdoor time (the irony of scheduling unstructured time is not lost on me). It looks like efficiency. It looks like a household that runs smoothly, where bedtime happens on time and morning routines are dialed in and everyone gets where they need to go.

It looks, from the outside, like you have it together.

But from the inside, it feels like a conveyor belt. And the kids are on it, and you’re operating it, and nobody is actually standing still long enough to notice what’s happening right now, in this moment, which is the only moment any of us actually have.

I built Enchantably in part because I believe stories create connection between a parent and a child. I still believe that. But I’m starting to understand that the five-minute bedtime story, read at the end of a conveyor belt day while everyone’s exhausted, is not the same as being truly present for it. The story is a container for connection — but I have to actually show up inside it. Not just read the words. Be there. Watch his face. Pause when he points at the page. Let the moment be the moment, not a waypoint to lights-out.

What I want to practice

I’m not going to tell you I’ve figured this out. I sat in the grass on Mother’s Day and had a reckoning, and now it’s Monday and the conveyor belt is running again and I’m writing this between meetings.

But here’s what I want to practice. Not master. Practice.

I want to get lost in what my kids are doing. Not observe them doing it while I plan the next transition. Not supervise their play while scrolling. Actually get lost. The way I get lost in a story arc at midnight. The way I get lost in a spreadsheet at work. That same quality of absorption, directed at a 5-year-old holding up a rock with a face.

I want to spend an hour in a sculpture garden, not walking through it, but standing in front of one statue while my kids jump around it and ask questions I don’t know the answers to, and instead of saying “let’s keep moving, there’s more to see,” saying “I don’t know. What do you think it is?”

I want the ten-minute timer to become unnecessary. I want presence to stop being something I schedule and start being something I default to.

I know that’s aspirational. I know the conveyor belt exists for a reason — there are lunches to pack and emails to send and a business to build and teeth that genuinely need to be brushed. I’m not burning the schedule. I’m not quitting anything. I’m just trying to find the moments inside the routine where I can stop the belt for a minute and actually be where I am.

My kids don’t need more activities, more enrichment, more carefully selected wooden toys. They need me to sit on the floor and look at a rock.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

A note from inside the contradiction

I recognize the irony of writing a blog post about being more present with my children while my children are at school and I am on my laptop. I see it. I’m sitting with it.

But I think this is part of it too — the willingness to say out loud, in public, on the internet: I haven’t been doing this well enough. And I want to do it better. Not because I’m a bad mom. I’m not. But because “good enough” and “present” are not the same thing, and my kids deserve the difference.

If you’re reading this and feeling the conveyor belt in your own house — the rush from one thing to the next, the efficient but hollow rhythm of a day that’s full but not felt — I just want you to know you’re not alone in it.

And if you figured this out before I did, tell me how. I’m genuinely asking.