Three meditations from one month of fatherhood | #69

What my newborn is teaching me about grief, self-judgement, and attention

Image generated by ChatGPT based on a photo, in Japanese wood block style, because I don’t want to share any real photos of him online

He will never be this tiny again

My son, Étienne, is one month old.

Most early mornings I lie on the sofa as he sleeps on my chest, and these hours are the most precious of my day. I get to give his mother a little more sleep while I bathe in his presence during the stillness before the sun rises.

Each morning reveals a new version of him. He weighs a little more, his face is rounder and, when he wakes, his eyes are more alert, tracking me as I move.

Each day I catch myself looking forward to future milestones: when he smiles as he recognises us, when he can hold his own head up, when he sleeps for more than three hours at a time. In part, this is excitement to see him grow, to marvel as he unlocks subtler, more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

In truth, there is another part of me that wants him to get there faster, because this stage is tough. It's frighteningly easy to see him as a sequence of jobs to be done, particularly when deprived of sleep. Change nappy, feed, burp. Tummy time, soothe, nap. Bath, feed, burp, sleep. He is immediately and shamelessly demanding. He takes and takes and gives nothing back.

Except, no, that's not quite right. He takes everything we have to give, yes, but somehow he offers even more in return. Every time I look forward to his future, I’m pulled back to the truth of the rapidly-unfolding present, and as I sink into a wordless delight in his being I find a grief inextricably entwined. He will never be this tiny again.

Grief can be hard to sit with, but trying to push it away feels like missing the point. Each morning invites me to enjoy the grief braided through the connection in the pre-dawn quiet, and when I pause to appreciate it, that grief unfolds into its own bittersweet flavour of bliss.

That is his gift: he invites me out of my forgetfulness. He reminds me that this quality of being, this preciousness, is always and has always been there. It will always be there. My little prince, sleeping gently on my chest, is its avatar.

My son doesn’t know that my self-judgement isn’t his

In case I just gave you the impression I’m some kind of monk, let me correct that. Yes, many early morning contact naps with Étienne feel like sacred presence. But also: it's 4am, I haven’t slept enough, and I feel tired and foggy. So when meditating on my son’s radiant perfection feels out of reach, I play rapid chess against anonymous strangers on my phone.

This is a terrible way to play chess. I’m bad at chess even when well rested and, at 4am, I blunder constantly, which irritates me to an unreasonable degree.

This morning, in a moment of post-blunder clarity, I noticed something that concerned me: my son, though asleep, was in contact with me while my body moved through familiar patterns of self-criticism and irritation. Familiar to me, anyway—he doesn’t know that those are my emotions, not his.

You see, I believe that a lot more information is shared through touch than is generally thought. This comes from my experience as an Alexander Technique teacher, where touch plays a huge role in 1:1 lessons to both tune into what the student is doing and to convey an experience to them.

Moreover, the more I learn about ‘Parts’¹, in the Internal Family Systems sense, the more I understand that parts are psychophysical, as F. M. Alexander might have put it: neither mental, nor physical, but both, indivisibly. Put another way, Parts are something the whole bodymind does.

What all this means is that when my self-critical parts get triggered by blundering a move, I consider it perfectly reasonable to assume that my body is tensing in ways that transmit something of my patterns and conditioning to my son. Obviously, I don’t want this for him.

This realisation opens up new territory: parenting as a practice. In the Alexander Technique context, I often advise the teacher trainees I assist to remove their hands from a student when they’ve lost touch with their own coordination and presence. The risk of transmitting something at best useless, or at worst actively unhelpful, is too high. Better to step back, reorient, and then begin again.

With my son I have two options, one easy, one more challenging.

The easy option is to avoid activities that trigger my parts in this way when I’m in contact with him. I can choose not to play chess if I know it will make my body broadcast self-judgement.

The harder option is to remain aware of what’s happening and practice compassion with myself in real time, so that what I transmit is something a little more sophisticated. Not just the inner critic part, but also the capacity to be with it, to welcome and love it. That’s something I do want him to get, because he’s going to get Parts of his own no matter what I do.

Ultimately, I’m holding this intention lightly. Looking after a newborn is hard enough and I don’t want to create a stick to beat myself with. It’s enough for me to gently notice my own inner experience when I’m with him, and to bring even greater compassion to what I find.

Holding my son’s attention as sacred

I saw two essays on my feed this week discussing how university students these days can no longer focus, read deeply, or engage with anything requiring more than momentary effort. Many no longer care about anything beyond the next notification.

I want to delve deeply into this topic soon, but for now, I know I don’t want Étienne to fall victim to this attention crisis, which I suspect we’ll one day look back on as a tech-induced pandemic in its own right.

I know how easy it is to use technology to zone out from feeling certain flavours of bad, because I’ve done it a lot myself. My favourite loop is “I’ve scrolled too much and I feel awful. Oh, I know, more scrolling will fix it!”, and so a deep habitual groove becomes worn in my mind.

This avoidance is my Parts trying to soothe locally, but making things worse globally, helped by tech companies happy to monetise the pattern. The way out of this, by the way, is to feel all the emotions all the way through, though this is often much easier said than done.

As Étienne gets older, there will be conversations and decisions around screen time, education and access to technology. I want to be flexible, cultivate his skill and curiosity, and give him experience fit for a child born in 2025.

At the same time, attention is sacred and deserves reverence. What he attends to—and how he attends to it—shapes the world as much as it will shape him and, for now, I’m its guardian. To that end, I have a few rules for myself:

• Let his focus run, even if he’s just staring at a leaf or into empty space.

• Leave him be if he’s absorbed elsewhere. He doesn’t owe me eye contact when I want it.

• Model healthy use of attention, particularly with how I use my phone.

My hope is one day he’ll wake to find that in a world where attention is becoming increasingly dull, fractured and commodified, his has remained bright, steady and free, and will serve him for the rest of his life.

1. In this model, Parts can be thought of as stable sub-personalities that crystallised in response to felt experiences of deficiency at various points in our development. They have their own goals to stop us feeling certain ways again in future, and they use various strategies to meet those goals. While well-intentioned, from their perspective, these strategies often create repeating patterns of behaviour that create problems and stuckness in our lives. Inner critics are a classic example of Parts.