When we are not present to what is actually happening, we miss it. The child who is trying to tell us something with their behaviour, not their words. The moment of beauty in an ordinary afternoon. The rising tension in our own body that, if we had noticed it twenty minutes earlier, we might have been able to address before it became the sharp word we later regretted.

We are living in a world that pulls us away from each other — toward screens, toward productivity, toward the management of anxiety rather than the cultivation of joy. Choosing connection in that world is a small act of resistance. It is also, it turns out, one of the most effective things we can do for ourselves and for the children in our care.

We spend so much time talking about what women do. The invisible work, the emotional labour, the impossible balancing act. And all of that is true and worth naming. But underneath the doing is a being.