For the last week or so, every time we drive around in the car, Eli has been calling out from the back seat in a melodic singsong, "Ma-ma, where ARE you?"
      And each time I've answered, "Right here, Eli."
      Then a few minutes later, the question comes again. "Ma-ma, where ARE you?"
      The twentieth time this happened, I started to wonder, "What is he really asking?" So I asked him: "Eli, you always ask me that question when I'm sitting right next to you. You can see me. So I wonder if maybe you're asking something else. Are you?"
      "I'm asking where you are on the INSIDE," Eli replied.
      "You mean what I'm thinking?"
      "Yeah," he said. "What you're thinking."

      My four-year-old has noticed — and can now call me on — all the times I'm with him in body without being fully present — all the times I'm distracted, when my mind is a million miles away. He's busting me on my lack of attention, my propensity to be off in my head, planning for the future, ruminating on the past, mentally cataloguing all the things I need to do.
      This issue of not being present is not one that suddenly appeared when I became a parent. It's one I've been criticized for repeatedly all of my life. Living in my head, removed from the world around me, is a childhood habit that's outgrown its usefulness. What once served me as a child now interferes with intimacy, making human contact, and living in the moment.
      And now my four year old is rubbing it in my face.

      When I was a brand new parent, more seasoned parents often said things that only made sense to me later on, as my children grew older. That was true of something my friend Bing once told me. She said: "The great thing about parenting is that you always want to improve yourself. If I argue and scream and cry with my husband, I don't think about how I'm hurting him. Screaming at him doesn't have the same impact as screaming at my kids. The kids make me want to stop and change, and that spreads to other relationships and other parts of my life. My kids have given me the gift of being a better person. No one else gives me these opportunities. And it's up to me what I do with them."

      So here I am. Eli is reminding me, on an hourly basis, that I am not always where I seem to be. The question for me is, "What am I going to do about it?"
      The issue is a complex one. In these days of multi-tasking, e-mail, fax-modems, and express banking, getting more things done in less time is considered a virtue. I take pride in how much I can accomplish in any given day.
      But I'm starting to ask myself, at what price?
      When I talk on the phone, I never just talk on the phone. I cradle the phone with my shoulder while I wash dishes, fold laundry, plan dinner, help Eli build a spaceship, pack a lunch, or edit a paragraph in my head. When it's my turn to clean up after dinner, I reach for the phone — it's an opportunity to talk to a friend, isn't it?
      Eli's questions are making me stop and wonder, "What if at least once a day, I just washed dishes, fully experiencing my hands in the warm soapy water, the squishy streak of the sponge on the counter? What if I let the fullness of each task, each interaction be my meditation? What if I did less, but did less fully?

      At a talk Janis Keyser and I did at Cabrillo college, we asked the assembled parents to close their eyes and imagine their children ten or twenty years in the future. Then we asked, "What is it you want your children to say they remember about their childhood?"
      When I ask myself the same question, I know I don't want Eli and Lizzy to remember a mother who was always distracted, whose full attention was never available. I want them to remember a mother who listened deeply and fully, who could stop whatever task she was doing when it mattered; who read books when she read books, cooked dinner when she cooked dinner, sat at the computer and focused completely when it was time to write. I'd like them to remember me as someone who was there for them — in every sense of the word.
      I have a long way to go in order to become the person I want my children to remember. But I think I may succeed. After all, my kids provide me with strong motivation — and they are the best teachers in the world.