The Unfiltered Truth About Mom Guilt and Why We Need to Ditch It
It Is a Waste of Energy (And Why I’m Trying to be Done With It)
If you’re a working mom, stay at home mom, work from home mom or really just any kind of mom, you’ve likely encountered the beast that is “mom guilt.” Maybe you forgot to sign your kid up for afterschool dodgeball in time and it filled up. Or perhaps you just didn’t have time to run the lunchbox your kid left at home down to school that day. Or honestly, it could just be a more macro feeling of constantly wondering “Am I doing the right things for my kids?” When I had babies that constantly needed attention (including all night long) or toddlers that I had to potty train or little kids who threw tantrums about the weirdest things … I thought those were the hardest times I’d experience in motherhood, but I was wrong. Parenting doesn’t get any easier as kids get older, it just gets … different. The stuff I feel guilty about just changes.
More often than I would care to admit, I find myself allowing this guilt to impact decisions I had been really firm on only moments before. Just recently, I made a choice to attend one event for my daughter, knowing it meant I couldn’t attend another one the next day, but when the second one happened, there I was, crying over my work laptop, feeling like I’d abandoned her for not doing the thing I said I wasn’t going to be able to do.
This post is as much for me as it is for anyone else. I constantly have to remind myself not to allow mom guilt to consume me or drag me down. I’m lucky enough to have many great friends as well who constantly remind me not to do this (as I try to do for them in return!). Everyone has to have boundaries and priorities and values that govern their parenting, even if sometimes, enforcing all of that makes you feel like an absolute garbage dump of a parent. So, here are some thoughts about mom guilt and why we need to chuck it out the window whenever it creeps up on us.
Two summers ago, my kids were enrolled in a summer camp in which it is VERY competitive to snag a spot. My son (five years old at the time) was playing tennis and my daughter (eight at the time) was playing golf. It was only four hours in the morning and I thought it would be a wonderful way for them to interact with new kids, spend quality time outside, learn some new skills (maybe) and have experience listening to an adult besides me for a change. And yet, every morning that I dropped my son off, he cried. This made me feel terrible, of course, like I was forcing him to do something he hated (and like a true monster, I was enjoying having a little bit of free time to walk the dog by myself and get some work done without any threat of interruptions). One morning, the absolute low point for me, was when he bravely tried to keep it together in the car, trudged off to the tennis court, racket in hand, but immediately broke down in tears upon reaching the spot where his counselor/coach was waiting for him. It killed me that my little dude was putting on a brave face for me and then breaking down without me even there to comfort him. I called my husband, in tears myself, asking if I should just go back and get him and let him stay home with me. Honestly, even just thinking about these mornings now makes me want to cry. “He’s just so little!” I told Dan, tears streaming down my face. “I’ll try again next year.” But luckily, Dan talked me off the ledge and reminded me about all the parenting priorities we’ve discussed for raising our kids and how this decision fit into that framework.
Here are some examples of those priorities at play here:
Resiliency: Every generation, life seems to get a little bit easier. Technology and innovation ensure we have to feel as little discomfort as possible (sidenote: a great book on this topic is The Comfort Crisis, by Michael Easter), which seems great until we’re faced with a necessary discomfort and have absolutely zero experience with how to handle such circumstances. I know that my kids have a pretty cushy life with plenty of creature comforts, so sometimes we have to inject a bit of discomfort to balance the scales and let them learn how to manage. I never would have thought sending my kid to a fancy tennis camp would be a dose of discomfort, but for five year old Linus, it was.
Independence: This one is especially hard for this mom. Most of the time, all I want to do is snuggle my kids, helicopter the crap out of them and help them with everything they do, every step of the way. But then … they’d never learn to be independent, which isn’t SO horrible at five years old, but fast forward to 18 and you’ve got a kid at college who can’t fend for himself. This one is a huge part of why we’ve structured our chores the way we have, but we’ve also strategically planned bouts of separation from parents in age appropriate doses throughout their lives thus far.
Exposure to New Things: This one is pretty self-explanatory, but it’s important to learn how to handle new situations, things and people. Humans seem to be pretty content on a schedule and steady diet of regular habits, but occasionally, you have to mix it up because that’s life!
All of these priorities were the reason we’d signed Linus up for the tennis camp to begin with (and of course, the aforementioned alone time for mom!), but when the tears started flowing, I instantaneously forgot all of that and just wanted to hop in to save my poor, suffering baby.
It seems, in fact, that most of the mom guilt (in my experience, anyway) centers on short-term discomfort. Crying, tantrums, a missed school activity, but rarely are they things that are talked about a year later (or, let’s be honest, even a day later, in most cases). It feels absolutely horrid at the moment, but that’s just my own lack of tolerance for discomfort clouding my judgment, I guess.
I keep a list of our parenting priorities handy at all times. On my notes app on my phone is the easiest way to access it. As the kids get older and our lives change, we adapt it, add to it or maybe even take things off if that is what’s warranted. Any time I’m feeling crummy about a parental choice, I look at that bigger picture and reframe it with those priorities in mind.
If the mom guilt is due to a mistake I’ve made (see above example about simply forgetting things I was supposed to do), it can be a lot worse because I didn’t mean to do it and all I want to do is replay in my mind how it went down and how I should have done things differently. This is helpful, to an extent, as it sometimes allows me to come up with new systems for staying organized and on top of everything, But to ease the guilt in the moment, I do a few things.
First, I remind myself that I am a human and that humans forget things. Sometimes, I even counterbalance how big the mistake feels in my mind by making a list of all the things I DID do that week that went correctly. Trust me when I tell you that the list of things that went correctly usually outnumbers the mistake by about 10:1 or more. I’m sure the same is true for you! Moms do so much.
Secondly, I think about how I would treat one of my kids if they were the ones that made the mistake because everyone knows that kids watch their parents VERY carefully when it comes to this kind of stuff. I wouldn’t want my daughter beating herself up or calling herself mean names (dummy, moron, idiot) for simply forgetting something.
Lastly, I bring in the parenting priorities if at all possible. A missed afterschool dodgeball session is a good opportunity to remind my kids that life isn’t fair and that they won’t always get what they want. It also teaches them that if something is important to them, they need to be proactive - remind me the day signups go live, etc. It gives them another chance to deal with discomfort and adversity, and aren’t I such a wonderful mother for providing that to them?
Every time I listen to a parenting podcast, read a book or even talk to a friend, I am subjecting myself to mom guilt. Someone is always doing better, knows better or has great advice. It’s easy to allow comparison and the constant influx of information lead to guilt about what you’re not doing, but hopefully this post will convince you to think twice about the value of the guilt. Sometimes, it’s inevitable, but the more useful application of it, in my opinion, is what you can learn from it and apply the energy toward moving forward. It seems like mom guilt is a good signal to realign with parenting values and be mindful and self reflective about your parenting choices, but wailing about a forgotten lunch box for an hour is certainly not going to get you there. Remember to encourage your friends to let go of their mom guilt too. Sometimes, you really need that outsider’s validation to remind you that you are amazing and that honestly, if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t feel guilty, and that alone makes your kids VERY lucky to have you as a mom.