Living with Mommy Guilt

This time of year happens to be a busy and stressful time for many people, so it is no surprise that my office sees an increase in calls as the end of the year approaches.  Just like anyone else, I rush around managing holiday commitments while maintaining all of my regular responsibilities.  As usual, my kids’ bad behaviors grow as my stress level increases and the effectiveness of my coping mechanisms decrease.  The end result is a common one: I question my abilities as a parent and think I should be doing better. 

I would like to blame these guilty feelings on our current societal trend towards creating “well-rounded” kids by over scheduling them with lessons and tutors designed to make them the best at everything they try, but in my experience this guilt spans many generations, socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures.  So why do we have this tendency to believe that our children’s behavior is directly proportionate to our parenting ability and what do we do with the inevitable guilt that occurs when our children don’t live up to our (likely unrealistic) expectations?

First, it is important to challenge these irrational thoughts with a more sensible inner voice that reminds us that nobody is perfect.  Neither your children, nor you.  Personally, I had an “aha moment” last week that allowed that sensible inner voice to break into my own guilty thought patterns.  In the midst of this end of year chaos, my children both had parent-teacher conferences.  Nothing I heard at either conference was a big surprise to me but, despite the fact that sometimes it feels like my children have morphed into uncivilized beasts, the feedback from their teachers was overwhelmingly positive.  Morever, my son’s teacher made a comment that really brought me back to reality.  She expressed that my son was not just a good student, he was also a good and thoughtful person.  As I sat there and listened, she outlined to me that all of the messages that I had been giving him at home were being used in his daily existence at school.  In that moment I realized that every time I repeated something to him for what felt like the fiftieth time and it seemed like I was wasting my breath, he was actually listening to me. 

So my takeaway was this, I am not a terrible Mom and I am doing everything I should be doing because my kids are GOOD PEOPLE.  When confronted with difficult situations, they do the right thing even when I am not there to make them.  I really can’t ask for more than that.  Suddenly I could look at them and no longer see the monsters I had been seeing all week.  The conference had shifted my perspective and made me realize what I knew all along.  Unfortunately not every parent has well placed conferences with insightful teachers to shift their perspective.  And sometimes we can get so caught up in the daily stresses of the moment that we don’t notice these little hints that life provides.  That is why it is so important to cultivate the inner voice that confirms to you that more right is occurring than wrong with your children and your parenting. 

Our brain is a complex thing that often makes connections of which we aren’t even aware.  The connections that often lead people to seek my counsel are negative ones.  What starts as one small negative experience triggers a chain reaction that spreads like a spider web across their brain connecting every negative event that is even remotely similar to this one.  However, if you cultivate them, positive experiences can create the same spider web.  The problem is that most people absorb negative experiences, and lose sight of the positive, easily.  The key to changing that pattern is cementing the positive experiences in your mind and making them easier to recall.  So write them down.  Keep a box full of wonderful things your children have done.  Tell the positive stories often.  Make those the things that are readily at the front of your mind or use those written down reminders when you can’t get your brain to recall.

So I wrote down all of my proud feelings and a reminder of the things that were said in that conference and I am keeping it.  Next time I start to feel like a horrible mother, I will have a tangible reminder of how silly that thought truly is.  That is my starting place for managing my guilt.  It is unlikely that I will never experience mommy guilt again, so I needed to ask myself why I felt guilt in the first place.  Here is the revelation: I want to be a perfect Mom even though my logical self recognizes that perfection doesn’t truly exist.  So how can I reconcile the difference between reality and my expectations for myself?  The answer is simple: I remind myself that when I make mistakes and take responsibility for them I am teaching my children important lessons.  I am teaching them that it is okay to make mistakes and that they don’t need to try to be perfect.  I love them anyway, enough that I am willing to say I am sorry when I need to.  This also means that I am teaching them how to take responsibility for their behavior.  I wrote all of that down too.  I don’t want to let those revelations get away from me again, although they likely will.  So when they do I have my reminders ready.  I want to help others learn to be similarly prepared.